The Most Intriguing People of 1989
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- May
- 5
I was cleaning out some junk in my office not long ago and found a 1989 issue of People magazine featuring the 25 “most intriguing people of the year.”
Fame is fleeting as the old cliche goes. But some of the people on this list are all but forgotten, if not totally irrelevant in today’s celebrity currency.
Let’s take a look.
George Herbert Walker Bush: Newly minted prez back then. Photo shows him pushing twin granddaughters, Jenna and Barbara, on a swing.
Roseanne Barr: She still had that stupid TV show. This was well before the National Anthem fiasco.
Athina Onassis: The three-year-old daughter of Christina. I wasn’t aware of her then, let alone now.
Lisa Marie Presley: Spawn of Elvis and future brief wife of the kooky Gloved-one. “Can Elvis’ little girl avoid the pitfalls of fame that doomed her daddy?” They must have been kidding!
Benazir Bhutto: She came back to Pakistan, a fatal mistake 19 years later.
Liz Taylor: Of course.
Michelle Pfiefer: She had three hit movies in 1989. She’s now on the Whatever-happened-to list.
Jesse Jackson: Somewhere over the Rainbow Coalition, he was actually taken seriously as a presidential candidate. He still rhymes his platitudes.
Phantom of the Opera: Is old scar face still on Broadway?
Merv Griffin: Ooooh, Merv’s dead.
Anne Tyler: Author.
Orel Hersheiser: Good pitcher for champion Dodgers.
Jodie Foster: She was 26 then, and making a comeback after years of being the object of “Taxi Driver” nut job John Hinckley.
M. Butterfly. Whoddat? Apparently, he was a man who pretended to be a woman, inspiring a play by that title.
Kevin Costner: Is that the sound of somebody throwing up?
Flo-Jo: A Korean Olympian who was “ready for stardom.” I don’t think so.
David Hockney: British painter.
Jessica Rabbit; The cartoon babe.
Stephen Hawking: This guy is still intriguing. In fact, he defies explanation.
Tom Hanks: See Kevin Costner.
Fergie: Fuggedaboutit.
Tracy Chapman: Good singer. Hard to believe it’s been that long since she came on the scene.
Sage Volkman: Sad inclusion of a child who was badly burned in an accident in New Mexico.
The Cyberpunk: A nod to the dawn of the computer hack. “Conceived in the pages of science fiction, he comes alive to hurl the modern missiles at the heart of the computer civilization.”
Mike Tyson: This was the Robin Givens era, well before he bit off Holyfield’s ear, had his face tattooed and did a stretch in jail.
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on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
Ah, 1989! What a year of lows and highs.
In February, a mob of 1,000 burned Salman Rushdies’ novel “Satanic Verses,” and then Iran’s Ayatollah announced a $1M-$3M bounty for Rushdie’s death. But at the end of the year, in November, East Germans bounded over the Berlin Wall.
I remember watching the amazing Wall event with a Larchmont neighbor. At the time I was longing to celebrate with my son, who had just departed for Oberlin College. In the lighthearted springtime months of the year, we had been able to catch up on Mike Tyson news together: Tyson hit a parking attendant when he was asked to move his car! Tyson collected two speeding tickets for drag racing in Albany! Now, though, while old systems were crumbling, my son was viewing the scene elsewhere.
In 2007, my son Dade, with his wife and children, moved back to Larchmont. I left the village many years ago, and I have grieved. But now I have a home to visit. The lows and highs of ‘89: how they are with us still.
– chayes in erie