On The Springboard of Notoriety

By Frank Trippett

No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville

While running for President about a century ago, Grover Cleveland bumped into what might have been a fatal problem -- the public charge that he had fathered an illegitimate son by a tall, pretty widow, Maria Halpin, manager of the cloak department in a Buffalo store. To modern Americans accustomed to politics as show biz, it may be surprising to learn that Cleveland survived the scandal by acknowledging paternity and giving his organization a simple order: "Tell the truth."

Even more surprising to the 1980s sensibility is the fact that Maria Halpin remained obscure during the public sensation and later. Incredible. Had she lived in today's tattletale milieu, the mother of little Oscar Folsom Cleveland would have bounced from magazine covers right into the hot seats of Donahue and Nightline. Agents would have hatched deals for books, movies, interviews, docudramas and maybe a stint of modeling to launch a new line of lingerie called Grover's Corners.

Exaggeration? It is hard to exaggerate the way people caught up in scandal, sensation or fragrant doings can parlay a puddle of notoriety into oceans of money plus exotic life-styles. Culprits do it, victims do it, innocent bystanders do it. Even an ordeal equals opportunity. Rescued in the Yukon, where a 1963 plane crash delivered her to seven weeks of subzero weather, Helen Klaban exulted over a dream come true: "Hey, I'm a celebrity!" Her book, Hey, I'm Alive, duly followed.

These days Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice and Fawn Hall are crisscrossing public attention, suddenly shot from obscurity to -- well, not fame and not stardom but a sort of fuzzy, soggy celebritude. They illustrate how the resourceful can profit from publicity that might just embarrass the unambitious. Consider:

Hahn, 28, first came to public notice as the former church secretary from Long Island, N.Y., who toppled Televangelist Jim Bakker from the pulpit of his lucrative PTL ministry by admitting an irregular sexual escapade into which Bakker and fellow Preacher John Fletcher allegedly conscripted her in 1980. Now she is on the cover of the November Playboy, which paid about three- quarters of a million dollars for an interview ("I'm not a bimbo," she said) and topless photo layout. Her face has become familiar on such shows as Larry King Live and Good Morning, America. Her lawyer, Dominic Barbara, speaks of possible mini-series and books to come -- "her only way of collecting compensation and fighting back."

Rice, 29, is the Miami model and aspiring actress who was unwittingly introduced to the American public by former Democratic Presidential Candidate Gary Hart. A cruise with Hart on the yacht Monkey Business carried her to the covers of the celebrity magazines and into an interview by Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20. She is now served by agents and career advisers, and has broken into big-time modeling for a new line of sportswear called No Excuses. "I make no excuses," says her script. "I only wear them."

Hall, 29, an occasional model, won national attention during the Iran- contra hearings as the loyal secretary who helped Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North shred documents. She later landed on a Barbara Walters special and, while refusing tawdry offers and showing no tasteless impatience, has enlisted the William Morris Agency to represent her. She would like to latch onto an on-the-air TV job. "If I don't try this," Hall explains, "I might regret it."

Few observers would insist that such opportunism is, in Tocqueville's word, noble. Yet not many would feel it wrong to cash in on otherwise profitless situations. Perhaps crass, tacky or vulgar (as in the latest Jim & Tammy enterprise: Area Code 900 Dial-the-Bakkers taped messages that might bring as much as $100,000 a month from the 25 cents they get for every $1.50 toll a phoning fan must pay), but not immoral.

Nobody seems to mind, or much notice, run-of-the-scandal trash such as the movie Stripper Fanne Fox made, Posse from Heaven, after she became notorious in 1974 by getting caught at the Tidal Basin with Congressman Wilbur Mills; or The Washington Fringe Benefit, the book put out by nontyping Secretary Elizabeth Ray after the whoop-de-do over her 1976 affair with Ohio Representative Wayne Hays.

True, some mercenary flights manage to offend. Judith Campbell Exner tastelessly trod on a national icon in My Story, the tale of her sexual adventures with President John F. Kennedy and Gangster Sam Giancana. Putative Aristocrat Sydney Biddle Barrows' best-selling book The Mayflower Madam -- and the forthcoming TV movie -- raises the grating spectacle of a woman thumbing her nose at the system that convicted her of promoting prostitution.

In the 1970s there was widespread resentment as Watergate culprits cashed in with books -- among them, John Dean's Blind Ambition, Charles Colson's Born Again and John Ehrlichman's The Company. By the time Richard Nixon's book came along, in 1978, a Committee to Boycott Nixon's Memoirs had been born. Its slogan, "Don't buy books from crooks," failed to work; the Nixon tome earned him $2.2 million, and the hardback became a best seller. But the phrase caught the spirit of the only official ethical stand that Americans have ventured on sensational exploitations. In some 30 states, so-called Son of Sam laws (named for the serial murderer who killed six young women in New York City in 1976 and 1977) now seek to ensure that victims rather than criminals share whatever profits are made as spinoffs from crimes.

Crime and conventional morality aside, the transmutation of base fame into gold does scratch at some deep nerve in the public psyche. Most observers would probably agree with Thomas Kerr, associate professor of business ethics at Carnegie-Mellon University, who would not condemn the "public for wanting titillating gossip" or the "media for giving the public what it wants." Yet people inevitably feel some unease because, as it is put by Eugene Secunda, New York University professor of advertising, marketing and media, "fame and infamy are often viewed in the same light."

And there is the rub. Fame and infamy also turn out to be rewarded in the same ways. That is the source of disquiet, the secret price of living in a society that has precise epithets for men and women who sell their bodies but none for those who sell their souls.

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi/New York and Susan Schindehette/Washington