aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Fame
Is there anything Stephen Fry can’t do? Damnably versatile without ever exhibiting a hint of undue exertion, Fry is an actor of plummy aplomb on stage, screen, and telly (the imperturbable Jeeves to Hugh Laurie’s sputtering-tea kettle Bertie Wooster), a film director, a novelist, a playwright, a memoirist, the author of an inspirational how-to book on versifying, and the presenter of a travel series about the US of A, which prompts the image of Oscar Wilde (whom Fry portrayed on screen) entertaining the mining camps of Montana.
So Fry knows what he’s talking about:
Fame. It’s an embarrassing thing to talk about, for all that it is a national/global obsession. It is one of the few apparently desirable human qualities that … no, what am I talking about … it is not a quality. It is not like courage, mercy, kindness, strength, beauty or patience; or laziness, dishonesty, greed or cruelty for that matter. What is different about fame, I was going to say, is that it is so contingent. If you are tolerant or strong or wise, you are tolerant and strong and wise wherever you are on the planet that day. You don’t become bigoted, feeble and dim-witted the moment you cross a continent. Famous people however, can become entirely unknown the second they leave their homeland. Only the World Famous are famous everywhere, and there are precious few of them. They used to claim Mohammed Ali was about as well-known as a human could be, the same was said of Charlie Chaplin and Elvis. Who now? Osama bin Laden? Michael Jackson? Robbie Williams can walk around Los Angeles without being recognised and they say Johnny Carson was so surprised/irked/mortified at going unremarked in London whenever he showed up, as he did regularly for Wimbledon Fortnight, that he arranged for British TV to carry his Tonight Show at a reduced rate. Martha Stewart can travel by Tube unspotted, but not by Subway. And so on. As for myself, well, I mean next to nothing in Italy, but seem to strike a chord in Russia. Don’t ask.
Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders. What an ugly sentence. I mean this. We cannot, however much we may want to, make someone unfamous. We can make them infamous, unfashionable, notorious, despised or derided but the more we do so the more we actually increase their level of fame. Fame is a function of memory. I can’t impel you to forget Adam Sandler, for example, any more than I can instruct you to forget Jack the Ripper or the Jolly Green Giant. Indeed, as I’ve suggested, to urge someone to forget is worse than useless. It’s like the well-known procedure of telling someone not to think of something specific and odd, a yellow panda, for example. Go on, do not think of a yellow panda. [...]
All of which leads me to this obvious point. It is no good everyone repeating that tiresome cliché about x, y and z ‘only being famous for being famous’ - their fame exists in our heads and it is therefore our fault, not theirs, if fault there is.
Adds Wolcott, “this is why it’s such a steaming vat of bad faith when the press acts as if celebrities who are hounded the moment they meet outdoor air...deserve the grief they get as a penalty tax for their fame, casting them in the role of molestation victims who were ‘asking for it.’”
Read the whole blessay. But if you plan not to at least read “The Tom Cruise Eye-Contact Canard.” I’ve quoted it after the jump.
Poor old Tom Cruise. If only I had a euro for everyone who has said to me in tones of wild, almost joyful disapproval, ’apparently no one is allowed to look at him on the film set!’ (Actually the link I’ve embedded just there also shows how these ‘stories’ can be skewed for the purposes of some raving agenda, in this case a right-wing one). ‘Eye contact is banned!! I’m not making it up!! How mad is that?! Extras and crew are actually instructed not to stare at him!!’ In fact, a little imagination of the kind I asked you to summon up earlier and you might be able to picture this scenario: Tom Cruise (but you actually, because you’ve put yourself in his shoes) is about to do an important scene which involves hundreds of extras. He has to break down/shout/burst into tears/whatever. He comes on set to finish the camera line-up and get ready to shoot. Wherever he tries to rest his eyes there is someone staring at him. He is working, mind you, earning his fantastic salary (or if not earning it in your opinion, complying at least with its contractual imperatives), this is what he does, it takes concentration and skill, you may not value it, but take it from me, it isn’t easy. He has to prepare himself for whatever is required and then repeat the performance time after time for different camera angles. Put yourself in his position: you’re going to have to do something wild and daring in front of the camera and as you try to put yourself in the correct frame of mind there is nowhere to rest your eyes. Is it unreasonable to say to the Assistant Director, ‘would you mind asking all the background artists if they wouldn’t stare at me? Actually, knowing Asst. Directors, they would probably foresee the problem and make the announcement without consulting him even before Cruise ever arrived: ‘no one to stare at Mr Cruise when he’s on set.’ This gets repeated, comes to the ear of gossip columnists, mad republicans and others and it soon sounds like insane vain stardom all over again. When I was playing Wilde I had the same problem getting ready for the scene where Oscar comes out of the courtroom in handcuffs and is jeered and spat at. As the scene was being lit I couldn’t look in any direction without meeting the gaze of an extra, so I spent all the time staring at my boots or into a corner, like a naughty boy at kindergarten. I didn’t ask the AD if she’d put out a request for them not to look at me, but if I were in the same position again I might. Or I would spend the whole time in my trailer until the very, very last minute, which is bad for the director, the crew and the performance, not to mention the reputation of the actor who is forever set down in people’s minds as a Trailer Queen. But see how easily rumours of mad egoism get round? I’m not saying there aren’t wild egos amongst the famous, but sometimes it’s just a lack of imagination amongst the non-famous that sees insanity where all that lies behind it is professionalism and self-preservation. Many people of course have an ardent desire to want the famous to be deranged, spoiled, stupid and impossible to live with and perhaps some of you reading this will still choose not to believe me, preferring your image of star as pampered idiot child monster. It’s too much to bear that they have all the money, adulation and opportunity in the world, so let’s console ourselves with the thought that they’re deranged imbeciles so far up themselves it hurts. It is interesting isn’t it how very, very important money becomes (even to the most apparently spiritual) when criticising a famous person. ‘What are they complaining about? They’re paid enough aren’t they?’ as if money compensates for all things. Maybe it does in some people’s minds. ‘I’d put up with any amount of shit if I was paid that much.’ Would you indeed, how noble of you. I’ve seen enough of the very famous close up, film stars, sportsmen and musicians, to know it’s a pretty miserable fate. Happy superstars are a rare sight. Not many seem to want to believe that, but it’s true.
