Shameless: The 8 Most Egregiously Exploited Celebrity Tragedies

Posted at 9:00 AM Nov 12, 2008

By Kathleen Willcox

We generally use this space to lightheartedly berate celebrities for their great variety of always amusing, sometimes charming and (hopefully) harmless peccadilloes. Actors and musicians are too-often seen as impervious to the great tragedies of life, so it's easy to titter into our tea about their ill-chosen movie roles and freewheeling games of musical beds and totally ignore the fact no, they're not merely wind-up circus monkeys put here to tickle our fancy ("dance, monkeys, dance!!"). They're human beings who sometimes encounter real catastrophes.

When Jennifer Hudson's mother, brother and nephew were murdered, it drove the point home. The media covered Hudson's misfortunes with the same glib, faux-somber, three-ring-circus enthusiasm they use when stalking the red carpet at movie premieres and award ceremonies, with that extra-special dose of schadenfreude reserved for celebrity tragedies. Especially the following eight.

8. The Murder Of Nancy Spungen

Poor, nauseating Nancy. Last month marked the 30th anniversary of her death and the soon-after implosion of the punk scene she formed an equally symbiotic and exploitive relationship. Her murder (or was it a suicide?), oft-believed at the hands of lover Sid Vicious (who overdosed a few months later), like her life, looked like a particularly noisy blip on the cacophonous music scene. But looking back, the vicious backlash against the already calumniated punk world directly resulted from a self-consciously bourgeois display of horror at her bloody, crusty demise in the crumbling Chelsea Hotel. From the get-go, Nancy seemed to think the whole world had it out for her, and the one little pocket she thought accepted her as a runaway, prostitute and junkie eventually spurned her too. In the end, she won though. The scene didn't want her, even openly mocked her, in the end killed her, and then her death symbolically killed it.

7. The Saga Of Christian Brando

Just ask the Crawfords and the Barrymores (and someday, the Jacksons and the Spears): when Mommie or Daddy dearest is in the spotlight and perhaps just a tad batshit, your childhood's gonna be a bitch. Chances are, humiliating debacles that could be swept under the rug in a "normal" family will become front-page news, compounding their significance and making the possibility of future stability inversely proportional to the amount of coverage the incidents receive. For no one does this truism hold as steady as with Christian Brando, Marlon Brando's understandably unhappy progeny. From an early age, Christian was shuffled between his sexpot/wacky activist/violent father and his boozehound/pill-popping/violent mother, the actress and hippie Anna Kashfi. Finally, after a protracted custody battle that the media and public followed with a degree of interest generally reserved for world wars and cataclysmic natural disasters, Marlon won custody. That's when things really started to unravel for the 13-year-old. Mom's friends kidnapped him; they hightailed it to Mexico; Marlon hired a P.I. and nabbed him back; Christian developed a disturbing affinity for the bottle; he drunkenly shot and killed his pregnant half-sister Cheyenne's abusive lover, Dag Drollet; Cheyenne commited suicide; he was accused of being involved in the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakley, Robert Blake's wife and Christian's lover; and he got married and divorced. On January 26 of this year, he died of pneumonia at 49 years old, giving every cheesy rag on the planet yet one more excuse to drag out the old chestnuts and befoul his name and character while his family and friends mourned his passing.

6. The Manson/Sharon Tate Murders

Life seemed to imitate art for Sharon Marie Tate, or at least according to the bloodthirsty media and willfully gullible public after her brutal murder at the hands of Charles Manson's gang of thugs in 1969. The model/actress' rise to stardom with her kitschy, insta-cult status turn in the deliciously drug-addled Valley Of The Dolls and relationship with troubled arthouse auteur Roman Polanski fueled speculation about their "untraditional" and "modern" (read: a slut-tastic drug-fest and dirty thumb in the eye to respectable folk everywhere) marriage. Tate was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed to death, but that didn't stop the media from spreading scurrilous, laughable rumors that she worshiped Beelzebub, participated in orgies and shot/smoked/snorted drugs. By the time Manson and his followers were arrested with charges that stuck, months had gone by, and the damage to Tate's reputation was done.

5. The Slaying Of Jennifer Hudson's Family

The shameless, exploitative, almost prurient coverage of the string of murders in Hudson's family epitomize the problems the media face and create when writing about a celebrity's misfortune. When her mother, brother and nephew were murdered, the press swooped in with all of the transparently phony sympathy, demands for justice and the latent but palpable "she didn't deserve an Oscar" snipes. Every aspect of the funeral was covered, no matter how grim and morbid, fom the colors of the coffins, to details which casket she turned to first, to the design of the funeral "tickets" (it was a private event). Like every other aspect of celebrity life (from underwear choices to gas problems) that's breathlessly covered by even the most old-school broadsheets, death in Hollywoodland seems to be as much (more?) fun for us as watching a gaggle of schnookered starlets weave their way out of the S Bar to their waiting limos on TMZ.

4.The Kidnapping Of Frank Sinatra Jr.

The bizarre and exceedingly brief kidnapping of Ol Blue Eyes' loin fruit was like one of Robin And The 7 Hoods' ill-planned last-minute plot twists, except much more convoluted and imbecilic. The 19-year-old Frank was nabbed at a hotel in Lake Tahoe by two bumbling parka-clad gunmen who posed as room-service waiters. Naturally, the incident was tackled by the press with the same restraint and discipline Jaws displayed during kiddie time at the beach. Two days after his capture, he was released when Frank Sr. coughed up $240,000, but Frank Jr.'s fledgling music career pretty much tanked thanks to the inexplicably hostile press coverage that accused him, without a shred of evidence, of masterminding the scheme. Since then, his career has foundered, partially due to his bratty antics (e.g. storming out of The Howard Stern Show just moments before a scheduled interview and after throwing various office accouterments about the studio), but also partially due to the old "he's riding on his father's coattails" indictment.