Dirty Linen
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television DIRTY LINEN BY MARVIN KITMAN One has to admire Billie Jean King's courage in finally confessing her lesbian affair with Marilyn Barnett to Barbara Walters and the rest of us 20-30...
...To make the situation worse, not only is all this blabbing embarrassing-it is boring as well...
...After a few more pithy remarks about how crime doesn't pay, Billy would say, "Shoot the juice to him, Louie...
...Had he said, "I am a crook," he would have finished out his term...
...Once it sufficed for a pervert to flash on the subway, where only a few people could see him...
...In our media age, lawyers also seem to go directly to the press with their cases, rather than to the courts...
...The trend started a few years ago when the writer Merle Miller admitted in the New York Times Magazine that he was a homosexual...
...Heck, I've always said sex makes strange bedfellows...
...Next, it is said, would come televised executions: Cameras would go right into the cell for the last supper, track the death march, and pick up the blessing by Billy Graham as the condemned man is strapped into the electric chair...
...Everybody was standing around on the set, including Donahue himself, as the couple traded accusations-right on the air-About who cleaned out the joint bank accounts and who took the silverware and the furniture...
...Billie Jean is only a tennis queen, ajock(or jockette...
...The series could be called Marital Spats...
...The fact is, this stuff about Billie Jean's and the Jenrette's sex lives has nothing to do with us...
...Don't we have a right not to know certain things, including stars' sex lives...
...Attention all cars...
...People used to want to protect their privacy...
...Rita bared her breast, so to speak, for correspondent Tom Jarrell, explaining how Playboy tricked her into undressing...
...All of us are being invited to become video voyeurs...
...Poor thing...
...She also said it hurt her to ask-but I'll bet not nearly as much as her nosiness hurt the tennis player...
...You have to expose yourself on network television, preferably before Barbara Walters-in a 20/20 segment, if you can't wait for her quarterly specials...
...While the Moral Majority and other pressure groups congratulate themselves on driving sex off the entertainment programs-hence the demise of Sherrif Lobo, B.J...
...To millions of viewers who didn't know any better, FDR's contribution to history was his fling with Lucy What' s-her-name...
...Exhibitionism itself has changed because of the tube...
...Heck, it's the people's medium today, and these efforts would be the real Real People shows...
...Why not Lee Marvin and his pal lighting it out right on TV around the swimming pool or in the bedroom...
...Billie Jean, for example, started out by denying the lesbian allegation and was under a cloud of suspicion...
...It is as if people had a fantasy about having cameras hidden in their walls...
...There is an irony to the new concern with the private lives of the stars on prestigious news shows and magazine shows like 20/20...
...and the Bear, Bosom Buddies, and Soap-it is rearing its head in the news and in public (private) affairs...
...On Television DIRTY LINEN BY MARVIN KITMAN One has to admire Billie Jean King's courage in finally confessing her lesbian affair with Marilyn Barnett to Barbara Walters and the rest of us 20-30 million serious students of sociology and human behavior on ABC's 20/20 the night of May 7. As for her husband Larry admitting that he drove her into another's arms-well, there you go...
...Barbara Walters was deeply concerned when putting the big question to Billie Jean...
...And then who should call in but the ex-Congressman himself, the dishonorable gentleman from South Carolina, to dispute his lovely wife's various statements...
...But newsprint no longer has sufficient kick...
...I'm not convinced this is progress...
...One of the arguments against allowing television cameras into the courtroom is that this would further debase the judicial process...
...Amlgo-ing to have to watch everybody's sex life now, just because they are in the news...
...You could even get the juiciest fights from radio, starting with the Kilgallen's (Dorothy and Dick Kollmar's) classic rows, or from police radio...
...The idea does not have to be limited to superstars...
...In John and Rita's native South, this whole exchange would be called "tacky...
...She hadn't planned to take of f an earring when she went to the nice photographer's studio, and before she knew it she was naked...
...As soon as a famous couple senses trouble brewing, they could dial an emergency number like 10-4, and a video crew could come running to catch the real meat in less time than it takes the volunteer ambulance corps to arrive...
...The tennis star's trouble had been a private matter until it became a so-called public issue when a lawyer for her ex-lover went to the newspapers on his way to the courts...
...What a great country it is...
...A week or so later, however, by the time Rita got to 20/20-the second milestone in the quickie television career of this great American schoolteacher, Country and Western singer and nude poseuse-I was getting stick and tired of her...
...Because I still don't think it's a right that should be invaded, I feel out of step with the rest of TV and the public...
...But I call it real television...
...There is a spat over on 14th Street...
...Today, hardly anybody wants to keep their secrets secret anymore...
...Sa-laciousness, the dirty, theget-right-down kind of stuff that the Jenrettes pulled on The Donahue Show is not that uncommon, after all...
...What kept running through my mind during the painful moment was-why...
...Then some smart media adviser told her to get with the new morality, to cleanse her soul and wash her dirty linen on TV at the same time...
...Truth," as Doctor Donald Kaplan has observed, "is the last refuge of scoundrels...
...I knew somebody who flashed on radio, but psychologists tell me that it's not the same thing...
...You could tell because she was wearing her Pained Expression...
...Local TV shows often feature small-town celebrities who start fighting about one thing or another...
...Now he has to do it at Shea Stadium, in front of 50,000 fans plus the millions of viewers at home who are watching the game...
...to each his own...
...Isn't it warm in here," the photographer must have said...
...Talk about your audience involvement...
...Clearly I am a reactionary about the right to privacy...
...Not that I think there is anything wrong with lesbianism...
...It was even better than Family Feud...
...Yet at least in the old days one had to be true royalty to merit scandal...
...Is this what they mean by the public's right to know...
...Nor do I mind getting under the sheets with Henry VIII on TV-that's history...
...It's just not right to fight about finances and air your love life on The Donahue Show...
...There I was, ironing my shirts or dusting, listening to the hottest TV super-starofthelast 15 minutes, Rita Jenrette, tell America how your Congressman husband can be a crook and you can pose naked for Playboy-And still be invited on TV talk shows...
...This could be a new psychological mishagas, Walterso-philia-the need to tell Barbara one's deepest darkest secrets-An electronic age fetish Krafft-Ebing never dreamed ot...
...J V ust the other day I read that ABC is doing a made-for-TV movie about the career of Walter Lippmann...
...Apparently everyone else cannot get enough of the squalid fights and scandals that have become standard TV fare...
...Had she been able to last more than 15 minutes she could have become the new Barbara Howar of Washington...
...It would be a way to decentralize TV, increase grass roots contributions to the culture, and introduce all the other rot the foundations are always trying to inject into television...
...And you can bet that every station's mobile unit would race over to tape the quarrel, no matter how ordinary...
...You can't win...
...Her candor, though, hardly matched that of John himself detailing on network news shows what it had been like making love on the steps of the Capitol...
...Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows...
...Some celebrities, afraid of being ignored by the media, are inventing vices just to be able to tell all...
...I hadn't had a similar TV experience since the Jenrettes, Rita and John, discussed their marital woes on The Donahue Show the morning of February 26...
...The success of the Billie Jean and Larry and Marilyn Show, not to mention the Rita and John Show, will no doubt lead to innovations in programming...
...In his prime time as a columnist-pundit for the New York Herald Tribune he was one of the most boring writers in America, right up there with Arthur Krock and Arthur Daley of the New York Times...
...What a wonderful way to raise the intellectual level of programming...
...We've already seen what they did to Eleanor and Franklin...
...It sounded like a new show called Ask Rita Jenrette...
...Richard Nixon's mistake was trying to cover up Watergate...
...The Statue of Liberty could be a lesbian and I wouldn't be offended at all...
...As a result, watching the news with the kids is like taking them to a wholesome movie about downhill skiing where suddenly the stars are getting out of their warm clothes and into bed for some apresski And while you're dying 10 deaths, the kids are following the action without baiting an eye...
...On cable, where things are much more liberal and open, you could have an hour featuring the best sleazy revelations of the week, culled from the entire nation's marital-spats-on-the-air...
...Old Phil-o didn't help smooth matters over by asking if the defrocked Democratic Congressman was "still on the booze...
...No one can equal Rita's snappy remarks...
...Itis just halfastep to penetrating homes themselves, where you can hear the squabbles before they hit the courtrooms or the papers...
...JeanHarrison NBC...
...That is what I call the Barbara Howar school of political science, concentrating on privateaffairs rather than public affairs...
...I suppose you can't fight the power of TV anymore...
...Since Lee Marvin and his pal, virtually every pali-mony case involving a celebrity has used this preliminary tactic...
...I got the feeling that I am the only one bothered by the new frankness on television, the new free speech...
...I don't mean to put Billie Jean & Marilyn & Larry & Rita & John in the same bed...
...Confession is the new national sport...
...Witness the apparent course taken by Marilyn Barnett's legal strategists...
...Television's involvement with the courtroom has already led to recreations like ThePeoplevs...
...Out of the whole range of Lippmann' s rich and varied life, the film will focus on the journalist's affair with a colleague's wife...
...He didn't seem to mind whether it was the mailman or mailwoman...
...She made me wish Margaret Trudeau was back "in...
...Although the public carefully sifts all the media disclosures, treating them like trial records, as long as the supposed culprits admit their wrongdoing they can get away with anything...
...Society has become one big Match Game or Newly wed Game, in which superstars reveal their private lives...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 12
