Circulating via email, Ben Stein's final column for E! Online, a piece published in December 2003 entitled 'How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?'
Description: Forwarded email
Circulating since: 2004
Status: Authentic
Email example contributed by Marian B., Oct. 8, 2004:
Subject: Ben Stein's Last Column
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's". (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe)
Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time because it praises the most unselfish among us and portrays a valuable lesson learned in his life.
Ben Stein's Last Column...
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it.
On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of something we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.
A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
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Analysis: Nothing to dispute here — author, pundit, and sometime movie actor Ben Stein did write the soul-searching article above to close out his series of columns for E! Online in December 2003. It continues to circulate via forwarded email to this day.
More of Ben Stein's writings are available on his website.
Email This Article
See also:
Ben Stein's Christmas Confessions
Urban Legends, 20 March 2006
Sources and further reading:
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
E! Online, 20 December 2003
Ben Stein Biography
From Ben Stein's website
Last updated 07/15/09
