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By Brian Braiker
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Sure they're occasionally prone to phone throwing and couch hopping. Granted, they're famously self-indulgent, famously scandalous and famously ... well, famous. But celebrities--our pet rock stars, our so-bad-it's-good celluloid heroes--maintain that, really, they are nice people. That they do care about the right things. And this week, for one blessed, shimmering moment, they appear to have irrefutable proof.
The celebrities in question are the actors, actresses, singers, rappers and athletes who donated their faces to the One campaign. You may have seen the ad. Sleek with a stylish black-and-white Richard Avedon look, the commercial features a barrage of instantly recognizable pretty faces exhorting us average Joes to help a coalition of humanitarian and faith-based groups "beat extreme poverty." How? By lending a voice. By sending a letter or making a phone call to representatives in Washington in anticipation of next month's Group of Eight (G8) summit in Scotland of the world's wealthiest nations (and Russia).
"We have the potential to end poverty in our time; we can be that generation," One spokestar Brad Pitt told Diane Sawyer during a recent 50-minute "Primetime Live" interview shot partially in Africa. "Man, I mean, what is more exciting than that?" Pitt, who plays the titular role in the current thriller "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" alongside Angelina Jolie, who herself does humanitarian work in Sierra Leone, also spent a fair amount of time parrying Sawyer's probes into his personal life (and if you don't know why, he's probably not the guy who will convince you to join the fight against poverty).
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The One campaign urges the United States to increase its spending on foreign aid to 1 percent of its budget, and implores rich nations to forgive the billions of dollars African nations owe to international organizations such as the World Bank. Last week, the proverbial stars appeared to have aligned for the literal ones: President George W. Bush signed off on a deal with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to forgive African debt. The White House also plans to announce more aid for Africa next month.
"I'd like to think we helped give a sense of urgency" to the issue, One spokesman Seth Amgott tells NEWSWEEK. The campaign may be an unprecedented coalition of left-leaning Hollywood types and Red State faith groups, but it's the stars that we're shown. "Brad Pitt was on television for 50 minutes last week talking about AIDS orphans and children out of school in Africa. That's approximately equal to the total amount of time broadcast networks devoted in their newscasts to Africa last year ... If hunchbacks and second-grade spelling bee champions were who our society listened to, we would use hunchbacks and spelling bee champions."
The "urgency" supplied not just by Brad but also by Bono, George Clooney, Jewel, Jamie Foxx and others may or may not have tipped the scales for the Bush administration, but the One campaign reports that 121,000 people signed the Web site's petition after the "Primetime" spot, a substantial addition to the 800,000 signatures they had amassed in the entire year before the broadcast. Tens of thousands more are expected to attend the affiliated series of free Live 8 concerts organized by Bob Geldof on July 2. The former Boomtown Rat drew some criticism for organizing events where uber-rich headliners proselytize on poverty. Damon Albarn, a white Britpop singer, sniffed rhetorically to the BBC, "Why is the bill so damn Anglo-Saxon?" These critiques were perhaps easily shrugged off by Geldof, but they raise again a broader question as old as Hollywood itself: just who do these stars think they are?
It's not hard to understand why they may feel a teeny bit entitled: this country has an insatiable demand for them. Even as advertising revenues have stagnated at traditional newspapers and magazines, gossip rags are thicker than ever. Us Weekly's ad pages are up nearly 25 percent in the last year; at Star Magazine, ads are up almost 17 percent, and In Touch Weekly's ads have risen nearly 22 percent, according to a recent New York Times report. A choice candid celebrity snapshot can fetch a photographer upward of three quarters of a million dollars. We wake up to stars on the morning talk shows, we read about stars in the papers during our commute, we spend weekends with stars at the movies. We want to sleep with them, dress like them, be them even as we delight in the schadenfreude of their pratfalls, their late-night run-ins with the law, their cellulite exposed (look ma, they're just like us!).
But since when do we let them lecture us? Well, since just about always. Railing against poverty (or war in Iraq), is simply the latest version of a time-honored celebrity tradition. In 1936 a group of screenwriters and Eastern European refugees founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. "The stars weren't generally the deepest of people," says Brown University historian Paul Buhle, coauthor of "Radical Hollywood" (New Press). "It was more the writers who would explain things, and the actors who were sympathetic would go along." As such, they have occasionally found themselves on the right side of history: In 1944 Orson Welles campaigned furiously for FDR's fourth term alongside Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx and others. Danny Kaye famously served as a goodwill ambassador to UNICEF from 1954 until his death in 1987. The civil-rights movement galvanized Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier in the 1960s. Sometimes, however, stars can be spectacularly tone-deaf: Just ask "Hanoi" Jane Fonda today if she regrets traveling to North Vietnam in the middle of the war.
Which brings us up to One. Some economists bristle when they see sensitive singer-songwriters slumming in the world of global finance. "There's simply no evidence that doubling aid per se will actually have any output on the other end," says Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Bandow praises forgiveness of debts incurred under corrupt cold-war regimes, but doesn't buy the argument that more aid will automatically translate into less poverty. "Celebrities feel good and they want to improve their image. They make a record and they go on an ad. Have they actually made any sacrificial commitment themselves? ... Bono has a genuine commitment, and I presume Bob Geldof and all these other people really do care. But good intentions aren't enough."
Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, begs to differ. The former World Bank chief economist and Nobel laureate has famously railed against multilateral institutions like the one that once employed him. He sees addressing extreme poverty in Africa as a moral issue and applauds the efforts of One's stars. "I may be a little more informed, but those moral judgments I think are common sense," he tells NEWSWEEK. "I think it is important for people who are public figures, in the way that Bono is a public figure, to say 'Listen to me, not because I am an authority on morality--I am not a religious figure--I want to use some of the influence that I've gained as a singer to draw this issue to your attention.' And to me that's fine. It's more than fine."
It may be finer than fine. But does high-wattage star power make activism more effective? A 2003 USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that 87 percent of Americans claimed there was no celebrity who could cause them to change their position on the Iraq war. Some causes may be more popular than others, though, so celebs would do best to pick their battles carefully. "If I'm a celebrity, and I embrace 30 products or 20 causes, my image starts to get diluted and my credibility goes out the window," says Michael Kamins, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. Sounds like sage cautionary advice for perennially crusading stars like Sean Penn, who has taken more hits from critics than he ever administered to pushy photographers in the '80s.
But for celebrities who play it right, says Kamins, "Consumers like to identify with what they stand for ... [but] it works better for the young who are more susceptible to the identification process." Brad Pitt movies like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" may stand for bombs, bullets and brash beauty more than they do for leaving the world a better place, but it appears the One campaign is reaching an audience of more than just young fans. And there are probably worse things Pitt can do with his fame than get people thinking about poverty and AIDS in Africa. Like make another sequel to "Ocean's Eleven."
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