Goldie Hawn is sounding the alarm on a celebrity culture that rewards young people with attention before achievement.
During a conversation with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the cultural and community center 92NY, the 80-year-old actress was asked to share her thoughts on children and teenagers finding early fame as social media influencers.
“It’s a nightmare,” Hawn said. “All I can say is it’s a nightmare.”
“The First Wives Club” star argued that children and teenagers are ill-equipped to process fame and public scrutiny because they are still developing emotionally and cognitively.
“They don’t have the ability to have the vision,” she said. “They’re not taught that. They don’t have the witness.”
“And I can tell you they have no tools,” Hawn added.
Hawn contrasted today’s young aspiring stars with her longtime partner Kurt Russell, 75, arguing that the years that he spent working to become both an actor and a professional baseball player helped give him the discipline and perspective needed to withstand fame.
“Kurt Russell is an exception,” she said. “He’s been acting since he was 9 years old. He’s also a baseball player. He doesn’t believe in all this stuff. He’s very strict on all of it, on the way he looks at life.”
“But most kids today — not then — are really susceptible,” Hawn continued. “And they’re susceptible because of the very things we’re talking about. They have been given zero tools to understand how to handle it. Not just that, but to know the beauty and the fragility of — as we learn as an adolescent.”
Hawn, who began pursuing acting and dance at a young age, noted that like Russell, she also learned early that success had to be earned. The “Overboard” star expressed her concern over how social media turns teenagers into influencers and ordinary users into celebrities overnight.
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“It’s a false world,” Hawn said. “I always believed that I could only do as good as I could be. And it wasn’t anything. And I look at this and I think, ‘What happens to children who didn’t feel they earned it?’ They’re not earning it. They didn’t dance every weekday.”
“They didn’t take voice lessons,” she continued. “They didn’t take ground balls. They didn’t have the grit to understand that you have to work for your accolades. It just doesn’t happen like that.”
Hawn shared an anecdote about a piece of advice that her mother gave her when she was a young aspiring performer. The Washington, D.C., native recalled that at the time, she was living alone in New York City for a month while working as a dancer at the 1964 World’s Fair.
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She remembered that she was hoping to be discovered by someone in the entertainment industry when a man claiming to work for famed cartoonist Al Capp approached her.
Hawn, who previously shared that she never considered herself attractive when she was younger, explained she appreciated that the man didn’t try to flatter her.
“I love that he said that I wasn’t beautiful because I wasn’t,” Hawn said. “I was weird-looking. And he said, ‘You’re interesting-looking.’ And I thought, well, he’s telling me the truth.”
“So he told me all this story. At the end of the day, I said, ‘OK,'” she remembered.
Hawn said that the man dropped her off “somewhere” and told her that she would be auditioning for Capp.
The actress has spoken publicly about her encounter with Capp before, including in her 2005 memoir “A Lotus Grows in the Mud.” In the book, she recounted being 19 years old when Capp allegedly propositioned her and exposed himself during what she thought was a professional meeting.
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Hawn later opened up about the experience with Capp, who died in 1979 at age 70, during a 2017 interview with People magazine.
“I was 19. I went up for the ‘meet,’ and it was so scary,” she claimed to the outlet. “He took off his business clothes and came in, like, a dressing gown. I got the picture, and I thought, ‘I’m in trouble. Where’s the door?’”
Hawn said she was briefly put at ease by what she perceived as honest feedback about her audition performance from Capp, but she soon realized he had ulterior motives.
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“I went, ‘Wait a minute. He knows what he’s talking about,’” she claimed. “I said, ‘OK, so I’ll do it, like, more quiet, more real.’ Then he wanted me to show my legs, and I said, ‘You know, Mr. Capp, I don’t know. I don’t think so,’ and then I sat down, and he wanted me to give him a kiss, and I went, ‘I don’t do this. I’m sorry.’”
Hawn has said that the late “Li’l Abner” creator became angry after she refused his advances and allegedly told her that she was “never gonna make anything in your life” and she should “go and marry a Jewish dentist.”
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“I was crying, and I didn’t have any money to go back to the World’s Fair, where I was dancing, and so he threw me $20 for a taxicab,” Hawn recalled. “It wasn’t a good day.”
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Hawn said that after being cast in the sketch comedy show “Laugh-In” in 1968 and winning an Academy Award for 1969’s “Cactus Flower,” she sent Capp a pointed note letting him know she hadn’t needed to “marry a Jewish dentist” after all.
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During her conversation with Haidt, Hawn explained that her story illustrated a lesson her mother taught her during her early career.
“My mother wrote me a letter to be careful of the casting couch,” Hawn recalled. “She said to me, ‘I want you to understand something. Know that a producer cannot make you a star. Know that they can only put you in front. If you are not ready and you have not honed your craft enough, then you are not ready. And you have to make sure that that’s who you are, because a casting couch will get you nowhere.'”
“I’ll never forget that,” she added. “And that was saying, ‘Be the best you can be at what you do.’ And these kids that are out there now wanting to be stars — it’s frightening because they have an inflated sense of self until they crash, right?”
“That’s upsetting.”
