Our Cheating Hearts
Since no one in show business has risen to the defense of poor Andrew Lloyd Webber, please allow me to do so.
When Mr. Lloyd Webber's company lied about how much money "Sunset Boulevard" was making on Broadway during Glenn Close's recent vacation -- inflating the weekly figure by $155,000 -- it was engaging in a well-known show-biz practice near and dear to any student of P. T. Barnum: humbug.
Mr. Lloyd Webber has a big, expensive product to sell. There's little evidence that an unlimited public wants that product without Ms. Close in it. Since she is soon to take her permanent leave, a scheme had to be devised to convince future customers that "Sunset Boulevard" was a hot property worth $70 a ticket once she was gone. That the scheme backfired -- pitching Mr. Lloyd Webber into a fight with Ms. Close, and inspiring Ms. Close to publicly insult her understudy -- only added to the humbug. If there's this much smoke backstage at "Sunset Boulevard," a ticket buyer may wonder this summer, maybe there's actually some dramatic fire on stage, too.
And we all know what Barnum used to say about suckers.
Whatever the final outcome, the "Sunset Boulevard" hoax is in the honorable tradition of an entertainment industry that never pretended to be honorable. As the story took over the tabloids last week -- or did until Al D'Amato did his impersonation of Warner Oland's Charlie Chan on the Don Imus show -- it obscured all the cheating that we might more profitably worry about. Why bother to pick on a show-biz humbug artist when almost every pillar of our society turns out to be a cheat without even a song as ubiquitous as "Memory" to show for it?
I exaggerate, but only slightly. Last week a jury concluded that the president of the country's best-known charity, the United Way of America, was guilty of stealing more than $600,000 to feather the nests he shared with a 17-year-old girlfriend. The week before, a major American corporation, W. R. Grace & Company, was exposed as a liar for having attributed its C.E.O.'s departure to "differences of style and philosophy." (The actual cause: accusations of sexual harassment.)
Then there are the fine recent examples set by the nation's schools. At Steinmetz High in Chicago, a member of the 1994 "Cinderella team" that did well in a national academic competition confessed that her teacher supplied the answer key. In New York City, where a school supply-purchasing scandal threatens to rival police and union corruption, an elementary-school principal pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing $11,500 from the proceeds of student plays and bake sales.
It was also last week that The Wall Street Journal exposed how schools, New York University and Boston University among them, cheat when reporting their students' average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores to Money magazine and U.S. News & World Report, both of which publish influential annual consumer guides to higher education. Asked to explain why he inflated his school's average, the admissions director of the New College of the University of South Florida gave the answer Andrew Lloyd Webber should have come up with: it was a "marketing strategy."
To make the week complete, Adm. William O. Studeman confessed that the C.I.A. had misled Congress about its involvement with Guatemalan thugs three years ago. (The facts just "slipped under the carpet" was the Admiral's the-dog-ate-my-homework excuse.) And back at the trial of the century, the jurors were revealed to be as suspect as any of the witnesses whose credibility they are supposed to judge.
Why this epidemic? Recalling her teacher's words as he fed her the answer key, the former member of the Steinmetz High "Cinderella team" explained: "He told us: Everybody cheats, that's the way the world works, and we were fools just to play by the rules."
It's hard to dispute this logic, and while I'd be happy to put the blame for this sorry collapse in national ethics on Watergate, a cynical press, the Contract With America, the counterculture, P. T. Barnum or the Easter Bunny, I must instead take my leave to join the rest of the country in finishing up my scrupulously honest tax returns.