Author: Steve Perry

Here is Jim Carrey, telling you pretty much everything you need to know about Jim Carrey: “I just knew [from an early age] that I needed a lot of attention from a lot of people and I needed to prove to the world that I was magic. That was the underlying factor in everything. It’s the underlying reason why I do this.”

Don’t a lot of actors say things like this? They do. The difference is, Carrey means it. He really really means it. In a Hollywood where there is rarely very much at stake anymore besides money, Carrey’s quixotic quest for the best that Hollywood stardom has to offer is the most interesting high-wire act around—maybe even the only one around, at present.

His career as a topline star commenced in 1994 with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, an unusually apt vehicle in that Carrey was allowed to take what started as a fairly straight B-picture (think Jim Belushi and K-9) and turn it into a farce on the strength of his manic mugging and ad-libbing. Two things were immediately evident: He could do physical comedy like no one else in generations, and he’d stand on your throat to get your attention. But it was more than attention Carrey meant to command. He wanted love, adulation, respect—whatever you had. It’s hard to think of another male actor quite so needy. He’s practically an Y-chromosome version of Marilyn Monroe.

And Carrey was nothing if not likeable. His comedy contained nothing of its era’s defining cynicism, which was less a creative decision than a reflection of the fact that Jim Carrey is not wired to understand cynicism. Cynics stand outside. Carrey wanted in. His métier was not the smirk but the full-bore anarchic grin that only grew wider the harder he chomped on the scenery. There was no malice and no condescension in anything he did, just a gleeful sense of the untapped absurdities lurking in every scene.

But there was an undercurrent of menace, too, without which the rapid-fire gags would have worn out pretty quickly. If Carrey seemed a little like a stray dog that licks your hand and follows you home, you always half-expected this particular mutt to attack anyone who tried to leave the room while he was doing his tricks. Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy (1996) is Carrey’s best performance, and his best movie, for exactly that reason. It was also his first box-office stiff. Nobody wanted a Carrey who wouldn’t go home, who held on to your ankle and gnawed until he drew real blood. Nobody wanted a comedy that played fast and loose with the kind of bottomless loneliness that turns its victims into dangerous people.

He followed The Cable Guy with two movies that represented much safer bets: the gloppy, wholesome Liar Liar (1997) and The Truman Show (1998), a concept movie of middling merits that posed considerably greater risks for director Peter Weir than for Carrey. It’s tempting to suppose that Carrey made them partly because he wanted no part of roles like The Cable Guy that put his rising star at risk, but it’s not so; the lead times of Hollywood productions being what they are, he was signed to both projects before The Cable Guy bombed. The path his career has followed is the one dictated from the start by his aspirations and the way he defines success. What a friend of mine lamented a couple of years back as the “Tom-Hanksification” of Carrey—the process of turning him into a latter-day Gary Cooper, a totem of idealism and uprightness—has been in the cards all along. And each step of the way it has involved discarding a little more of what Carrey does best in the pursuit of what he needs most.

I’ve always suspected that Carrey isn’t as interested in acting as he lets on. Yes, he takes pride in his craft, approaches it with diligence and usually intelligence, seems to enjoy the challenge of unraveling a character. That’s not the point. What I mean is that it’s all a means to an end—that he wants to be a star and an idol much more than he wants to be an artist. That’s a crucial difference. In the end Jim Carrey needs to mainline adulation. He has to be loved for being Jim Carrey, not for anything he manages to create as an artist (hence all the painful, compulsive confessionalism in his interviews). It leaves him little room to differentiate himself from the parts he plays (remember all the bizarre tales of his transmogrifying into Andy Kauffman on the set of Man on the Moon), or conversely to differentiate the parts he plays from the way he wishes to be seen. And he wishes to be seen as someone who never gives offense, is impossible not to like.

Which leads inevitably enough to Opie Howard’s shining, saccharine Grinch and the even greater depths of The Majestic, the execrable little post-WWII fable that’s being released to home video this month. They call it “Capra-esque,” but Capra never made anything this treacly. Carrey does everything but lick the camera to pull you nearer, but it’s a con. You know there are plenty of things he’s too afraid to show you. Even the Academy Award nominators, usually suckers for simpering flattery, were repelled this time. But no matter. “Carrey has never been better,” raved Roger Ebert. The show must go on.

Don’t bet that he’s through, though. He’s presently linked to three projects, and two of them sound like stinkers—a God-for-a-day comedy called Bruce Almighty; a social drama called Children of the Dust Bowl that’s sure to be Spielberg-ian in its middlebrow sentimentality; and a Howard Hughes biopic with Memento director Christopher Nolan. After that he would probably run for president if he could. But as a native-born Canadian he can’t, so he’s stuck in the movies. Once he’s Forrest-Gumped his way to an Oscar and sees how little it assuages in him, it’s hard telling what Carrey may do. He might even get interested in the work for its own sake.

The Majestic is available on DVD beginning June 17.

On a recent Sunday at Knollwood Mall in Hopkins, a dozen or so baseball card dealers and traders huddled grimly behind folding tables as the occasional stray shopper passed by. A mere two or three years ago the weekend card shows were several times the size of this one, and prices were astronomical. Not anymore. How to cope with the newly diminished state of affairs? One seller at the Hopkins gathering, a surly balding man named Rick with a ridiculous haircut, actively trumped the customers disinterest with his own. In those rare moments when anyone asked to see the wares stacked in his locked display case, he only glared at them and demanded to know which card they were looking for. No listee, no lookee.

Thirty years ago, before the “serious” card collector’s market existed, only one company—Topps—was still making baseball cards. And because they were for kids and modestly priced, most of them wound up in the trash eventually. If you bought cards and saved them, you might possess something genuinely scarce. The modern collector’s market was born in the late 70s and early 80s as nostalgia-starved baby boomers started paying hefty prices for these talismans of their youth. By 1989, when a company called Upper Deck rolled out its first series, there was suddenly an unprecedented number of new or resurrected baseball card lines.

It was Upper Deck that almost single-handedly transformed the business, first with its glossy production values and later with its proliferation of specialized high-end card lines and marketing innovations such as autograph cards and memorabilia cards, the latter featuring embedded snippets of “game-used” this or that—jerseys, bats, caps, balls, bases, stadium seats; even, in one case, game-used dirt.

The advent of autograph and memorabilia cards changed the industry in a couple ways. It gave manufacturers a direct piece of the top-end collectors’ business, which previously had been an after-market that took years to ripen as cards aged and grew scarce. And it turned baseball card collecting into a species of gambling. These cards were seeded into packs at exceedingly low rates; Upper Deck’s first memorabilia cards typically appeared at rates of one in 2,500 or more packs.

As they exploded in popularity (and purported value—anywhere from $20 to over $1,000 apiece according to the monthly Beckett price guides), these specialty cards came to drive the industry. Predictably, the card companies rushed to give buyers more of what they wanted. By now it’s become common for the higher-end products to contain autographs and memorabilia at rates of one, two, three per box, even one per pack in premium lines. The trouble, of course, is that this glut has destroyed the cards’ book value. Meanwhile the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices have only kept climbing. As a result, it’s not at all unusual to pay $150-$200 per box for the chance to glean a card you would be lucky to get $30 or $40 for at a show. It’s a sucker’s bazaar. Lottery scratch games offer better odds.

And the suckers are catching on. Tim Smith has toiled in these vineyards of human abasement for seven years as the proprietor of the Sports Card Exchange in Robbinsdale. Nowadays, though, his retail shop accounts for barely a third of his income. The rest comes from card shows and Internet auctions. Smith pines for the days when card-collecting was not the near-exclusive province of aging, obsessive white men with too much money. “Ever since Pokémon,” he laments, “kids have abandoned sports cards and not looked back. And they really couldn’t afford most of the products if they did want them.”

It is a strange and dispiriting business, he admits. “It’s the only retail industry I know that’s dictated by price guides. They’re the ones who tell us every month what our product is worth.” He shakes his head. “And nobody believes them anyway.”

This morning I sat around watching it rain outside and trying to cull some signal moment from the many hours I spent with my friend Nellie Stone Johnson, the labor/civil rights legend who died April 2 at the age of 96—some little story that might sum her up for purposes of a remembrance like this. But there isn’t any. She was too thoroughly a force of nature for that. According to the terms of an old Jewish parable, the student travels from afar not to hear the great rabbi interpret the Talmud but to watch him tie his shoes. So it was with Nellie. She wore who she was and where she had been in her every aspect: the sharp, graceful lines of her face, the easy dignity with which she carried herself, the burning clarity and urgency in her voice. If you had any sense, you simply drank it in whenever the chance presented itself.

I first met Nellie in 1990. She phoned me at City Pages one day out of the blue to say that she liked the things I had been writing and we ought to meet. The truth is I’d never heard of Nellie Stone Johnson. I had no idea this woman had made more history than anyone else still alive and kicking round here. Nonetheless, something in her manner precluded my saying no. We met for lunch, and after talking for an hour or so she gave me my second directive: “I think you might want to interview me for a story in your paper.” I did as I was told.

During those years at City Pages, she became a mentor to several of us on staff—Monika Bauerlein, Jennifer Vogel, me. And in having her way with us she could be as dogged and as demanding as she ever was in confronting foes. Many was the time the phone rang at 2:00 on Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours from press deadline, to disgorge Nellie from the other end, primed for her one of her pack-a-lunch lectures on some piece of skullduggery she was trying to bring to light. It didn’t matter that you had heard this one before and had more pressing things to do; you listened, and it was always worth as much time as it required.

Within a couple of days of her passing, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers published long, glowing tributes. I read them with faint distaste. It’s in the nature of obituaries to domesticate whatever they seek to memorialize; saint and scoundrel alike turn cuddly in death’s embrace. So let us say it one last time, with emphasis: Nellie Stone Johnson did not like to be called a lady or a liberal. Despite her extensive involvement in practical politics—she visited the Capitol more than some legislators—Nellie remained a radical, as the Pioneer Press correctly noted, a former member of the Young Communists League, the Young Socialists, the Socialist Workers Party, and several other hard-line labor groups. She was a fighter from first to last. But she was never content to be a marginal character. Nellie helped midwife the merger of the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties in 1944. Much later, at an age when most people are retired, she served a stint on the Democratic National Committee. Her radicalism ensured that she always had far more enemies than friends; these included the establishment civil rights organizations, a sizable number of liberal middle class feminists, and anyone else from either party who would neglect or subvert the hard-won gains in labor and civil rights she had given her life to.

After she died everyone took pains to say that even her enemies respected her, as if that meant a damn thing. I can tell you for the record that she had no use for their reverence; she saw it for the patronizing flip-off it was. All her life she was wise enough to stay clear of the clutches of anyone who might disarm her. That is why she passed up the countless political jobs and other bits of patronage that could have been hers across the years. She sacrificed enormously and without complaint, continuing to operate her seamstress shop on Nicollet Mall well past the age of 85, until finally she could not walk up the stairs anymore.

But then again it hardly amounted to sacrifice in her eyes. She was exactly where she wanted to be. As Walter Mondale put it, with affection and perhaps a little discomfiture, she was a tough old bird. Unlike so many leaders of the civil rights movement, Nellie had no real use for the church. She respected its political contributions but harbored no affinity for musings about God. “I just figured it was real simple,” she told me once. “You do what you can for people and you don’t worry about God.” I doubt she’d have called herself an atheist; that would imply too much attention to the question. She was an Enlightenment rationalist to her core. Her whole ideology could be nailed down with two planks—the value of education and the dignity of a decent job.

“She was so incredibly generous,” Jennifer Vogel wrote me a couple of days later, “but she wouldn’t have seen it that way. She fought because that was the only thing a decent, seeing person could do. I also liked how she gathered soldiers along the way. She saw the best in those who were trying to do good. She was forgiving of weakness, though I’m not sure she truly understood it. She looked past whatever your particular fears were and tried to nurture your strengths.”

Nellie’s public life was everything to her, and that is where she sought and found her friends. She eventually abandoned any pretense to traditional domesticity after her second failed marriage and toiled on by herself for another 50 years, a life odyssey that surely befitted one so indefatigable and so fiercely unsentimental. If she were reading this I imagine she’d say about now, That’s all very well; you wrote some nice things. But if I was your teacher, then what is it I taught you? All right then. Call this the short list.

Do the legwork.
Know your history.
Concern yourself with others, always.
Stay busy and you will stay as close to selfless as possible.
Keep your own counsel; be beholden to no one.
Be proud of what you do.
Let good faith be its own reward.
Remember that regret wastes time.
Keep on.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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I shuffled past the television this morning—March 11, the six-month anniversary of the shots heard round the world—in time to see Lisa Beamer on the Today Show, weeping at the behest of Katie Couric. (At 45, the terminally pert Couric is still the cutest succubus on television.) My first thought, I’m ashamed to say, was this: It can’t be very easy anymore, crying on cue that way. In recent months anyone who surfs the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer’s teary face on every outlet worth mentioning. The soundtrack is always the same, a snippet from Elvis Costello’s “Pills & Soap”: “They talk to the sister, the father and the mother/ With a microphone in one hand and a checkbook in the other/ And the camera noses in to the tears on her face…”

Mrs. Beamer, as everyone knows by now, was the wife of the late Todd Beamer, one of the principals in the passenger uprising on United Flight 93, the hijacked jet that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Lately she’s all over the tube again. There was the birth of her daughter in January, now the 9/11 anniversary—and sandwiched between the two, the revelation that she is trying to copyright her husband’s endlessly regurgitated parting salvo, “Let’s roll!” “We believe we own ‘Let’s roll’ because Todd said it and it was attributed to him,” says Beamer’s attorney, Paul Kennedy. “We’re going to do all that’s necessary to protect that.” Well, a widow’s got to do what a widow’s got to do. Meantime she is also preparing a memoir (tentatively called Let’s Roll!—of course) to be published in September (of course, of course…) by the Christian publishing firm Tyndale House, purveyors of the mega-selling Left Behind novels of religious apocalypse.

I was curious to know just how many times Beamer has spoken to the press since 9/11, so I tracked down one of her publicists, Helen Cook. Cook didn’t profess to have an exact count, but agreed that 200 or so would be a reasonable estimate. No wonder she has a personal media representative and at least two outside PR guns. Even before her book deal she was named one of People’s “25 Most Intriguing People of 2001.” Intriguing, hell. She’s hot—in a wistful, understated way that becomes her young widowhood. She is also articulate and relentlessly upbeat. The media never tire of her.

And God knows she never tires of them. Beamer’s utter lack of compunction about repeatedly baring her grief and the mundane, intimate details of her family’s life on television may be, in her mind, the dutiful expression of her evangelical Christianity (evangelicals are taught never to shy from any opportunity for witnessing, especially an electronic one), but it reaches the rest of us as something else: just another spasm of celebrity self-disclosure, albeit of an unusual sort. Her ubiquity on the news magazine shows has already spawned countless jokes: Hi, this is Lisa Beamer. Could you let Diane Sawyer know that on Thursday I’m going to be taking my kids to the mall for the first time since Todd’s death? Get back to me soon—Jane Pauley is all over me on this one.

All right, one might say, but what exactly is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That’s entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly private dimension to real grief, a point at which one’s own words and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a bad thing; it’s a measure of respect, for oneself and for what is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all must bear on our own eventually. The media’s incessant flogging of Beamer’s story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt—a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras.

The syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall dared suggest as much in his February 28 posting, entitled “Terror Widows.” In a series of six panels it paints the 9/11 survivors making the talk show rounds as callow showbiz apparatchiks. “The unbearable grief of the empty spot in your conjugal bed must weigh down your heart with unimaginable pain,” says a Good Morning America interviewer to one of them. “Huh?” she replies. “Oh, yeah, definitely.” Rall’s cartoon was pulled from the New York Times and Washington Post web sites after some 9/11 families cried foul. To his credit Rall was unrepentant, going so far as to call Lisa Beamer’s behavior “cynical, crass, and gauche.”

Also sinister, for reasons quite apart from her own motives. Remember always that in wartime, propaganda is a chief preoccupation of government and its major media adjuncts. This means, at the most obvious level, a ceaseless and numbing proliferation of caricatured heroes and villains. Yes, the police and firefighters caught up in the events of September 11 demonstrated courage and dedication. But after you have assented to this proposition a few hundred times, it tends to lose its savor and even its meaning. Or rather the meaning changes—genuine instances of heroism and sacrifice become nothing more than veiled warnings, inducements to the rest of us to keep our mouths shut and rally round the flag.

Which brings us to the centerpiece of the six-month anniversary commemorations, CBS’s abundantly hyped 9/11 documentary. It was a mess, frankly, marred by studiously cool narration that talked too much and refused to let the footage on the screen stand on its own as the ultimate verité document it could have been. 9/11 was assembled in a manner that militated against any direct experience by the viewer of what was happening. Watching it you could almost suppose that the Trade Center bombings were staged as the mother of all training exercises, a backdrop against which good men could prove their mettle. Like the Beamer saga and all the other wretched post-attack uplift pieces, it strained too much to present September 11 as all heroism and no horror. And that is the falsest, most demeaning note of all.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.