It

Introduction

introduction I belonged to the Public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else. -l\larilyn Monroe There is a certain quality, easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people. Call it "it." For the sake of clarity, let it, as a pronoun aspiring to the condition of a noun, be capitalized hereafter, except where it appears in its ordinary pronominal role. ~lost of us immcdiately assume that It has to do with sex, and we're right, but mainly because eye,ything has to do with sex. Most of liS also think that It necessarily entails glamour, and so it does, but not for long. Most of us think that It is rare, and it is quite, even to the point ofseeming magical, but It is also everywhere to be seen. In fact, however elusive this quality may be in the flesh, some vcrsion of it will, at any given moment, fall within our direct view or easy reach as a mass-circulation image; if not, a worthy substitute will quickly come to mind, even to the minds of those who, commendably, want to resist generalizations like these, along with the pervasively seductive imposition of the icons that they describe. Let's not be IInduly prim, however. This is the way of the world right now, and it has been so, with increasingly invasive saturation and ingenious manipulation since the seventeenth century, when popular celebrities began to circulate their images in the place of religious and regal icons. Todav these totems can pop up anywhere . Just at the limit of my reach, on the magazine table at the barbershop on the corner of Chapel and High streets in New Haven, but looking close enough to touch, Uma Thurman returns I1n gaze fr0111 the cover of CQ. It's uncanny. She might, with minor adjustments perhaps,just as easily be looking up from the cover of Cosmopolitan in the checkout line ofStop & Shop at the Amity Mall, but here she is, big as life, sitting right beside me at Tony's, miraculously outshining the lesser deities of Maxim and Esquire. Of course she hasn't popped up just anywhere, because there's history everywhere. In one direction lies the town green, zoned for sheep and churches bv the founders of New Haven Colony in 1638, the same vear that the royal surveyor Inigo Jones laid out Covent Garden Piazza, later to become London's teeming market offlowers, flesh, and fantasv; in the other direction, three streetsDixwell , Whalin', and Goffe-named for the regicides who took refuge in Connecticut after 1660 to escape the retribution of the restored king Charles II, who installed his flashiest mistress and her complacent, papist husband in the very house in King Street, Westminster, that Major-General Edward Whalley had abandoned in order to end up hiding out in a cave near here. Taking local inventory of a still-activc front in thesc long-running culture wars, there's no doubt which side has pulled ahead on points: mocking the Puritan heritage that once sheltered and even honored the most die-hard iconoclasts anywhere, painted harlots now reign like rovals on newsstands everywhere. As DQs cover girl, Thurman is fragile of feature-eyelids drooping, lips parted, hair bad-and negligent of dress, or about to be, the silken filament of one strap sliding down almost to her right elhow, carrying part of the lace bodice with it, the rest apparently soon to follow, if the insinuated narrative of volition or gravity is to keep its eye-catching promise. I Then again, let's not be wholly prurient either. Thurman's image fascinates, not merely because she looks to be nearly naked, but also because she looks to be completely alone. Even as her eyes meet mine as seductively as they must in order to do their work, her countenance somehow keeps a modicum of privacy where none seems possible, a discreet veil of solitude in a world brought introducliO/l 3 into illusory fullness of being by the general congregation of unaverted stares. That countenance, the effortless look of public intimacy well known in actresses and models, but also common among high-visibility professionals of other kinds, is but one part, albeit an important one, of the multifaceted genius of It. The following account of that...