A NASTY FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

By LANCE MORROW

The tale came to a close in one of those rituals of shared planetary theater: a joining of tragedy and gossip in universal soap opera. But whatever emotional residue lingered as the world dried its eyes, two slightly hard-edged questions presented themselves in another part of the brain. The questions were not necessarily unkind. They were churned up by the undercurrent of sadness and disgust and fatalism that ran through one's thoughts on hearing the news from Paris that night, and in the days that followed.

The first question was this: Why on earth would anyone want to be famous, especially now? (What a nightmare! What a disaster!)

And the second question (the obverse of the first): Why do masses of men and women feel such intense emotion about the life and death of people who are strangers to them--strangers, that is, except to the extent that masses of people have been deceived by the tabloids into an illusion of intimacy with the famous?

If the intimacy was an illusion, is the grief an illusion as well? Or how exactly do we assess the emotional truth of these outpourings? A moment of poignant communion in the Family of Man? A cheap exploitation of sympathies one centimeter deep? Or is there a third possibility? Something to do with mortals and gods and goddesses?

To be famous is among the basic human ambitions, of course, an all but universal fantasy. Who--except for nuns and monks, say, who are content with God's radiant attention--sets out in life to remain obscure? Fame is fun--and vindication. One need never be lonely, anywhere, ever. Fame has style, glamour, money, attention; ignites the sudden light of recognition in strangers' eyes, commands the comic deference of headwaiters as they sweep you past the serfs and hoi polloi to the best table.

Some who have come to be famous see in retrospect that the daydream may have been touchingly adolescent, self-inflating in the style of Mr. Toad. In some personalities, the need for attention is darker and more retrograde: neurotic, infantile, a sort of baby's unappeasable love craving, a raw, screaming hunger.

In any case, one should beware of answered prayers. Those with hard experience at being famous know that while celebrity can occasionally be delightful, it may become a burden, an arduous and menacing bore. Just how menacing it can be we saw in the middle of that recent night in Paris.

It was always a primitive terror to be cast out of the tribe and made to wander as a stranger. Today a famous person--Arnold Schwarzenegger, say, or Sylvester Stallone, those universal action figures whose films require the fewest subtitles and therefore address masses most eloquently in remote cultures--might go anywhere on earth and never be a stranger. Is that desirable? Or a horror? Such planetary recognition may be as dangerous, in a different way, as being an unknown alien once was.

The famed one is paradoxically as naked as an exile dispossessed. The celebrity enters into a powerful and potentially dangerous force field, a relationship with masses of people gone slightly insane; sometimes he encounters that side of human nature that forms lynch mobs: the beast. A surreal dynamic goes to work. The famous may find their fortunes held hostage by the moods and attention spans of people they do not know. The unstable affections of fandom have a life of their own and acquire an unpredictable but nearly absolute power over one's personal and professional fate. Fame becomes a form of primitive, dangerous religion, like snake handling.

The most extreme danger comes in the form of the sort of lethal nonentity who gunned down John Lennon. Other stalkers are less murderous but more numerous. In fandom, boundaries of individuality break down and enthusiasts come to think they own the celebrity in some way. They behave with a bizarre, intrusive, proprietary aggression, as if the icon had entered their own head (as indeed the icon has) and thereby relinquished all rights of privacy and courtesy and become a plaything of fans' fantasy. Madonna has said that one of the worst things about being famous is that you cannot put your trash out on the sidewalk in front of your house: someone will plunder it. Autograph hunters are the most benign of stalkers. The press, to a divorced princess, an actress or the U.S. President, represents a complex evil and professional necessity. The predations celebrities fear most from the press, especially photographers, are intrusions into the lives of their children.

Sane, well-balanced celebrities accept their fame as part of their working life, but also an irrelevance and an intrusion and a pain in the neck. It is true that people live more comfortably with fame when they are confident that it is something they have earned by their own merit and hard work over a period of time.

The trouble is that fame at the end of the 20th century--a global, multicultural and multimedia saturation--gets distributed by a sort of cultural chaos theory, detached not only from merit in many cases but also from any comprehensible framework of value and virtue. And so beneath the surface floats a fierce sense of injustice--a sense of ethical dislocation, as if the laws of cause and effect had been rescinded. In such a culture, to be obscure is by definition to be a failure. The obscure man asks bitterly, "Why is he famous, and not I? What's he got that I haven't got?" Manifestly, nothing. It is not the Salieri-Mozart configuration, mediocrity envying genius; today, let some unsung brilliant political thinker wonder why Dick Morris is famous for sucking a call girl's toes.

A guilty sense of the injustice of fame assaults the famed one as well: "Why am I famous? Why do all these people seem to love me? I don't deserve it. I am a fraud." The anguished, neurotic internal monologue gets dramatized in self-destructive ways (drug overdoses, alcohol, rampages, broken marriages, suicides or, if the celebrities are lucky, a trudge through the rehab that ends with confession and absolution in prime time: "I feel more centered now, Barbara"); all this mess forms up as part of the great sobbing dysfunctional pageant on display at the supermarket check-out counters.

Fame is the delicious toxin that addicts the troubled famous--including Diana, for example, and, in different ways, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Brigitte Bardot--the waifs and shipwrecks. The troubled famous develop a virtually sadomasochistic, I-hate-it/I-need-it dependency on fame. They are married to it as unhappily as Strindberg couples are married to each other. They are imprisoned and isolated by their fame. In a curious fashion, the metaphysical loneliness of their fame may expose and energize their worst latent flaws and turn them into monstrous distortions of themselves: fame tends to draw their spirits away from them in the way that some tribal people fear that being photographed will steal their souls. Fame distributes their souls to the masses as in Communion. The famous get ingested by the world in some primitive manner.

That is the pathological side--the part of fame that appeals to the tabloid groundlings. Many famous people, of course, are worthy and righteous, and have even been much improved by their fame; all the public attention actually encourages them to rise to the occasion. One thinks of veterans in show business like Sophia Loren, with her sexy, humorous sense of self and feet on the ground; or the late Audrey Hepburn; or Gregory Peck, who is still to be seen around Beverly Hills with majestic white mane and bushy black thundercloud eyebrows and his air of formidably screwy gravitas. But in general the sane-and-sober famous, in show business or elsewhere, pose the same problem to their chroniclers and their public that God presented to John Milton when he was writing Paradise Lost: Satan was a much more interesting character to describe, and to read about, than God.

Fame is a nasty Faustian bargain, the famous find, but with an inversion of the classic deal. Instead of selling one's soul to the devil in order to know all things, as Faust did, one sells one's soul in order to be known. A devolution from the active to the passive. The outcome is not happy in either case.

The ancient Greeks savored stories from Olympus that in our culture fill the "People" columns. Celebrities are what we have instead of gods and goddesses. We mortals may get more out of the famous than the famous get out of us. We get gaudy entertainment; life's possibilities and absurdities all heightened and tarted up with sex and sermonettes; vicarious excursions outside the confines of oneself; a kind of narrative structure to contemplate in our otherwise formless lives; fables with suspense and denouement--as in Diana's story, which has a fairy-tale beginning, a troubled middle and a climax of pageant at the sad end.

It is a strange transaction. People projected all sorts of fantasies upon Princess Diana in somewhat the way girls project little play scenarios upon Barbie dolls. Diana was a sort of Barbie-Ophelia--except that Barbie is an inanimate doll and Ophelia a part played by an actress who, after her performance, takes off her makeup and goes out for a late supper. Who would want such sacrificial fame for keeps? Diana, a real person, died, and stays dead.

Literature has better consolations than either life or tabloids. After Diana's funeral one wistfully looks up the quote at the end of George Eliot's Middlemarch and reads: "... For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."