“A celebrity is a nothing but a nonentity who got lucky,” wrote Kathy Lette (don’t ask – there was nothing else to read and I was desperate). Although looking at most “celebrities” you’d expect the luck to be long gone, drained and not even a few dregs caked on to the bottom of the barrel.
Ten years ago the whole “famous for being famous” thing hit the big-time with Paris Hilton, what with her sex-tape and describing anything she liked with a drawled “That’s hot”. Now we’ve got the Kardashians, and although I could, like everybody else, bag them, most of what I hate about them has been said before by people much smarter than me, so I’ll make it short: They seem to promote illiteracy – last time one of them came here (I don’t know which, the one that doesn’t look like a bloke) Channel Ten had a news item on this visiting Kardashian that was titled, in the spirit of the Kardashians taking the letter K to levels not seen since the Ku Klux Klan, “KARDASHIAN KAOHS” – see, try to do a Kardashian and they can’t even spell the word “chaos” properly. The only positive thing I get from them is that at least the famous-for-being-famous crew has become a bit more ethnically diverse.
I think the best nonentity though was Kim Duthie, otherwise known as the “St. Kilda Schoolgirl”. What a fun January that was! In 2011, stories appeared of an underage girl attending a training camp in the US with the St Kilda Football Club. And that this girl (who had so far remained unnamed due to her age) had leaked photos of naked footballers arseing about in all their chest-waxed and pube-shaved glory (ugh!). Sure enough, pics were seen of Nick Riewoldt grinning and baring all and Nick Del Santo playing with himself – which prompted the joke about doing a nude calendar of the club, and having Del Santo as “Mr February – because it’s the shortest month.” It then transpired that she was sleeping with a player-manager, Ricky Nixon, and that she was going to have his baby (subsequently debunked when she was hooked up to a lie-detector). And didn’t we all taste a bit of sick in our mouths when we read that over breakfast? That a young girl was banging some fat old walking, talking beer-gut? Best of all was that Duthie was on Twitter and tweeting away without a care in the world, especially for legalities. One night a middle-aged female friend and I, high on Cab Merlot and dope, tweeted Duthie but sadly got no response: “Hey, when you banged Nixon how many times did you orgasm? NONE!” And then we got onto the maestro and puppet-master of slebs for no reason everywhere, Max Markson. “Hey Max Markson, when are you gonna’ get Duthie to kiss ‘n’ tell for a few bob?” Again, no response and after we sobered up and realised how stupid we were, we thought we’d sensibly leave the poor girl alone.
A week later my friend had one of her “cunning plans”, which usually involve something that would cause outrage to simpletons and be hilarious if all goes to plan. “I was driving from Richmond today and I drove past Carey Baptist Grammar”, the biggest private-school in Melbourne, “and Nixon used to teach P.E. there, so I thought why not go there at night and graffiti along the front wall HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol? It’s right in the bible-belt and everyone’ll think it’s the sign of the devil!” How could I disagree with this? I took the next tram up to Kew and walked round the entire length of the school, sadly realising that even at night the road was too well-lit and virtually impossible to spray-paint one letter let alone HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol before being caught. Oh well, better a cunning stunt then a … Yeah.
And yet after all this, Ricky Nixon still gets in the papers. Abandoning sports management for stand-up comedy (which of course bombed) and proposing marriage to his next pretty young thing in a McDonalds in Moe, of all places (you just know his honeymoon was going to be at the Best Western in Dandenong) – does anyone really give a shit?
As much as a celebrity may only be a nonentity who got lucky, I blame lazy journalists and lazy editors too. If you have the “power”, for want of a better word, to give the luck that can make or break, surely you have a duty of care to use it wisely.
The Josh Holley 