The big trend in star relationships is … trending
Do we all owe a big apology to Star Jones?
Observing the lavish, many-day, crosscultural affair that was the recent wedding of Nick Jonas, 26, and Priyanka Chopra, 36 — one of two relationships that defined 2018, in my estimation — my thoughts promptly swam to the former co-host of The View. While the Bollywood-gone-Hollywood star, and the youngest of the Jonas bros, have been anything but shy about flexing their #Sponsored partnerships for their nuptials, I was reminded of the uproar that Star, then a household name, caused, some 14 years ago, when she tried to do likewise.
Back then, in an attempt to cash in — when a PR proposal was shopped around, and later disclosed, billing it as an “outstanding product placement opportunity” and one promising “guaranteed press” — Star was burned at the media stake, stickered as a Bridezilla. Viewers, and reportedly even the ma- ma-bear on her show, Barbara Walters, eventually soured on her.
I remember the howls of disbelief well, especially when it was leaked that beauty companies had been given the “opportunity ” to fork over $4,500 to be the “event sponsor” or to pay $1,500 to provide product for “Oscar style” gift bags.
What I recall, too? The mea culpa, that came from Jones, a couple years after the marriage had blown up, but the cloud had not: “I don’t think I took the viewers on the right journey with me, and I want to apologize for that,” she told People. “I was a 40-year-old who, according to urban legend, had a better chance of being kidnapped by a terrorist than getting married. And I was caught in the euphoria.”
What Jones could not have foreseen, but what #PriyankaandNick have showed all too well? It’s all just business as usual today. Anyone following the couple’s Instagram feeds over the last few weeks — particularly Priyanka, who is the most-followed celebrity coming out of the Indian sub-continent — no doubt noticed the mercenary feat, with E! News estimating, for one, that the two averaged six-figure deals for the majority of their brand collaborations. And this was even before the pictures starting streaming out of Umaid Bhawan Palace, the site of the I-dos in Jodhpur!
Besides the litany of both Tiffany and Ralph Lauren references, all carefully tagged and captioned, as well as nods to LimeBike and Elit vodka (good-time suppliers for Jonas’ bachelor party), there was also peak wedding registry through a collaboration with Amazon (in return for which they agreed to donate some money to UNICEF, it has been noted).
Having interviewed Priyanka just last year, on the cusp of her visit to Toronto — she sits in my upper range of most eloquent, and smartest celebs I have had a chance to encounter — what struck me about the moment is that it was all kind of a proper celeb appropriation of the kind of shilling (#SponCon, as it is commonly known) we’ve been seeing from Bachelor castoffs, Real Housewives, and “influencers” galore, for a while now (with some Bachelor alumni known to essentially make their living off Instagram!).
Because, think about it: if Priyanka and Nick could do it, and then she can be awarded with the cover of the latest American Vogue right afterward (she is the first Indian woman to grace its cover!), then did that mean an actual climate change when it came to the division between A-list, B-list, and whatever-list?
Even the up-to-the-minute sharing of the various ceremonies, and events, during the love-fest — letting people on social media experience it, nearly in real time, with them — was almost reality-TV-ish in form, and eons away from the kerfuffle, for instance, that Michael Douglas and Catherine ZetaJones caused, in 2000, when they had the moxie to sell their wedding pictures (for $1.8 million), which glacially came out about a week later in a mag. How quaint, right?
Nothing glacial, by the way, about the other couple that will go down in 2018 infamy, and that has been on my mind: the we-barely-knew-you union of Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson. Begun in May and done by October, theirs was a relationship upon which there was much projecting (the chief nucleus of celebrity couplings!), and a question that hummed and hummed: What does she see in him?
She: the one-time Nickelodeon star who had shape-shifted into one of pop’s biggest acts, but who “reached a new, unwelcome level of fame when a sui- cide bomber targeted her Manchester concert in July 2017, killing 22 people,” as Vanity Fair recently reminded in a piece about the couple. He: the young comedy nerd who at 20 became the youngest on-air performer to be hired by Saturday Night Live in nearly three decades when he got the gig in 2014, who was expressively open about his struggles with borderline personality disorder, as well as the trauma of losing his dad, a New York firefighter, on 9/11!
“Two young, famous people, their lives marked by tragedy … Pete and Ariana were nowhere near the same level of popularity, and occupied vastly different cultural niches,” as VF went on to say, but they somehow fulfilled the promise of a moment, in the American zeitgeist, when the political is pop culture, and the pop culture, political.
Add to the headlines during this long year: the news that Ariana’s ex, rapper Mac Miller, had died from an overdose from a dangerous opiate, and Pete, for that matter, was chiming in about the online abuse he had been getting since breaking up with Ariana. Both facts made clear that there was not only R&B, comedy and terrorism in the mix here, but also the spectre of cyberbullying and drugs.
The engagement might be finito, meanwhile, but the Google Trends live on: both made each other significantly more famous, if the search engine stats tells you anything. “Thank U, Next,” appropriately enough, was the internet-shattering single that Ari anna put out at the end of year was capping.
You win some (Nick and Priyanka), you lose some (Ariana and Pete), but the hashtags are forever. Am I right?