A Hollywood love story we all felt part of
HOW very dare they? I’m livid with Brangelina. I’m grown-up enough to appreciate we “ought” not to be over-involved in the lives of people we don’t know and have never met but I’m also realistic enough to accept that we all need role models and folk who smoulder at us from the silver screen are impossible to resist.
We are pretty much forced to follow their life stories. We have no choice but to be aware of their highs and lows, fashion faux-pas, worldwide property empires and occasional spats. Whether we wanted them to or not, Brangelina became a part of our almost daily experience.
We marvelled at her honorary damehood, boggled at his beard, exclaimed over their brood of offspring and wondered why they adopted a peripatetic nomad existence, constantly trekking en masse through airports on a seeming road to nowhere?
What we wanted and needed from the JoliePitts was for them to keep on keeping on. We required them to have achieved a state of marital equilibrium, to have triumphed over Hollywood’s temptations, to have found the secret of remaining perpetually desirable – even to one another – to churn out entertaining movies, promote world peace, espouse worthy causes and wear magnificent complementary outfits on catwalks.
Believing in the myth of their earthly bliss made us feel a trifle better about our own disappointments. Maybe we were numb with boredom at our partner’s oft trotted-out anecdotes, refrigerated at the thought of carnal relations and in a perpetual state of disappointed shock with our children? No matter. There were glorious Brangelina bestriding an airport concourse to show us such mundane miseries could be easily overcome.
Watching them coining it while caring, tripping the light fantastic while saving the planet and exchanging looks of lustful longing made anything and everything seem possible. We might be blundering about, botching up practically everything – wrong wallpaper in the hall, lousy schools for the offspring, spare tyre and bingo wings, spending the holiday money on a broken boiler – but Brad and Ange could be counted on to compose Grecian hexameters in an elegantly appointed chateau while their graceful and impeccably mannered brood gently strummed a tune of their own composition on a hand-made harpsichord.
So that’s why I’m incensed. If Brangelina fold under pressure where the hell does that leave the rest of us? Seriously, if you can be that stunning, that wealthy, that feted, lauded and venerated and employ a nanny for each of your children and reinforcements for weekends and public holidays and you still can’t keep the flame of true love flickering, we normal folk, plagued by acne, hot flushes, unpaid bills and feelings of failure, don’t stand a flipping chance.
Chaps, you should have looked at the bigger picture, seen what your divorce would mean for your common or garden man on the Clapham omnibus and glued it together pour encourager les autres. WEANING a toddler off nappies is no picnic. My memories include carting a tortoiseshaped potty from pillar to post, public accidents, acute embarrassment and endless roadside stops on every car journey. Nevertheless the job had to be done and the elation on the face of the infant who has learned to be clean and dry knows no bounds. Shame therefore upon the parents who neglect the task, leave the burden to teachers and excuse their laziness with guff about “leaving it to the child to decide” when he or she fancies going nappy-less.
THE BOSS WASN’T ALWAYS SO TOUGH
IF you needed proof that Sigmund Freud was spot-on with the syndrome he called the Oedipus complex, named after the tragic king who murdered his father and married his mother, just listen to Bruce Springsteen who revealingly recalls: “My father loved me but couldn’t stand me. He felt we competed for my mother’s attentions.”
Bruce took up body-building partly to impress (possibly to intimidate) his father but eventually had no choice but to leave the family home to escape paternal aggression. His biggest hit furnishes the title of his autobiography Born To Run.
Freud would have been proud of his triumphing over a horrible childhood to achieve fame, fortune and spectacular success.