Just Call it a Comeback
There are two stories that get told a thousand different ways in the business press but which never grow old. One is the saga of the underdog, the start-up run by the plucky entrepreneur who succeeds against the odds, who pulls off the impossible, who beats the big boys at their own game or at least awakens them from their lethargic complacency. The other is the turnaround, the ressurection from the corporate scrap heap and the return of former glory, the once-written- off who rewrites new rules of engagement. For anyone who regularly reads the business press, this observation likely comes as nothing new.
What may have escaped notice, however, is the propensity of so many business journalists to borrow so frequently from the same pop culture meme - Terri McMillan's 1997 NY Times bestseller, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and the 1998 movie by the same name. Here's how Kirkus Reviews describes the novel:
Stella Payne has it all--a charming 11-year-old son, a beautiful house north of San Francisco, and a high-paying job as a financial systems analyst. So why isn't she happy? For three years- -since her divorce from the man who talked her into abandoning her art-furniture business in favor of a more lucrative career--Stella has had no serious love interest in her life. When her son, Quincy, flies off to visit his father, workaholic Stella spontaneously signs up for nine days alone at a resort in Jamaica. The last thing she expects to find is an unquenchable passion for a 20-year-old chef's assistant; on her return home, she discovers that she can't quite relegate her happy thoughts of Winston Shakespeare to the vacation-fling portion of her memory bank. So Stella arranges for Winston to visit her in San Francisco--where the easygoing boy charms her son, her sisters, and her friends, and even talks Stella into dumping the stock exchange and returning to her artist's life. Despite Stella's repeated protests that Winston must be out of his mind, there are few serious barriers to this May-October love affair.
And while it is widely known that the novel is semi-autobiographical- McMillan, an African-American woman, met and married a Jamaican man 23 years her junior - few are probably aware of the real-life story's decidely ungroovy epilogue- a bitter divorce battle. According to the San Francisco Chronicle,
In a tale rich in lost love, closeted secrets and acrimonious divorce, it turns out that famed local writer Terry McMillan -- whose celebrated romance and subsequent marriage to a man 23 years her junior became the subject of her fictionized best-seller "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" --actually got her groove back with a man who now says he's gay. McMillan, 53, said in court documents that the marriage was based on a "fraud'' because Plummer lied about his sexual orientation -- and married her only to gain U.S. citizenship. "It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit,'' she wrote in her declaration. "I was humiliated." Plummer, 30, countered in court papers of his own that McMillan has turned on him with a "homophobic'' vengeance and is trying to force his return to an uncertain future in Jamaica. He wants to void the couple's prenuptial agreement that would keep from him most of the millions she's earned as a writer. McMillan says Plummer zeroed in on her precisely because of her celebrity status as an author whose earlier books included "Waiting to Exhale, '' which sold some 4 million copies and was made into a movie. In an interview, Plummer insisted that he didn't know he was gay when he met McMillan in June 1995 at a Jamaican resort. Nor, he says, did he seize on the author's fame.
It is not my intent here to criticize McMillan, her life choices, or her art. The same applies to Plummer. Rather, the intent is to make this simple suggestion: business journalists should henceforth refrain from using the words "got their/its groove back" in the titles of articles about turnaround stories. For starters, the phrase is no longer fresh; it has been overused in the last several years, especially by BusinessWeek Online whose reporters published four articles using this meme in the last few years- How Motorola Got Its Groove Back, How Seagate Got Its Groove Back, Online Advertising Gets Its Groove Back, BMG Entertainment Gets Its Groove Back.
Secondly, given the scurrilous charges that were leveled by both McMillan and Plummer against one another- fraud, deception, embezzlement, harrassment, and infidelity- this phrase has clearly taken a turn for the worse. It would be far better if business journalists come up with clever riffs on the word "comeback." It may lack the lustre of the "groove back" titles, but it also comes with a few pop culture references that are less tarnished. One of them is from LL Cool J's hip-hop classic, Mama Said Knock You Out, from the 1990 album by the same name. It begins, interestingly, with a fake news report "And with the local DBT news, LL Cool J with a triumphant comeback but tonite..." which is then interrupted dramatically by LL loudly exclaiming "Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years, rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear...Explosion, overpowerin, over the competition, I'm towerin."