WHY PRISCILLA DAVIS IS A CELEBRITY AND YOU’RE NOT

ONCE UPON A TIME, PEOPLE DIDNT USE THE word “celebrity.” If someone did well in a craft or profession, he or she was famous. If it happened that the person became an idol to the masses, that was simply a byproduct of that fame.

But then, something very odd happened. “Personality” outdistanced output as a means of gaining fame. It wasn’t necessarily what you did that got you known. It was impressing enough people to project you into the realm of “celebrity.” Soon, many of our greatest celebrities were famous for being famous, known for their knownness. Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Gobel. The list goes on.

What happened? In a word, television. You may be fat and look like a Hefty garbage bag filled with tapioca, You may be unwashed and unloved. But if you appear often enough on television, you will be “famous,” or at the very least, “fabulous.” Visibility has become such an end in itself that after forty years of living with television we live in a dictatorship of eye over mind. You Thomases who doubt, turn your eyes toward the White House. Isn’t an actor sitting in the Oval Office? You wanna be famous in Dallas? Remember, it’s 90 percent timing and 10 percent lighting. Apparently, all that rises in America must converge on a TV talk show.

Thirty years before TV turned us all into square-eyed worshipers of the eternal subfamous-rock star wives, game show hosts, Christina Onassis’s escorts-celebntydom in Dallas was different. Recognition was not nearly as important as wealth and power. Nor was “status” or being from the “right” family all-important. Dallas has never minded that some of our famous have been rascals-right, J.R.? Old folks out on Singleton Boulevard still shake their heads admiringly and smile, reminiscing about neighborhood gangster-celebs Bonnie and Clyde.

Yes, we celebrated raffish cats that Damon Runyon would surely have admired. That was particularly true in the Fifties when the city’s nightlife sparkled along a few blocks on Commerce Street, a ghetto of joints and posh private clubs frequented by local bigshots. Walk in Benny Bickers’s The University Club where the late celeb bartender, Joe Miller, poured drinks after hours while Gordon McLendon, inventor of Top Forty radio, sang along with Ling-Temco-Vought czar Jim Ling, that generation’s Ross Perot. Local comic Ukie Sherin kept them laughing (“Hey, more men have landed on that broad’s bed than Iwo Jima”). Over at the Bachelor Club, married men brought their cupcakes and danced cheek-to-jowl to the music of Lieux Dressier and Bobby Batson. Here again, the ubiquitous Joe Miller.

Stop in at the show at the Adolphus Hotel’s Century Room or the Baker’s Mural Room or the Statler-Hilton’s Empire Room, or go over to Cipango and say hello to oil millionaires Clint Murchison and Buddy Fogelson, before he married actress Greer Garson; and Tony Zoppi, our own Walter Winchell. And there’s everybody’s favorite band leader, Joe Reichman, laughing with Milt Joseph, the “jeweler on the hoof,” who always had rings, watches, and bracelets in his pockets and up his sleeves. After the show Milt would open his car trunk and sell the stuff on the street.

The real action, however, was down the street at Abe Weinstein’s Colony Club where a young woman from Edna, Texas, took her clothes off every night and captivated audiences of bank presidents and lawyers alike. No local entertainer since has created the sensation made by Candy Barr. Men sat riveted, hot as moths doused with pheromones, as they watched her bump and grind. Blonde, with a flawless body, Candy Barr had a superabundance of every chemical ingredient that combines to make 100 percent sex appeal.

Nearby, Barney Weinstein. Abe’s brother, had his own hot-cha, Nikki Joy. at his Theatre Lounge, while around the corner. Jack Ruby tried to lure both stars away for his Carrousel Club. An “eight-play” act, he called it. with two women. What eventually happened to Candy Barr probably was inevitable for ultraconservative Dallas during the Ike Decade: she was busted for possession of a small Bull Durham bag of marijuana hidden in her bosom (a rumored setup job by the cops). And who showed up at her apartment right after that? Why. her good friend and business-developer celeb George Owen, who would later (briefly) marry John Dean’s wife Maureen, during her stopover in Dallas as a Braniff flight attendant. Oh, yes, the same George Owen who helped get SMU in the soup last year over illegal athletic recruiting.

This also was the Golden Age of the Supper Club, symbolized by the elegant Cipango on Gillespie. Here gathered the socially prominent (this time with wives) like Mayor “Uncle” Bob Thornton; Stanley Marcus; Bob O’Donnell, head of the Interstate Theatres circuit; and an early-era jock star, Bobby Layne, the legendary party-horse who would usually join singer Don Cherry on stage for a round of “The Eyes of Texas.”

Like so much else, it all changed in the Sixties. TV’s influence grew, and the Kennedy assassination sobered the city in more ways than one. Downtown clubs closed, barmeisters died or moved on, Candy Barr went to jail, and millions watched horrified as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald (without doubt, the city’s all-time most famous person) on national television. Ruby had sacrificed his own future for a chance-however briefly-to know the life that was becoming increasingly the American Way, celebritydom. Eighteen years later, Highland Park’s own John Hinckley did the same on the streets of Washington, D.C. Later he spoke in the language of popularity that had contributed to his madness: “After I shot President Reagan, his polls went up 20 percent.”

Gradually, as leisurely as the drift of continents, TV was changing the name of the fame game. The Dallas Texans and then the Dallas Cowboys became the city’s darlings and televised games made heroes out of hulks, especially those like Don Meredith who had talent, flair, good looks, a Texas twang, and a taste for the fizz of the nightlife. Football glamour rubbed off on local sportswriters like Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake {remember Bud Shrake West out on Maple?), Gary Cartwright, and Blackie Sherrod, who is still the king, as they chronicled the local behemoths and threw down Number Two Dinners with Dandy Don at Pete Dominguez’s restaurant on Cedar Springs.

TV made sport into entertainment and athletes into entertainers. Their huge salaries made them more loyal to themselves than their teams, and like any professional entertainer, they worked hard to further their self-interest and sell their services to the highest bidder. Like movie stars before them, they learned that much of the job meant carefully cultivating the press. Beam me up, Scotty. The media star trek had begun.

With downtown moribund, the Restaurant Way of Life began around the city. Along with discos, these glittering eateries became the playpens of the stars. Craig Morton and eternal playboy Billy Bob Harris held court at Wellington’s on Northwest Highway. They shared other interests as well; Harris dated for years the town’s top fox, model Susie Sirmen, before she married the Dallas Cowboys quarterback. See the stars, including sister Brenda, at one of Phil Vaccaro’s three restaurants-Arthur’s, Mario’s, or Les Saisons. Nuzzle your pretty at the coal-mine-dark back room at Chateaubriand’s. Down at Nero’s Nook in the Cabana Hotel (now the Bill Decker Detention Center), a Neiman-Marcus model named Raquel Welch had her pick of the swarm of local swains as she worked waiting tables. A KLIF talk-show hostess named Chantal Westerman (now with ABC’s “Good Morning America”) became known as the sexiest woman in Dallas.

Jazz poetry at the Rubaiyat on McKinney; Dixieland at The Levee, with ex-Dallas Texan Ed Bernet and the Cell Block Seven; James Brown at Ann Bovis’s Louann’s at Lovers Lane and Greenville, near where Confetti stands today; Little Richard at Angus Wynne Ill’s Soul City, also on Greenville and an early progenitor of that street’s present club madness. Dallas dance fans could swing with Jesse Lopez, baby brother of Trini, at Sam Ventura Jr.’s Gringo’s on Oak Lawn. Meredith, Morton, Harris, sportswriters, models, black-eyed pea magnate Gene Street, and other up-and-coming business celebs made them all, often with country singer Charlie Pride and ex-Yankee superstar Mickey Mantle in tow to draw evermore adoring limpets.

No place symbolized the Seventies celebrity scene more than Oz, a chrome-and-suede palace that opened in 1974 on LBJ near Mont-fort. The place became so hot you could bake bread on the bar. Owner Ron Monesson hired Angus Wynne III to deejay the private club and brought in a forefather of the celeb chef, Jean LaFont, to tart up the veal cutlets. Monesson went broke two years after Oz’s glittering opening.

Discos like the #3 Lift, Disc A Go-Go, Papagayo, and Da Vin-cis gave way to singles bars like T.G.I.Friday’s on Greenville (which, unbelievably, is fifteen years old this year), and H.P. Cassidy’s, elan, and Tony Gobel’s James Comedy and Le Jardin (he’s still at it with Pasha). In the Seventies you had to cover the city, not just six blocks, to be seen in the scene, and that was the crucial key to celebritydom. The public craved the new; celebs were here today and gone next week unless they kept at it. The names change but the show stays the same.

Today, we see the logical extension of the tyranny of celebrity. In the age of People magazine, “Entertainment Tonight,” “High Profile,” Liz and Nancy Smith, gossip passes for serious discourse and we are force-fed trivia like ducks bound for pate. We can even boast of having a local crew of that most odious of shows. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” which chronicles the vulgar, greedy, smug excesses of the Eighties. Never have we had so many pronounce the silly to be significant and the idle to be amusing.

More than ever we hear the cri du coeur of women slavering to be celebrities (like Jacque Wynne. Yvonne Crum. and Susan Collins) by chairing high velocity society bashes (granted, they do raise money for good causes). Some are more resourceful; Nancy Brinker found fame by forming her own charity, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and Annette Strauss may be the next mayor thanks to her tireless society-fund raising efforts.

Still other Dallas folk are so anxious to stand out like a cherry on top of the Creme Chantilly that they hire people like Martha Tiller to get their names and sincerely vacuous faces before the public so they can roll around in reams of personal publicity like Berkshire hogs. The founding guru of public relations. Benjamin Sonnenberg, well understood this mission: “I make very large pedestals for very small statues.”

Fame in Dallas now is a business, as Andy Warhol understood years ago by naming his celeb-assembly line “The Factory.” Now we have noted vassals to the lords: celeb florists, celeb jewelers, hairstylists, house hunters, celeb shoppers, worker bees who serve the well-known with spaniel-like devotion. What of achievement? You must be kidding. How could such people have the time to read, let alone write, a book, create art. create anything besides piles of money when they spend every waking effort bouncing around town like a heated molecule learning the names of maitre d’s?

Of course there are exceptions; Ross Perot can manage both, as can author A.C. Greene. Roger Staubach, former Cowboys star and now real estate star, has never succumbed to the silliness of celebrity (as long as you don’t count his Rolaids commercials). But intellection, for the vast majority of our celeb crowd, means skipping an hour’s TV; playing Scrabble constitutes a literary event. For celebrity celebrates the gratification of the moment and doesn’t honor the values of protracted effort, wisdom, and permanency. With our “gang,” real achievement happens about as often as the Ayatoilah Khomeini sends out for spareribs. Priscilla Davis is recognized more now than she ever was. Would someone explain why?

So it’s off to win-a-date with a Dallas bachelor celeb; another private club opening to mingle with the clotted cream of Dallas and hear “yeah, I’m working on a video project,” the code words for “I’m unemployed and have no skills.” Or off to the next society ball to see glittering women as goldfish: entirely segregated from real life around them and powerless to affect it; pretty, harmless, and useless, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars. Emily Dickinson got it right a long time ago:



How dreary to be somebody; how public, like a frog to tell your name the livelong June to an admiring bog.