Hollywood’s Hottest Accessory
by Maryanna Abdo on February 7, 2007 in Culture
Everyone in Hollywood has a baby these days: Tom and Katie had their little Elvis alien, Britney produced another unfortunate tater tot, and even Halle might have a baby bump.
But some of these celebrity babies are more special than others. The best babies of all come from far-away places most Americans can’t place on a map: Cambodia, Malawi, Ethiopia. Saved from lives of poverty by their new, millionaire parents, these once-forlorn looking infants grow fat, happy and Versace-clad before our eyes. Adopting children is, objectively, a good thing. So why does celebrity adoption make us so uncomfortable?
I’ll put aside immediate concerns about whether a celebrity’s money and power grease the adoption wheels (they do) or whether some babies could be said to have been “bought” rather than adopted (they have). The question still remains: why this child? Why adopt children from the developing world instead of ones from Houston or Miami or Manchester?
One could say Madonna was adopting a needier child than she might have found closer to home. David’s prospects were obviously poorer than those of an American or European baby. But I don’t quite think that’s at the heart of the matter. After all, a regular baby from South L.A. could never have the same caché as little Malawian David Banda.
While Madonna offers David a new home and a new future, David gives her far more than a first-world orphan could. His foreignness and poverty confer on Madonna both exoticism and an air of beatific selflessness. Madonna’s public sees David clutched against her chest and attaches all the appropriate labels to him - different, beautiful, exotic, real - and with that also attaches the same qualities to his adoptive mother.
David is another accessory to Madonna’s fame, complementing and building on it, offering her that most elusive quality of celebrity and cool: authenticity. It is crass, but not inaccurate, to compare little David to a pair of perfectly torn Levis or a fabulous Gucci bag; while I don’t doubt that he will be loved and looked after, David serves a very public purpose for Madonna and her vanity. David, Malawian orphan, is the real deal. In adopting him - and his ethnic and geographic otherness - Madonna links herself in the most powerful way with all that he represents.
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