With reality TV the rage, millions of viewers are tuning in to cheer on want-to-be millionaires or pop stars in their quest for success. But does ultimate success equal happiness?
Not necessarily. Take, for instance, mega-star Sandra Bullock. The actress/producer admits in a recent Southam News entertainment article that she is "completely and totally burnt out."
A self-confessed workaholic, Bullock has all the money she could ever want, but she's tired and is looking for a new direction. What does she want to do next? "I have no idea," she says. "There's a vapid, gaping, open hole of nothingness. That's what is in my head and my body and my abilities."
Bullock isn't the first celebrity to succumb to "burn out." Seventies singing sensation, Tony Orlando, known for the hits "Knock Three Times" and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," is one of the latest celebrities to reveal his inner struggles with stardom in his recently published memoir Halfway to Paradise.
Orlando was at the height of his career when he found himself exhausted from juggling concert tours and television tapings, writing scripts and comedy sketches, rehearsing, and recording. He and Dawn (Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent) were enjoying their own variety show, sharing the stage with some of Hollywood's greats, Jackie Gleason, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jerry Lewis, to name a few, when the toll became too great.
The breakdown came in July of 1977 at a time when Orlando was most vulnerable. His best friend, popular comedian and star of TV's Chico and the Man, Freddie Prinze, had committed suicide in January, brought on perhaps by a dependence on cocaine, quaaludes, and cognac. While Orlando had attempted to quit his drug use a week prior to Prinze's death, the suicide pushed him over the edge, and he once again turned to his drug dealer for a fix. He soon would discover, however, that drugs could not fill the void that was consuming his life.
In an interview with Living Light News, Orlando talked candidly about the events that led to the change in his life. "There's an old expression that says you have to be far enough down to want to look up," Orlando relates. He had come to a point in his life when he realized he could not rescue himself.
"Not until I was to my knees and on the brink of what was a complete disaster did I ever look up and ask the Lord to come into my heart, into my life," he says.
Orlando writes about this change in his book as the moment that "I could feel my heavenly Father reach out to me, and I knew it was going to be okay."
Christianity had always been a part of Orlando's home life. He was brought up in a Catholic home and was taught to love Christ. "I went to parochial grammar school, and I knew my prayers in a loving, obligatory way as children would do," he admits.
But what he lacked was a personal relationship with God.
When the Lord came into his life, the experiences he had as a child learning about Christ finally became a reality. "When God makes his presence, He awakens you. It's a personal experience. He gives you the strength to change what you are doing, to recuperate, and, in an essence, to resurrect.
Looking back, Orlando says the Lord used many experiences he had while growing up to help him minister to others today. He writes in his book's preface "life isn't completely defined by your success, but rather by your solitary struggles and small triumphs."
The child of divorced parents, Orlando underwent many struggles of which most people are not aware. It was Orlando, for example, who shared much of the responsibility of caring for his younger sister Rhonda, who was born with cerebral palsy and had the IQ of an eight-month old child until she died at the age of 21.
Not once can he ever remember thinking of her as a burden. Instead he has always considered her an angel, sent to teach him of the "simplicities of loving life in its most simplest form." His life with Rhonda tendered his heart and helped him develop compassion for others rather than criticism.
Today Orlando, his wife Frannie, and their daughter Jenny, live in Branson, Missouri, a small resort town in the Ozarks. There Orlando continues to entertain, sometimes sharing the stage with his son, Jon, an aspiring comedian.
He loves what he's doing, only now his motivation isn't self-directed. "I'm not up there to take from the audience," he says. "I'm up there to give to the audience. The gift [God] has given to me is hopefully something I can give to others."
Having traveled the "road to success," Orlando empathizes with the people who are driven to find fame and fortune, and he understands how easily it is for people to lose hope or focus when they try to fill the voids in their life with something other than Jesus.
"It's all a part of the growth experience," explains Orlando. "We're just vulnerable, [we're] human. We are susceptible to these changes and trappings the world has out there for us."
Now, however, rather than leading to fame or fortune, Orlando's road leads heavenward toward eternal treasures.
"The successes that I consider successes today are not the ones in the music business," he declares. "Being a successful father and a husband in the eyes of your son and daughter and wife, being a great friend and a servant to the Lord, being respectful to yourself, your friends and to the people in general, to me that's success."
