Reflections of a stormy petrel

Who remembers my posts about the significance for society at large of the events that surrounded Kate Moss' exposure as a cocaine user? I said, at the time, that this might turn out to be a defining case in our social history; not because it mattered in itself - whatever happens to a rich, moderately pretty, bored, and very silly 30-year-old, is of no consequence to anyone but herself - but because it would indicate where we, as a society, are, with respect to drugs.

Well, I would say that the results are by now tolerably clear. Kate Moss disappeared briefly into a detox clinic; having re-emerged, and smelled the wind, she has thrown herself back into her old lifestyle, not, as before, quietly and behind closed doors, but with the most emphatic and deliberate publicity, as if throwing it in the faces of the public and the media. (http://www.thesuperficial.com/archives/2006/01/12/kate_moss_and_lindsay_lohan_ho_1.html#comment) After all, while she was briefly away, the world's leading fashion magazine, VOGUE, placed her on its December front cover, with the complimentary blurb "Kate Moss, scandalous beauty". Ms. Moss clearly feels that she has the support of her industry and her social milieu.

I have no admiration or sympathy for anyone involved in this, but I have long been of the opinion that drugs ought to be legalized. I hope that this indecorous circus, and the cowardly behaviour of the London police, are indications that the demonization of drugs is finally running out of steam, and that we can look forward to a more sensible state of the law in our lifetimes.

According to how it finally ends, the Kate Moss affair may well be of considerable historical importance. Here is the reason why.

In 1935, Hollywood actress Mary Astor was caught by her husband having an affair with well-known theatre personality George Kaufman. Her diary ended up in the hands of the press, and it was a disgusting document: one that, behind yards of schoolgirlish rhetoric and self-absorption, showed a woman who treated her men as living vibrators with a few irrelevant appendages thrown in, and did not even begin to understand the ideas of loyalty, companionship, or even respect for another person. (No wonder that Astor had her greatest movie part as the heartless, murderous seductress in The Maltese Falcon; she was playing herself.)

The significance of the Astor divorce case is this: that before 1935, and in spite of Hollywood's well-deserved reputation for sexual, alcoholic and chemical excess, anyone caught like Astor condemning herself out of her own mouth, would have been finished. But with the passing of the decades, Hollywood had become increasingly used to, indeed increasingly confident in, what might be called their unusual ways. By 1935, a generation had been born and brought up in the extended brothel in Southern California, and found it harder and harder to even accept the sexual views of the rest of America and the world. And in the case of Mary Astor, they closed ranks. She was not destroyed; she did not even lose any important job.

When this sort of thing happens, it is because a whole group of people, a whole social class, has grown up with a sense of entitlement, of normalcy. Americans before the Civil War, especially in the Southern states, had grown up with large-scale black slavery around them; it was part of their sense of entitlement, part of their social world, and they did not begin to understand why the rest of the world should find it so unacceptable. By the same token, Hollywood citizens had either been born in or entered very young into a society whose sexual habits were routinely out of kilter with those of the rest of America, let alone the world. They had a distant awareness that this was so, but with a steadily diminishing understanding of outsiders' views; the sense of entitlement was growing, as was the resentment at the hostile scrutiny of others.

The Astor case was the breaking point. It was the point where Hollywood, as a collectivity, silently and widely challenged the rest of the world. Mary Astor remained a star. She continued to perform. Hollywood essentially, collectively (the collective aspect is important; it means that nobody in particular had to stand up and justify their stand) held up two fingers to ordinary morality. And, what is more important, they succeeded. The public did not desert - or deserted only briefly - Mary Astor's movies. Moral disapproval lost out before Hollywood glamour.

Now, getting back to the present. Does anyone doubt that if the kind of stories that came out about Kate Moss in the last few days - there are several, not just one - had come out ten years ago, she would have been instantly destroyed? Nobody would have wanted to touch her with a barge-pole.

However, look what is actually happening. Not one, but several media personalities have defended her on screen or gone in print with articles about "the Kate Moss I know," that Kate Moss being of course a fantastic, funny, intelligent, generous, etc. person. And to date, only the mumsy Swedish high street outfit H&M have broken their contract with her.

We still have to wait and look. Things might turn out differently. She might yet lose all her contracts - nothing is more cowardly than a large corporation. But if she survives this storm, it will be a sure sign that in several influential areas of our world, not only multi-partner sex - that was already known - but regular cocaine consumption, has come to be covered by that sense of entitlement and daily habit that I was speaking about.

The consequences for our society may well be far-reaching. Hollywood's increasingly successful defence of their own turned into an increasing commercial use of semi-nudity and propaganda, however disguised, for free sex. The Sixties, the destruction of the Hayes Code, and the rise of pornography as a major industry (now surpassing Hollywood in cash size), may all be seen as the long wave of Hollywood's successful imposition of its own view of sexual morality, which began with the Astor affair.

By the same token, if rich and media-savvy parts of society such as the fashion industry (and do we doubt that they are not the only ones?) have come to take the use of cocaine as part of their sense of entitlement and normalcy, then the laws against the use of drugs, however savage, however supported by State power on all sides, cannot be expected to last for ever. What people come to see as habitual cannot be long forbidden.

(As a side note, I will add that I am in favour of legalizing most drugs - not because I have any respect for the fashion industry, which I loathe, or Hollywood, which I despise, but because I find it hugely hypocritical that one of the most damaging drugs of them all - alcohol - should be freely available, while others are forbidden.)