- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 27 2002 01.43 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday January 27 2002
It may say something about the slippery nature of fame that one of the best-known quotations of our age is also one of the worst-remembered. Back in 1968, the year the Me Generation discovered its communal conscience, Andy Warhol answered the contemporary paradox of every individual wanting to stand out from the crowd: 'In the future,' he suggested, 'everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.' [My emphasis.]
Yet almost invariably when Warhol's prediction is now mentioned, the 'world' is conveniently dropped or forgotten. Convenient, because without the global dimension, a flip comment becomes a brilliantly prescient statement of fact. Today, a third of a century later, world fame is no nearer for most of us. But a certain kind of celebrity, albeit localised and fleeting, really does seem within reach of almost anyone who is interested. For while it is true that such internationally renowned people as Tom Cruise and Madonna are celebrities, so, too, are Darren Ramsay and Ben Fogle - as well as, say, Monica Lewinsky and Mad Frankie Fraser. In case you're wondering, Ramsay and Fogle appeared respectively in Big Brother and Castaway 2000.
The need to explain who someone is might appear to run counter to the very idea of being well-known, but the concept of fame has been stretched almost to breaking point since it was, literally, first minted by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. For placing his own portrait on his empire's coinage, where previously there had only been images of the gods, Alexander is often cited as the original, self-conscious seeker of fame.
It was certainly a powerful act of symbolism. First, it moulded the relationship be-tween recognition and money, thus demonstrating that fame has its own currency. Secondly, and more profoundly, it marked the celebration of a man in preference to a deity - or, viewed another way, the presentation of a man as a deity. And there, in a Macedonian drachma, is the double-sided history of fame. On one side is evidence of the democratic instinct that has been the engine of fame's expansion (initially from the gods down to man) and, on the other, the equally strong urge inside us to revere some men (and, much later, women) as special and separate from the mass - in other words, as godlike.
Throughout most of history, fame has worn the clothes of greatness, in particular the political greatness of kings and noblemen. It was not until the Enlightenment and the beginnings of the collapse of the old social and religious order, that fame discovered a new wardrobe.
Lord Byron - poet, revolutionary, dandy - famously said that one day he woke up famous, following the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (in 1812). He was the first modern celebrity. 'Byron marks the point,' Leo Braudy wrote in his history of fame, 'at which the desire for fame, the aristocracy of the spirit, might be vicariously enjoyed by every reader.' His readings drew crowds of adoring women. According to Camille Paglia: 'Byron created the youth cult that would sweep Presley to uncomfortable fame.'
More significantly, perhaps, his social arrangements earned as much coverage in the fledgling newspapers of Britain as his poetry. Yet in an early example of mixed celebrity signals, while Byron courted the press, he loathed speculation about his private affairs.
Ultimately, Byron's myth overshadows his work, which sounds like a reasonable working definition for modern celebrity. However, not withstanding his gift for publicity, Byron was first of all an exceptional poet. In this sense his fame was still tied to his achievements. Whereas the aim of the truly modern celebrity is to break that bond and allow fame to float free from the limiting restraints of human ability.
That ambition, of course, cannot be realised without a mass media. Thanks to newspapers, Byron's renown, at least among the educated classes, stretched across the continent, and even as far as America. It's debatable whether, with radio, cinema, TV and the internet, he would have been a bigger name had he been born in the second half of the 20th century. He was, after all, a poet. But it is beyond question that bra model Caprice would have been unknown had she lived in the early 19th century.
The recorded image, and still more the moving image, liberated fame from the intellect. The advent of film gave primacy to the physical form. Just as advertising brought a whole new means of its exploitation. You could make the crude equation that fame + the consumer society = celebrity. The history of 20th-century fame is the history of Hollywood. And the history of Hollywood - entrancing, disturbing and imperishably glamorous - is all about the triumph of celebrity.
In the immediate wake of 11 September, one of the first deaths announced was that of celebrity. The news was greeted across the media with an audible relief. Suddenly, newspapers, magazines, TV shows and internet pages felt that a change of diet was not only necessary, but long overdue. There was a collective sense of shame and guilt. More attention should have been given to observing Islamic dissidents, everybody agreed, and less spent on Russell Crowe's love life.
Lurking behind the shame and guilt was something stronger and more galvanising: Schadenfreude. At last, the media thought, celebrities have received their comeuppance. No one will care about their delicate egos now. No one will tolerate their unreasonable demands, least of all the media themselves.
For years, there has been a growing sense of frustration in most sections of the media at what is perceived as the spoilt behaviour of celebrities. For example, just before 11 September, a leading British actress - always keen to portray herself as down-to-earth - gave an interview to a magazine in which she made some comments that she later regretted. When the magazine ran the rather tame interview, the actress got her publicist to inform the magazine that it would no longer have access to any of the stars on his roster. Soon after, the actress repeated the remarks in another magazine and was so annoyed at herself that she sacked her publicist.
This kind of thing goes on all the time, and the media was fed up with such antics. Nevertheless, in thrall to the market strength of celebrity, the media was capable only of moaning about how ungrateful the stars were, and reminding everyone that it was the media that had made them stars in the first place. This plaintive self-pity was reminiscent of the jilted lover in the Human League song 'Don't You Want Me?': ' You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you...'
Now, with half of Lower Manhattan in ruins, it seemed as if the public would not want to hear about a celebrity's search for spiritual enlightenment. Leading the rallying cry for a new seriousness was Vanity Fair, hitherto the house magazine for Hollywood celebrities and well known for its tender touch with the famous. Two months after publishing a solemn editorial calling for more journalistic gravity, Vanity Fair ran a cover interview with Tom Cruise.
In the piece, Cruise examines the motivations of the character he plays in the new film Vanilla Sky, a romantic drama about a man who is shocked to find himself passionately in love. 'You look at the World Trade Center,' says Cruise. 'I think the World Trade Center has kind of ripped the social veneer off this country. I'm not comparing this character to the World Trade Center. I'm not saying it's that extreme.' What is he saying? Who cares? It's Tom Cruise, he can say anything. To promote his latest movie, he can even make crass comparisons with the attack on the WTC, and it won't matter at all.
Celebrity may be trivial, but it will take more than Osama bin Laden to blow it away. The reason is simple. We, the public, want it to stay. When Princess Diana died in a car crash, such was the outrage at the press for apparently hounding the woman to her death that it seemed for a brief period that paparazzi photographs would no longer be published.
Now, just over four years later, magazines like Heat and Hello! thrive on paparazzi shots, and everything from the death of the Chancellor's baby to Diana's son's drug problems is treated as another celebrity photo opportunity by both the tabloid and broadsheet press. (Incidentally, if she achieved little else, Diana showed that the only viable future for the monarchy is celebrity. The alternative is a rather dull soap opera that nobody wants to watch.)
Buried among this voyeurism and titillation is the hope of transcendence that celebrity, despite its constant despoilation, still holds. We long to witness that untarnished moment when an individual steps outside everyday life and does something that resonates through time. It's that moment when Elvis first appears on the Ed Sullivan Show , a moment of pure iconography which redirects popular culture and reshapes our sense of self-image. Thereafter, things will never be the same. And they will be the least same for the celebrity. Such an image of instant creation, of instant worship, must have its correlating destruction and denunciation. With Elvis it comes at Graceland, his palace of bad taste, where he was found obese, drugged-up and dead on a lavatory at the accelerated age of 42.
Our relationship with celebrity is clearly not without its problems and contradictions. We seem to have developed a bulimic appetite for fame, consuming endless spin, rumour and gossip before spewing it all back out in disgust at the celebrity's privileged and pampered lifestyle.
Like a confused stalker, we are not sure whether to venerate or vilify the famous, whether to love or hate them. As the author Daniel Boorstin once put it: the celebrity's 'relation to morality and even reality is highly ambiguous'. That's why it helps that the media stands between us and the beautiful people on the other side of the glass. It means we can blame the press for its sensationalism and intrusiveness, and we can buy the press for the same reasons.
With the encouragement of the media, we have come to think of access to the famous as a fundamental requirement for the common good. All inquiries - into sexual infidelities, drug abuse and other important moral issues - are conducted under the lofty banner of the 'public's right to know'.
Unearthing celebrity skeletons is a shadowy business that, as often as not, involves some degree of complicity on the part of the celebrities themselves - or rather their army of PRs and publicists. No one is certain how a home movie of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee having sex found its way into video stores, but it has undoubtedly made some people a lot of money.
The old precept that all publicity is good publicity only really applies at the beginning and end of the celebrity arc. In the first case, the star is eager to gain press attention and will often allow his publicist to plant fake, often compromising, stories about him. In the second, the star is more concerned with losing press attention, and this period often coincides with a need to discuss his successful battle with drug abuse and sex addiction. At the height of their fame, celebrities are usually able to control and sanitise personal information because it's not in the interest of the media to offend them.
There are, of course, unavoidable exceptions. Hugh Grant's brief encounter with Divine Brown comes to mind. The unfortunate incident was notable for a number of reasons, not least of which was Brown's overnight elavation to celebrity status. In the era of chat-show criminals, it's hard to see the join between notoriety and celebrity, so successfully have they been fused. Brown went on to appear on talk shows and as a presenter at kitsch award ceremonies. And she may not have been the only one to gain financially from the meeting. Piers Morgan, editor of The Mirror, recently estimated that Grant's arrest raised his profile and therefore earning power by some £20m.
In the golden era of Hollywood, despite the scandal sheets and syndicated gossip columnists, the public's right to know did not usually extend to the truth. Even arrests could be covered up. The growth of television brought the famous down to size. Television changed the dimensions of fame. Instead of being projected on to a giant screen in a lavish cinema, actors looked out from within a small box in the corner of the sitting room. Television domesticated celebrity, made it less exotic, more everyday.
It also formalised the idea that the audience had a right to see inside the lives of the famous. After all, if they were appearing in our homes, why shouldn't we see into theirs? Our apprehension of fame shifted from the Byronic (larger than life and legendary) to the ironic (petty, camp and knowing).
The press was quick to pick up on the salacious potential this diminished celebrity offered. As a result, the tabloids and TV have become locked in the kind of incestuous embrace that regularly produces inbred headlines such as: ' Corrie Tracy beats up new hubby on jet'.
In a more direct sense, TV upped the demand for celebrities. There simply were not enough famous people to fill the screen time. More than anything else, TV made the allocation of fame more egalitarian, so that a lack of talent or 'star quality' was no longer seen as a bar to wider renown. A contestant on a quiz show could gain greater recogni tion in half an hour than he would otherwise achieve in a lifetime's labour.
As far back as 1962, in his book The Image, Boorstin identified a 'new kind of eminence': 'The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knowness... He is the human pseudo-event. He has been fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.' In fact this new kind of eminence, as seen on TV, was more a product of smaller expectations of human greatness. The point about the new celebrity was that he or she was the same as the rest of us, only different. To become a household name you only had to appear in enough households, and to do that you only had to appear on television. In the 50s and 60s, in Britain at least, that meant two channels. Now, with satellite, cable, and digital TV, there are hundreds of channels, not to mention the limitless potential of the internet.
Underlying this thinly spread fame is the cultivation of the principle of 'the public's right to know'. Gradually, that injunction has metamorphosed into 'the public's right to be known'. No fewer than 50,000 people applied to take part in the second series of Big Brother . A 21st-century bill of rights would probably need to contain some guaranteed protection from anonymity.
In a post-religious, post-political society, celebrity offers deathless hope to all of us who do not possess an immortal talent. Not long ago Martin Amis detailed the contemporary options open to the talentless: 'You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdothon). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.'
But why banish talent when you can simply expand its defining criteria? In the world of celebrity, almost anyone can be described as a 'genius': models, hairdressers, stylists, make-up artists. The multi-untalented Victoria Beckham can't sing or dance or write music and yet she is not only a pop star but also one of the country's leading celebrities. Her rather plain, if scarily lean, features adorn countless magazine covers and her bland opinions are sought on every chat show.
In the postmodern era, when even the co-ordinates of competence are not always visible, celebrity is the clearest clue to ability. Amid the uncertainty of the art world, the neo-conceptualist YBAs have identified themselves to the outside world just as much through their public image as their work.
In all of this, it should go without saying, the media is not some passive interlocutor. We live in a society saturated with media and a media saturated with celebrity. Celebrity values - beauty, wealth, a ready supply of sexual partners - are constantly endorsed by the media, but it would be far too reductive to envision this state of affairs as some kind of media conspiracy.
For a start, today's audience is wise to the absurd spin that makes up, in cultural historian Leo Braudy's phrase, the frenzy of renown. Programmes such as Popstars, that lay bare the fabrication of the music industry, are hugely popular. As was the openly fabricated pop group which that programme created. Everyone knows that all it takes to get on the front page of a newspaper if you are an attractive young woman is to turn up at a film premiere in a revealing dress. Yet that knowledge does little to dampen the public's appetite for seeing and reading about the young woman in the revealing dress.
If you'll pardon the suggestion, let us look at the topless model Jordan. Famed for her breasts, which have been surgically enlarged on three occasions, Jordan, according to no less an authority than Piers Morgan, 'is the biggest driver of sales of tabloid newspapers in the country'. He complains that there is nothing he can do about it, that he is trapped in a Jordan nightmare. The bottom line for a tabloid editor, he says, is 'either embrace it or you're dead'. If Jordan is the archetypal media creation of our age, she is one carefully constructed to the public's demanding specifications. That is the slightly sad and completely naked truth of the matter.
What is it like, though, on the other side of the glass? Is it as appealing over there as it looks? And can I come, too? Braudy argues that the attractions of fame are mostly illusory. He describes the moment when Charles Lindbergh, flying in the Spirit of St Louis, was above the clouds on the first-ever Atlantic crossing by plane, and beyond reach of the public, yet the absolute preoccupation of the public, as the closest man comes to the fame myth of independence and acclaim.
Real-life celebrity is a far more agitated and monitored business. In public, at least, it is a full-time job. And that is a pressure that disfigures all but the most resilient personalities. As John Updike observed: 'Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.'
The visual evidence of that maxim is there to see in Michael Jackson's strange facial transformation. And it's there in those photographs of celebrity parties that are a staple of glossy magazines. They always take the same almost indistinguishable form and yet they are seldom less than compelling. Gladragged and merry, the celebrities greet the camera like a friend. But underneath the smiles there are the signs - physiognomic, cosmetic, surgical - of a face that has had to work too hard to live up to expectations.
A few years back, Johnny Depp became embroiled in a dispute with some paparazzi photographers outside a London nightclub. 'I don't want to be what you want me to be tonight,' he told his tormentors, before hitting one of them.
While it may well provide escape from humdrum existence, celebrity is contained in its own prison, albeit one with expensive furnishings and a swimming pool. Distanced from the rest of the world, celebrities tend to seek out the company of people who can understand their exceptional predicament: namely, other celebrities. The irony here, however, is that while the forces that shape the wider distribution of celebrity are in essence democratic, celebrity itself is strictly hierarchical. No other walk of life is alphabetically stratified.
On the whole, A-list stars are no more liable to hang out with D-list names than they are with the local plumber. Celebrity is a vertical community in which you can only get out at your own floor. And in this caste system we are all zealous Hindus. Who was not a little appalled to see the photograph published last year of Nick Bateman from Big Brother, a celebrity untouchable, forgotten but not gone, holding hands with the actress Edie Falco, star of the wonderful Sopranos?
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of fame is its tendency to increase self-regard at the expense of self-awareness. A prime example of this syndrome is Geri Halliwell, the one-time Spice Girl. Last year I had the opportunity to witness, at close quarters, her estrangement from reality. I attended the premiere of the Bridget Jones movie (the film premiere has become the nonpareil celebrity event) at which, Halliwell, who contributed a song to the soundtrack, outflanked the stars of the show by electing as her date for the evening a young boy from the adoring crowd. Cue flashguns and a reserved place on the next morning's front pages. Halliwell once made an impassioned televised appeal for greater human understanding. 'Call me an old hippie,' she said, 'but I just think we should love each other a bit more.' Later that night, at the after-premiere party, Halliwell had disposed of her youthful date and was accompanied by a muscular bodyguard. It seemed like an unnecessary measure, given that the party was subject to the strictest security and, in any case, was made up of people from the entertainment business.
Chatting to a friend at the party, I suddenly felt the impact of what seemed like a crowbar in my back. In agony, I turned to see it was the elbow of Halliwell's bodyguard thrusting aside anyone who dared, however unwittingly, to stand in her path. At that moment, I didn't feel loved by the ginger singer.
The point is, of course, they're not supposed to love us. We are meant to love them. And we do, we do. But these days, it's rarely for more than 15 minutes.
