Celebrity
When I was a boy there was a television show called Queen for a Day. Among various female contestants who told the host about their plights one would be crowned (based on audience applause) and win some coveted yet utilitarian prize. I can still see some woman swooning upon learning that she had been chosen. Such was the fate of queens in modern times and such was the fate of the celebrity that queens once had borne. Queen for a Day touched on many deep nerves, such as women as the bearers of emotion in American society, but a big one was the prospect of being lifted up and made into someone special. To have a wish and then have it granted was manifest magic. The next day the queen went back to her life, though she had a new refrigerator and some exciting stories to tell her friends, but there were those whose celebrity might be, and sometime was, much less evanescent. In an astronomical turn, these people were called “stars.”
Acting—someone becoming someone else—was a sort of magic that had, and continues to have, a special allure. Ravenous, myth-making Hollywood, which stood at the heart of so much of modern times, readily translated that allure into celebrity. To be a movie star was to exist in some ether far from daily life, an ever exhilarating place where romance never turned into dirty dishes and a squalling infant. Fairy tales often depended on chance and luck, to say nothing of the supernatural, but the canny moguls who ran the large studios knew that magic could be manufactured. That was their business. And there was that margin of uncertainty that surrounded how the public responded. Despite the efforts of powerful men like Howard Hughes, not every “find” turned out to be a bona fide star. Enough did, however, to lend a note of permanent glamour to the enterprise. Enough did to fuel a gigantic imaginative economy.
The aura of celebrity that the movies promoted and that other arenas picked up on—“rock star” becoming a phrase in its own right—provided a scintilla of enchantment that counterbalanced the grinding impersonality of modern times. How many women spent their lives in offices working as secretaries or at home attending to their domestic responsibilities while yearning to let the world know that there was something marvelous inside of them? They had acted in high school plays. They could sing. They had made more than one man turn his head. As for men, how many of them spent their lives working in factories while remembering how well they once swung a bat or boxed or also acted in a high school play? Stardom was far away but not far at all. The raw materials were in each person.
Part of the story of celebrity was that it, too, had its tribulations. Many stars, as the tabloids testified, had their problems. For those who looked at the “larger than life” screens and sighed with envy that made for consolation. No one, at the end of the day, was “larger than life.” As a fantastic commodity, celebrity thrived on gossip. Whereas once upon a time, commoners commented on what the king had said at his coronation or what the queen wore as she stood waving on a balcony, modern commoners commented on what an actress wore to the Oscar ceremony or how an actor was getting divorced again. Whether those commoners thought twice about what it was like to be in the actor or actress’s skin and how much such a person really wanted to be in the public limelight and what price that limelight exacted were other stories. Celebrity promoted unreality not empathy. To pierce that scrim as the celebrated Princess Diana tried to pierce it was, at once, to reach out to the world yet hold back in the name of her own life. To be “known” by millions was to be everyone’s accomplice and no one’s friend. Her life story reads like a legend of celebrity, a compound of fairy tale, nobility in the literal and figurative sense, public scrutiny, and yearning that went unsatisfied.
Andy Warhol, that antic seer, gibed that “in the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His prognostication failed for many reasons, not the least of which is logic: if everyone is famous, then there is no such thing as fame. In the sense, however that Warhol was pointing to the mania surrounding celebrity, he was correct. The emptiness of celebrity, the glitz and aura that trail in its wake, offered balm to any frayed, on-looking ego: there goes nothing. Meanwhile, the advent of electronic media gave each person a chance to puff his or her identity. The result, contra Warhol, was not fame but, as the playing field became more and more level, a vast chorus of egos. Glamour, with its hint of remoteness, got pulled down further and further.
Despite its sometimes gruesome consequences, celebrity is comic, an afflatus intent not so much on honoring achievement as proclaiming some throbbing empyrean where every resident, however ephemeral, is luminous and eager to grant an exclusive interview. Behind the battalions of public relations advisers, media consultants, agents, reporters, and declaimers of every stripe stands a figure like Falstaff, someone fascinated by the spectacle of his or her fallible being. Falstaff sparred and drank with a man who was about to become a great celebrity indeed—a king. One of Prince Hal’s tasks was to see through the bombast that enveloped Falstaff, to say nothing of many a prince and king. Hal’s rejection of Falstaff showed a terrible clarity. A man or woman was just a man or woman, though the aura of celebrity would have it otherwise. Hal’s first words as Henry V put it well, “This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, / Sits not so easy on me as you think.”