Dead Celebrity Crush: Zebulon Vance

Zebulon Baird Vance (1830-1894)
If I ever have a son, one of my top-five name choices will be Zeb, in honor of this guy: self-made man, governor, orator and all-around 19th Century hottie. Zeb Vance represented North Carolina in Congress just before the Civil War, and was governor during the war and again during Reconstruction. He managed somehow to simultaneously support the Union and states’ rights, only resigning his Congressional seat when N.C. voted to secede from the U.S. after Fort Sumter.

But that’s not why I crush hard on Zeb Vance. It’s hard to explain…I kind of have a soft spot for the ol’ mountain boy who made good in the big city. Born near Asheville, he precociously wrote the UNC president to ask for a scholarship to its law school – which he got. Under his leadership, N.C. was the only Confederate state that didn’t suspend habeas corpus during the war (something even President Lincoln couldn’t manage). At one point during the war, he gave a speech in Salem, just blocks from where I live now, that lasted – no sh*t – four and a half hours, and no one left. Sure, he may look a little jowly with his mullet and porn ‘stache, but make no mistake – this guy was the 1860s answer to Bill Clinton.

After the war, he duly served his time in prison, being pardoned in 1867 (though he was never charged with anything). He was re-elected to Congress, though not allowed to serve because of the whole Confederacy thing. A few years later, he would defend Tom Dula (aka “Tom Dooley) in his murder trial. Sure, he lost…but I don’t really care.

It also doesn’t bother me that Zeb’s military career wasn’t exactly distinguished. In his book Covered With Glory, author Ron Gragg recounts the history of the 26th North Carolina, which lost almost all of its strength by the end of the Battle of Gettysburg. Zeb was the unit’s first commander, and was most noted for his recruiting ability and sense of when to retreat. But give him credit: Zeb had the honor to admit that he was better suited for the legislature than the battlefield, and left the military to men with better skills in that area. He was a lover, not a fighter. And, porn ‘stache or no, he makes me swoon.

Introducing the Dead Celebrity Crush

In this era of ever-present media, it’s possible to delude oneself into believing that it’s possible to really know that star of your favorite TV show, that athlete, that “American Idol” contestant who you just know you would have so much in common with, if you ever met. (And that’s how stalkers are born.) But the more mentally healthy of us recognize that what we read online or see of said celebrity in a five-minute “Daily Show” appearance doesn’t represent everything that person has going on. But escapism is fun, and that’s why God gave us celebrities.

Maybe I’m the only one, but I kind of feel like my generation’s crop of celebs is a bit lacking. Is it because we now have the tools to rip them apart before they can achieve that mythical, untouchable super-stardom? Or are the starlets upchucked by Entertainment Weekly, et al., really just a pale imitation of the past?

I have my celebrity crushes. But I have a great deal more invested in what I call my Dead Celebrity Crushes. Maybe the people on this list really did have more substance…or maybe they benefit from not having People magazine and TMZ camping out on their doorsteps. Maybe, like any good celebrity, they say more about who I am than about who they were.

I can’t begin to imagine how long this post would be if I listed all of them…so I’m just going to take them one at a time, in no particular order…

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Why do I love me some Mary Shelley? Let me count the ways. At age 21, she wrote one of the world’s great novels, Frankenstein, also one of the first of what we would recognize as a novel, period. (Between Shelley, Jane Austen and the Brontes, one could argue that women invented the modern novel. But I’ll leave that for an English major to handle.)

Her biography fascinates me…it would make such a great film if it weren’t for the fact that the last two-thirds of the movie would be either shamefully unrepresentative of her life, or just monumentally depressing. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote the brilliant feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, then promptly died days after giving birth to her daughter. Mary herself married the Romantic poet and all-around man-whore Percy Bysshe Shelley, who may have cheated on Mary with her step-sister Claire. Then Percy drowned in 1822, leaving Mary with an infant son.

One biography I read posited that Mary, all her life, wanted the stability of a family that she never had in her own childhood. If so, boy, did she marry the wrong guy. Her post-Frankenstein novels haven’t gotten the same recognition as that first effort; in fact, some of them are difficult to find in print. It’s only in the last few decades that Mary Shelley, despite her brilliantly conceived first novel, has been given credit by the literary community as anything other than her husband’s editor.

So, was Mary Shelley a feminist before her time, undermined by the male establishment? Or was she just a girl who would’ve gladly traded in her writing skill for the proverbial white picket fence and 2.5 kids with Percy? I don’t know. If I ever run into her in the afterlife, I’ll ask her. Whatever the answer is, I feel like I would understand, and sympathize at least a little.

She may have died more than a century before even my own mother was born, but I feel a certain kinship to Mary Shelley. And, holy shizznit, did her little horror story keep me up at night.