See this story in its original context on Page of 21 of Take the Handle's The Romantic Issue, October 2008
“There is no love where there is no bramble” – Bill Callahan
If the affections of true romantics spring from emotion rather than thought, and if pure desire accesses primal magnetism rather than psychological need, then certainly it is in the delicate time of youth that society's intrusions begin to pervert the implausible, perfect love.
As a boy of primarily rural influence in a pre-Internet era these distortions of idyllic, loving bliss came to me by way of notably cosmopolitan avenues. In the worlds of celebrity, urbane sophistication and “extraordinary lives” I encountered another romance—the mysterious caverns of the female body and its magazine and television advertisement expressions.
In my own New England town, there was one mass media fascination that loomed larger and circulated faster, at least amongst nine year-olds, than any other gossip item around. It was talk of Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel. For a while, if the local whispers were to be believed, this chic couple was shopping for real estate in our quaint oceanside town.
This was no simple matter. Tim MacGregor and I had recently put on an undoubtedly bizarre performance of the Piano Man’s don’t-blame-me political mindfuck “We Didn’t Start the Fire” at the elementary school talent show. For reasons that now elude me, we were dressed in identical gray sweaters and wore matching black plastic sunglasses with fluorescent green rims. And certainly our female peers in the fourth grade who had access to either the television or their mothers’ makeup cabinet knew of the Cover Girl. (Not to mention boys like me whose fathers had a copy of the swimsuit issue lying around.)
While the sexual allure of piano ballads and supermodels was still a bit of a pre-pubescent mystery, Christie and Billy were undoubtedly the Famous People around town. The scrawny third baseman on my little league team saw them in the local diner and rumors ran rampant that they were looking to fix up the old stone house on Main Road. The one that everyone was sure was haunted.
They wound up purchasing property in neighboring Westport. Whatever. When this happened we transferred our disappointed, starstruck feelings into reactionary vitriol. Fuck Westport. Yuppies. I renounce Westport.
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For boys growing up in the 80s and early 90s Christie Brinkley was the ultimate woman. Emblematic of the greatest heights of beauty and of the natural complement for men of great accomplishment like Billy Joel. She was not the unapproachable, emaciated model of today’s runway. She was a sunny American girl, a consumerist hyperbole of the prettiest girl in class.*
How did it come to be, then, that Peter Cook, the jet-setting Long Island architect who landed this coveted prize after it had slipped through the shaky hands of Billy Joel, wound up spending $3,000 a month on Internet pornography? Why did he seek out a teenage girl from the toy store instead of his iconic, ravishing wife? After having all but forgotten the youthful fascination of Christie, her divorce trial as newspaper-rack eye-candy once again drew me into the strange world of supermodels and modern day Gatsby.
Christie Brinkley’s beauty was much in the vein of the Mona Lisa, her face worshipped in the manner of coveted images that offer only the slight, unreadable smirk to suggest deeper personality. But like da Vinci’s monumental work, is it possible that there became no way to access the image without contextualizing the onlookers taking pictures?
Forgive me for defying the noble theme of the issue here, but is romance a bust? Is attraction a fleeting psychological whim? Perhaps I am just taking a superficial view of the sexual impulses, but the inability for Mr. Cook to find even remote satisfaction in such a coveted beauty is a striking reminder of the strange entanglements of those impulses. There is nothing vaguely groundbreaking about discussing attraction as a media construction and a psychological snakepit, but here it comes into sharp focus. What happens when those years of media fantasy become a Hamptons reality? There may be no perfect love, but $3,000 a month on porn and a young lover on the side? Why had he chased down the 80s beauty queen in the first place?
The answer is simple, right? This is the lot of the rich and famous. To live out the tragedies of their vain desires and stay barred from the simple pleasures that the rest of us find in our common love.
But is that really true? Is not the lustful wandering all around us? The lustful wanderer in every mind, lurking around the corners is constant defiance of our hopeful vows? If we can waste our tabloid type demonizing Peter Cook for his infidelity and perversion, can we not also, at least for a moment, learn what may be the hazy lessons that arise from the murky drone of celebrity gossip?
Idolatry is myth. And flesh is flesh.
Grasping the unattainable will do no more than to alter its definition.
Beauty must appeal to all of the senses.
Did Mr. Cook, certainly himself some sort of disciple of iconic late 20th century beauty, at some point begin to wonder whether he had chosen his new wife or whether the larger media-mystique of Christie Brinkley had chosen him? Is it surprising that he was so obsessed with pornography—his wife’s entire persona was built on fantasy-images that were as ubiquitous as any woman of her generation. Had he fallen for the image only to find that when it materialized there grew a void that could only be filled by further pictorial fantasy? Was she his original pornography and the actualization of his flesh-and-blood wife could never approximate the magic of the Cover Girl?**
This is desire. Mr. Joel knew something of this truth when he so eloquently sang of the fire: “It was always burning since the world’s been turning.” We are in the 21st century. A time when fantasy baseball threatens to overshadow the love of our great American pastime. When Second Life exists as a substitute for negotiating the treacherous social world. Perhaps the Piano Man is right and we are not to be blamed for our transgressions—we are the helpless victims of the media machine.
Or.
Perhaps this is where we define the true romantics—those who embrace the glorious mystery of human frailty rather than searching for the perfect myth, the holy grail of desire that simply does not exist. Christie Brinkley is, in fact, a woman, not an image. The rest are ghosts of the mind.
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*Christie Brinkley truly is a lady of the 80’s. She is not one in the classic sense, lacking some of the wondrous transparent aura that Robert Stillman so eloquently enumerated in his introductory column on the topic. But she is a woman of that mysterious era that lies somewhere between class and trash. Between unattainable magazine goddess and publicity stunt party girl. That treacherous bridge between Marilyn Monroe and Lindsay Lohan. Between Jackie Kennedy and Sarah Palin.
** If all of this seems to objectify Christie Brinkley and deny her rights to her own personality and agency, fair enough. Until Take the Handle gets their shit together and sets me up an exclusive interview I am left to wrangle with these New York Post apparitions.
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