Audrey's got it

My dad hates celebrities. He can't name them, but he pretty much despises them all.

It's not that he hates entertainment; he just really hates that the mundane activities of a person's life constitute any portion of a news report. He just doesn't care. He doesn't care who an actor is in a movie -- if it's a good movie, then great. If not, so what.

"Trash," he mutters, shaking his head as he wanders past the eternally babbling television. "Who cares about that smut?!" Sometimes there's a shaken fist to emphasize it. "All they did was smile for a camera and get strategically naked!" At the store, it's an over-exaggerated snort at the check-out aisle -- "PSH! Garbage ..." Heads turn to look at the guy talking to himself next to the displays of "People," "Star," and "OK!"

He can't tell one celebrity from another (except for George Clooney; Dad isn't a Clooney fan).

And that's okay. Life carries on, whether Dad knows who's dating Paris Hilton, whether Britney's in or out of rehab or who's getting married/divorced/having a baby or not.

And so I was taken aback several years ago when, in a conversation about "Breakfast at Tiffany's," my dad got this glassed-over look to his eyes and a faint, far-away smile on his face as he wistfully said, "Audrey Hepburn was so stunning in that movie. She was, like, the standard for femininity after that."

And he was serious.

I think I may have been talking to the teenager in my dad during those five minutes, but it got me to thinking about true celebrity: The staying power that someone's enigmatic presence can have.

Forget drug problems, relationship problems, money problems. That's not celebrity. Not true celebrity, at least.

True celebrity, I think, comes long after the individual can reap an endorsement contract (or jail senetence) from their actions.

True celebrity is recognized more than forty years later, when a guy in his fifties smiles wistfully and remembers what it was like to see a truly beautiful woman on a black-and-white screen mesmerize a world with her charm, beauty and talent.

Audrey's still got it, fifty years later.

I'm not sure that many of today's "celebrities" will be remembered for much of their actual work in fifty years.

But in fifty years, it will have been a century since "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and if my dad were to live 'til then, I think he'd still get that far-away look in his eyes when he talked about it ...