Laura's wedding day advice to Jenna

On May 10, in a quiet corner of Crawford, Texas, the daughter of the president of the United States will be married in a private ceremony, attended by 200 people. All will be close friends and family. TV cameras will not be present.

AP

Henry Hager with Jenna Bush

As celebrity weddings go, Jenna Bush's nuptials will be strikingly different from the garish spectacles uniting Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. All because Jenna wants it that way.

And why?

"Because I want the privacy," Ms. Bush told The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday. "It's a really special day for me, and I don't want it to be televised. That's not my style. Also, because, I'm not from Washington. Washington does not feel like home to me, although I think it's a beautiful place, and we've had such an amazing eight years.

"Texas really is home. I want to do it in a place where it felt natural, and that's just where it was."

Crawford (pop., 700). Which is, of course, far removed from Odescalchi Castle in Lake Bracciano, Italy, where Mr. Cruise and Ms. Holmes exchanged vows; or Castle Leslie in Ireland, where Mr. McCartney and Ms. Mills were wed; or Skibo Castle in Scotland, where Madonna and moviemaker Guy Ritchie got hitched.

As you can see, castles are big.

But so are celebrity weddings, which represent a multibillion-dollar industry and an endless stream of oozing fodder for ink-stained tabloids and trash TV shows the world over. Such provocative spectacles often end in divorce faster than the bride or groom can declare themselves a plaintiff. But celebrities keep having them, and the public keeps salivating over them.

Why?

"We don't have a nobility," says Gordon Clanton, a professor of sociology at San Diego State University. "So, who are our nobles? They're these dynastic political families on the one hand and our entertainers on the other. In England, if you're the Beatles, you get knighted. We don't have that equivalent, but what we have is a version of the same thing in terms of public notoriety."

Whatever the reasons for Ms. Bush's modest inclinations, her taste and decorum are being applauded. Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, sees the hand of her mother at work, that being first lady Laura Bush. "Her instinct would be to make this for friends and family and particularly to keep it out of the national spotlight and the national cable news mill," says Dr. Jillson.

Another telling factor may have influenced the first family: the president's abysmally low approval rating.

"Even in good times, a similar decision might have been made," says Dr. Jillson. "But I think it would be quite ill-received to have a major White House wedding at a time of war and economic turmoil."

Tricia Nixon Cox was married in a Rose Garden ceremony in June 1971, with the end of the Vietnam War four years away. On the day of her wedding, her father, President Richard M. Nixon, was on his way to winning re-election in a landslide the next year. The Watergate break-in would not occur until June 17, 1972.

Luci Baines Johnson was married in a lavish ceremony at a Catholic church near the White House in August 1966. The presidency of her dad, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was yet to break on the shoals of the Vietnam War.

The gold standard for celebrity weddings is the 1981 colossus that joined Princess Diana and Prince Charles. The marriage failed miserably, as did singer Mariah Carey's 1993 union to Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola. For her wedding, Ms. Carey copied every conceivable detail of Lady Di's extravaganza, all the way down to wearing an eerily similar gold tiara and a bridal-gown train that stretched to a pythonlike 27 feet.

Celebrity weddings are often a costly cavalcade of gourmet food, flowers by the truckload, big-band music, high-tech security, sleek stretch limos, killer bling and sumptuous his-and-her fashion. The more outrageously expensive, the better. Ah, but one other ingredient usually comes along for the ride.

Humor, intended or not, is a pesky tag-along. In 2002, Liza Minnelli married music producer David Gest in a ceremony that featured Michael Jackson as best man and Elizabeth Taylor as matron of honor. Forbes magazine later assessed the Gest-Minnelli wedding as having an estimated price tag of $3.5 million. It included a 60-piece orchestra and vocals by Tony Bennett, who sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" for 500 guests.

Mr. Bennett also performed a few years back at the Malibu, Calif., wedding of Dallas-based rock legend Don Henley, who had a few other name entertainers serenade his guests, who included Jack Nicholson. They got to hear the Chieftans, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow and Billy Joel.

When it came to her first marriage, actress Tori Spelling would eventually sing the blues. For that wedding, she spent $1 million in 2004 linking up with writer-actor Charlie Shanian. For her next nuptials, she lowered the bar just a tad, marrying Dean McDermott on the private island of Wakaya in Fiji.

Ms. Spelling, the daughter of the late television producer Aaron Spelling – he graduated from SMU – vowed to keep it "quiet and simple" for the encore ceremony. In almost apologetic tones, she told one interviewer she agreed to settle for pre-wedding French pedicures for her and her fiancé as long as she could have a post-"I do" breakfast in bed, served with her favorite Veuve Clicquot.

It cost Sir Paul $48.6 million to free himself from Ms. Mills, who have may have given him a preview of things to come during the wedding. For the big occasion, she wore a dress she designed herself, spurning the talents of his daughter, designer Stella McCartney. The dress alone cost 10,000 pounds – by today's exchange rate, a whopping $20,000.

Even regular folks spend a lot on weddings. The average U.S. wedding costs $26,800, according to The Wedding Report, an annual survey. And maybe it's because average citizens feel the need to mimic celebrities, about whom there's an endless source of information, which Dr. Clanton blames on both the media and the culture at large.

"We are," he says, "increasingly preoccupied with trivia. This is what our country is about right now."

He teaches a course called "Love, Jealousy and Envy." Recently, he showed his class a photograph of actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who's promoting a new fragrance called Covet. He asked his students to raise their hands if they knew who she was.

Everyone in the class raised a hand.

He then asked, "Raise your hand if you can name your congressman."

"One or two hands go up, and so there it is," he says. "It's bread and circuses. People aren't paying attention to what they ought to be paying attention to, in my view. And this is what fills the gap – reality TV and celebrity gossip."