The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  They had become famous for having met each other on screen and fallen in love. This event was agreed by both themselves and the press to have been some kind of miracle – a conjunction, defying the laws of chance, of two soulmates who might otherwise never have found each other. Actually nothing could have been more ordinary, because each of them meets someone exactly like the other every day of the week. It would be impossible for them not to. By now, in the Britain that Tony Blair inherited from Margaret Thatcher and has somehow managed to make worse, there are millions of young people who, without qualifications for attaining to the luxurious life of which they dream, nevertheless believe, and it is the only belief they have, that if they could find their way to the right tree, it would have money growing on it. Money and celebrity. The press, keen to supply them with both those things, closed in. The pair of helpless young inadequates soon found that the press, once it closes in, is slow to go away until there is nothing left drifting down through the pink water except bones. The likelihood that married bliss would be temporary was intensified by the attentions of friends, acquaintances and the general public. Jane and Wayne, to the extent that they had ever had lives, now found that their lives were not their own. Even the closest friends became enemies, because fame breeds envy the more it is unearned, and if you have done nothing at all to earn it, absolutely everybody is dying to see it taken from you. Nobody looks at a photograph of Jesus Christ on the cross and asks ‘Why not me?’ because they know the answer: you haven’t been crucified. Every one of Jean and Dean’s friends looked at their photographs and thought, correctly, that they could have been famous too. Thus the friends became betrayers, the acquaintances became informers, and the general public became delighted ghouls at the scene of the inevitable disaster. The only remarkable thing was that the classic dynamics of celebrity were being applied to absolute nonentities.

  Perhaps it was a good thing, a necessary sacrifice. Because Andy Warhol understated the case. He should have said that in the future everyone will not be famous for fifteen minutes, they will be famous all the time. And indeed fame is by now not only what almost everybody wants, it is what almost anybody can get. If you want to be famous, urinate on the shoe of someone who is already famous. You will be given your own television series. In Britain at the moment there is a famous couple you may have heard of called David and Victoria Beckham. David plays football very well some of the time and Victoria sings very bravely all of the time, but there is some reason for their celebrity. There is no reason for the celebrity of a young woman called Rebecca Loos except that she managed to sleep with David. By all accounts this feat is rather less taxing than to square the circle, but Rebecca has the plus value of looking rather more upmarket than Victoria. She might look it, but Victoria, were the positions reversed, might have been less likely to sell her story to the press. Rebecca sold her story, and is now a TV star. The historian George Grote brought his monumental, multi-volume history of Greece to an end at the point when, as he explained, the Greeks no longer realized they were slaves. We may have reached the point when people who sell the story of their love-lives no longer realize they are nonentities. Having come into close contact with the famous, they convince themselves that they have caught fame, as they might catch crabs. The age we live in is the apotheosis of the parasite. So far there are few formal studies of this phenomenon, but let me recommend Bob Dylan’s fascinating new autobiography, which will soon be published. Judging by the extracts I have seen, it is the work of a master deceiver. He would have us believe that in order to escape the pressure of fame, he made bad albums deliberately. He would have us believe that his early songs were never meant to lead his listeners on the path of social rebellion, and that he was appalled when they did. I suppose that’s why he wrote the song with that haunting refrain, ‘The times they are a-changing, more’s the pity.’ But the stuff about how being one of the world’s biggest celebrities turned his private life into a misery is obviously all too true.

  It isn’t a matter of celebrity getting out of control. Celebrity is out of control by its nature. Everyone who becomes famous is convinced beforehand that his fame will be different. All of them find out that it is bound to be the same, because no human being is naturally supplied with the defence mechanisms that can ward off universal attention. Every beautiful woman who becomes famous, for example, acquires at least one stalker. If we think some of them don’t, it’s only because they have so far managed to avoid having to take out a restraining order. We found out about Nicole Kidman’s poet when she went to court to get rid of him, or anyway try to. At the moment he is defending his human rights in the Hague, one of his human rights being the right to make Nicole Kidman admit that she is in love with him. In reality, she awaits his inevitable reappearance with dread. She could put up with the poems he sent her, although if you read a few of them you wonder how she did. She could even put up with his haunting her doorstep with a new bunch of fresh roses every morning. But when he offered to take her children to school in his car, she had to call in the cops. You might have thought that she already had her work cut out, being married to a miniature Scientologist. Incidentally, in her latest movie she mistakes a ten-year-old boy for her late husband. It makes you wonder if she ever mistook Tom Cruise for a ten-year-old boy. But being married to a fellow celebrity was something she chose. She did not choose her stalker. Her stalker chose her. And there is a stalker for almost every celebrity: for all the women and even for most of the men. The penny dropped for Bob Dylan when he realized that not only he himself was incurably famous, the weirdo who was cataloguing his garbage had become famous too. Dylan’s garbage-collector was sorting the garbage in order to write a book about Dylan, and then somebody wrote a book about the garbage collector. Jodie Foster won’t allow interviewers to question her about the man who shot Ronald Reagan in order to impress her. But all her interviewers mention that they are not allowed to mention it, and here I am mentioning it now. Something she never did is stuck to her for life, and the achievement of a serious artist is ineradicably branded with the action of a psychotic. The Jodie Foster jokes will always be there. In 1982, some comedian said that Ariel Sharon invaded the Lebanon to impress Jodie Foster. It was a good joke, but it was on her. The stalker never goes away. Yoko Ono is not a woman high in my affections. I listened to one of her songs once and suffered irreversible damage not only to my hearing but to my left foot, because the radio was beside the bath and I tried to turn down the volume with my toes. But Yoko Ono is currently living with the knowledge that the man who shot her husband is scheduled to be set free on parole. No doubt the prospect has already encouraged her to rethink her original position on the coercive power of the state. I truly sympathize with her, but her best chance of life resides in the fact that the man who shot her husband is now world famous himself, and thus quite likely to inspire an assassin of his own, in the way that Lee Harvey Oswald was the inspiration for Jack Ruby.

  But the chance of getting murdered is only the most spectacular question of life and death that fame raises. Leaving out the malevolence of the mentally disturbed, and the professional cynicism of the press, there is quite enough extreme behaviour from ordinary people to make the everyday life of someone famous scarcely worth living. This is the main reason why the famous actually need the biggest income that they can get, because they will have to spend a large part of it on protection from people who are otherwise clinically sane, but who, faced with the dazzle of someone they admire, temporarily lose all conception of the privacy of others. Julia Roberts needs her twenty million dollars a picture, because she needs nineteen million dollars’ worth of perimeter defence in order to stop the fans entering her house and sitting down with her to dinner, each of them convinced that she is as lucky to meet them as they are to meet her. And of course she would have the same chance of dining undisturbed in a public restaurant as Napoleon had of successfully invading Russia. That was why he invaded Russia, in fact: to get away from the press. On the is
land of Elba, he spent most of his time giving interviews. And that’s a true story. When he got tired of giving interviews in exile he would reappear in Europe to fight yet another last battle. It was like Cher’s farewell tour, but with fewer lighting effects.

  *

  Unwanted attention is the real reason why stars isolate themselves, and by doing so they pay another penalty. At any big premiere, or even in any small nightclub, there is a special roped off area reserved for stars. It isn’t just so that they can meet their next wife, or so that their current wife can meet Salman Rushdie, it’s so that they won’t be talked to death by normal people like you and me. Each of us has something interesting to say, but the stars can’t afford to listen, or they will be worn out. Nor can they sign every autograph they are asked for, or carpal tunnel syndrome will end their careers early. The late George Harrison, when asked for his autograph, used to say: ‘I can’t. It’s Tuesday.’ On Wednesday he would say: ‘It’s Wednesday.’ It was years before anyone noticed that he never gave his autograph. He had the technique worked out for remaining reasonably private in public, although those techniques availed him nothing when a screwball got into his kitchen. The British comedian Eric Morecambe, one of the best-loved faces in the country, was woken up on the stretcher after his first heart attack by one of the stretcher-bearers, who said his daughter would never forgive him if he didn’t get an autograph. And these are ordinary people whose obtuseness should be forgiven because for them the encounter with the famous one is unique, and it never occurs to them that for the famous one it would happen a thousand times a day if there were no haven. Yet the cost of being in the roped-off area is that the press will hate you, and so a new layer of harassment is added, by which people who have been raised up by fame are given the reputation of being above themselves.

  The natural result of this inexorable process is a well-founded wariness, which is bound to look like aloofness when seen from the distance at which they must keep the rest of us if they are to survive. Even the most magnanimous and naturally gregarious celebrities are bound to ration their supply of bonhomie if they are to get through the day, and if we catch them at it, we are equally bound to think that they are putting on airs. And of course some of them really do. In many cases, talent arises from an unstable personality, and if the talent brings fame then the instability is less likely to be assuaged than exacerbated. But even the most normal artist can be forgiven for enforcing the contract to the letter. Robbed of everyday life, you don’t want to be robbed in your professional life as well. One of the many nice things about Mel Gibson is that he can laugh at the hoo-hah: he has retained a degree of Aussie dinkumness that armours him against the hype. While filming a TV special about him in Los Angeles, I went with him to a TV show on which he was promoting one of his movies, and I was pleased at the way he laughed at the outrageous size of the fruit basket that had been put in his dressing room. For most stars, the fruit basket can never be big enough. But if there had been a small fruit basket, we would have seen the Passion of the Mel. When I was doing my first TV series at Granada television in Manchester, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood were both there to tape a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Their lawyer measured the dressing room that had been provided for them and it turned out to be two feet narrower than the width specified in the contract. The builders were called in, and for several days rehearsals were interrupted by the uproar of pneumatic drills. When I was introducing a Frank Sinatra concert for the opening of Sanctuary Cove, Sinatra’s lawyers went down on the floor with a tape measure to make sure that the fasteners holding down the red carpet were no more than the specified eighteen inches apart. I have seen these things happen with my own eyes. And these are the sane people.

  Luciano Pavarotti is sane too: the most delightful group of men you could hope to meet. But he has his requirements. When he guested on my New Year’s Eve show in England, he had to be flown in from Italy on a private jet, and the private jet had to be big. It wasn’t precisely a Boeing 747, but it was big enough to carry a football team. Luciano was a gifted footballer in his early days, by the way, and you kind of wonder why later on the Italian team didn’t ask him to keep goal. They would have been impossible to defeat. The car we sent to meet Luciano at the airport had to be a BMW 8 series because although he can fit into a 7 series, he doesn’t want to be seen struggling to get out of it. All this was understandable, as was his refusal to descend the stairs on our set. Since the set would obviously have descended with him, we went along with his requirement to walk on from the side. But he also refuses to sit down on set without a table on front of him. When we tried to cheat and put in a table made of glass, the lawyers arrived. Luciano sincerely believes that if the set is correctly arranged, he will look as thin as a reed. He has been encouraged in this belief by his entourage.

  The entourage for Diana Ross look like the remaining brothers of Malcolm X. They are there to ensure that Miss Ross will not be expected to do anything not specified in the contract, which includes singing. Instead, she mimes to playback. Not even one improvised musical phrase during a conversation is permitted. I could go on about Barbra Streisand for the rest of the night. I could go on for as long as she kept me waiting, which was five hours. Fame has turned her into a monster of control. Fame has convinced Bono that he is some kind of economist. But these are talented people, and talent should be forgiven anything. And yet it is sad to see how the fame earned by talent can affect the personality. Robert Redford is always, on principle, an hour late for any meeting with anybody. If he ever has a cardiac arrest from the accumulated strain of having his facelifts lifted, he had better hope that the doctors in the emergency unit aren’t working to the same timetable as he is.

  Did my own small measure of fame affect my personality? I don’t think so. I was always paranoid. I was paranoid in Class IB at Kogarah Infants School, when I won the spelling bee but Laurie Ryan was still given the first early mark just because he had kacked his pants earlier in the day. Next day I beat him to it. But my own small measure of fame did affect my expectations, especially when I travelled. When I went down the jetway into the aircraft, I got far too used to turning left. At the destination, I got far too used to looking for the limo driver holding a card with my name on it. I got far too used to never booking my own tickets, to being greeted by the hotel manager as if I had just arrived from Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, to getting the suite instead of a room, to the bathroom with enough towels for a symphony orchestra. But above all I got far too used to being recognized, until one day, far too late but better late than never, it occurred to me that being recognized is not the same as recognition. In that regard, television ruins everyone who appears on it. You get used to so many people wanting to say hello. Some of them are coocoo, but most of them are friendly at the very least. And that, I finally realized, is what’s wrong. It’s a too-easy familiarity. You are being hailed for being somebody, even when you have done nothing.

  So a few years ago I fired myself from the small screen and tried to find the path back to normality. I don’t claim sainthood for this, and I suppose it could be said that I want it both ways. I want to be well-known enough to be asked to an event like this one tonight, and I want to be anonymous enough to disappear back into the crowd I came from. The two desires are incompatible: I realize that. But I think it’s a conflict we’re all going to have to face, because we can’t go on like this. Our best hope is that the celebrity culture is already discrediting itself. We should help it on its way downhill, and do our best to get back to a state where fame, if we have to have it, is at least dependent on some kind of achievement. If people want to be somebody, they should do something first. There is no excuse for my generation of Australians not knowing the difference, because our early youth was spent in a land without television, and the sharp division between earned fame and pointless celebrity could be heard, if not seen, every week. It could be heard on the radio.

  For me it was the
difference between Bob Dyer and Jack Davey. Bob Dyer was the Americanized host of Pick a Box and my mother and I were agreed that he didn’t do very much except shout. Actually it is no cinch to run any kind of game show and in retrospect I can see that Bob Dyer was quite skilful at marshalling the human traffic, but it’s equally certain that he had no particular verbal prowess beyond yelling ‘Happy motoring, customers’ and cranking up the tension as he gave the quaking punter the tantalizing choice between the money or the box. ‘The money . . . or the box?’ shouted Bob Dyer. Then he would whisper it. ‘The money . . . or . . . the box?’ The box could have the big prize in it: a Westinghouse refrigerator, a Lotusland inner-spring mattress, or a diamond-encrusted J. Farren Price wristlet watch from Proud’s. Or the box could have the booby prize in it: a packet of Bonnington’s Irish Moss gum jubes, containing petroloxymel of garagene, from a rare seaweed washed up on the coast of Ireland. But both my mother and I were agreed that for a real booby prize, the box should have had Bob Dyer in it. We were Jack Davey fans and that was that. It was because Jack Davey did something. He made the language live.