Global News

Thursday September 02, 2010

One of my favorite anecdotes about our society's infatuation with fame and the famous appears in a Talk of the Town piece from August 6, 1927. It describes a tactic used by new Yorkers to entertain the "country cousin" during his visit to the big city: bring him to a meal at a large restaurant, and point out the other diners as celebrities, whatever their real identity may be—“in any dining-room you can find a satisfactory Theodore Dreiser, a passable Gene Tunney, a creditable Mayor Walker, a reasonably good Jeanne Eagels and any social celebrities you decide on. Vanderbilts are always perfectly safe." But steer clear of motion-pictures stars. “the country cousins know very accurately what Gloria Swanson looks like, and no substitute is quite good enough.”

The question of why we are so susceptible to the pull of fame drives Fred Inglis's "A Short History of Celebrity." Tracing the phenomenon of modern fame from its rise in eighteenth-century London, Inglis, the Honorary Professor of Cultural History at the University of Warwick, seeks to explain why it is "everywhere acknowledged but never understood." he kindly answered my questions on celebrity, role models, and the importance of talent.

We are all involuntarily audiences to celebrity—being alive in the twenty-first-century Anglophone world commits us to having views on the topic. But beyond the surface response, I was forcefully struck by the fact that our celebrities dramatize for us both the best and the worst of our contemporary values. worst because one consequence of an excellent egalitarianism in our societies is a refusal to endorse the status of other people; older forms of deference have gone down. At the same time, the all-powerful rhythms of advertising teach us all to feel envy and then disappointment and finally revulsion, and this social psychosis comes out with painful vividness in the more hateful aspects of magazines like Hello and its horrible imitators. we also find sincere admiration of other public figures who have been made into celebrities. I close my book with a little hymn of praise to an assortment of these, including Paul Newman, Seamus Heaney, Oprah Winfrey, Nelson Mandela, and the best newscasters, led by the late Walter Cronkite.

What were some of your biggest surprises in researching?

Researching for the book was almost all by traditional library work, although I interviewed a few people just for fun, like Cronkite (a lovely man), Seamus Heaney, a Playboy centerfold, and Dorothy Hodgkin. my biggest surprises were completely banal: for example, just how rich the rich of Newport were in 1900, or the discovery of how hard the stars worked in nineteen-thirties Hollywood.

There has been a lot of outcry lately over the influence of celebrity culture on children (I am thinking of the outrage over young girls imitating Lady Gaga, for example). What is your stance on this? is there a distinction to be made between celebrities and role models?