In my previous post, "
The Idea of Steve Jobs," I described how people regard others as images and ideas. In Jobs' case, he was billionaire, genius auteur, progenitor and guru of the electronic device era. The imagizing of Jobs was most pronounced by those closest to him, who forgave Jobs his insulting, denigrating attitude towards everyone who wasn't Steve Jobs.
But the most remarkable ideation of Jobs was by his wife, who seemingly accepted that he regarded her as little more than an interchangeable object when he debated marrying her or another willowly blond girlfriend, and who then endured Jobs' ignoring their two daughters and her own compensatory mothering of them. (Jobs had previously disavowed a daughter from another relationship.) The best sense I could make of the attitude his wife, Laurene Powell (who had been a successful Wall Street trader and a student at the prestigious Stanford Business School) held toward Jobs was this: "I love the world's greatest genius, even though he often seems to despise me and our daughters, along with everyone else."*
Can someone love an image or an idea of a person? In support of this hypothesis, I turn to two other legends: Sergeant Ernie Bilko and Private Duane Doberman, characters on
You'll Never Get Rich, a late 1950s TV series also known as the Phil Silvers show (Silvers was a fast-talking B-comedy film actor who was best-known for his portrayal of Bilko in the series). In a classic episode of the show, Duane (played by Maurice Gosfield, who was 5'4" tall and weighed over 200 pounds) was selected as king of the platoon's Mardi Gras celebration. Doberman in turn picked local debutante Joy Landers for his queen.
Landers, for her part, laughed at the prospect of being the platoon's queen, thus unleashing a diabolic plot by Bilko to. . . well, here, let me quote Bilko on the subject of Doberman to Landers:
"What does he look like? What does Doberman look like? How, how can I describe him to you? First you must forget all your middle class ideas of beauty, which is rapidly losing favour with the Continental set. To describe him we must take a leaf from the Orient. They who have mastered the arts of love, beauty as they only can. Short! With that pulse-quickening plumpness. A Buddha.....and his face, glistening as if rubbed with the mysterious oils of the East. Swarthy, greasy, if you will, but with that inscrutable air about him."
What could Landers do? She falls deeply in love with Duane, sight unseen. And when she desperately grabs for him when they do meet, Doberman dismisses her with a wave and the kiss-off, "Get lost."
Psheew, that was a heavy psychological moment in television history; few of us who saw it will ever forget it. It was the apotheosis of the idea that image dictates human reality—right there on "You'll Never Get Rich!"—and I was learning it before my Bar Mitzvah!
But here's the kicker. According to Silvers, the actual Gosfield filled the Doberman role perfectly:
"He didn’t know what he was, he thought he was Cary Grant playing the role of a fat fellow. He lived the way people thought I lived; he never missed a cocktail party. If we had to do a benefit or charity show he was the safest to take. We would make the plane trips, get to the place and the next night would be the show and in would walk Duane, with one of the stewardesses. I don’t know, some women did distortion. I mean I was out rehearsing and he was out swinging. . . .In Las Vegas, he thought everyone should faint when they saw him."
That can't be true, can it?
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* Jobs was the "victim" -- as well as beneficiary -- of imagistic love. He had a several-years-long affair with the older Joan Baez, but he decided he didn't really love her, and that he was drawn to her due to her association with his hero, Bob Dylan.
