A flawed Hall of Fame
IS IT LIKE THIS every time the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducts its new members? The barroom second-guessing, the griping, the Monday-morning quarterbacking -- “What, him? That steroid-stoked mule in spikes?”
It is? Good, then you’ve got some practice.
Let’s have it out, right here, right now, over the first people welcomed into the new California Hall of Fame -- established by a couple who know a little something about the subject, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The museum staff hadn’t even vacuumed the scarlet carpet last week before the “why thems?” began about who made the cut. Our first class of California immortals includes 11 big names and two fabled families, honored for “achievements in the arts, politics, science, entertainment and sports.”
Historians, scholars, experts and Shriver’s staff winnowed the field to likely candidates and left the final choices to Schwarzenegger himself. Are you lovin’ it there, gov? It’s Christmas -- is it really it better to give a major award than to receive one?
Six of the 11 honorees showed up for the ceremony. They could; they’re alive. For my money -- $7.50 admission to the museum, kids 5 and under free -- I prefer my icons dead.
I understand why the Nobel committee requires its prize winners to be both brilliant beyond the run of mortal man, and breathing. Even a genius hasn’t come up with a way to endorse a check for 10 million Swedish kronor from beyond the grave.
But dead is a reasonable standard for a hall of fame. It works for postage stamps, which require a 10-year cooling-off period between the last breath and the first lick. Death offers us perspective on our luminaries, a little patina of time. Does today’s fair-haired boy look as good when his paint’s peeling as he did with a fresh coat of celebrity? Death adds gravitas. It puts the hero beyond the reach of some late-in-life embarrassment when, oops, there he is, already up on Mt. Rushmore.
California’s Hall of Fame choices would be so much more obvious if “deceased” were appended to those stellar resumes in arts, politics, science, entertainment and sports.
From the current crop:
For architect Frank Gehry, substitute the late Julia Morgan. Gehry will wind up in the pantheon in due time. But first Morgan, the pioneering San Francisco architect who built Hearst Castle, among other landmarks.
For Dr. David Ho, Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine and spent his final 32 years in La Jolla.
For Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson, who grew up in Pasadena, or Joe DiMaggio, born in Martinez, Calif.
For Wolfgang Puck, Julia Child. For Alice Walker, John Steinbeck. For Ronald Reagan, the even longer-dead Ralph Bunche -- a UCLA Bruin and the first black American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
As for Clint Eastwood, we’ve been making movies for nearly a century in California, and Eastwood is cinema’s first Hall of Famer? Sure, he’s great, but he’s got a long way to go to catch up with a Chaplin, a Lasky, a DeMille.
Because it’s too late to add “dead” to the admissions criteria, here’s my other notion. Once museum-goers get their fill of the admirable and the laudable, let’s get down to it. Give them a California Hall of Infamy -- the lunatics, the villains, the scoundrels, the eccentrics that the world expects of us. Mark Twain (practically a Californian himself) advised that the state was “heaven for the climate, hell for company.” And what company. Among the merely notoriously murderous are so many characters that we’d have to rotate the exhibits: Manson, Sirhan, the Night Stalker, Juan Corona.
We also have political offenders like L.A.’s Frank Shaw, the first American mayor ever recalled, an act so welcome that someone stuck an “under new management” sign on City Hall; Chuck Quackenbush, who put a “for sale” sign on the insurance commissioner’s office; and Kevin Shelley, who mucked up the secretary of state’s job at the precise moment voters began to understand why the job mattered.
There’s Hollywood’s glam flimflammers, like embezzlin’ David Begelman. Financial headliners like Charles Hurwitz -- a Texan, actually, but Californian for our purposes -- who ravished the redwoods to pay off his junk-bond debts. And the gorgeously named Courtney Chauncey Julian, the 1920s L.A. oil speculator and swindler. Cherished eccentrics like Timothy Leary and Simon Rodia, who assembled the Watts Towers and buried his 1928 Hudson automobile nearby so the cops couldn’t find it. So many deliciously outre cultists and true believers, madams and madmen.
And the gift shop? Lordy, Lordy. The T-shirt/mouse pad/keychain income alone could finance the entire museum. Crime and colorful characters can subsidize virtue. That dreary Marxist maxim about history and historical figures appearing twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? This is California. First act, tragedy, second act -- marketing.
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