Keep celebrities’ lives private

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January 10, 2009

BY BARBARA GREENBERG The Commercial-News Sat Jan 10, 2009, 05:13 PM CST

I’m not big on celebrity gossip, probably because I’ve lost track of who’s a celebrity and who’s not.

But when I was in my teens, I had a long list of movie and music stars whom I followed. The criteria for making that list changed as I grew older, but I still kept some of my old favorites. One of them was Cary Grant.

Handsome, strong, witty and romantic, he personified to me all that made a man appealing. Little did I know that at the same time as I worshiped him from very afar, he perhaps forced his then-wife to indulge in recreational drugs. It was primarily LSD, as I recall.

I knew Cary, as I called him, primarily from the small screen. His old movies filled the TV schedule weekends while I babysat. He seemed eternally young. It was a shock when I finally saw an up-to-date photo of him and he had white hair.

Shortly before he died, Cary toured with his one-man show called “An Evening with Cary Grant.” I was lucky enough to see a performance. Yes, he was old, very old, but it hadn’t diminished his looks or his charm. And his accent was even better in person. If I remember correctly, he died right before a performance.

I mourned Cary, but I moved on. Actually, I didn’t have far to go — I’d already discovered John Travolta. I’d followed him through many of his incarnations: Vinnie Barbarino, Tony Manero, Danny Zuko and the rest.

The two stars really couldn’t be directly compared to one another except in terms of good looks. I thought they were both unbelievably cool, too, but for very different reasons.

For years, I thought of Travolta as more of a dancer than an actor. As he matured, though, his acting talent did, too.

I knew more about Travolta’s life than Cary’s. He made it easier by marrying only once as opposed to Cary’s multiple times.

It surprised me when I recently learned that Jennifer Grant is Cary’s daughter with Dyan Cannon. Although I knew Travolta had a son and a daughter, I had no idea what they looked like or anything about their medical conditions. And other than know the names L. Ron Hubbard and Tom Cruise, I was clueless about Scientology.

I know much more, more than I wish to, about these things now.

The huge differences between the Travoltas’ lives and mine really don’t matter right now. I’ve long believed that the worst fate that could befall a parent was the death of a child. They’re going through that nightmare and I pity them. They did the best they could as parents, but their son still died.

The comparison that can be drawn now between the two men has to do with things that are none of my business. What impacts the public about any celebrity’s life, including former and future presidents, is their body of work, whether it’s politics or entertainment.

The rest should be kept as private as they wish.

Reach Barbara Greenberg at bgreenberg@dancomnews.com.

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