Apr 13, 2007

Celebrities heed the call

Malcolm Fleschner / Humor Columnist

Celebrities come in for a fair share of criticism these days. A few of the complaints you tend to hear are that they're overly narcissistic, make too much money, check in and out of rehab like they think the tenth visit is free, and that they don't respond to repeated fan requests for signed photos (Was it something I said, Salma?).

But the one area celebrities catch the most grief for is their political activism. Fed up with yet another famous person's outburst on the latest cause of the day, many Americans have angrily wondered, "Why can't these people just shut up and act?" (or sing, or dance, or play basketball, or do whatever it is that Paris Hilton does, etc.). Personally, I'm a little more open-minded. I don't think celebrities should have to keep all their opinions to themselves - just the ones I disagree with.

I fear, however, that because of all the criticism, some celebrities are deciding that it might be better not to speak out on controversial issues. Catherine Zeta Jones is a perfect example. Since 2003 the Academy Award-winning actress has been waging a virtual one-woman campaign of conscience, desperately attempting to help us save something even more precious to us than the rain forest or the whales: money on our cell phone bills.

Yet last year Jones' voice on this important issue unexpectedly fell silent. With little warning she stopped appearing on TV suggestively encouraging cell phone customers to "get more." Well, congratulations, celebrity haters, you've scared Catherine Zeta Jones away. But meanwhile, who's left to carry on her brave crusade? Or are you people naive enough to believe that entrenched social ills like rampant roaming charges and dropped calls will just go away on their own?

The real shame here, of course, is that we may be witnessing the end of the long and storied tradition of phone service-related celebrity activism in this country. I think we all recall fondly the heady days of the late '90s when top stars like Michael Jordan, David Spade and Carrot Top all went on television to plead with Americans to stop throwing money away on outrageously priced collect calls. Former A-Team star Mr. T even joined the chorus, angrily declaring that anyone paying too much for collect calls would be added to the ranks of "fools" he had no choice but to "pity."

But before cell phones, before the collect call frenzy, even before all those commercials where we were inexplicably told to dial 10-10 and then about a dozen other seemingly random buttons on the keypad before the number we were trying to call - before all that, there was one dominant phone service-related issue that got celebrities more worked up than any other: the danger of choosing the wrong long distance carrier.

Candice Bergen was among the first celebrities to get behind the cause of low long distance rates. During the 1990s, when not sparring with Vice President Dan Quayle about the issue of out-of-wedlock births among fictional sitcom characters, Bergen tirelessly advocated on behalf of the long distance carrier Sprint. Other actors on "Murphy Brown" reveal that for a period of a few months in 1996, the Emmy-winning actress became so obsessed that she would frequently interrupt on set conversations mid-sentence to say, "Shh! What was that? Did you hear a pin drop? I could have sworn I heard a pin drop."

Sadly, the issue of inexpensive long distance service, once so prominent, has now been virtually abandoned by today's celebrities, forgotten alongside such other previously high-profile causes of the day as homelessness, apartheid and the Y2K crisis.

Still, I was impressed enough by Bergen's dedication that when I recently ran into her I made a point to excitedly explain that, thanks to her advocacy, I was still saving money with Sprint's long distance service. But did she care? Hardly. All she could do was sputter a non sequitur about it being four in the morning and repeatedly ask unrelated questions like, "Who are you?" and "What are you doing in my house?"

So while Catherine Zeta Jones may have been silenced, I nevertheless remain confident that the nation's famous voices will speak out again. They're celebrities, after all, and keeping quiet just isn't in their blood. We merely need to wait until a new phone service-related controversy emerges - say, whether it's preferable to have a satellite communications chip attached to the ear or embedded directly into the brain. Then all the A-listers will clamor to share their thoughts on which provider offers the best service plan or which chip causes 25 percent fewer incidents of tumors.

I could even see Jones returning for an ad campaign featuring a new slogan: "Get less. Less brain cancer, that is."

Malcolm Fleschner pities the fool who doesn't e-mail him at Malcolm@CultureShlock.com.