Not So Star-Struck

All the important elements are in place: red carpet, helicopters, jockeying paparazzi, fans. This could be any movie premiere in any city. Except that I would know with my eyes closed that it's a Boston-does-Tinseltown event, because for one thing, it has our signature combination of small-time ambience with big-time attitude, and, two, there's a woman screaming, "Jawwwneee! Jawwwneee Damon!" in my ear.

Partly that's circumstantial. This is the April world premiere of Fever Pitch, and the baseball-obsessed romantic comedy is being feted inside Fenway Park, where sprinklers hiss a unique outfield commentary and the red-carpet runner is splattered with the cocoa-brown soil of the first-base line. But more than that, it's because we view celebrity a little differently in this town.

With a cocky provincialism, one might say.

Here, celebrities don't occupy a separate stratosphere; they're seen as mostly ordinary folk, filtered through our everyday values, even if they dress in couture and don't pay for cocktails.

So maybe everywhere else in America, the stars of Fever Pitch are Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore, but in Boston, there's no setting where those two actors rate a louder reception than Red Sox center fielder Johnny Damon and Patriots quarterback Tom Brady working the same receiving line. What's more, this is exactly the kind of event where Hollywood can expect to share the spotlight with our past and present sports heroes (Ray Bourque, Doug Flutie, David Ortiz, Kevin Millar), our favorite punk rock band (Dropkick Murphys), and even our original pinup restaurateur (Todd English) - not because there's a shortage of star power in the Northeast, but because we're easily persuaded that a little celebrity goes a long way. After all, this is a town where an A-list party is usually some dentist and Alan Dershowitz.

To us, Todd English represents red-carpet material of the trendiest kind. Remember when Boston was ridiculed for its unrefined cuisine? Now Clio's Ken Oringer makes People magazine's "Top 50 Bachelors" list, and our local gossip pages regularly boldface the names of Jody Adams, Michael Schlow, and Ming Tsai right along with mention of the superstars they feed. (Yes, the world is awash in celebrity chefs; it's just not everywhere that a Barbara Lynch inspires infatuation as much as rocker Steven Tyler.)

And curiously, to their credit, many famous entertainers seem fine with that equation. Some, including actors John Malkovich and Chris Cooper, may have even come to live here in some measure because of it. Unlike the Elizabeth Taylors of yesteryear, a lot of stars today actually covet a certain dressed-down normalcy. Boston has long been the sort of place where a bartender or a fisherman ascends to legend more often than the high-paid ham who can open a film, and where perhaps the biggest celebrity is not a person but an institution that goes by the name of Harvard.

Do those we anoint, and the ways we treat celebrity in general, say anything unique about our little corner of the country?

Beans have always been good to us, but Robin Williams gave a major shout-out to one of the savviest cupboard characterizations of Boston in 1998, when he accepted the best supporting actor Oscar for his role in Good Will Hunting. "You're a can of corn," Williams said during his televised thanks to the residents of South Boston. "You're the best."

That's right, a can of corn.

It's baseball slang for an easy-catch fly ball; obscure Southie slang for an easygoing, good-humored personality. Which is to say that if you've ever wondered what the celebrities who come to Boston think of us -- and they do pass through here far more often than you might think -- Williams's borrowed colloquialism should tell you that they like us, really.

In interviews, stars routinely praise our city for its unusual blend of sophistication and small-town intimacy. It's well documented in the city's gossip columns that they come here not just to work but to shop and eat, drink in our culture and history, seek treatment at our hospitals, and enroll in our ivy-infested schools. You'll spy them strolling Newbury Street or Harvard Square, loitering in the lobbies of the Ritz-Carlton and Charles hotels, kicking back at the Four Seasons' Bristol Lounge, power-lunching at Radius and the Union Oyster House, and checking out Restaurant L, Via Matta, Davio's on Arlington, or the view from table 26 at Aujourd'hui.

They don't seem to mind that it's hard to be outwardly fabulous in this town, what with the inhospitable weather and the anemic after-hours scene. And if our no-exceptions desire to put a collar on unruly, irregular behavior shows that we don't understand celebrity the way people do in other parts of the country, that's apparently not a significant mark against us. It's no secret that in glamour-challenged New England, "celebrity" is widely considered a dirty word. Generally, the more egocentric and image-conscious a person acts around here, the less attractive he or she is in the public eye. This helps explain why our most beloved entertainers are people like James Taylor and the late Julia Child, and why many of our biggest household names come not from Hollywood but from the ranks of government, academia, literature, religion, business, and medicine.

How many other places in America hang on every word tripping out of the mouths of guys like Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Boston University's uber-powerful John Silber? What similar-sized community brings together business guru Jack Welch, cancer guru Dr. Judah Folkman, and Car Talk gurus Tom and Ray Magliozzi? Could any other city inspire hundreds of famous authors ranging from Robert B. Parker to Ha Jin, yet be governed by the often unintelligible Mayor Thomas Menino? And where else might an orthopedic surgeon named Bill Morgan be asked to autograph baseballs, just because he performed a bizarre little surgery on Sox ace Curt Schilling?

Even in the sports arena we follow our own gold standard of teamwork, giving our hearts more freely to the no-nonsense Tedy Bruschis and Jason Variteks than we ever will to a Terry Glenn or a Pedro Martinez. (Not that we'll decline your services if you want to help us win a world championship or lay claim to an Oscar, of course.)

Massachusetts has always been a place that rewards humility and shouts down the selfish.

Ever hear of the crab-bucket syndrome? As explained in Ron Suskind's book about urban schools, A Hope in the Unseen, it plays off the notion that crabs piled into a bucket don't need a lid, because if any one of them tries to escape, the other crabs will drag it back down, ensuring that they all share the same fate. If any town in the United States is the capital of the crab-bucket syndrome, it's Boston.

"There is this longstanding sense that Boston is superior," says Joseph Conforti, a professor of American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine. "We think Boston is a sort of homeland."

That's why Lenny Clarke is bigger than Jerry Seinfeld here, and the Kennedys will always rule Camelot. We're entrenched, and we don't care if that makes us seem insecure. Furthermore, this isn't a place that denies its parochialism. When best-selling author and Dorchester native Dennis Lehane tells me that his dad didn't even know who Clint Eastwood was before the director came to Boston a few years ago to turn Lehane's novel Mystic River into a blockbuster film, not only can I believe that such a man still exists here; I probably know five other guys proud to be just like him, and so do you.

"For a variety of reasons, there's been an anti-celebrity ethos in New England," Conforti says. And though he cautions against attributing too much of that to our heritage, there's no getting around the fact that this region is predisposed to favor substance over style. Even John Adams, who biographers suggest had an ego as limitless as the Big Dig, wisely let his personality take a back seat to his patriotism.

Today, for the most part, we remain unconvinced by the expanding glut of newcomers who are famous for being famous. Survivor conniver Rob Mariano notwithstanding, if you want true and lasting worship in Boston, you almost always have to earn it in attitude as well as action. (And, oh, by the way, regularly reaffirming your love for us is a nonnegotiable part of the deal -- just ask former Bosox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra.)

But then this is also a place where hordes of screaming middle-aged women will turn out for location filming by John Travolta and George Clooney, because while we may be descended from Puritans, that doesn't mean we're blind.

So "culture of celebrity" is an especially incongruous expression here - like "highway maintenance" or "Yankees fan" - because we like to think we're smarter than the latest pop trends and claims to fame, even as we keep tabs on them from the corner of our eye. In practice, I wonder, are Bostonians really any less celebrity-obsessed than the rest of the country? Or do we just hide our obsession considerably better than most?

When Barry and Eliot Tatelman walk through their bustling Jordan's Furniture in Reading, even on a wintry Wednesday morning, there's bound to be at least one rock star moment in the offing. This day it comes outside the store's IMAX theater, where gray-haired ladies in bright-red hats are waiting in line for the next show.

"Oh, my god!" someone squeals from the group, which leads the women to point and tug on one another's sleeves as the Tatelman brothers brush past.

"How are you, ladies?" Barry waves to them. And they giggle.

Barry and Eliot -- no last names necessary -- are familiar to just about everyone in Boston, regardless of where you buy your end tables. In the first place, they're witty and self-effacing, as their distinctive commercials project. Second, the stores they promote (as executives rather than owners since they sold out to Warren Buffett in 1999) are increasingly like theme parks, with the newest franchise, in Reading, sporting a Vegas-style water/light show, a trapeze school, and amusing replicas of Boston landmarks. It's no wonder they're seen as entertainers, even if it's an image they claim not to cultivate.

"We don't look at ourselves as Tom Cruises," Barry insists while relaxing on a tan sectional in the showroom. "We look at ourselves as local guys trying to make a living."

Says Eliot, lounging beside him: "When somebody wants our autograph, we do it, because obviously it's important to them. But in many respects we feel funny doing it, because we're basically business people."

Business people who have come to know this much about Boston: Celebrity might get you a table in a crowded restaurant, but otherwise it's a very unreliable currency.

"People like what we do," Barry says of the pair's public image and charity work, "but if they thought our furniture was overpriced, they wouldn't spend 10 cents - even knowing that we're real nice guys."

That's because Bostonians are, overall, discerning and pragmatic, traits that help keep our adoration impulses in check. Lots of people get treated like rock stars here. They just shouldn't ever count on it.

Matt Damon is the quintessential Boston celebrity. By all accounts smart, talented, hardworking, and affable, he seems not to have changed much with the success that vaulted him from Cambridge boy to Oscar winner and beyond, which lets us think that even though he now hangs with the biggest names in the business, he's still one of us. But is he, really?

Damon lives in Manhattan now, and he admits he's lucky if he gets to spend a couple of weeks a year in his home state - this year being a rare exception because, beginning in midmonth, he'll be here filming Martin Scorsese's The Departed with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and fellow Bay Stater Mark Wahlberg. Technically, Damon isn't any more connected to Massachusetts at this point than, say, Uma Thurman, who most people forget was born in Boston and raised in Amherst. Still, he remains our guy because he embodies our ideals, the same way that his boyhood buddy and Good Will Hunting co-writer Ben Affleck became the antithesis of our guy when he put a pink rock the size of Plymouth on J.Lo's finger before enduring an embarrassing split.

"If [New Englanders] see somebody being flashy, they'll say he doesn't remember where he came from," Damon says of highfliers in general. "The values that people want to see me bring to my work are pretty simple; they're the kind of values that most people are raised with in Boston." Values that he's reminded of every time he shakes the hands of Hub residents, who he notes are actually quicker to approach him than fans he encounters anywhere else.

"Work hard, don't take it for granted, and if you fail, fail trying," Damon says when I ask what fans in Boston say to him. Their collective advice, he says: " 'Keep it up, but don't embarrass me.' I think that's the unspoken contract."

And it's where Affleck probably should have read the fine print on his birth certificate, because as radio and TV personality Billy Costa points out sympathetically, the Pearl Harbor poster boy was huge for Boston, "but then he became a liability . . . and now we don't want to acknowledge him as one of ours."

Meanwhile, straight-arrow Damon gets grouped with those who do us proud -- names that in the old days would have included Bette Davis, Jack Lemmon, Leonard Bernstein, and Ruth Gordon, and these days might run from Errol Morris to Aerosmith.

The list of all the famous people our area lays claim to goes on and on, but it would hardly be a revelation to trot out names like Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Donna Summer, Michael Chiklis, Kate Bosworth, Yo-Yo Ma, Jonathan Richman, and Chick Corea. Not to mention that Boston is the Kevin Bacon of cities when it comes to tangential connections. We could be here all day if we wanted to list every Natalie Portman who's passed through here by way of a degree or a job.

Even more daunting, there are endless VIPs who are too often overlooked by the lists. They include official royalty (Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, born in Cambridge), people's royalty (Rosie's Place founder Kip Tiernan), and dozens more local heroes captured by photographer Bill Brett for his upcoming book, Boston: All One Family. "Boston isn't a celebrity town," says Brett. "Boston is a town of good community, people who really want to make the city move."

Maybe. But the way we treat celebrities is telling, even when we hold them in high regard. New Englanders have a reputation for being distant -- OK, cold -- and respectful of boundaries. Let's dispense with those myths right now.

Though the local celebrities I interviewed all had glowing things to say about Boston, many admitted, when pressed, that fans here don't always take the high road.

WBZ-TV's longtime entertainment reporter, Joyce Kulhawik, remembers one local lingerie-buying experience when the Victoria's Secret clerk was so excited that she called her family and insisted Kulhawik get on the phone. "It was very funny. I remember being a little embarrassed, but at the same time I enjoyed it," she says, laughing. "You have to carry your celebrity very lightly. Any celebrities out there who are feeling burdened by their celebrity should just get a grip."

And in the event that they need some nudging in that direction, Bostonians are always here to help.

"We're a city of ball busters," says Costa, whose banter on KISS 108's Matty in the Morning show makes him an especially convenient target for off-air teasing. "It's what we do as a culture, break balls. Think about the St. Patrick's Day breakfast."

Or think about Dennis Lehane, who tells the following Sean Penn story over a beer at Matt Murphy's Pub in Brookline: The author and the Mystic River star, who became fast friends during the movie's filming, are standing outside a Boston hotel when a local woman approaches. "I love your work," she says to Penn, who answers with a thank you. ("He was totally nice," Lehane insists.) The woman walks inside, only to reemerge seconds later through the revolving door to tell the actor, "I didn't realize you were so short." To which the notoriously humorless Penn replies, without blinking, "[Bleep] off."

"She looked stunned," marvels Lehane, "like she was hurt.... It just blows my mind."

But if we sometimes express our adoration in ways that are rough around the edges, we also get points for poking good-natured fun at famous egos in need of a reality check.

Lexington-born David White mans the concierge desk at Boston's Four Seasons Hotel, where he says at least one high-profile guest checks in a week, and customized care can mean getting the perfect degree of melt on the apple pie a la mode or running 16 humidifiers for a singer who wants junglelike sleeping conditions. It's rare that high-end hotel staffers get to give as good as they get, but White reports that one especially fussy nationally known radio personality got more than he expected from the Four Seasons team after he asked for a large Caesar salad to be waiting in his room. When the guest arrived, he was greeted by a large Four Seasons employee outfitted in a toga, holding a bowl of greens.

Could it happen in New York or Los Angeles? Sure. But in New York the guy playing Caesar might have been expected to belt out a show tune, and in LA he would have handed the celebrity his screenplay.

The difference is that Boston isn't an audition for anything.

Comparing Los Angeles to any other city is ridiculous, and Boston in particular has more in common with Chicago, San Francisco, or Philadelphia. But in any serious examination of celebrity, LA must be acknowledged as the epicenter; it's maybe the only place where one can assume that if the guy at the front of the Fatburger line looks like Tom Hanks, he probably is Tom Hanks. In Los Angeles, when the door to a restaurant opens, everyone in the dining room steals a look, because if Barbra Streisand or Steven Spielberg or the second-unit gaffer from Sahara walks in, people want to know about it. Angelinos act cool in the company of celebrity, but they pay it more surreptitious attention than any civilization on the planet.

(While I was living out there, I once noticed Diane Keaton rummaging through a pile of lace tablecloths next to me at the Long Beach swap meet. In accordance with the municipal hipness code, I said nothing but kept her in my line of vision through several more aisles. In Southern California, this is called shopping.)

Contrast that with New York City, where people who act as if they aren't star-struck genuinely aren't, and Boston, where an attaboy pat on the back is far more common than a request for an autograph.

While Academy Awards night at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood is a sea of crimson and gold -- with so many major stars filing past frenzied paparazzi and fans, it's truly dizzying -- in Boston, at Saint's Oscar Night America party or the Four Seasons' gala fund-raiser for the Massachusetts Film Bureau, Oscar glamour is roughly 20 feet of red carpet and Tony Shalhoub. The annual Hasty Pudding awards at Harvard seem more our speed, with their charming mix of coeds in recycled prom dresses and nervous movie stars being roasted by future world leaders in drag. At the very least, as 2005 Man of the Year Tim Robbins pointed out to me, "you can actually make soup in [the Pudding pot] award, which you can't in an Oscar."

The sidewalk stars on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame bear the names of entertainers known all over the world. Boston has stars worthy of foot traffic, too - in fact, there used to be a few immortalized outside the former Back Bay Tower Records -- which is why it's no surprise that an official walk of fame proposed for Boston's Theater District is getting serious consideration, possibly with nameplates in the shape of lobsters or something equally distinctive.

But if this Hub attraction materializes, it won't need crustaceans to announce its place of origin. Surely it will distinguish itself the moment it places Jay Leno and Matt Damon in the company of legendary theater critic Elliot Norton and children's TV cowboy Rex Trailer. City Councilor John Tobin, leading the promenade push, says he thinks David Brudnoy, the late Boston radio host and critic, would be "a natural first pick" to be honored. And while nobody would have laughed harder at that idea than Brudnoy himself, don't be surprised if it happens.

Consider, as a reference point, the walls o' fame at Joe Tecce's in the North End, where the foyer offers caricatures of politicians, journalists, clergy, athletes, and entrepreneurs who are barely known west of Concord.

Sarcasm aside, it's this type of display that's the perfect statement to tourists, even when it shines a klieg light on our cluelessness. Celebrities are commodities in Los Angeles. In Boston, they're neighbors.

Where would you rather live?

Janice Page is a Boston-bred writer and a former entertainment editor at the Los Angeles Times. Her last story for the magazine was a profile of Doug Flutie. She can be reached at jpage22@hotmail.com.