By BRYAN PATTERSON [Melbourne Herald-Sun. Reprinted with permission]

23feb03

Fame is proof that people are gullible — Ralph Waldo Emerson

HENRY Kissinger once said the nicest thing about being a celebrity was that if you bored people “they think it’s their fault”. Kissinger admitted fame had its drawbacks, too. When you are out of favour, you are really out of favour, he said, recalling a sudden lack of social invitations after his boss, President Richard Nixon, was forced from office.

Mel Gibson recently admitted he once turned heavily to alcohol to cope with the pressure of being in the spotlight and admitted: “Things got out of hand.

“When you first get famous you don’t know that you can’t go back to a normal life any more.

“That you’ve walked into a flytrap; that it’s dark down there and that there is no way out of it, not really.”

Celebrity worship has become a religion in recent years. It is clearly a savage faith.

Michael Jackson, and scores before him, have found that Hell has no fury like a public scorned. It is the nature of celebrity life that it eventually turns sour.

Clark Gable once remarked to David Niven that, when it came to the contract between a star and his public, the public had read the small print and the star had not.

David Gritten, in his book Fame, said fan worship always contained within it the potential for hatred and disdain.

The switch could flip at any time, he said.

Who is to blame? Comic Fred Allen observed that a celebrity was a person who worked hard all his life to become well known, and then wore dark glasses to avoid being recognised.

But without fans, there would be no celebrities.

Recently, US and British psychologists concluded that the lower a person’s religious conviction, the more likely he or she was to revere celebrities — a reverence that has been likened to pagan worship.

Anthropologist Edgar Morin said the public had an unquenchable thirst for celebrity tittle-tattle and most fans were happy to destroy heroes perceived to have passed their use-by dates.

This was similar to old religious practices during which believers sacrificed their favourite animals or even relatives to ensure a new and better crop.

Writer Somerset Maugham knew the score. He said it was dangerous to let the public “behind the scenes” because they were easily disillusioned.

“Then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved,” he said.

A disturbing element of today’s fame game is that people do not have to do much to become celebrities.

Appearing on a TV quiz show, wearing very little to a pop music awards night, sleeping with a movie hero or stalking someone famous will get you Andy Warhol’s promised 15 minutes of fame, and perhaps more.

You do not have to be skilled at anything.

Kylie Minogue — nice girl, but a mediocre singer and dancer — was recently voted the greatest living Australian. Why?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills noted that the star system was so out of whack with reality that “a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States”.

Most of the harm done in this world was due to people who wanted to feel important, said poet T.S. Eliot.

“They do not mean to do harm . . . they are just absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves, so they think of nothing else.”

It takes some maturity to realise that glamour is not greatness and that prominence is not eminence.

When we indulge in fan worship we diminish ourselves.

We should discourage our children from making heroes of those who claim to be celebrities.

Teach them, instead, that those spoken about least on Earth are often the best heard in Heaven.

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