The Perils of Celebrity

By LANCE MORROW

In his novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody will be famous for at least 15 minutes." But many survive long after the deadline. Their 15 minutes stretch into years and years, until the public, whose adulation sometimes conceals a hard little rock of vindictiveness, wishes that, after all, the 15-minute rule had been observed.

Contrary to Warhol's essentially democratic premise--everybody, but briefly --fame elevates some mortals into realms where their celebrity achieves a life of its own. While a Tiny Tim or a Judith Exner may flare and fade, others acquire a strange permanence--or its illusion, which is of course just as good. They have been transported into another medium where information and images are permanently (or for years, anyway) stored. In the formula of Historian Daniel Boorstin, they have "become well known for being well known." A classic of the category is, say, Elizabeth Taylor. Who, outside of her family and friends, would have the slightest interest in her were she not phosphorescent in her sheer famousness?

As Bellow knew, fame can be a state as complicated as serious religion; at any rate, the vocabularies are sometimes interchanged. Terms like "immortal" get thrown around. The Beatles' boast in 1966 that "we're more popular than Jesus now" was a cheeky little blasphemy accurately located an intersection between Liverpool and Nazareth. In her book Fame, Susan Margolis noticed that "today the gifted as well as the deranged among us are struggling to be famous the way earlier Americans struggled to be saved."

In the beatitude of fame, certain privileges and immunities exist. The higher orders may, for example, appear through a curtain, unannounced, in the middle of a Johnny Carson show, exciting little whoops of recognition and incredulity in the audience. (Bob Hope may always do that; Don Rickles can get away with it.) The middle orders make the Dean Martin roast, regularly inhabit the "People" pages of magazines and newspapers. All enjoy, at least for a time, immunity from the agent's call proposing that they do an American Express commercial: "Remember me? I used to ..."

Fame improves some people. Except for certain saints and others with inner resources, there is nothing ennobling about obscurity. Watergate transformed Carl Bernstein from a cigarette-scrounging city-room fixture and superannuated punk into a superb journalist who carries his fame with a self-assured but quizzical grace. Rosalynn Carter has flourished in the public gaze.

Some celebrities from time to time pronounce their lives a living hell. Raquel Welch not long ago complained that sex symbols are vulnerable and tragic figures "who have a corner on the misery market." Louise Lasser (of TV's late Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) declared,

"When you are a celebrity, you are totally a victim."

There are plenty of cautionary examples to prove them right: Elvis Presley living like a rhinestone troglodyte, Janis Joplin careering around on quarts of Southern Comfort, Freddie Prinze putting a pistol to his head.

But the public is massively unpersuaded when the rich and famous feel sorry for themselves. Celebrity is by definition an exposed life--except for Howard Hughes, who made a public event of his obsessive absence. If Woody Allen is so shy, why is he always turning up where the photographers are? Celebrity involves a sort of hospitable narcissism: "Say, I'm absolutely wonderful, come have a look." Some of course think it peculiar, and even clinically neurotic, to wish to have millions of strangers monitoring one's life. A sometimes awful intimacy is one of the strangest aspects of fame: people turn their lives inside out for our inspection. Paula Prentiss once explained on a talk show that she had had her intrauterine coil removed so that she could have a baby.

People arrive at celebrity by various roads. Some are famous because of accomplishment (Jonas Salk, Beverly Sills, Reggie Jackson) or because they possess power and position (the Shah, say, or the Pope). But there exist categories of celebrity quite outside the usual cause-and-effect logic of merit. W.B. Yeats noticed it bitterly in a couplet: "Some think it a matter of course that chance/ Should starve good men and bad advance."

It is those who achieve celebrity's bright orbits without much boost from talent or intelligence who fall victim to the public's readiness to be bored, to discard disposable personalities like empty bottles of Champale. When fame ceases to bear any relation to worth or accomplishment, then the whole currency of public recognition is debased. The famous are merely random iridescences on the oil spot, depending less upon intrinsic value than upon the angle at which the light strikes them. After the 4 millionth exposure to Farrah Fawcett-Majors' teeth or to Billy Carter's wheezing bray, the celebrity consumer's brain begins to click like Mme. Defarge's knitting needles, compiling lists. He begins to think that the Warhol 15-minute rule might profitably be applied to everybody. Those who have grown tiresome must have their immortality repealed: Sorry pal, your 15 minutes are long since up. As Dr. Seuss wrote in one of his books for children, "Marvin K. Mooney, I don't care how/ Marvin K. Mooney, will you please GO NOW!"

The 15-minute rule of course works by a natural laissez-faire mechanism in many cases. This is the celebrity version of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand at work; it might be called the Invisible Hook. The Hook has thus ushered away in timely fashion the likes of Mark Spitz, Fanne Foxe, Elizabeth Ray, Evel Knievel, Werner Erhard, Roman Polanski, Margaret Trudeau, Sun Myung Moon, Cybill Shepherd, Chevy Chase and the Captain and Tennille -- all the spiritual descendants of Pinky Lee.

Then there is a whole category of celebrities who seem in imminent danger of staying too long: people like Margaux Hemingway, Jimmie Walker, Geraldo Rivera, Princess Caroline, Brooke Shields,Ilie Nastase, Anita Bryant, Sylvester Stallone, Susan Ford. The clock has run even longer on Jann Wenner, Erich Segal, Erica Jong, Vanessa Redgrave, David Frost and Rex Reed.

But finally there ought to be some kind of 15-minutes Hall of Fame -- a compilation of those who have egregiously overstayed their welcomes in that part of the national imagination that is always sitting under a hair dryer. Some nominees:

Barbra Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Burton, Jacqueline Onassis, Cher, Howard Cosell, Hugh Hefner, Muhammad Ali, Barbara Walters, Dean Martin, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote . . .

But this is Neronian proscription, a culling process that goes on constantly in the minds of talk-show "talent coordinators" and the audience itself, which always enjoys the reassuring drama of yesterday's famous being returned to oblivion. Celebrities are intellectual fast food. Perhaps we ought to be troubled by the combination of proliferating celebrities and diminishing public attention spans. If Emerson was correct that "every hero becomes a bore at last," then how much more quickly the famous mediocrity must become unendurable. Shelley thought of Ozymandias. Perhaps we ought to find a metaphor for the evanescence of glory in Monty Rock III's image imploding to a sad white dot on the TV screen as his last Johnny Carson show is switched off.

Lance Morrow

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