Some of the writers who defended Joyce Maynard for telling all and selling Salinger's letters to her remark on how Salinger saw her picture and then contacted her by letter and eventually met her, invited her to live with him for 9 months, and then dumped her. They insist Salinger obviously noticed how beautiful she was. With all due respect, looking at the same picture, I think it more likely he was attracted to her mind.
Maynard was raked by some other commentators for having breast implants, then removing them, and writing about the entire experience in Vanity Fair. If Maynard wants you to believe that Salinger was attracted to her because of her looks-- I'm not sure she does-- and that there was something wrong with that, why the implants?
While watching Miley Cyrus' pornographic performance on the 2013 MTV awards, I thought about an article I'd read hours earlier, about a new biography of J. D. Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno, and about Joyce Maynard who tried to sell letters Salinger had written her when she was 18 and he was 53, which resulted in her moving in with him for a year. Maynard was vilified by some for trying to sell the letters to pay for her childrens' tuition costs. Peter Norton, he of the famous Norton Utilities (well, famous back in the days of DOS), purchased the letters and gave them back to Salinger, displaying more class than anybody else involved in this celebrity dust-up, including Salinger.
The deal is usually this: you want to sell your book / movie / record by appearing in magazines and on talk shows, you give up your right to privacy. I'm not sure why that is a "deal" but it is. If you seek publicity for personal gain, you don't seem to have the right to complain if someone tries to take pictures of you topless at a private beach. Or if people camp out in front of your door and photograph you every time you go out to dinner or to get groceries or pick up your child at school. Why is that a deal? Because the "moderates" of the media monster have decided that that is reasonable. The subject celebrity supposedly agrees to this exchange, tacitly, when they agree to some other specified act of publicity.
J. D. Salinger famously became a recluse. He had a taste of fame, didn't like it, and stopped publishing, and retreated to a very private cabin on a 90 acre property in Cornish, New Hampshire. He built a separate house for his family. He had work to do, even if he wasn't publishing.
The essential duplicity of Maynard's action is the decision to expose, for public consumption, very private sexual acts. The obvious question is why. The obvious answer-- from a publicist's point of view-- is to tell the truth, or the help other people, or to have closure, or to work through her depression. The real reason, without the slightest doubt, is to evoke sympathy, make money, whether through book sales, the auction of the letters, or personal appearances, and exploit the fame of the person you are exposing. You may choose to believe Maynard's rationalizations: I do not. I think it's bullshit. It is exactly what it looks like and there is never any doubt about what it looks like: you took a very private relationship and splattered it all over the place knowing full well what kind of mincemeat most of the media will make of it by the time they're through. You behaved a certain why while with Salinger-- you kissed him back, embraced him, undressed for him, whatever, consented to intimacy without giving him the slightest indication that you would eventually use that information to sell yourself, to be noticed, to get press, to sell more books, to present yourself as some kind of victim.
It's Goldman on Lennon, Hersh on Kennedy, Kelly on Sinatra: it's all the same. And nobody is absolved by saying, oh, they should have known that would happen. If you can't take the heat...
There is nothing shockingly new about the whole thing: it just throws the issue into sharper relief than usual. I remember Dylan shredding a reporter who asked him if he was a "spokesman" for his generation. No. Are you the spokesman for your generation? You actually felt bad for the reporter, but Dylan learned as well: you can't win that kind of exchange over the long run, no matter how smart or quick you are. You are never going to go camp out in someone else's driveway and go through their garbage.