New novel reopens cold case death of Kup's daughter

     Celebrity is the cheapest coin, the shakiest currency. Debased to begin with, it loses value quickly. Today’s Taylor Swift becomes tomorrow’s Taylor Dayne. Sound impossible? It’s not; it’s inevitable.
     The stars themselves are burdened by fame’s presence, then tormented by its absence.
     “You used to be big,” Norma Desmond is told in "Sunset Boulevard." It is not a compliment.
     The rest of us ordinary folk hoard the briefest encounter with celebrity, our personal cache of fool’s gold. I catch myself tossing a few chips on the table, bragging how Barack Obama once called me on the phone to complain about a column, how I chatted on TV with Oprah Winfrey and sat in the Bulls locker room, talking with Michael Jordan. I used to be big.
     But it fools no one, not even myself. "Self-praise is self-debasement,” as Cervantes writes. These flashes mean close to nothing, three pebbles to suck on in the long forced march through the desert of non-entity.
     Now Irv Kupcinet, he was truly big, a star in his own right. The columnist shared tidbits of the famous we all hunger to read, sparkling in their reflected glow. He didn’t vanish, but left behind a quite-good statue on Wacker Drive, a sign on the Wabash Avenue bridge, and fading memories of those like myself who knew him.
     The Kup story I like to tell is that he once parked his Cadillac on Wacker Drive in front of the Lyric Opera before a performance. Lincoln Towing promptly hauled it away. Back at their yard, they ran the plates, realized whose car they had taken, and brought it back before the final curtain. That’s power.
     Just as the past isn’t past, the dead don’t stay dead. There is Kup, his wife, Essee, their daughter, Karyn, the whole Sun-Times circa 1962, the rock upon which Peter Orner builds his new novel, “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter.”
     Orner takes a footnote in Chicago history — on Nov. 30, 1963, a week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Karyn Kupcinet, who everyone called “Cookie,” was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment. Foul play was suspected but never proved.
     The subplot involves an English professor who may or may not resemble Orner, a native of Highland Park who now chairs the English and creative writing programs at Dartmouth. Orner is an elegant writer who has his character's low-rent milieu down cold:
     “I hunker in my windowless cube at Loyola ... maybe at this point an English department is lucky to be housed at all. Our enrollments are in the toilet. This office has a Soviet Brezhnev-era feel. A solid kind of nowhere. It’s very quiet. Aside from the medievalist across the hall, who turns up every once in a while, nobody comes in to work anymore. Coming into work is a relic, an abandoned social practice.”
     “A Solid Kind of Nowhere” — I might have to swipe that as my autobiography title.

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