If you think a passion for the written word is the only thing that best-selling memoirist Paris Hilton has in common with the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, think again. According to a new book, Shaggy Muses, the Nun of Amherst loved her gigantic, slobbery pooch Carlo at least as much as the Princess of Bel Air loves her tiny canine army. But while Carlo led a life of such cloistered obscurity that literary pet scholars can only agree that he was either a St. Bernard or a Newfoundland, Hilton’s fur-lined purse-stuffers are dogged by the puparazzi almost as relentlessly as their mistress is.
Thanks to the investigative efforts of USA Today, for example, we now know that Hilton treats her 10 chihuahuas and two Yorkies almost exactly like one imagines Pamela Anderson once treated Tommy Lee. (“Hilton has them groomed every two days and has hired a beefy security guard to tote them to and from her various homes in individual cages.”) And that she dresses them in bikinis, and is unrepentant about the fact that she buys them in tony LA pet stores instead of rescuing them from the SPCA.
Of course, it’s not just Hilton’s spoiled hellhounds or man-bites-dog shockers like the Michael Vick torture-kennel story that chase Somalian presidents and Indonesian earthquakes out of our newspapers. These days, seemingly every celebrity dog tale is deemed newsworthy. When Oprah wrote about the choking death of her golden retriever in O, the Oprah Magazine, it made sense that dozens of newspapers would pick up the story—it was a moving and instructive tale of one woman’s struggle to understand why the universe had granted her a gift of a gorgeous asphyxiated dog. (“Dear Gracie,” Oprah pondered, “what were you here to teach me that only your death could show me?”)
But is there really any pressing demand for the news that Billy Ray Cyrus’ dog is pooping all over his neighbors’ lawns in Toluca Lake, California, as TMZ.com recently reported? Or that Britney Spears’ new pet Yorkie did its best impression of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog all over a borrowed $6,700 gown during a disastrous photo shoot for a British tabloid?
Why, one wonders, does a photograph of an incandescent-looking Katherine Heigl snuggling some doomed pound dog at a Times Square adoption soiree enchant us so?
Celebrity pets are the crack cocaine of fame, a way to amp up the buzz of unconditional privilege when $100,000 gift bags at the Oscars no longer thrill like they once did. Even more than exotic refugee tots, a panting pug is a tiny, purebred engine of conspicuous consumption. (Plus, if you’re not sure your personal assistant really understands the challenges and responsibilities that will come with raising your adopted child, a Shih Tzu makes an adorable starter baby, and you don’t even have to endure a long, boring plane ride to Jakarta to get one!)
Eva Longoria’s tiny Maltese has a better dental plan than you do, and she eats at hipper restaurants, too. Paris Hilton’s least-loved chihuahua has a more extensive wardrobe than entire villages in Burkina Faso. If you take a dump on a velvet chaise lounge at some Rodeo Drive boutique, you will get arrested. If Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Cavalier King Charles spaniel pulled a stunt like that, it would probably get an organic, hand-cut biscuit from the shop’s proprietor.
Finally, is there any grimmer, starker illustration of the vast chasm that exists between the famous and the nonfamous than the fact that some smelly little Maltipoo whose favorite hobby is nuzzling strange canine sphincters knows exactly what Jessica Simpson’s epiglottis tastes like, and you don’t? Yes, nonfamous person, that’s exactly how grotesque you are: Jessica Simpson would rather make out with a dog than with you.
But if celebrity pets inevitably make their owners seem somewhat monstrous, they’re great equalizers, too. As the photographs at CelebrityDogWatcher.com and similar websites illustrate with unflinching honesty, it doesn’t matter how rich or how hot or how pampered our favorite stars are, or how vigorously their fans and flunkies shower them with mindless unconditional affirmation. At the end of the day, they want more of it, and just like everyone else on the planet, they seek it out in the mute, dumb, terrified eyes of their precious little babies and beloved, good, good boys. Desperately trying to suck love and companionship out of the dirty, fetid mouths of aging beagles, crushing helpless labradoodles with their vague, unfulfillable longing, they look just as lost and empty and broken as the rest of us, at least momentarily.
And that, no doubt, is why celebrity dog stories will never go out of style.