The Music Man is a fantasy about a fellow who gained power through a marching band. So was the Nuremberg Rally.

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How did actors come to inhabit our soapboxes, in preference to dentists or plumbers? Actors, as a group, aren’t more intelligent than tradespeople, they are just more prominent.

Writer wonders why and responds: the publicity department. Legit stage actors, both sides of the pond, were once lauded, and merchandised, their fame fronting soap or motorcars. But they were not invited to “hold forth.”

Early silent films, to the surprise of their creators, created stars. The pub­lic wanted to know the — necessarily intimate — details of these creatures’ lives. And as these details were either boring or unmentionable (as in your case and mine), their interest was gratified by fantasies. These, like the Nuremberg Rally, were designed to enflame, flatter, awe, and otherwise immobilize or reward the public suf­ficiently to win its custom.

The early moviegoers demanded the names and, then, the histories of those creatures they saw on the screen. The creatures were originally, and essentially, set dressing for the attraction, which was the flickering and magic light. But with the creation of the Star the studio was no longer churning films out as shot-in-the-dark, one-off propositions. The stars provided merchandising con­tinuity, and the wise observed that their bankability could be augmented by fiction.

Now came the publicity departments. Unemployed hacks were hired to fake biographies and “personally sign” photos of the stars; and canny gossip columnists forsook the retail dish of café society and elbowed for positions as arbiters of cinematic fame.

But, save at a French film, everything in life changes. The ragged labor agitator becomes the shop steward, then the union boss, and the propinquity of the bargaining table supplies the fellow with new best friends. He, rationally, comes to prefer Havana-Havanas to the cigarette butt, and weekends in the country to a Margate bank holiday.

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The unwashed were informed by the publicity mills that stars were not only well read but well bred. Josef von Sternberg was actually Jonas Sternberg, a Jew from Queens; Erich von Stroheim was the son of a Vienna hatter; and many of the stars claiming exotic or elevated lineage (male and female) had lately come from the streets or from the parlor.

Well and good, but they, like the labor agitator on his way to knighthood, came to accept (a much more powerful con­dition than belief) their beatification.

With the end of the slavery of the long-term contract, the stars achieved free agency and began to muscle the studios that had kept them on board wages. And they hired their own pub­licity hacks, to tell personally tailored fibs. Now, instead of a passion for horses, dogs, married bliss, or golf, the actors took on Causes.

Their connection to these was as factitious as their previous link to toothpaste. (What movie star ever used any of the down-market products he flogged?) But the Causes sounded posh to the stars, and they put their names at the top of various petitions, to sell: wildlife preservation, anti-vivisection, and other inarguably worthwhile propositions.

Then came the Vietnam War, and some thought it good to praise the Viet Cong and indict American imperialism, the atom bomb, and, then, the vile slave state of Israel; and so on, to taste.

But there were many players and only so many causes; and, prior to the movement of that name, no one sought prominence by announcing, “Me, too.” The stars, now in fact convinced they were saving the world, puzzled and vied for possession of the next-new-thing soapbox.

But there is this about titillation: In a striptease there are only so many clothes one may remove. One may prolong the act by beginning dressed in more clothes, swaddled like Nanook of the North, but the operative mechanism, “Wait till you see this!” cannot hold the attention through successive layers of long underwear.

No. The beginning of the act must convey the proposition. But, when down to the buff, what special treat might remain? Lewdness and pornography. But what, however, when the public are, as they must inevitably be, sated with even this?

The next, exploitable, step is hatred (presented as outrage), and its incitement to riot and murder.

Many of the prominent of my racket turn righteous, which is to say vicious, and why not? For, their bumf to the contrary, they are just some more of us sinners knowing no better than their fellow human beings, but doing worse (as do we all), when warped by self-aggrandizement. The labor leader, hunt­ing in Scotland, must come to identify with his former adversaries and will sell out the folks who brung him. And the star, whose likeness once sold foot powder, has progressed through selling himself, then Good Causes, then political right-thinking, and, now, into fronting for hatred. Of what? Of the free, varied society that, wise or foolish, elevated him.

Individual instances will no doubt occur to the reader.