Column: Nepo babies beware! You didn’t hit a triple if you were born on third base

Hollywood is crowded with nepo babies like, from left: Maude Apatow, Judd Apatow’s daughter; O’Shea Jackson, Ice Cube’s son; and Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. When I walked her in, the birthday girl’s mother, the actress-wife of a much more famous actor-husband and someone I knew from our kids’ small classroom, walked toward me and said, “I’m sorry, this is a private party.” Last month, New York magazine set the nepo baby world alight with its cover story extravaganza, complete with elaborate family trees, on the phenomenon. The New York story featured an interview with Meriem Derradji, a 25-year-old tech-support worker, who seems to have brought the idea of nepo babies into the public conversation with a tweet last May: “Wait,” she wrote, “I just found out the actress that plays Lexie is a nepotism baby omg her mom is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie director lol.” “In 2022,” wrote New York’s Nate Jones, “the internet uncovered a vast conspiracy: Hollywood was run on an invisible network of family ties — and everyone was in on it!” His piece, an exhaustive look at the current crop of Hollywood nepo babies — too many to list, really — did not go over well with some of the kids, who lashed out. And auditioned for two years before getting the role.” And further down in the thread: “Once the door was opened it was up to me to walk through it and thrive.” The next day, Jackson returned to the topic, retweeting a 1998 clip of the supremely talented nepo baby Whitney Houston, who was the daughter of Cissy Houston and cousin of Dionne Warwick, telling Magic Johnson, “Nepotism’s not all that easy.” “Embrace it,” Jackson suggested. Hollywood nepotism sticks in our craw, I think, because it violates the fantasy that, as Lottie Moss wrote, “If you put your mind to something you can accomplish anything.” That’s a little bit rich from a model whose genetic gifts likely have nothing to do with willpower and whose last name surely put her at the head of the line in her chosen profession.