According to legend, Frank Sinatra once said this to a close friend: “I wish that someone would hurt your family so that I could find that person and hurt them back.”
To which, I suppose, the only polite response was, “Gosh. Thanks, Frank. I hope so, too.”
There are probably better ways to put it, of course, but it must have been nice to know that Sinatra, the “chairman of the board of all show business,” liked you enough to vow a terrible vengeance upon your enemies.
Hollywood friendships, in other words, are weird.
Martha Stewart is the world-famous queen of home decorating and entertaining. She’s known for her prim and highly controlled public persona and her obsession with details.
Snoop Dogg, the Los Angeles-native rapper and recording artist, is famous for being a casual, shambling figure: He speaks in his own special patois and has never once expressed an interest in arranging flowers for an attractive centerpiece or the correct spoon to use with sorbet.
And yet, Stewart and Snoop Dogg are good friends. They are close enough, in fact, to have starred in a reality television show together in which the unlikely pair hosted dinner parties with other celebrity guests.
The correct spoon to use with sorbet, by the way, is the runcible spoon, or what some people (not me, and certainly not Martha) might call a “spork.”
The so-called friendship between Stewart and Snoop Dogg may seem strange, but inside the bubble that encloses much of the New York and Los Angeles mediaopolis, it makes perfect sense. Famous people may have little else in common with each other aside from fame, but that’s often enough. The paparazzi and publicity machines that surround well-known people act, in a way, like celebrity sheepdogs, herding the famous and the infamous together into a tightly formed knot of bold-faced names.
These days, as we all know, the word “friend” can have a very elastic meaning. For the past four years, there has been an almost chilling photograph floating around the internet — how chilling depends, I suppose, on your political leanings — showing a beaming Bill and Hillary Clinton, both dressed in their formal best, embracing an ebullient Donald and Melania Trump on the latter couple’s wedding day. At the time the image was snapped, the four were a merry and mutually supportive quartet, all smiles and winks and let’s-do-lunch giggles.
Now, not so much.
The question arises: Were they ever really friends, the way nonfamous You and nonentity Me define the word?
On the other hand, maybe we’re thinking about friendship in the wrong way.
In 2016, Alex Pentland, a social and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed a study that revealed some disturbing statistics. Barely half of all friendships are mutual. When he asked a group of people to rank each other in terms of the closeness of their friendship, they only matched up 53% of the time. In other words, the people you think of as your close friends may not think of you the same way.
It gets worse: In the survey, a subject who reported a “close friendship” with a person who did not reciprocate was 94% more likely to expect the opposite. The study managed to deliver two uneasy messages to the socially paranoid: One, a lot of your friends probably don’t like you that much, and two, you have no idea which ones do and which ones don’t.
Clearly, Donald and Melania and Hillary and Bill are evidence that this study is sound science, though maybe it doesn’t apply in cases like that.
It’s impossible to imagine that at the precise moment the famous Happy Foursome picture was snapped that any of the principals involved really thought they were friends. In fact, if the gossip is true, there isn’t much friendship within the couples, let alone among the group as a whole. It’s a picture of four smart and strategic individuals, forming a temporary alliance to serve the immediate needs of each. It’s positively Ayn Randian in its depiction of ruthless efficiency.
Perhaps if Pentland had studied celebrities and politicians, his conclusions would have been different. That kind of study would surely have revealed that something closer to 100% of the celebrity subjects surveyed disliked their celebrity friends 100% of the time and were 100% certain that their famous friends felt exactly the same way.
The lone, heroic exception, as always, is Sinatra, who knew a thing or two about what friendship really means — and how to express it.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
