Dear Christine,
Your first time in the spotlight ended a couple of years before I was born. You returned to the limelight at other times, whether you wished to or not. For example, there was the release of Scandal, a film about the events in which you were a part involved. Then, of course, you always came to mind whenever there was a political sex scandal. Your name fell easily onto people’s lips.
Yet, in death, you have shown us the special, temporal dissociation that is reserved for celebrities.
Following your passing, your picture was featured in traditional and online media. Of course, the image was of you in your youth, not as you were at the age of seventy-five. I guess the media assumed which one of you we really wished to mourn.
Does the treatment of celebrities offer a secret to immortality. First, become either famous or infamous. Second, escape the public eye and stay out of it for years. Finally, and in finality, you will be remembered as forever young. Ask Elvis, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain or even Jesus. While achieving the first element may be hard, leaving fame all behind can be even harder.
But I am also left wondering how different the times were for you when a dogged media hounded you. Yet in this new age of sex scandals, we find that self-same media having ignored abuses as the way life was meant to be. They did nothing. No follow ups. No investigations.
Did you ever wonder which would have been better for you specifically or for our society generally?