When I Was Young

BY TEDDY WAYNE


Justin Bieber’s rap sheet over the past year would have been an afternoon’s work for Keith Richards.

Yet we excoriate Mr. Bieber for his misdeeds while glorifying Mr. Richards for his. And musicians are far from the only ones expected to be on their best behavior.

“If there was an arrest for drunk driving,” Robert J. Wagner writes of old Hollywood in his new memoir, “You Must Remember This,” “there would be a nod, a wink, perhaps some modest amount of money changing hands, and that would be the end of it.”

He added, “If an actor behaved the way that, say, Tiger Woods did – and believe me, it was not unusual – it was covered up.”

The days of our celebrating the rowdy, libidinous, self-destructive artist may be drawing to a close. What’s more, celebrities are no longer behaving all that badly.

Blame the Internet’s power to shame and memorialize. It certainly had an effect on Alec Baldwin, who quit Twitter multiple times and bade a recent long goodbye to public life in New York magazine.

Those chronicling the famous also have to mind their manners. A reporter who parties like Hunter S. Thompson did in the 1970s is unlikely to be published regularly by Rolling Stone in the 2010s.

Cat Marnell, 31, is the rare journalist who seems to be written about more than she writes. The news media in New York, where she lives, have broadly covered her exploits with drugs. Ms. Marnell has written for a number of publications but has not stayed too long at any of them: she told The New York Post, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book.”

Ms. Marnell has sold a memoir for a reported $550,000. She is ambivalent about her subject matter. “As somebody who’s overdosed and nearly died in September, I struggle with what kind of tone I want,” she said of her writing. Yet she acknowledged that “people do like me because I’m bad,” adding: “I didn’t go out there showing off. When I relapsed, I started writing about it. And it got me super-popular. Drugs are bad, but they’re still fun.”

Our cultural image of the writer has historically been of a thrice-divorced, whiskey-swilling chain smoker who brawls with his rival in a dimly lit speakeasy. Now it’s a married yogi who tweets from the kale section. Smokers, who once had an aura of sophistication, now huddle outside bars, resembling addicts who need a fix.

Coming of age, the writer Jay McInerney idolized Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, all with a noted fondness for alcohol – along with what he called “the silver generation” of hard drinkers like Norman Mailer, John Cheever and William Styron.

By the time Mr. McInerney published his debut novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” in 1984, followed a year later by Bret Easton Ellis’s “Less Than Zero” – which depicted Reagan-era Manhattan and Los Angeles, respectively – “drugs were part of a rite of passage” for young writers, he said. Glamorizing hedonism, they failed to see the drawbacks, even of cocaine.

Mr. McInerney, at 59, now writes a column for The Wall Street Journal about a less lethal inebriant: wine. “I’m glad I survived my excesses,” he said. “I feel like an extinct species.”

Another species on the brink: the Casanova. With better education about sexually transmitted infections and apps like Lulu that crowd-source ratings of men (often flagging the cads), large numbers of people now deem sleeping around unhealthy.

Adelle Waldman, the author of the novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” has found it amusing how many readers dislike her character, a narcissistic young writer who is less than attentive to the women in his life.

Compared with the misogynistic protagonists in the works of the silver generation, his actions do seem tame. “They were able to prioritize their sexual experience and pleasure and find a way to dismiss any unhappiness that women might feel,” Ms. Waldman said. “They behaved in ways that Nate feels one can’t today – it violates our common beliefs of how civilized people behave.”

Ms. Waldman has felt “nostalgic for the more decadent past,” she said. “I sometimes crave a little more drunkenness and people saying the unwise thing, especially among creative types.”

Reached the morning after a night out, though, her views had changed – at least for the moment – as she was “a little hung over,” she confessed.

“Now I am anti-bad behavior,” she said, “and in favor of strict two drink limits.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 29, 2014