Читать книгу Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver - Eugene Salomon - Страница 25

I was cruising down Columbus Avenue one evening in 1987 when I was hailed at 77^th Street by a middle-aged man wearing a tuxedo. He opened the rear door, but instead of getting in, he leaned forward and inspected the condition of the compartment and picked up a couple of errant pieces of paper from the floorboard. Deciding that my taxi now met his high standards, he then asked me to wait a minute while he retrieved his friends from a restaurant on the avenue. One of his friends, he said, was a ‘major VIP’.

Well, my curiosity was certainly aroused. Who could this Very Important Person be? In a few moments the man in the tuxedo reappeared from the restaurant with another man, also wearing a tux, and two women in fashionable evening dresses. The cause of all the fuss, it turned out, was this other man. He was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

It was a name you would recognize if you were past a certain age. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, had been a movie star, a leading man, in the 1930s and was the son of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, himself a big star from the silent movie era. I was familiar with Jr mostly because he was a pitch man for the wool industry and would appear in that capacity in television commercials.

We drove down Columbus Avenue a mere eleven blocks, to Lincoln Center. As Mr Fairbanks opened the door of my cab and stepped out into the plaza there, he was immediately surrounded by photographers snapping away, their strobe lights creating an explosion of brightness in the cool night air. He posed for the paparazzi, flashing a winning smile and looking altogether dapper. Apparently a special event of some kind was being held that night at Lincoln Center and the media were waiting for the stars to arrive.

After I drove away in anonymity, I had some thoughts about this phenomenon of celebrity. Consider this: although the glow of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr’s movie career had faded away nearly fifty years prior to that night, he was still being treated by the mortals around him with the care and adulation that you and I never receive for even a single day in our lives.

No, they are not the same as the rest of us. There is truly a phenomenon at work here. It’s like a force of nature, a type of energy. The physics of mass communications, if you will.

It can be interesting to observe how different celebrities deal with it. Some, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, are quite comfortable with it. Others, like John Lennon the two times I saw him on the street, resist it by trying to remain unrecognized behind dark glasses, scarves and various disguises. And then there are those who, like rodeo cowboys riding on the back of a bull, can’t seem to get enough of it and will go out of their way to let you know who they are.