Celebrities Like to Peek in Other ‘Cribs’

Marilyn Manson bassist Twiggy Ramirez opens the door to his Los Angeles home to reveal what looks like an opium den as decorated by Jar Jar Binks. In a room where sunlight is smothered by black drapes, he shows off some of the bizarre highlights of the house: a mounted skunk and pheasant; some Seals & Crofts records; and a man he calls his spiritual advisor, a Hare Krishna named George. In the kitchen, Ramirez pulls out a $200 bottle of champagne and says, “Always gotta have the Cristal. Or the Dom. Whatever you prefer.”

This isn’t just rock-star decadence. This is MTV’s “Cribs.”

“I figure it’s part of ‘Cribs,”’ Ramirez adds, as images from earlier episodes show rappers Snoop Dogg and Jermaine Dupri and R&B; singer Sisqo smiling with their own bottles of bubbly. “In the three episodes I [saw], they said they had either Cristal or Dom [Perignon], so I figured Cristal.”

“Cribs,” which returns Thursday with segments on the rapper Nelly, pro skater Tony Hawk and members of the pop group O-Town, is the ultimate in celebrity voyeurism--a look inside the bedrooms and refrigerators of musicians, actors and athletes--and it’s often other celebrities who are peeping through the window.

“The biggest fans of the show are other artists,” says executive producer Dave Sirulnick. “They watch for the same reasons as the rest of us. Is there anybody who doesn’t look into a lighted window and wonder, ‘What do they have that I don’t?’ It’s part of keeping up with the Joneses.”

When the Joneses have pool houses with remote-controlled retractable roofs (Ice-T), indoor bowling alleys (NBA player Anfernee Hardaway) and custom everything (Chester Bennington of the band Linkin Park has a custom-made Mullen car), keeping up isn’t for the faint of heart or pocketbook. The competition sometimes turns tongue-in-cheek, as with Ramirez’s champagne or his “bling-bling Master P. pool”--one of the inflatable kiddie variety--but it’s also very real.

MTV producers noticed it after “Cribs”’ first episode featuring Dupri. “[Dupri] came on and said you’re not a big dog unless you’ve got a Bentley, and then in later episodes, other artists said something to the effect of, ‘D said if you want to be a big dog, you have to have a Bentley, so here’s my Bentley,”’ says Sirulnick.

Conspicuous consumption has been part of American culture for much longer than MTV, but there is a sense of “excess oblige” at play in “Cribs.” Many of the show’s stars, particularly young rappers, are living out their music-video images of platinum jewelry, exotic cars or wads of cash.

When stars display their real-life mansions and Bentleys, they’re positioning themselves as marketable success stories who embody the MTV ideals. “These people depend heavily on constant publicity. The show is just more hype,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a media studies professor at New York University.

Sirulnick counters that “Cribs” examines the stars as real people, since it’s not their possessions that are the most important element but rather their anecdotes of why the possessions are meaningful to them. But Cintra Wilson, author of “A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations,” says, “Do the executives honestly think they got to the molten human core of Pam Anderson just by slobbering over the shabby chic armoire in her beach cottage?”

Richard Schickel, Time magazine film critic and author of “Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America,” says any self-promotion by the star is to be expected and is part of the price of access. But he admits that “since MTV is watched by mostly young people, selling that fantasy is much more dangerous than if [‘Cribs’] were on CBS.”

The fantasy can be dangerous for the stars, too. Young celebrities, caught up in the spending that seems to go with fame, run the a risk of basking in it on “Cribs” one day and explaining how it destroyed them on “Behind the Music” the next.

MTV’s Sirulnick says, “I think it does register with them that the money may dry up. But then, two minutes later, they’re showing you their six cars.”

The fact that so many of the celebrities watch “Cribs” and compete with their show-biz neighbors in the spiraling one-upmanship means the balance between restraint and unabashed buying or showing of toys is bound to be tenuous at best. Former Motley Cre drummer and accidental porn star Tommy Lee says he did “Cribs” because he’d seen so many other episodes and wasn’t impressed with the houses. “I’ve got a cool house, so I figured, why not?”

Lee says his tour of Tommyland, as he calls his 4-acre Malibu spread, gave him a chance to reveal a side of himself the audience doesn’t often see and to prove that he’s “not a maniac 24-7,” though that may have been easy to overlook as he watched TV on his theater-sized screen, poured draft beer from his bar/in-house Starbucks and gave an extended tour of his bedroom, taking care to point out the mirror on the ceiling above the bed and the remote-controlled mirror opposite the Chinese Basket, a kind of acrobatics-required sex swing.

Nonetheless, Lee says even he knows not to reveal too much. “There’s a fine line. You don’t want everybody to know too much about you or you lose some of the mystique. Some of the coolness is gone.”

Why does “Cribs” include the most intimate of details: What’s in the fridge? Schickel offers this guess: “Whether we’re famous or not, we all think there’s somebody out there who has solved life’s questions and found the key to happiness, whether it’s a way of decorating your house or something in the refrigerator.” But Sirulnick says, “We look in the fridge because I don’t think we could get in the medicine cabinets.”

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The season premiere of “Cribs” can be seen Thursday night at 10 on MTV. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).