Famous to Death

Do You want to be famous? Have you ever really thought about it? How about notorious? Infamous? I couldn’t find any reliable statistics but what percentage of people do you think would be famous if they could be? Some people crave fame as much as the rest of us crave air. But I think most people would choose fame if it was available to them. It’s a very particular kind of power and social status. Yet it comes in so many different forms that it defies simple explanation or study.

Come to think of it, infamous should be the opposite of famous. It should probably mean not famous. But it doesn’t. If you are infamous, you are still famous, but probably not in a good way.

If I had to pick one I would probably go for celebrated. People know who you are and it’s definitely for something they liked. But all forms of fame are the same in one way. It always means that people that you don’t know, know you. It’s actually a little creepy when you think of it that way. If you are really famous, everywhere you go, people will know who you are. Or at least they will think they do. How close they are to being right is more a matter of how similar you actually are to your public persona.

The whole people knowing you that you don’t know is really the only consistent thing about fame. Everything else is up for grabs. What are you famous for? Who are you famous to? How long have you been famous? I think we are now in the golden era of fame. How many people do you think you have heard of?

That’s the working definition. For our purposes anyway. How many people are there whose name you would recognize that you don’t know personally? Hundreds? Thousands? Perhaps even tens of thousands? In the 1750s, how many people do you think the average person had heard of? There is no way to know for sure but my guess is it’s probably not much more than a 100 at best. By the way, I’m going to use heard of as a stand in for fame. Yes it papers over the degree of how much you know about the person. But it’s a reasonable way to express the basic concept of people outside your personal social circle that you and many others are aware of.

While looking into this I found surprisingly little academic research on the subject. The reason might be because the concept is pretty tricky to standardize. It’s difficult just to define what exactly makes a person famous and what it means. There’s a fuck ton of different definitions of what it means to be famous. And a lot of different ways to become a person that members of the general public have heard of.

Here's a good way of putting it. Many of you know that I came out as a Star Trek nerd some years back. I have been on not one. Not two. But three Star Trek theme cruises on big ships completely devoted to Star Trek and its fans. They completely deck out the ships in Star Trek stuff. They go so far as to label and decorate the elevators as turbo lifts. They do an amazing job. If you are a Trekker, I highly recommend them.

We are joined by actors from the various series and it is incredibly cool. At one point I sat a casino bar, drinking with three actors from the same Star Trek series as the three of them were simultaneously on the TV in the bar (Star Trek is shown on all the TV’s throughout the ship). I probably should be, but I am not at all embarrassed by the truth that I consider it one of the best times of my life.

But here, at last, is the point. There were about thirty Star Trek actors on that ship. Of which maybe two would be recognized by the general public. But in that closed environment, they were known by everyone (except some of the crew), for that week on that ship. They were all as famous and well known as Tiger Woods or the President. Once they get home they will again be known only by a fairly small corner of the public at large.

I myself had a short-lived, very specific type of fame. I spent one month in Cuba as an athlete. As such, I was required to wear our team USA jacket at all times that I was in public. Even if I was not competing that day. I believe that this is normal in most forms of international sports, including the Olympic games.

I very much stood out like a sore thumb. I’m 6’3”, light hair, blue eyes and wearing a red, white, and blue jacket with a giant ‘USA’ emblazoned on it. And it’s the 1990s in Havana, Cuba. Moreso, all five matches I played in were broadcast live and then replayed constantly on television. Everywhere I went I was signing autographs. I wasn’t exactly mobbed, but there was a steady line of folks wanting to meet the giant Jew that they had just seen on TV.

It was amazing for the first couple of weeks or so. Then it began to get old. All of the people I met knew me in a superficial way. Which isn’t much, but I didn’t know any of them at all. It all started to feel weird. Don’t get me wrong, everyone was very nice. Almost as if I were a curiosity. Overall it was a wonderful experience and I felt pride at the opportunity to represent my country.

But it forever changed my idea of fame. I came home realizing that for as nice it could be to be famous, it definitely wasn’t for me. It would never be something that I want for myself. And I remembered thinking how trapped the household names of the world must feel. And these days it has to be even worse. If a famous person farts or looks cross-eyed at a waiter they get roasted on social media even before the fart stops smelling.

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part famous people have sought fame and the money and power that often comes along with it. So I don’t feel a whole lot of sympathy for the actor, singer or other performers who made becoming famous their life’s work. It’s a bit rich to hear them complain about paparazzi and the loss of their privacy. There are plenty of ways to live without fame and they had every opportunity to avoid it. They wanted the popularity, fortune and influence that come with fame. So just shut up and smile for the camera.

And, as gross as it is to have to play into his (tiny little) hands. I have to mention Donald Trump because he is nothing if not famous. Literally nothing. That’s his whole thing. We’ve all been forced to pay attention to the fat fuck and that’s exactly what he wants. In fact that might be ALL that he wants. Yes, he likes money too and he was glad to inherit and swindle as much of it as possible. But his oxygen is fame and celebrity. I’ve never seen a human being as obsessed with celebrity as he is. I think an excellent argument could be made that everything about him is a means to that end. That even the presidency was just a way to stay on TV and in the public attention.

It presents a small problem for the country. Because to keep commanding attention you have to keep raising the stakes. Committing an endless stream of ever more unhinged antics in order to keep the spotlight on him. I even think that’s why he keeps getting fatter. It’s just more of him to be seen. With that said, I think his run for the presidency started out as a cash grab in addition to a grab for attention. I think he had a negative net worth and was out of potential lenders and correctly thought that he could easily fleece the rubes to get out of a financial jam. It worked. And the presidency was a surprise bonus.

On the other hand, do you know the name Richard Jewell? Jewell was originally a suspect in the bombing of Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. For a couple of months he was considered a suspect and underwent intense media scrutiny. Eventually he was cleared of any wrongdoing. But not before his name became synonymous with the bombing. In fact, he was really a hero, having identified the suspicious backpack and evacuating people nearby. He almost certainly prevented some additional death and injuries.

When I wrote his name, what did you remember? There is a good chance you remember him as the bomber. For the record the actual bomber was Eric Robert Rudolph. Here’s a shocker, Rudolph is an extremist white Christian supremacist who bombed the Olympics and at least two other targets including a lesbian nightclub and an abortion clinic.

Did you remember Rudolph at all? I didn’t. I only remembered Jewell. Jewell received a horrible form of fame and celebrity. He died just 10 years later at just 44. The shit-stain Rudolph is still alive and costing us all money at a supermax penitentiary in Colorado.

What actually got me thinking about the subject of fame was seeing Carol Burnett. If you are 50 or older you certainly have heard of her. If you are under 50 you may very well have barely heard the name or never heard of her at all. If you are a Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fan you might know her from the final season of Saul. Although known as a comedienne and comic actress, she played a very serious role on Better Call Saul. And she was great, by the way.

She led one of the most popular variety TV shows in the history of television and the first with a woman as its host. The Carol Burnett Show ran from 1967 to 1978 as one of TV’s highest rated programs. Where I am going with this is that there was a time that she was easily one of the 10 or 20 most famous and recognizable people on the planet. Yet today I would be surprised if even half of the population would recognize her. I did my own informal survey and nobody under 40 really knew who she was, but a few kinda sorta had heard the name.

That is the weird, slippery, and indefinable nature of fame at play. Carol Burnett (at 90) seems to have outlived her fame. Yet some types of fame are not subject to an expiration date. Figure this shit out: More people know of Hitler than Truman or Eisenhower. Does that mean that infamy is more durable than fame? Honestly, I don’t know.

This is really a huge subject and I could probably babble about it forever. Maybe someone a lot smarter than me can tie all of these threads together and produce some kind of comprehensive scholarly book on the subject. That is well beyond my attention span.

Yet for every benefit of the thrill of fame is a cautionary tale of its dangers. Children are particularly prone to the dangers, or so it appears. So much so that California has “The Coogan Act”. Named after one of the earliest of childhood movie stars, it was enacted in 1939 to protect famous children. Mostly from their own parents. Many of whom would make off with the fortune made by their ‘star’ children.

Think about that for a second. Fame is so powerful that we need an actual law to stop parents from fucking over their own children. Laws only exist to stop us from things we actually do to each other. We wouldn’t need a law against cannibalism if we didn’t occasionally eat each other. Nor would we need a law against stealing from your famous children if it wasn’t happening.

On many, many occasions fame has been no friend to the children blessed with it. From Judy Garland to Amanda Bynes to Charlie Sheen and Corey Fucken Feldman. Early fame seems more often a curse. Try to imagine being famous from birth. Imagine being JFK Junior or a child of the British version of royalty. Who are you when the public has a perception of you before you are old enough to form a perception of yourself?

I don’t know. And probably neither do you. So I will leave you with this.

When it comes to fame, be careful what you wish for.