Paul Thomas: Vulgarity keeps us all interested

It's open season on Tom Cruise: Hollywood royalty, in the form of Lauren Bacall, has put the boot in. Referring to Cruise's very public new romance, which just happens to coincide with the release of his latest film, Bacall harrumphed that it's "vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially".

Coming from half of one of Hollywood's most celebrated on and off-screen couples, this seems a little holier-than-thou. It also seems plain wrong.

Since when was vulgarity unacceptable? Every time a big movie comes out, the stars hit the road to promote it. They do the talk-show circuit and an endless round of magazine and newspaper interviews talking mostly about what's going on in their private lives, because that's what gets the punters fizzing.

Novelists have a much harder time flogging their wares because they are not, as a rule, celebrities and it is difficult to rivet an audience by discussing a work of fiction that they and, more often than not, the interviewer haven't read.

American crime writer James Ellroy readily admits his biggest career break was his mother's unsolved murder when he was 12. Not only did it trigger the obsession with crime and darkness that informs his work, it also gave him a sensational real-life story to tell.

Interviewers prefer to talk to interesting and/or famous people rather than about interesting books. By the time Ellroy had put the finishing touches to his haunted, alcoholic, panty-sniffing persona, he was a lot more interesting than your average wordsmith.

Hollywood stars don't have private lives. Their off-screen dramas sustain the on-screen image. Their real lives are part and parcel of the glamour and mystique of stardom, soap operas the star-struck public tunes into whenever it wants a break from mundane reality.

So last month, Angelina Jolie was out and about denying she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt, even as evidence to the contrary assumed mountainous proportions. Next month, jilted Jen gives her side of the story ("I still love Brad; I never said I didn't want kids") in Vanity Fair.

Movie stars gushing about their relationships to promote a film - and thereby justify their $20 million asking price - are doing much the same as our home-grown celebrities who sell their wedding or baby photos to women's magazines, albeit on a grander scale.

To apply Bacall's test, one is as vulgar as the other.

Vulgarity is as much a reflection of contemporary society as advertising slogans and opinion polls. It is a by-product of the mass culture created by the defining forces of the modern age: consumer capitalism and democracy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich "are different from you and me". They are certainly more vulgar, if a recent Vanity Fair article on the new status symbol - super-yachts - is anything to go by.

Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis blazed this trail. His Christina O had a crew of 60, an orchestra, and barstools covered with whales' foreskins. Whether the latter is vulgar or just environmentally unsound is a matter of debate. However, his remark to Greta Garbo as he led her into the bar - "I'm going to sit you on the world's biggest prick" - must surely be one of the most vulgar chat-up lines recorded.

New Zealand is there, as ever, punching above its weight, courtesy of Alan Gibbs and his 59m yacht Senses. He boasts that his was the first super-yacht to visit Tunisia: "The helicopter just drove them nuts - that some private person would have a ship that looked like the navy and wanted to fly all over Tunisia in a helicopter." Vulgar, moi?

It is hard to think of anything more vulgar than pornography, that juggernaut that threatens to clog the internet and which becomes more pervasive by the day.

How much longer can Hollywood keep its black sheep sibling at arm's length? How long before the already blurred line between mainstream and adult entertainment disappears?

Elections are increasingly exercises in how-low-can-you-go vulgarity, along with the traditional pork-barrelling and character assassination. It is not so long ago that kissing other people's babies was as undignified as politicians were prepared to be to gain office.

The recent American presidential election plumbed new depths, with the Democrats portraying John Kerry as Rambo with a Yale degree while the Republicans, whose candidate ducked and dived to avoid active service, went to great lengths to try to prove that Kerry didn't deserve his medals.

Perhaps nothing symbolises the vulgarisation of western society as starkly as the life and death of Princess Diana, a twisted fairy tale that ran the gamut from bedroom farce to tragedy via prime-time confessions of adultery.

Given her tumultuous life and the Hollywood values underpinning the cult of Diana, it was almost inevitable that her funeral featured the stupendously vulgar Sir Elton John singing Candle In The Wind, his syrupy lament for Marilyn Monroe.

It took the fearless iconoclast Christopher Hitchens to ponder the appropriateness of marking Diana's passing with a song about a disturbed, addictive, promiscuous suicidal woman.