With ankles swollen and heels slapping against the unforgiving road, Edmund and Mary Kean trudged out of Birmingham. Ahead of them were 178 miles of purgatorial pathway, stretching all the way to Swansea, and they’d have to cover every inch on foot. It was June 1809 and the summer sun sizzled their skin. Progress was slow. He was encumbered by their few worldly possessions; she by the child growing in her belly. Unlike Joseph of Nazareth, Edmund had failed to rustle up a donkey for his pregnant Mary. But she was in love. Her charismatic new beau was eight years her junior, and he had charm, he had verve, he had … well, sod-all money. Mrs Edmund Kean – it had a nice ring to it; but, alas, probably a lot nicer than the ring on her finger.
A clever Irish girl with a good education, Mary had crushed her parents’ hopes that she would become governess to some precious child of privilege to instead join the theatre, where she’d fallen for a penniless actor. Newly-weds often start married life with the romanticised austerity of second-hand furniture, but this wasn’t a newly-wed romance. It was Act 1 of a quiet tragedy. Mary had married an alcoholic screwup, a wandering actor whose boyhood had been scarred by tragedy. Edmund’s father had died by suicide, his actress mother – Ann Carey – had succumbed to prostitution to keep the wolf from the door. With absent parents, the boy had been raised on the stage by his aunt, Charlotte Tidswell, and uncle, Moses Kean, who’d administered their backstage parenting in between rehearsals and performances. But, for all their affection, there had been an unfixable crack in his temperament. He was impulsive, unreliable, and prone to doing a runner; he’d often been found sleeping up a tree, like a runaway cat.
Mary had married Edmund when he was in his early twenties, but puberty had misfired – the growth spurt had been more a splutter. He was small, and that had forced him down the path of juggling, tumbling, and cartwheeling. He was a proficient harlequin, and knew his way around a comedy pratfall, but he craved the role of tragedian. He longed to glide around the stage with elegant grace, but leading men were handsome with mellifluous voices and faces like soft-chiselled Roman statues. That wasn’t Edmund. He was funny looking – not exactly ‘Steve Buscemi funny looking’, but squat and dark-haired, somewhat sharp-featured. His voice rasped rather than enraptured. Perhaps his only truly alluring characteristics were the dark, flashing eyes that gazed out with angry energy. There was definitely something intriguing about him, but the spectre of failure seemed to haunt his face.
In his youth, there had been a slight brush with fame, when his mother had advertised her scrawny teenager as a boy genius, the London playbills falsely promoting him as ‘the celebrated theatrical child, Edmund Carey, not yet eleven years old’. Making the most of his underdeveloped frame was a useful lie, as was the story he’d started telling himself about his lineage. It seems Aunt Charlotte had once embarked on an affair with the illustrious Duke of Norfolk, and her role as surrogate mum seems to have confused an impressionable Edmund into assuming he was their bastard love child. In which case, noble excellence coursed through his veins! He fervently bought into this delusion, which is perhaps why the clowning roles scalded his ego. He was better than that.
The walk to Swansea was the latest failure born of brittle arrogance. It had come after yet another casting snub in Birmingham, whereupon he’d vanished to the nearest tavern to waterboard his sorrows in a gallon of booze, a habit that later drove Mary to the edge of despair. This time, he’d emerged from his epic hangover with a plan. He’d told the theatre manager into which orifice to cram his crappy role, as he’d found a better job in Swansea. What’s more, he’d even convinced his new boss to advance his wages, so he could settle his debts. But the cost of boozy oblivion had proved steeper than expected, and every penny of that advance was already owed to the tutting Brummie landlord. Edmund and his pregnant wife had to walk to Swansea on an empty purse, sleeping under the stars like vagrants. At the 100-mile mark, he’d had to write ahead, begging for another advance to cover their meals. To clear his debts, he arrived indebted. It wasn’t much of a plan. But Swansea was a fresh start and a new opportunity. At last, could this be the making of him?
In the Hollywood movie that someone should definitely make,* the trek to Swansea will be the moment of revelation, Kean’s Damascene delivery from bitter failure. The fevered Welsh audience will scream in acknowledgement of his genius, and then he’ll go to London and wear fancy hats and meet the king, and be happy forever. That’s how stories work. But the reality of history isn’t nearly as formulaic. There was more suffering ahead. In fact, Edmund Kean’s life continued to get progressively worse for another five agonising years before it suddenly got miraculously better.
After Swansea petered out, he was back on the road, now with a baby in his arms, dragging his family on tours of Ireland, Scotland, and England, and emerging with very little to show for it. Sometimes they were forced into begging in the streets. In York, it was only the generosity of a stranger that saved the family from starvation, and funded passage back to London. All the while, his pleading letters to London’s theatre managers went unanswered, and his performances varied wildly in quality as the alcohol pickled his wits.* Four years of being coupled to this human train wreck proved exhausting for Mary, who watched her alcoholic beau flail through life while their eldest child, Howard (named in honour of Edmund’s apocryphal dad, the Duke of Norfolk), became increasingly poorly. She wrote to a friend: ‘I saw nothing but misery before me … Little Howard is very delicate, the Measles has weakened him very much. Mr Kean’s aunt has been trying to prevent his living with me – Oh! You know not half what I am suffering.’
The Keans were on the road to Hell. But, finally, a dollop of luck smeared itself upon their worried brows. Edmund landed some leading roles on the Exeter regional circuit, and there was the odd occasion when Shakespeare’s classics needed a leading man. Drunk or not, he knew those plays inside out. It was on one of his better nights that a certain Dr Drury, Harrow School’s retired headmaster, was in the audience. Impressed by the short-statured tragedian with bewitching eyes, Drury sent his recommendation to London’s prestigious Drury Lane theatre* – one of the two foremost playhouses in the land – and they dispatched their general manager, Samuel Arnold, to take a look. Arnold agreed. There was definitely something intriguing about this simmering misfit.
A contract was written up, and Edmund happily bit their hand off. But then came the snag. Edmund had also just accepted a contract from the lowlier London Olympic Theatre, and the proprietor, Mr Elliston, refused to break it. Edmund had tumbled into the classic joke about two buses coming along at once; he’d boarded the slower one and was now staring longingly out of the rear window as the sleeker bus overtook them. Was his explosion into the big time about to be extinguished beneath a mountain of paperwork? It felt like his rock bottom, to which Fate seemingly said: ‘Hand me that pickaxe, I can go deeper.’ Within days, their sickly little boy was dead.
Mary and Edmund were devastated. Beset by grief and financial uncertainty, they crashed at Aunt Charlotte’s house – penniless and morose – waiting for the two theatres to thrash out a deal. It took weeks of stubborn negotiation; all the while Edmund hung uselessly around the Drury Lane theatre, prowling the wings like a malevolent imp haunting a gothic cathedral. He wasn’t a popular guest. One of the actors noted ‘the little man with the great capes is here again’,1 joking that he was swamped by his dramatic fashion choices, while another actor blanked him entirely. The superstar actress Sarah Siddons, who we’ll meet later in the chapter, cruelly mocked him. These condescending jibes fuelled his resentment. He was desperate to enter a place where he clearly wasn’t wanted.
Eventually, compensation was arranged, and it was decided that Edmund’s Drury Lane wages would subsidise the Olympic’s lost earnings; his £8 pay packet was cut to £6. It didn’t matter. Finally, after a lifetime of trying, he would play to the most discerning of audiences, in Britain’s premier playhouse, and in his preferred role as tragedian. This was the dream. There was no higher peak to climb. At least, that was the idea. In truth, the Drury Lane theatre – though dignified by royal warrant, and one of only three London theatres officially licensed to stage proper plays – was in crisis. After burning down in 1809, the lavish rebuild had plunged the business into debt. Audiences had also drifted away to the rival Covent Garden Theatre which boasted the refined talents of John Philip Kemble, brother to Sarah Siddons. Drury Lane was drowning.
And so, as we begin the task of uncovering how a wandering failure could become a megastar, here we find the most powerful fulcrum in Edmund Kean’s rise. He was levered out of poverty, and deposited in the shining hall of celebrity, because of sheer financial desperation. The contract offer wasn’t so much shrewd talent-spotting by a far-sighted visionary as it was a panicky, chuck-stuff-at-the-wall punt by the Drury Lane committee members; the theatrical equivalent of promoting a competent busker to Vegas headliner. Maybe this intense little man with the strange voice and burning eyes was their salvation? Bizarrely, it worked. Within a week, Edmund Kean was the talk of the town. Within a month he was a bona fide superstar.
I’ll be honest, I absolutely love this story. I’m probably meant to be the dispassionate narrator, but Edmund Kean’s triumph is so improbable that I still feel the urge to root for him, even though he was a total prick to his family, cheated on his wife, became progressively incapable of remembering his lines, alienated his closest friends, and later caused a literal riot in Boston by being a spoiled diva. Regardless of his extensive flaws, his sudden transformation from abject, itinerant poverty to London’s hottest talent is the most thrilling example of that bizarre metamorphosis we call ‘getting your big break’; a sequence of events in which opportunity turns a nobody into a somebody, and they smash their way into public consciousness to arrive, shiny and new, as an object of human fascination. As a celebrity. It’s a brilliant story that hums with romantic power; the sort of fairy tale we love to tell kids about the importance of never giving up.
But perhaps I’ve let my giddy Kean fandom get the better of me. Does celebrity really require transformation from nobody into somebody? Do all celebs start out in obscurity? Well, not necessarily …
Edmund Kean owed his career to William Shakespeare, and it’s to the famous Stratfordian that scholars of celebrity also owe plenty. There’s a celebrated line in Twelfth Night that goes: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.’ It’s an oft-quoted observation, and it forms the basis of the sociologist Chris Rojek’s typology of modern celebrity.2 Here’s my simplified summary of his categories:
1. Ascribed celebrity – people are born already famous (e.g. the child of movie stars).
2. Achieved celebrity – fame requiring a ‘breakout’, earned through talent and effort (e.g. a star athlete).
3. Attributed celebrity – reputation externally applied to the person by the public or the media. It’s either positive or negative fame imposed without the celebrity’s consent or intent (e.g. a notorious criminal, or a venerated religious figure).
This category trio describes how a celebrity debuts into public consciousness. A few celebrities – such as the children of existing stars, or royalty – are made famous by association, and, even as kids, photos of them stomping around in tiny welly boots will shift thousands of gossip magazines. Most celebrities, however, find fame in adulthood: they intentionally achieve celebrity through a combination of talent and self-promotion, or they are flung headlong into sudden fame by the media/public arbitrarily attributing notoriety to them.
But here’s a thought. Could a celebrity tick all three boxes? Well, actually, yes! And my proof, dear reader, is Miley Cyrus. Now, I’ll admit that I’m nervous about using a modern reference because, by the time you read this, she may no longer be famous; she might be a yoga teacher, or a digital avatar uploaded to a cloud computing network. Maybe you’re a robot too? Hello, future dystopia! I’m veering off topic … Let’s just agree that Miley Cyrus is a popstar with a pulse. Arguably, she first came to prominence as the child of a celebrity, her dad being the bounteously bemulleted country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. Plus, her godmother is Dolly Parton. This double whammy of illustrious lineage lands her in Category 1: ascribed celebrity. She was born famous.
But if she’d been a talentless klutz who couldn’t sing, act, dance or memorise her lines, then she never would’ve made it as a Disney child star, aged eleven, in the smash-hit TV show Hannah Montana, which also launched her successful solo music career. Her young audience adored Cyrus’s own performing abilities, their fandom wasn’t contingent on the foot-stomping catchiness of ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, so her career is largely owed to hard work and natural talent. That’s achieved celebrity. However, Billy Ray Cyrus played a main character in the show, as did the very famous Dolly Parton, so part of the programme’s success was its ability to frame Miley Cyrus within an existing celebrity context. Her family connections gave it oomph. Her celebrity was both ascribed and achieved.
Bearing in mind we’re talking about a sweet-smiling Christian teen fronting a Disney show about a sweet-smiling Christian popstar, Cyrus’s fourth solo album, Bangerz, was one hell of a departure. Although she’d already embraced a sexier look in the promo for album number three, sporting leather boots and a high-waisted leather leotard, this was largely in keeping with the ‘all grown up now’ model that transitions famous girls into famous women. But Bangerz was a wild escalation that caught everyone off guard. Cyrus didn’t just dial up the sexy, she went nuclear, reinventing herself as an off-the-rails, hip-hop-loving hedonist who partied hard, posed nude, wore outrageous costumes, twerked her buttocks into an older man’s crotch, simulated masturbation on stage, and bestrode giant inflatable penises. It wasn’t so much a sexual awakening as a full-blown radicalisation.
Whereas Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera had also drawn flak in the 90s when they’d first started writhing around in their PVC catsuits and leather chaps, at least their Disney TV days had been long behind them. By contrast, in 2013, America’s impressionable kids were still avidly watching repeats of Hannah Montana cheerfully belting out songs about being an ‘Ordinary Girl’; all the while Miley Cyrus was on stage pretending to give a blowjob to a dancer in a Bill Clinton mask.* One can only imagine the epic range of swearing heard in the Disney boardroom that week.
Inevitably, Cyrus was vociferously demonised by conservative media outlets for her pernicious immorality and for leading vulnerable youth astray. She was a twenty-first-century Socrates in hotpants; a Socra-tease, if you will. Cyrus was perceived as a threat to others. The big debate in liberal, left-leaning discourse was about whether Cyrus was a threat to herself: was she a sex-positive feminist asserting her freedom after years under the Disney yoke? Or a vulnerable victim of some secret, cynical Svengali forcing her onto the torrid path of psychological meltdown and career destruction? Liberation or exploitation – place your bets! Happily, as I write this, Miley Cyrus seems a well-adjusted twenty-seven-year-old with a flourishing music and acting career, suggesting she’d been in control all along. Phew.*
But here’s the thing: even if she’d been deliberately provoking outrage with her new image, how the conservative media chose to portray her was their choice, not hers. Regardless of her intention, Miley Cyrus’s years of positive fame were stripped away and transformed into negative notoriety. Hannah Montana was dead, and ‘Miley’ was apparently the demonic succubus who’d possessed her soul. This new identity was reported as a novel phenomenon – some terrible contagion from which kids had to be protected. The scandalised huffing and puffing also introduced her to those who hadn’t seen the TV show or heard her earlier albums, including me. The media frenzy made her famous anew, to new audiences, for being something new. To some she was Billy Ray’s daughter; to some she was Hannah Montana; and to some she was a terrifying sex terrorist/empowered young woman. She straddled Rojek’s three categories of ascribed, achieved and attributed celebrity, and she did it in leopard-print, arseless chaps. Classic Miley.
Rojek’s system is useful, but Miley Cyrus reveals how categories of fame can awkwardly overlap. Indeed, so much of celebrity theory leaves scholars scratching their heads and wondering where the edges are; even the idea of celebrity itself is maddeningly complex to define, hence I’ve parked it in Chapter 3, to give you a bit of a run-up before we tackle the hard stuff. I’ll pursue attributed celebrity in Chapter 2, focusing on people whose status was thrust upon them: either as an exciting, enjoyable novelty or as a live grenade which detonated white-hot shrapnel into their faces. But, in this chapter, I want to concentrate on those who achieved fame deliberately: the wannabes and dreamers who seized their chance when it came, no matter how long they had to wait for it. And so, we return to Edmund Kean – a man whose overnight stardom required years of painful incubation.
Some of the celebs in this book were so bursting with energy that, had I built a time machine to go back and thwart them at their breakthrough moment, they still would’ve found another way to get famous. But Kean fascinates me because he might just have easily died in a ditch while trudging miserably to his latest short-term gig. Fame never seemed likely, let alone inevitable. In the movie Sliding Doors, we see two parallel realities for Gwyneth Paltrow’s character: one where she hops onto the train before the doors slam shut, and one where she arrives moments too late. A single moment dramatically alters her destiny. But Kean’s story is so unlikely because his fame needed a series of doors to slide open at exactly the right moment. Amazingly, that’s what he got.
When we last left him, Kean was about to make his London debut after an agonising few months. Torn apart by fresh grief for his dead son, wounded by years of failure, inflated by delusions of nobility, angry at the other actors who mocked him – Edmund Kean took to the stage in January 1814 to play one of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters, Shylock, the Jewish moneylender whose complexity dominates The Merchant of Venice. From the outset his performance was radical, even the opening line had the small crowd pricking up their ears. January’s cold skies had dumped snow on the metropolis and few had tramped through the dirty slush, but those who’d braved the cold were rewarded by a transfixing performance.
Kean howled and roared, then whispered and lamented; his gestures were frenzied and bold, his eyes were crazed. The atmosphere in the theatre was electric, the audience screamed their approval and clapped feverishly. William Oxberry, one of his cast-mates, later recalled with astonishment: ‘How the devil so few of them kicked up such a row was marvellous!’3 With all his lines delivered, the play was still going on when Kean bolted out the back door, skidded wildly through the slushy streets, and burst into Aunt Charlotte’s house with the heroic words: ‘Mary, you shall ride in your carriage, and Charlie shall go to Eton.’ He had done it. At long-bloody-last, success!
You might well ask: if Edmund Kean was such a brilliant actor, why wasn’t he already famous? Surely great talent always shines through, no? In later life, Kean wondered the same thing, confessing to a Drury Lane committee member, Douglas Kinnaird: ‘I have often acted the third act of Othello, in the same manner as now calls down such thunders, when the whole house laughed.’ Why London suddenly declared his genius when the provinces had shrugged was mysterious. Maybe the fancy new theatre’s acoustics better amplified his harsh voice? Perhaps he benefited from the sudden popularity of literary Romanticism and the fashion for aesthetic feeling, at that exact moment being dished out by Lord Byron, the devilishly passionate, hot, young sex pirate? Maybe it was just thrilling to see a performer hurl himself at a role with such demented gusto. He was also, presumably, not drop-dead drunk for once.
Whatever the reason, Edmund Kean wowed that audience. But there were just a few hundred playgoers in the theatre, and yet he was famous within the week. How did he conquer all of London so fast? Well, not only was he benefiting from Drury Lane’s desperate casting experiment, but he also got lucky with the audience. One of the souls who’d ignored the snowfall was a young journalist named William Hazlitt. Later to become a brilliant essayist and critic, on that night he was just a junior reporter for the Morning Chronicle with a deep love of Shakespeare. In fact, Kean had lucked out – there were two journalists in that night – the other wrote for the Morning Post – and both critics filed rapturous write-ups of his performance: ‘For voice, eye, action, and expression, no actor has come out for many years at all equal to him. The applause, from the first scene to the last, was general, loud and uninterrupted …’4
From an opening night seen by a measly crowd, the disseminating power of the printing press, and the reputation-making power of the judicious critic, meant thousands were aware of Edmund Kean by the following day. The two reviews were so extraordinary, Londoners immediately had to investigate the cause of the fuss for themselves. The next week, Kean strode out onto the stage before a packed house. Every paper had sent a critic, apart from The Times, which staunchly preferred John Philip Kemble’s plummy conservatism. The collective verdict was unanimous. Kean was brilliant. To confirm it wasn’t a fluke, he soon after gave his legendary performance as Richard III – a tour de force of sociopathic rage, and a role that Kemble had struggled to master. Kean thus bested his established rival, claiming top spot for himself. The accolades poured in.
After years of wandering the desert, of regional theatres and begging in the streets, Edmund Kean had been propelled to exalted stardom in barely a month. Across the capital, his name was uttered in amazement at dinner tables and card tables. Lord Byron couldn’t contain his Kean fandom in gushing letters to his friends, while artists debated Kean at the Royal Academy club – was he just the latest fad or a once-in-a-generation talent? With the notable exception of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was weeks away from being booted off the French throne by British and allied forces, no other person generated such fascination in the spring of 1814. Kean’s box office takings soared; crowds queued outside the theatre long before admission time, then elbowed and shoved their way in, desperately scrambling to get the best seats. Kean was a sensation. He was a star!5
Star – a word we use so frequently. Big-budget movies cast charismatic stars in the lead roles; TV shows have main stars and guest stars; supreme athletes are sports stars; gorgeous autotuned singers are popstars; sexual athletes with oversized sexy bits are pornstars; and even ordinary members of the public are thrust into the limelight as reality stars. In our world, stardom simply means pop culture visibility, coupled with a unique, marketable brand. As long as they have a thing that makes them ‘them’. Such generous usage is fine, but it suggests everyone famous occupies the same echelon of cultural importance, and that’s not really true.
Let’s take the biggest cinema performers: in the 1910s, Hollywood studios first developed the idea of movie stars whose charismatic fame would ensure eager audiences and box office success. The film critic James Monaco later argued that ‘actors play roles, stars play themselves’.6 If a friend invites you to see a new film, and your first instinct is: ‘Who’s in it?’ instead of ‘What’s it about?’, then that’s movie stardom at work. It’s the cult of personality over plot. We knew what we were getting from an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, regardless of what character he was playing. Stuff exploded, people got punched, guns were fired, Arnie uttered some iconic, cheesy quip, and we chomped our popcorn in record time. Movie stars, then, are meant to be box office heavyweights; guarantors of commercial success.
More recently, this idea has been splintered into a hierarchy used to measure the financial power of a celeb. Perched at the pinnacle are the A-listers – previously known as movie stars – who can reliably turn a profit from a $100m production budget. They’re not A-list if they can’t carry a mediocre film to success.* By contrast, B-listers have plenty of fans and we’d be thrilled to meet one in an airport, but they’re not really a true star. Studios would be gambling by printing their name on the top left of the poster, unless it’s a superhero movie with an established fanbase (such franchises reliably transform B-listers into A-listers).
Instead, B-listers will play the best friend, or the angry prick of a boss, or the cackling villain who gets chucked out of a helicopter and eaten by a shark while the hero snogs the love interest. C-listers, of course, are probably lead actors on a popular TV show. D-listers are TV actors and screen personalities whose face is weirdly familiar, but we don’t know what from; they’re ‘that guy from that thing’. Recently, crueller observers have crowbarred in Z-listers as the ‘famous for being famous’ also-rans, who squeeze every drop from their fifteen minutes of fame.
This all feels very twentieth century. However, it wasn’t the film industry that first invented stardom. One hundred years before Charlie Chaplin was a global sensation, star was starting to appear in theatrical advertisements and referred exclusively to actors of truly extraordinary talent. The idea was rooted in the works of earlier writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Molière, who’d invoked the stars shimmering in the heavens as metaphors for eternal beauty. Indeed, Geoffrey Chaucer – writing in the late 1300s – gave us the words starry and stellified (a gorgeous word meaning a human transformed into a star), but the notion was already ancient. The Roman poet Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses of Jupiter ordering Venus to turn the soul of a murdered Julius Caesar into a ‘bright star’.7 This was lofty poetry based on hardcore astronomy – in 44 BCE, a comet had shone in the sky during a festival dedicated to the murdered Caesar, and it became known to Romans as ‘Caesar’s Comet’ or the ‘Julian Star’.8
Fittingly, the theatre historian Clara Tuite has shown that the first use of star in an acting context arose around the time of the Great Comets of 1811 and 1819, which provoked wide coverage of meteorological and astronomical science.9 And so, in the age of Romanticism – an aesthetic movement underpinned by awestruck wonder at the natural world – celebrities also began to be spoken of as natural phenomena; they were human comets, blazing through the theatre, and to gaze at these meteors was a breathtaking delight. Whereas the Romans made stardom a posthumous transformation, the Romantic era afforded such privilege to the living.
Edmund Kean was a brilliant storm cracking the sky with rolling thunder and, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, watching him was like watching Shakespeare illuminated by sudden ‘flashes of lightning’. Meanwhile, Lady Caroline Lamb recalled meeting her future lover Lord Byron with these words: ‘Should I go up to my room and tidy myself before confronting him as I was? No, my curiosity was too great and I rushed in to be introduced to this portent.’ Byron the portent – he was no ordinary man, he was some divine omen! A blend of devilish sin and natural genius, his intense fame was rich with both theological and astronomical meaning. That’s a proper star!
Edmund Kean’s overnight celebrity was rare and strange, but he’d paid his dues tenfold. On the face of it, we might expect child stars to have dodged such a long apprenticeship, but even they had to mount momentum-building publicity campaigns to break through to mass audiences.
In 1803, an angelic boy captured hearts when he took to the stage and earned himself the nickname ‘the Young Roscius’, a homage to ancient Rome’s finest thespian. Yet the success of this ‘heaven-born constellation’ – his name was William Henry West Betty, but he was commonly known as ‘Master Betty’ – lay not just in talent, but also circumstance. Though English-born, he’d grown up in Ireland and in 1803 his world was cast into turmoil by the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, led by Robert Emmet, against British rule. It was a scary time, and the terrified authorities slammed a curfew into place. The theatres shut down. Society barricaded its doors. Civic life froze. It was in this climate of fear that Betty’s father somehow managed to talk up his son’s patriotic appeal. Might not a powerful play, with a charming young lead, unite the Unionists and see off the nationalist threat? Well, perhaps.
The theatres were cautiously reopened, but only if little Master Betty was stomping across the stage. Suddenly the eleven-year-old was the focus of intense attention. Was he a good actor? Maybe! But – as his biographer Jeffrey Kahan points out10 – it’s pretty easy being the number one attraction when you’re the only attraction. Also, Betty’s dad probably bribed a few critics to ensure good reviews, a promotional scam known as puffing. Every little helps. Having successfully charmed loyalists in Belfast and Dublin, they realised young Master Betty was on to a winner.
Next came the Scottish tour, where the boy won over crowds by donning kilt and sporran; the wearing of highland dress had been illegal until 1782, so this potent symbolism thrilled Scottish patriots. With the Celtic leg deemed a success, Betty next travelled south to England, where he found anxious audiences fearing Napoleonic invasion. Betty’s arrival into this tinderbox culture provoked a frenzy of excitement as he tuned himself in to the frequency of tub-thumping nationalism. Audiences went berserk for him, leading to scenes of astonishing violence. Bettymania had arrived.
But why the extreme reaction? Young William Betty could certainly act, but his sudden and intense fame was more likely earned through a tactically astute promotional campaign in which he appealed to the desires, and mollified the fears, of multiple publics. This child star was a human Rorschach test; people projected ideas onto him. He was small and beautiful and perfect and innocent; a human puppy.11 Obviously there was a small but noisy contingent of eye-rolling cynics who thought Bettymania was baffling and cringeworthy – the modern obsession of hate-watching popular things is nothing new12 – but huge numbers of eminent, free-thinking people were suckered in by the puffery and the fear of missing out. Even government ministers called a cabinet meeting short to scamper off to watch Master Betty in Hamlet.
Inevitably, this intensity was unsustainable. The haters, such as the radical essayist and poet Leigh Hunt, gradually punctured the Bettymania balloon with sustained criticism, and satirists also found a sharp angle when they attacked his boyish femininity, suggesting Betty’s Romeo looked and sounded more like a Juliet. Within a couple of years, the bubble had burst; his massive earnings were shredded, and the heat swiftly went out of the fandom. Though he continued to act, his lack of classical learning – plus the onset of awkward puberty – further disappointed the discerning crowds, and by his late teens he’d quit the stage to study at Cambridge University. News of a comeback, aged twenty, garnered much public curiosity, but the whole thing proved a crushing disappointment. There was no sequel to Bettymania; instead he was instantly written off as a has-been.
In times of uncertainty, there’s no finer cure than wheeling in a cute kid. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the highest-grossing box office star in Hollywood was not Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, or Jimmy Stewart, but an adorable six-year-old called Shirley Temple. She was a giggling, grinning, tap-dancing box office powerhouse, and one of the most photographed people on the planet. Talented? Incredibly so. But, most of all, she offered something enormously alluring to a beleaguered public: sheer joy. Temple was a densely packed neutron bomb of sunny optimism, a blonde-ringleted moppet of such prodigious charisma that – as the historian John F. Kasson has shown – she became the torchbearer in Hollywood’s mission to lift a broken America out of the Great Depression.13 Indeed, her first major film, Stand Up and Cheer!, features a plot in which President Roosevelt creates a new government quango called the Department of Amusement, its purpose to lift the nation’s spirits. The cabinet post goes to a character named Mr Cromwell, but in real life it would have gone to Temple.
Enrolled by her pushy mother in a performing-arts school when she was just two years old, Shirley Temple was immediately talent-spotted and made her screen debut in an array of Baby Burlesks that satirised topical news with adorable nappy-clad kids playing the roles of famous adults. Her mum, Gertrude, had seemingly pinned the family’s financial hopes on Shirley, and no obstacle could be allowed to get in the way. On the day of her debut, after weeks of unpaid rehearsals, Shirley filmed in the studio for twelve hours straight, despite having been hospitalised the night before with an ear infection and nasty cold. She was barely three years old. Gertrude had begged for a delay, but, when the producer declined, there was no question of little Shirley going home. Hundreds, if not thousands, of kids would be shoved through this exploitative sausage factory, and dropouts were easily replaced. The show had to go on.
This reckless attitude to child safety permeated the whole enterprise. Despite the cuteness of the eventual films, the shoots were far from frolicsome. To counteract tantrums and misbehaviour, the producers built a soundproof, cramped box in which was stored a large block of ice. This cell was used to punish naughty cast members, with the troublesome toddlers being made to stand in the cold, or even sit directly on the ice, until they’d learned their lesson.14 Shirley told her mother about it, but a single-minded Gertrude dismissed the idea as childish fantasy. Later, when Shirley was spotted by a studio employee dancing in a cinema lobby and was promptly hired for proper film work, conditions improved.
Now a pint-sized movie star, Temple was cared for on set, but she was still a tiny kid, technically too young even for a game of Hungry Hippos by modern safety standards. To avoid awkward accusations, the studio PR described little Shirley’s filmmaking as being no different from ordinary child’s play, and Shirley’s own words – ghostwritten when she was just seven – said: ‘acting is like playing a game of make-believe’.15 But as an adult she later recalled, ‘I went to work every day … I thought every child worked, because I was born into it.’ It was child labour, but in cutesy frocks. Aged only six,* she had already made seven screen outings, and had spent half of her life in the film industry. It’s a stark reminder that even infant stars often served an unglamorous apprenticeship.
In comparison to Shirley Temple and Master Betty, George Gordon Byron – better known as Lord Byron – was a doddery old man when he burst into the public’s imagination as an eroticised literary sensation. He was twenty-four. Some two centuries later, his scandalous reputation remains gloriously intact; this talented, pouty shag merchant with the lustrous hair still looms large in our cultural imagination, gazing out from portraits with the confidence of a man who knows he could seduce your mum, your sister, and your pet dog if he wanted to.
Such is the enduring perfection of the visual brand, it often obscures his poetry (I’d never read a single line until researching this book), but one line that does still seem to do the rounds on the internet is his alleged quote about becoming a celebrity: ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’ This humble brag was supposedly issued in response to the sudden rush by the public to buy up the first two cantos of his new poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a loosely autobiographical travel romance, based on his post-university travels in Europe, which cast young Byron as the archetype of brooding poetical sexiness. The problem with this story is that it was an exaggeration bordering on myth.
True enough, the book sold out in less than three days, but only from a print run of 500 copies. And only the very wealthy could afford them. After six months, total sales numbered 4,500; this was a smash hit in 1812, and library copies would’ve increased readership yet further, but it’s not as if all of London, a city of nearly a million souls, was reading him.16 If Byron became the sudden talk of the town, it was mostly the posh nobs who were doing the gabbling. As Mary O’Connell notes,17 the hidden star in this story was the publisher, John Murray, who played a blinder in marketing Byron as an aristocrat of great dignity, but also as a brooding, moody romantic with a flash of danger running through his heart. While Murray laid the book’s marketing groundwork, Byron glided through the fancy drawing rooms of London, wooing his audience in advance.
What’s more, we’re not even sure Byron ever scribbled that line about waking up famous – it’s taken from the biography written by his friend Thomas Moore, who claimed to be quoting from Byron’s unpublished memoir, which Moore conveniently burned. What raises suspicion is that Moore was the lead architect of the ‘instantaneous fame’ idea, later recalling of Byron: ‘his fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night’.18 Nice line, but is it legit? Moore’s desire to cast Byron in the role of sudden superstar was perhaps a promotional tactic designed to make him seem like a natural marvel, and embolden his reputation after a pitiful, premature death suffered in Greek exile.
The way the story usually gets told, we might assume Byron scribbled his first ever poem, bunged it in the post, went to bed, and awoke to find himself covered in frilly knickers chucked through his window by a bevy of impassioned fans. This isn’t the case – not least because most women went commando in the early 1800s – but also because this wasn’t his first poem, or even his first book. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was his third publication in five years. In fact, his second work, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, was a biting satire of the critical savaging his debut work had received, meaning Byron was already so established that he’d managed to acquire his own legion of haters in his first work, and then publicly diss them in his sequel, all before supposedly waking up famous.19 In short, there’s no doubting Byron’s fame was turbocharged by the release of his third work, and he grew to be a publishing phenomenon, but it certainly wasn’t overnight success.
Achieving deliberate celebrity usually took a while and required considerable effort. Patience was often important. Sometimes, however, fame took bloody ages to arrive, and the delay was so prolonged that the eventual success felt like it had hurtled out of left field to the bewilderment of all involved. Edmund Kean is the classic case, but let’s enjoy an even stranger one from the world of highbrow modernist literature. In 1933, while little Shirley Temple was trying to dodge the ice-block of doom, a woman named Gertrude Stein became an American literary phenomenon, thanks to her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Frankly, it’s hard to judge who was more surprised by this: Stein herself or anyone who’d read her previous work.
Stein was a sixty-year-old, avant-garde, American expat who was in a closeted lesbian relationship with the aforementioned Alice. She also had a famously impenetrable writing style. Calling her a challenging read is like saying quantum mechanics is ‘a bit tricky’. As the founder of an intellectual salon in Paris, where she’d lived since 1903, Stein had hung out with the geniuses of modernism – Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Braque, Pound – and the most evocative stylistic label applied to her writing was ‘literary cubism’; it was said by Mabel Dodge, an influential friend with whom she stayed, that ‘she is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint’.20 But to her critics it was simply incoherent, unpunctuated, pseudo-intellectual drivel. And yet somehow Stein became a bestselling celebrity.
The usual version of the story is that she also awoke famous, or something near enough to that. But – as with the Byron myth – this is pure fable, one comprehensively sledgehammered into fine powder by the scholar Karen Leick.21 Rather than being a novelty in 1933, Stein had spent two decades being derided and discussed in American publications. In 1914, the Chicago Daily Tribune joked that, upon reading her homoerotic poetry compendium Tender Buttons, their subeditor ‘was not expected to recover’, which is a savage joke that makes me laugh every time I read it.
The same paper invited the public to mockingly send in their own attempts at Gertrude gibberish. The humorist Don Marquis adopted her as a running gag in the New York Evening Sun, as did a columnist in the New York Tribune. Life magazine also printed parodic poems in mocking emulation of the Steinian rhythm. If she’d been alive today, Twitter would be awash with nonsensical #SteinPoems and merciless memes. She was a laughing stock. People read out her poems at dinner parties, giggling uproariously at how ridiculously illogical they were. Others were convinced she was a hoaxer, deliberately trolling the literary establishment with literary garbage, just to see which pretentious fools would be suckered by her snob-bait.
But, while American intellectuals debated if her work had any merit, the general public was quietly being primed to think about Gertrude Stein as a famous person. Her friend Carl Van Vechten wrote to her regularly from America, boosting Stein’s ego with reports of her influence: ‘your name pops up in current journalism with great frequency. You are as famous in America as any historical character – and if you came over I think you might get as great a reception as, say, Jenny Lind [the Swedish opera sensation brought over by P. T. Barnum].’22 This was hyperbolic flattery at the time, but he ended up being surprisingly close to the mark.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about Stein’s celebrity isn’t that she erupted suddenly from obscurity, like Edmund Kean, but that she was allowed to unshackle herself from two decades of pre-existing notoriety. Stein didn’t bounce from obscurity to fame, she redefined her existing reputation by swapping mockery for acclaim. She became something new; Stein was the modernist Miley Cyrus, minus the twerking. This astonishing success was largely achieved through her own change of tack. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was artfully constructed, mostly because Stein wrote it under the guise of her secret lover, making it a playful autobiography of someone else. Determined to be famous, she also softened her style. The sentences became intelligible. In fact, if you forgive the strange punctuation and her fondness for repetition, it’s quite the jolly read.
Why Americans flocked to devour this faux memoir of Stein’s own Parisian life, replete with anecdotes about Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway etc., is perhaps self-explanatory. She was lifting the lid on some of the best-known cultural figures of the twentieth century, and – in so doing – managed to enrage them. Hemingway labelled the book ‘pitiable’, Matisse whinged about how his wife was represented, and Stein’s own brother, Leo, called it ‘a farrago of lies’. None of these outbursts were ideal quotes for the book jacket, but Stein burned her bridges with good reason. She desired fame and money, and for years had been carefully cultivating friendships with influential people in American publishing. Now she had the opportunity to call in her favours.
The other major pillar supporting her campaign was fortunate timing. Just as Edmund Kean probably benefited from Byronic excitement and Romanticism’s trendiness, Stein hitched a lift on the coat-tails of fellow modernists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both of whom were selling well in the USA. In fact, as Stein’s book smashed its way into the bestseller list, Joyce’s Ulysses was the subject of an obscenity case in a New York courtroom, and the resulting controversy made it an instant bestseller.23 Both Joyce and Stein soon after graced the cover of Time magazine. The Autobiography was also marketed brilliantly by her publishers, and the public were strangely thrilled by the Gertrude Stein phenomenon, particularly when she arrived in America to promote her book, oversee an opera she had created, and give a series of lectures on art.
It was a full-on charm offensive by an expatriate whose memories of her homeland differed greatly from the nation she encountered. But what she found delighted her. Stein was mobbed in the street, had her name in lights at Times Square, and became so famous that her earlier poems were referenced in pop culture and product adverts; her philosophical aphorism ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ is even quoted in my favourite movie, Singin’ in the Rain, which came out eighteen years later. This rush of fascination was as exciting to Stein as it was confusing to everyone else. As Vanity Fair observed in May 1934: ‘we doubt if any one – even Miss Stein herself – ever envisaged a time when a Stein book would, month after month, grace the best seller lists, and a Stein opera [would] run four solid weeks at a Broadway theatre, to re-open three weeks later at popular demand. But this is 1934, and the twin miracles have happened.’
To her credit, Stein oozed charm. A little old lady with an intriguing smile and a ready wit, she was way more charismatic in person than in print; she emitted a sort of Wise Grandma vibe, simultaneously projecting an impressive air of both unpretentiousness and deep cerebral power. As she stepped off the boat in New York, a squadron of journalists launched into an enthusiastic interrogation, but she defused their questions with cheery ease. The long-held notion of Gertrude Stein as perennial nonsense-howitzer, blasting the reader into baffled, cowering submission, instantly shrivelled up and died. Time announced her arrival with a wryly captioned photo: ‘Expatriate Stein: She was disappointingly intelligible’. It’s a lovely gag, and quite revealing. People presumably hoped she’d speak with all the jarring patterns of a malfunctioning robot. By undermining her brand, Stein risked seeming a bit … well, dull. But instead her intellect and warmth charmed the nation.
As the scholar Loren Glass points out, ‘Stein entered into an already-established authorial star system in which the marketable “personalities” of authors were frequently as important as the quality of their literary production.’24 There was a massive publicity machine driving the Stein bandwagon in 1933–4, but her personal charisma greased the cogs. She wasn’t just a writer; her friend Louis Bromfield dubbed her a ‘literary event’, while John Malcolm Brinnin later noted her fame was ‘shared only by gangsters, baseball players and movie stars’. She’s since been dubbed the ‘most publicised, least-read writer’ of the century. In short, Gertrude Stein’s celebrity vastly eclipsed her book sales. And her book sales were pretty damn good.25 Not bad for a laughing stock accused of being a hoaxer …
While I’m having fun popping the balloon labelled ‘overnight stardom’, Edmund Kean proved it could be done. And we’ll see later that heroes, criminals, and those caught up in scandals were also catapulted to notoriety at alarming velocity. But I want to stress how common it was for most celebrities to acquire their fame gradually. This was particularly true if their appeal rested on skill. Without wishing to go all Malcolm ‘you need 10,000 hours’ Gladwell on you, many historical celebrities were performers whose natural talent proved to be insufficiently explosive ammo to launch them out of the cannon. To detonate a celebrity career, they also needed to log the necessary hours; it wasn’t just a lack of opportunities or ability that hampered them, it was earning the vital experience needed to master their craft. Even little Shirley Temple took dance classes.
Let’s jump back a century to the 1820s. We might assume the astonishing musical virtuosity of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt appeared destined from the outset. As a small boy, Franz was a musical marvel able to play even the most difficult of symphonies from memory or sight-read the most challenging of scores. But Liszt’s frenzied adult celebrity wasn’t just the inevitable extension of natural genius. He also benefited deeply from a devoted father, Adam, who struggled heroically to get his son the musical education required to maximise his potential. Luckily enough, such was Franz’s ability – and his delightful personality – that two of Europe’s foremost musicians, Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri, both offered to teach him for free. This tuition greatly boosted his understanding of composition and creativity, and young Franz was soon ushered into the concert halls of Europe to showcase his gift. But, even though he was immediately hailed as a ‘Boy Hercules’ in Vienna, Paris, and London, there were several other child geniuses doing the rounds.
The arrival of mass-manufactured pianos had provided a steady flow of rosy-cheeked keyboard prodigies thumping out tricky tunes in the comfort of their own homes. In fact, it wasn’t just pianists. In 1824, a boyish Liszt toured Britain to great acclaim, but was upstaged by a three-year-old harpist dubbed the ‘Infant Lyra’.26 Much like Master Betty, she peaked too soon and became nothing more than another minor aristocrat, named Isabella Rudkin, settling for a life of comfortable domesticity at the earliest possible opportunity. A similar fate befell Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s talented sister, Nannerl Mozart. Though a superb pianist, when she hit eighteen the shutters came down on her musical career – her father, and wider society, demanded she shuffle off into the soft shadows of feminine respectability.
The Mozart family story is particularly interesting because Wolfgang is now so famous, but he too suffered a surprise misfire. More than half a century before Liszt’s arrival in Paris, an eight-year-old Wolfgang had come to dynamic, cosmopolitan London – joined by Nannerl and their father, Leopold – to thrill people with the family’s incredible musical abilities. Immediately, the siblings secured the coup of performing for the king and queen, and Leopold also made sure to promote his children widely to the public, regularly placing notices in newspapers. Yet, despite all this attention, the Mozarts didn’t return home in blazing triumph. So, what went wrong?
Early publicity was positive, but Leopold had succumbed to a sudden, serious illness for several weeks, and – while young Mozart used that time to compose his first ever symphony, which was an achievement of ludicrous precocity – this major interruption hampered their marketing momentum and squeezed the family finances. Upon Leopold’s recovery, they’d sought to refill the kitty with a lucrative public concert in February 1765, but ever-fickle Londoners had by now transferred their enthusiasm to another exciting import, the Florentine castrato Giovanni Manzuoli. Celebrity culture is often a story of constant novelty, and he’d hoovered up all the buzz. But there was also a more sinister reason for the underwhelming ticket sales. Historians have since suggested Leopold’s exuberant publicity campaign had backfired by alienating the musical community.
While eleven-year-old Nannerl was a wonderful player, Leopold’s trump card had always been Wolfgang’s improvisational brilliance, declaring in the Public Advertiser that his son was ‘the greatest Prodigy that Europe or Human Nature has to boast of’. Yet Wolfgang’s extreme youth provoked a barrage of snide accusations from rival musicians; the boy genius must surely be a fraud, and Leopold a cynical trickster. There was no way a child could churn out a symphony! Leopold denied the allegations in an open letter,27 but it was too late. The media blitzkrieg had burned through all the goodwill, and now he was the focus of a conspiracy theory.
Spotting the danger, Leopold invited sceptical scientists and members of the public to test the boy’s abilities for themselves, choosing to eschew concerts in favour of private demonstrations. The prominent naturalist Daines Barrington was the most notable of these interrogators, and he was suitably wowed, but his report wasn’t published until six years later, which wasn’t much use to anyone except modern historians.28 Disappointingly, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – now recognised as perhaps the greatest composer of all time – failed to conquer London. He ended his time there performing for ordinary punters in a rowdy tavern. It was quite the tumble from royal recitals, and nothing like the Bettymania of the next century. Indeed, though the adult Mozart later enjoyed success composing entertainment for royals, nobles, and even the new middle classes – particularly popular were his opera buffa works full of saucy jokes about unruly servants – nevertheless, he only reached full celebrity status after his death.
Wolfgang, Nannerl, and the Infant Lyra were all exceptional child prodigies, but only one of them had any major career success; and even he, a veritable genius, didn’t get to be a living celebrity. So it’s no great stretch to imagine how Franz Liszt might’ve also been lost to history, particularly when Adam Liszt died unexpectedly during his son’s mid-teens. This tragedy snatched away not just a loving father, but also his promoter, tour manager, venue booker, and primary motivator. From the beginning it had been the Adam and Franz show, but now Franz was bereft; his mother was thousands of miles away in Hungary and the teenager found himself alone in a foreign city, with a funeral to organise.
Even when she arrived in Paris, after three years apart, Franz became the family’s sole breadwinner at the tender age of sixteen, giving piano lessons to pampered tykes of high-born privilege. Adam Liszt’s death was destabilising and devastating. Franz went through stages of depression where he couldn’t touch a piano. But instead of succumbing to despondency, or surrendering to the usual teenage habit of raiding Mum and Dad’s drinks cabinet, Liszt threw himself into music, books, religion, and art. He started hanging out with brilliant creatives. And he started pushing the limits of human endurance.
Master Betty’s return to acting, aged twenty, had proved a damp squib. Comebacks weren’t always wanted, so Franz Liszt had to do something innovative if he was to claim his celebrity crown and make good on his potential. Having been amazed by the speed of the Italian violin virtuoso, Niccolò Paganini, Liszt resolved to develop his own jaw-dropping, lightning-fast technique on the piano. He began hammering the keys with manic energy, his large hands and long fingers traversing the scales with the sprawling dexterity of hyperactive spiders.
He’d been born a musical savant, but his fame would rest on manual technique patiently perfected in isolation, one finger at a time, hour after hour, day after day, often while reading a book to combat the tedium. Much like the glamorous, long-haired heavy-metal guitarists whom I worshipped as a youth, the most compelling virtuosos are often boring nerds who sat in their room for ten hours a day, practising their scales.* Franz Liszt redefined what was humanly possible for his instrument, and it made him staggeringly famous when he reached his thirties. But Lisztomania was a victory won through dogged attrition.29
On 29 December 1776, eager audiences piled into London’s Drury Lane theatre to watch The Merchant of Venice. Advertised in the role of Portia was a ‘Young Lady (being her first appearance)’ on the London stage, and the crowd was presumably enchanted by her initial appearance. This Welsh rose, named Sarah Siddons, was fresh-faced and attractive; her hair was dark and thick, her eyes expressive; and she possessed a long but elegant nose that somehow suggested a touch of regality lurking in the family genes. Siddons displayed all the physical characteristics of a stage beauty. But then the play started …
Despite two years of adult acting experience, and a childhood spent on the stage, this was Siddons’s first performance in a big theatre and she crumpled under the pressure. The words wouldn’t come out, her voice trailed off, she shuffled stiffly across the boards with guarded hesitancy. She looked exhausted and bewildered. It was hardly surprising; six weeks before she’d gone into labour mid-performance, giving birth to her second child in two years. This poor young woman had then arrived in the capital, barely a month before opening night, sleep-deprived and with a babe on her breast and a toddler tugging at her petticoats, to find herself performing for the famed David Garrick, in the famed London theatre, before a famously demanding crowd. Though newcomers were usually cut a bit of slack, she was totally out of her depth and Siddons was a disastrous debutante.30 After six months, her contract expired and there was no chance of her being offered a new one. She’d squandered a chance that Edmund Kean – in the same rebuilt theatre, in the same play – would later snatch up with manic vigour.
She began the resuscitation of her career in Birmingham and York, and then arrived in the fashionable city of Bath, whose theatre had been awarded a royal warrant only a decade beforehand. It was a great place to plan a second assault on London; Bath welcomed sophisticated audiences, but the pressure was less strenuous. It didn’t take long for Siddons, now choosing to focus on tragic roles over comedy, to build up a head of steam, or for London’s theatre scouts to take notice of her renewed momentum. Redemption wasn’t swift in coming, and neither would David Garrick be made to eat humble pie – he died before she could unfix his mind – but by 1782 she’d evidently done more than enough to earn her second chance in the metropolis. The comeback was on!
For the second time, Siddons arrived in London with a newborn baby – her fifth child, although only four had survived – but this time Drury Lane was under the tenure of its new manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He’d eagerly been trying to recruit her for a while, and the juicy carrot dangled before Siddons was the lead role in Garrick’s adaptation of Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage. This time, she nailed it. Audiences lost their minds in praising her performance. So, why the turnaround?
Obviously, she’d become a more experienced actress, which was vital. But, let’s not forget she was also, once again, nursing a small baby, juggling three other kids, and having to deal with her constantly disappointing husband, William, who was, to put it mildly, a bit of a plonker. These burdens surely drained her energies. So, what key variable made the big difference? The secret had been to turn the overwhelming maternal responsibility into an asset. She had a hook: motherhood.
Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage is a powerful, sentimental play about a widow who remarries, only to discover her dead husband still lives. Like a child entranced by the illuminated panel in a lift, it emphatically prods all the audience’s buttons at once, and keeps prodding them until the electrical circuits frazzle – contemporary reviews recounted how the theatre became a den of hysterical shrieking, wailing, sobbing and fainting fits. Men and women lost total control of their emotions, some had to be carried out. It’s that sort of play.
But Siddons could claim much of the credit. Six years beforehand, when it had all gone so horribly wrong, her son Henry had been the cheeky toddler tottering around her dressing room. Now, in 1782, as she made her heroic return, he took to the stage alongside her, playing Isabella’s child. The crossing of identity boundaries – between Sarah and Isabella, performer and character, real mother and stage mother – dazzled audiences. They were overwhelmed with tears as Sarah cradled her little Henry, the devastated pair lamenting the death of a fictional husband and father. It was a powerhouse performance, but it also felt viscerally grounded in truth. Audiences witnessed a real dynamic between the grieving characters, because the Siddonses were a real family.31 She was one of the first celebrities to use their children as a PR prop, and it’s been a valuable tool ever since.
Siddons enjoyed an almost flawless career from then on, and was among the least controversial celebrities I’ve encountered, with her only scandals being muffled grumbling about her tight-fisted miserliness, and allegations of an affair with her married fencing teacher. Others, however, built their name as provocateurs. Implicating oneself in sex scandals has always been an effective but risky strategy for getting noticed. The public love to be scandalised, but we’re also hypocrites who’ll shun those whose naughty adventures we’ve so enjoyed gossiping over. Between 1700 and the 1830s, there were numerous high-class courtesans who published accounts of their sexual encounters with the great and good, in so-called ‘whore biographies’.32 But these brazen confessors often struggled with the moral backlash – unfurling one’s dirty bedsheets was a quick but uncomfortable path to celebrity, and not one offering reassuring longevity.
Perhaps the most famous was Harriette Wilson, the ‘demirep’ lover of many elite nobs including the hero of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington. She was angered that her former conquests hadn’t provided long-term financial security, and also that unscrupulous publishers were issuing fake memoirs using her name, so she published a scandalous memoir in 1825 through a pornography publisher. Because it was essentially a moneymaking scheme, she first had him contact her aristocratic exes with blackmailing letters, demanding £200 from each not to include their names in the book. Some coughed up. Wellington famously refused, responding: ‘Publish and be damned!’
Wilson and her publisher allegedly raked in a fortune of £10,000 from their cynical plan. The episodic releases were a huge hit; they issued thirty-one editions in the first year alone, and so-called ‘Wilson Mania’ struck the bookshops, with people battling to buy copies. But they were then hit with libel lawsuits and all sorts of other trouble, including rebuttal memoirs by former friends who attacked Wilson’s version of events. In the end, she tried to launch a writing career from the publicity, looking to go legit as a creative artist, but it didn’t really take off. As was common for many beauties who aged out of their public allure, Harriette Wilson died in obscure poverty in 1845, just shy of her sixtieth birthday.33
Lord Byron’s bedroom adventures were of enormous fascination to his fans, who interpreted his poetry as a coded erotic autobiography (which, in fairness, it totally was). His fame was inseparably intertwined with his scandalous sexuality, and it led to his ditching England for a life in European exile, yet he’d already weathered howls of outrage because he was a writer of dazzling skill, but he was also male, and a titled lord, to boot. Yes, he’d had to work for his money, due to his father’s ruinous debts, and he’d endured a deeply traumatic childhood, but an adult Byron enjoyed male, noble privilege. Women, however, were not granted such leeway, and the inevitable moralising, or what some now call ‘slut-shaming’, was always much more of an obstacle, as discovered by the famous beauties Mary Wells and Emma Hamilton, who fell from grace when their wealthy lovers dumped them or died. But this is why Mae West is particularly intriguing.
In the mid-1930s, until Hollywood’s moral censors dragged her down, West was the queen of comic innuendo, having made her hugely successful screen debut in She Done Him Wrong. Yet this new screen star had been no fresh ingénue plucked straight off the train platform; she was pushing forty when American cinemagoers first clapped eyes on her playful winks and radioactive blonde hair. Indeed, she’d barely scraped a film deal in the first place, such was her provocative reputation – the movie studio’s internal censors were yanking their hair out at the news, terrified that they’d be ruined by her controversial brand. They had reason to be nervous.
Raised as a working-class ‘Tough Girl’ in Brooklyn, West had probably been sexualised at just thirteen,* was a vaudeville performer by fourteen, married at seventeen, and separated by eighteen. She’d dragged herself up on the seedier side of the theatrical scene; rejected by the increasingly wholesome vaudeville circuit, she’d paid her dues in vulgar, sleazy burlesque. After two decades of performing she was thirty-two years old and going nowhere. So, in 1926, she booked a theatre, hired a director, and mounted her own play, in which she would play a Montreal sex worker. The play was called Sex, though it may as well have been titled SeXXX! The public response was huge. And so was the outrage.
The Daily Mirror, one of New York’s less subtle tabloids, printed this delightfully unsubtle, all-caps headline: ‘SEX AN OFFENSIVE PLAY. MONSTROSITY PLUCKED FROM GARBAGE CAN, DESTINED TO SEWER’, which was followed by a review describing it as disgusting social contaminant: ‘This production is not for the police. It comes rather in the province of our Health Department. It is a sore spot in the midst of our fair city that needs disinfecting.’ Even serious critics lost all sense of perspective, damning Sex as a repellent, dangerous assault on public decency. It wasn’t simply that the play was about sexuality – as West’s biographer Marybeth Hamilton noted, other plays had been permitted to tackle this taboo – but it was Mae West’s lewd burlesque persona, fused to working-class themes, that upset their sensibilities.
It seems at this stage, in 1926, she hadn’t yet developed her ironic comic style. Instead, the horrified critics saw comic realism, a bawdy authenticity that threatened public decency; some horrified critics even suggested that she was sexually aroused by the brothel scenes – to them, it was a live-sex show starring a low-class, tough broad straight off the sidewalks. The law agreed. West served eight days in prison for the crime of public indecency. Audiences, of course, love to be titillated and flocked to see it for themselves. Whereas others were destroyed by scandal, sensation was Mae West’s springboard to fame. Sex wouldn’t be her biggest hit, but it was proof of concept. As she later cheekily punned: ‘I climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.’
Mae West had played a dangerous game, but she was bursting with natural talent and showcased a brand of risqué sauciness that seemed to tickle taboos rather than smash them. She was a provocateur, but one who carried the public with her in support, which was no small feat. And while it’s tempting to declare West as leading the vanguard of shocking celebrity culture – a harbinger of bold new attitudes towards women and sexuality – we might also recall an earlier example of the funny, sexy, ballsy, working-class gal who threatened the establishment while amusing the public. West was perhaps following in the footsteps of Nell Gwyn, the seventeenth-century actress-turned-mistress to King Charles II, who we’ll meet in a later chapter. If true, it made Mae West not so much a twentieth-century pioneer as an echo of celebrity’s very earliest days.
So can we declare that, having scoured the annals of history, the formula for stardom was as simple as celebrity = talent + graft? Sadly not. How many careers fizzled out on the launchpad, to the point that we don’t even know where to look for them? In the case of the Mozart siblings, we see that limitless talent wasn’t the only requirement, and that other external pressures applied. Wolfgang and Nannerl were the victims of their father’s bad luck and worse health, and found themselves overshadowed by a more established rival who gobbled up the public’s attention. Like baby emperor penguins, crammed with their parents into tight winter huddles, many a hopeful starlet was trampled underfoot before they ever grew big enough to withstand the scrum.
With the Mozarts, we also see the peril of overplaying the promotional game. Their father pushed too hard, burned through his supplies of goodwill, and incited a backlash; his claims of infant genius were well founded, but vulnerable to pooh-poohing and organised sabotage because they sounded like the hyperbolic claims of a huckstering hoaxer. As a result, history’s greatest composer ended up playing in a pub. As for his sister, her potential celebrity was killed by an even simpler force. Whereas Mae West accelerated her fame by subverting gender expectations – and Sarah Siddons found celebrity by conforming to them – Nannerl Mozart was never allowed to even try flying solo. Her womanhood was a fatal wound.
Over the course of the past three centuries, many people competed in the race for celebrity and crossed the line to see their names charted on the scoreboard. Many more tripped on the hurdles and landed face-first in the dirt. Those who sought fame required endurance, ability, luck, and favourable conditions if they were to succeed. And some people simply weren’t allowed to enter the race in the first place. Yet those who gathered at the starting line were willing participants. This wasn’t usually the case for those in the ascribed and attributed categories, for whom fame was something done to them without their intent or consent. Rather than volunteering to join the obstacle race, these victims were instead kidnapped, loaded into a circus cannon, and fired over the finish line in a parabolic arc of terrified screaming, with their limbs flailing and their faces smashing into every hurdle along the way.
But that’s a story for a new chapter …
* No, but seriously, please make this film. And if you do, call me?
* There are many drunk Edmund Kean anecdotes. I’m especially fond of the one where he gets so pissed he forgets buying a yacht – an actual yacht! But perhaps the best is the time Kean failed to show up for a performance, forcing the theatre owner to play King Charles I instead. As the crowd grew restless with the unprepared understudy, a voice yelled out: ‘Well done, my boy, well done!’ In an act of outrageous farce, Edmund had dragged himself in from the pub, stumbled up the stairs, and had slumped into one of the boxes, apparently with the intention of watching his own play. He was fired. Obviously.
* The fact they were both named Drury was a weird coincidence.
* Yes, that actually happened.
* Okay, shortly after I wrote this sentence, Miley Cyrus announced the breakup of her marriage. But that’s not so unusual in Celebrityland, and it appears to be an amicable split.
* I love Hugh Jackman, but The Greatest Showman is cheesier than a fondue menu.
* Some reports aged her down to a mere four years old, to make it seem even more impressive. The head of Fox Studios took a year off her birth certificate (Shirley thought she was only twelve on her thirteenth birthday). It’s depressing that even infant actresses have to lie about their age …
* My favourite guitarist is Synyster Gates from Avenged Sevenfold. He’s a classically trained harmonic wizard who sports gothic tattoos and dark eyeliner, and looks every inch the rockstar. But his real name is Brian.
* Her first boyfriend, Joe, was nineteen. This would have been statutory rape under New York law.