Celebrity: despite its weird spelling, the word glides off our tongues with ease. Yet its meaning is more slippery than a greased-up pig at a country fair. We know what we think it means, and we cheerfully swap it with other words – stardom, fame, renown, reputation, glory, acclaim, notoriety, VIP, personality – but, while these understudies do a perfectly serviceable job, in truth they’re not pure synonyms. They’ve all got their own subtle differences. We might assume this is a recent problem, and that our confused celebrity lexicon is the linguistic shrapnel from the messy, glorious explosion of twentieth-century pop culture. Alas, not! The vocabulary of famousness has been frustratingly vague for millennia.
While I’m confident there were celebs in the eighteenth century, nobody was called a celebrity until 1849.1 Originally, the word had meant a solemn ceremony or a major occasion where many people might throng together (such as a coronation or parade); by the mid-1600s, celebrity changed to mean ‘much talked about’ and was loosely applied to people. Yet even in 1751 Dr Samuel Johnson – a man who really knew his way around a dictionary – could only write: ‘I did not find myself yet enriched in proportion to my celebrity.’2 Celebrity wasn’t yet something he could be, it was only something he could have. Charmingly, Johnson’s dictionary also suggested celebriousness as a synonym for personal renown.*
In this chapter, I’m going to advance my own definition of celebrity, based on a five-point checklist. Many historical individuals were kindly suggested to me by friends and fellow historians as potential case studies, and a few have ended up in the book, but often they weren’t actually celebs. They’d been very well known, for sure, but they fell into other categories, such as fame, renown, royalty, and notorious infamy. These are all similar ideas that confusingly overlap with each other, but they’re ultimately distinct concepts, and, to make sense of it all, I’ve had to rummage through sources ancient and modern to find the discrepancies.
A word of warning, then: we’re about to rampage through 3,000 years of history while playing a challenging game of spot the difference. So, if you’re feeling a little sleepy-headed, this is a good time for a powernap, coffee break, or intense burst of star-jumps. Whatever works for you. Ready? Okay, let’s begin with the most important question of all: ‘What the hell is a celebrity, anyway?’ Well, it depends who you’re asking.
To my initial astonishment, it turns out there’s no single accepted definition of celebrity among sociologists and historians. This isn’t very helpful. So I’ll begin instead with a common response I heard when I mentioned this book to people: ‘Celebrities? Bah! Bunch of useless nobodies, most of them just famous for being famous!’ This pithy maxim is well embedded in popular culture, and dates back to at least 1967, when the critic and socialist politician Malcolm Muggeridge used it to describe his own antipathy towards being recognised for being on TV.3 But though he nailed the elegant phrasing, the idea wasn’t original. Instead, Muggeridge was smoothing out an earlier quote by the political theorist Daniel J. Boorstin, who defined a celebrity as ‘a person who is well-known for his well-knownness’.
Boorstin wrote this in his influential 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,4 in which he attacked celebrity as a diluted, debased corruption of deserved fame. You might be wondering what the difference is – after all, we often use fame and celebrity interchangeably – but fame is usually considered to be an ancient idea denoting glorious reputation. In his book on celebrity’s history, Fred Inglis summarises fame as: ‘[it] brought honour to the office not the individual, and public recognition was not so much of the man himself as of the significance of his actions for the society’.5 Fame is a mark of quality.
According to Boorstin, celebrities flunk this test with graceless vulgarity. They make public what’s usually private – flaunting their opinions, bodies, and sex lives – but contribute sod all to the betterment of society. For Boorstin, celebrity was a hollow and insubstantial ‘pseudo-event’ manufactured to distract us and sell us mass-produced crap we don’t need. ‘Famous for being famous’ was a damning indictment because it’s not fame at all; celebs haven’t earned their elevation, and the public are gullible idiots for worshipping these unworthy frauds.6
Here’s where I’ll sharpen my elbows and charge into the debate, because I passionately disagree. Obviously, it’s not a great look arguing with a dead guy, and his book is full of interesting ideas that are well worth your time, but Boorstin’s celebrity cynicism presents a false dichotomy. This stuff is way more complex than simply pitting supermodel hottie against Renaissance poet. Firstly, noble repute can exist both inside and outside of celebrity. Not all famous people are celebrities, but not all celebrities are passing fads. The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was hailed as a literary ‘lion’ in his lifetime, not because of his majestic mane (though he did sport luxuriant hair, he was more of a stone-cold fox in his youth*) but because lionism was a specific type of intellectual celebrity doled out by elite society to a gaggle of serious, chin-stroking brainboxes.7 This subset of celebrities were still chased around by excited fans, but their fandom was limited to a privileged class with access to high culture. In particular, lions were the sorts of men (it was typically men) who were guests of honour at salons hosted by aristocratic women.
Today, the same still applies. Boorstin decried the cluttering crap of lowbrow pop culture which devalues deserved fame, but such greatness isn’t extinct; there are still brilliantly talented celebrities whose contributions bring joy and cultural enrichment to millions, and whose influence helps redefine gender norms, sexual mores, political ideologies, and the boundaries of good taste. For all the supposedly inane, fake-tanned triffids invading our culture with their stupefying superficiality, and ricocheting between TV reality shows and Instagram adverts for tooth-whitening kits, there are also celebs whose statuses were earned through genuine ability and hard graft, and who contribute to the health of society just as much as some long-dead Austrian composer.
Lowbrow isn’t bad culture, it’s just different; it’s vibrant, immediate, accessible, and fun. There are laudable celebs and regrettable celebs, just as there are sublime operas and ones that make you want to staple your ears shut. So here’s my first line in the sand: celebrity isn’t the antithesis of talent; instead it’s to experience a very distinctive, intense type of public reputation. But how someone becomes famous doesn’t really matter. What’s more, it’s not mutually exclusive: public figures can enjoy renown for their work, or celebrity, or hold both simultaneously. Look at David Beckham, Meryl Streep, or Beyoncé. These people are insanely famous, but they’ve done things far beyond the physical and creative capability of billions of other humans, achieving greatness in their fields, breaking records, and influencing culture as they’ve gone. And yes, we’ve also seen them in their underpants.* They’re renowned and they’re celebs.
Celebrity isn’t a bastardisation of noble repute. It’s not an invasive species that’s bumped off the indigenous red squirrels of classical fame; nor is it a novel disease metastasising its way through our cultural bloodstream. It’s just a hyperactive, dayglo cousin of fame; one that lives in the moment. And, no, it’s not a recent invention. We’ve all read despairing articles about modern teens who aspire only to fame: model, actor, rapper, footballer, whatever. ‘What a shallow generation!’ the commentators shriek. Well, these kids are certainly not the first to aspire to glitzy success. Between 1910 and 1930, tens of thousands of movie fans contracted so-called ‘filmitis’ – a mocking diagnosis for the viral pandemic of egotistical hopefuls flocking to Hollywood in the expectation of making it big.8 That was a century ago. But they weren’t the first wannabes.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the infamous Italian seducer, Giacomo Casanova, galloped along the same path. He and his rivals weren’t going to wait for glorious fame to be posthumously bestowed upon them, they planned to hunt it down, wrestle it to the ground, skin it, and wear it as a hat. Casanova craved the limelight. Ironically, his posthumous fame as rampant sex weasel would’ve surprised him; he wasn’t then known as a womaniser.9 Instead, he aspired to be a famous writer, or astrologer, or preacher, or conversationalist – the eighteenth-century equivalent of model/singer/actor.
Meanwhile, Casanova also documented the fluctuating reputations of other gossip magnets, including Kitty Fisher, whose fame as London’s hottest courtesan was earned in the beds of her wealthy lovers. Her celebrity was heightened in 1759 by her falling from a horse while, as was the custom at the time, wearing no knickers – yes, she enjoyed a tactically brilliant ‘wardrobe malfunction’ that saw her dominate the gossip sheets for months thereafter – and she asserted her visual iconography by working closely with the portrait artist Joshua Reynolds.
If Casanova was an adventurous fame junkie, Ann Hatton’s was perhaps a sadder, more desperate tale of scrambling for fame. She was the sister of Sarah Siddons – who was the leading figure in the illustrious Kemble acting dynasty – but Ann lacked the necessary beauty for a stage career: alas, she was lame and had a squint, and her face was scarred from smallpox. Struggling for money after a failed marriage, she instead published poetry, lectured alongside London’s most notorious quack doctor, James Graham, and ran an advert in the papers asking for charitable donations, thereby shaming her famous sister for refusing to offer financial support.
The most dramatic moment in Hatton’s life came when she was interrupted in Westminster Abbey trying to drink fatal poison. Given the seriousness of such an act, I’d rather take this as a sign of depressed despair rather than some cynical publicity stunt. But, those of a more cynical bent might comment that she certainly knew how to embellish a story. When a pistol was accidentally discharged near her face, while she was working in a brothel, the papers were told in visceral detail of how she’d lost an eye. This was a wild exaggeration. Both eyes continued to function just fine.
Unable to make much of her career in London, she moved to America in 1793, and found modest success writing an opera and lecturing on human hearts, but she soon returned to Wales, to take up novel-writing under the nom de plume Ann of Swansea. Scholars now take her seriously as an early female writer in her own right,10 but, throughout her life, Hatton traded on her family’s fame; she attempted to sell a tell-all memoir of her celebrity siblings’ early years, and, when she returned to acting, she played the roles made famous by Sarah, who responded by paying her sister to stay a hundred miles out of her way, for fear of being publicly embarrassed.*11
Daniel Boorstin’s book is an energetic polemic, but he was fundamentally wrong. Not only is celebrity three centuries old, but the ambition to be famous for the sake of being famous was already thriving in the age of Mozart. Indeed, even in 1786, shortly after Ann Hatton published her first poems, Thomas Busby published a book called The Age of Genius which bitterly complained how a new infestation of shallow celebrities was ruining traditional fame.12 Boorstin was 200 years late to the party. However, in his defence, I can see how he tied himself in knots, because celebrity isn’t always easily distinguishable from other types of public reputation. What Boorstin was championing wasn’t fame, but what I prefer to call renown.
I’ve already mentioned Victorian ‘lions’ being hunted by enthusiastic fans, but allow me to switch to a celebrated lion-watcher of the modern day. The natural history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough is one of the UK’s most recognisable people, inspiring overwhelming affection in millions of television viewers. If he called for armed insurrection in the streets, or demanded we rename Thursdays in his honour, we’d probably see swarms of heavily armed people marching on Downing Street and getting adventurous with their wall calendars. Sir David may well be our most admired, most trusted public figure. But – and this is a BUT with capital letters – I haven’t the foggiest idea about his private life. Or if he has kids. Or where he holidays, what car he drives, or how he votes. Attenborough’s name carries more weight than a hippo with a slow metabolism, but I don’t think he’s a celebrity. Or, if he is, he’s had a very diluted dose.
Could he become a celeb? Sure! I hope Chapter 2 showed it’s possible to make the jump, either deliberately or involuntarily. But Sir David Attenborough hasn’t undergone this metamorphosis. I’ve never seen a feature in the Daily Mail called ‘How to get the Attenborough look!’, even though he definitely has a signature look – a natty combo of blue shirt and beige chinos. Attenborough is verging on celebrity, he’s heroic in a lot of ways, he appears regularly on TV chat shows alongside glamorous actors and comedians, he can get on stage at the Glastonbury music festival and be cheered by 80,000 people, but I don’t think he’s fully crossed the threshold. Instead, I believe he has renown: a public reputation built on admiration for his work, not his personal life. And this is a crucial distinction.
Generally, scholars agree that a celebrity is someone well known to a huge number of strangers, thanks to media exposure. However, what differentiates it from renown, and the likes of Sir David Attenborough, is the intensity of our voyeuristic curiosity. The scholar Graeme Turner suggests celebrity is ‘the point at which media interest in their activities is transferred from reporting on their public role … to investigating the details of their private lives’.13 Neal Gabler’s definition is even pithier; for him celebrity is ‘human entertainment’14 – it’s a genre of popular culture in which individuals function as thrilling stories.
Being renowned is to be well known for one’s work, and some celebrities – the Beyoncés of the world – enjoy both renown and celebrity, but Attenborough’s brand is not a ‘life movie’; he’s not the story, his TV programmes are. Gabler argues that maintaining narrative momentum is crucial to continued celebrity. These stars are human soap operas we devour with vicarious pleasure, to the point of consuming their adventures as if they were scripted shows, not real people. This is presumably how we can end up screaming obscenities at them on Twitter, or savaging their red carpet fashion choices, or judging them for their bodies when ours really aren’t any better. It’s not like they’re real humans, are they?
As with planetary gravity, the bigger a celeb becomes, the more likely they are to attract the orbiting moons of drama. But Gabler points out that the bigger the star, the less dramatic they need to be. I’d argue a Hollywood A-lister drunkenly punching a zebra is more compelling than a B-lister punching a zebra, and a Z-lister would probably have to marry the zebra in the middle of Times Square to earn the magazine coverage. Nor is public fascination underpinned by anything as boring as morality or likeability, either.
When a big star fades to career obscurity, it’s not necessarily because they’re suddenly unsympathetic; maybe their shtick is tired and we’ve lost interest? Scandal can be dangerous, but it’s not always a career-slayer. Sometimes being notorious is just an unexpected second act where the ‘life movie’ switches genre from bubbly romance to gothic melodrama. O. J. Simpson became vastly more famous during his murder trial than during his stellar football career. Obviously, nobody was offering him TV adverts any more, but he was still mega-famous. I’ll keep saying it, and I might even get T-shirts printed: celebrity and notoriety burn at the same temperature.
When the ‘famous for being famous’ line is hurled like a throwing knife, often the blade is aimed at celebrities whose fame comes through mere association; they’re the child of someone famous, or they’re friends with a socialite, or they’re dating a star. This is nothing new. Alice Roosevelt became a huge celebrity in the early 1900s because her dad was president; people were obsessed with her clothes and her boyfriends, and she was even nicknamed ‘Princess Alice’.15 Sometimes going after these fame-adjacent celebs is valid criticism. But they’re often dismissed as ‘nobodies’, and that fails to recognise that our obsession with celebs stems from something innate in their persona; they’re very much somebodies.
Obviously, we all know that maintaining a celebrity career requires massive media attention, propelled by the hidden effort of agents, managers, PRs, and stylists. But it’s naïve to assume absolutely anyone can be transformed into a star, provided they have the right team. We could pluck a random person from obscurity and launch an onslaught of publicity, but, without some intrinsic quality to snag wider curiosity, the public might still shrug in boredom, then wander off to giggle at a cat who looks like Hitler. Plenty of immediately forgotten TV talent show winners discovered this the hard way. It’s not enough to just be bathed in limelight. A publicity blitzkrieg can overwhelm the forces of indifference for a while, but true celebrity requires the public’s natural curiosity. We have to give a damn.
Various things might enthuse: the public delights in witnessing talent, particularly things of which they’re incapable; they also enjoy judging celebrity bodies in a way that simultaneously elevates and dehumanises the star; they enjoy funny people, and bitchy people, and inspirational leaders, and shocking provocateurs; they crave drama in both deed and speech, they want to be thrilled and surprised, to have their hearts swell with sympathy and outrage. ‘Make us feel something!’ the public screams. But, as we heard in the previous chapter, it’s not just the public who decide if someone gets to be famous. Celebrity is the explosion that occurs when we mix a profit-driven media industry, an individual trying to control their reputation, and an audience hungry for titillation. It needs all three elements for the flame to ignite.
Famous people are usually faraway images that reach us through mass media, but sometimes we might bump into a celebrity, or share a lift with them, and the experience can feel a bit weird. Often, fans meeting their heroes go a little giddy, or become speechless; people who’ve met President Bill Clinton speak of the intense connection he provoked, as if there was nobody else in the room. This indescribable star quality makes celebrities sound almost magical in their allure. But what causes such a hypnotic effect, and what should we call it?
There have been several terms suggested to describe this power. In the early days of Hollywood, it was simply called ‘It’. Clara Bow was the superstar actress whose goofy likeability made her immensely popular, and in her 1927 film It, in which she plays a shopgirl with effortless charm, a character asserts: ‘the possessor of “IT” must be absolutely “un-self-conscious”, and must have that magnetic “sex appeal” which is irresistible’. Another character chips in with more suggestions: ‘self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not – and something in you that gives the impression that you are not at all cold’. In short, to have ‘It’ was to be attractive, self-assured, exuding warmth, and yet to be unaware of it.
Given the film’s success, Bow – who ticked all the boxes – was soon dubbed the ‘It Girl’, a phrase we still use for glamorous women who waft through other people’s parties, floating on a cloud of champagne privilege. Though she was a playful chameleon, part flirt and part tomboy, Bow’s wildness away from the camera got her into hot bother. She had a fondness for gambling and drinking, was an alleged homewrecker, and preferred working-class friends to Hollywood schmoozing. As the classic flapper, her cheeky smile suited the Jazz Age, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 dampened the national mood. She’d made few allies in Hollywood, and plenty of enemies. She’d also had a couple of breakdowns. By 1933, the biggest star of the 1920s was done with movies. She retired to a ranch, aged just thirty-two.16
In the 1930s, out went Clara Bow and in came a new word for a new style of performance: glamour. Today it means something exciting and attractive, but originally it was a bewitching enchantment, having derived from the Scottish word gramarye, meaning a book containing occult alchemical knowledge.17 By the twentieth century, that magical patina had mostly been dusted away, and people might have gone on holiday to ‘glamorous Rome’, where they would’ve met very few wizards, and definitely no Scottish ones. But subtle traces of the magic remained when Hollywood fan magazines defined glamour as a new visual style. It was beauty defined as magnetic, cool, and impassive distance; a stylistically divergent mood from Clara Bow’s effervescence. Glamour was mysterious. It was quiet. It was to gaze out, cigarette in hand, and show barely a flicker of emotion. It was a seductive spell, a love potion drunk through the eyes. Greta Garbo was glamour, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn too.18 It wasn’t just dressing up in nice togs and bunging on some vibrant red lippy, it was a strategy of attitudinal bewitchment. Celebs had to be glam, not just look it.
Hollywood wasn’t done there. In 1933, Hilary Lynn proposed ‘X’19 as a sort of algebraic cipher that hinted at the mysterious, scientist-befuddling power of the superstar who could turn mere cinema-going mortals into blubbering, popcorn-devouring fools. From this, we got the ‘X-Factor’, which in turn gave us the shiny TV talent show of the same name. There was also ‘Oomph’, an onomatopoeic grunt applied to nubile stars with obvious erotic appeal. Ann Sheridan was voted Hollywood’s ‘Oomph Girl’ in 1939 – it was a label she hated – and a young Marilyn Monroe, then still nice-but-plain Norma Jeane, was declared the most-bountifully oomphish (yes, that is apparently a real word) of her high school classmates in 1941.
These were all movie terms, and sociologists have long claimed Hollywood is where celebrity was invented. But the most common phrase wheeled out to explain a celebrity’s mysterious charm is much older. Charisma is an ancient Greek word, most associated with the apostle St Paul – the New Testament’s famed Corinthian-botherer – who used it to mean ‘grace gifted by God’. However, though it extends back over two millennia, our secular notion of charisma is only a century old, having been laid out by the German sociologist Max Weber in 1922. He described charisma as a quasi-magical aura that produces influence over others, and even inspires frenzied loyalty and devotion.
But, before Weber turned up, such mysterious power had previously been dubbed ‘human magnetism’, thanks to the German physician Franz Mesmer having peddled a dodgy theory that planetary magnetism in the solar system affected Earth’s natural world, and that people – especially him – could wield it. Mesmer bolstered his fame in the 1700s by performing famously eroticised hypnosis techniques on his patients; indeed, our verb ‘to mesmerise’ derives from his status as controversial medical celebrity.20 This supposed power to entrance both individuals and crowds made magnetic people socially important.
In 1841, the eminent British historian Thomas Carlyle wrote an influential book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, which argued that great men and women – though mainly men, because Victorian patriarchs gonna patriarch – possessed superior qualities which made them natural leaders, and society should encourage them through public acclaim to achieve great things. From the late 1800s through to the 1920s, America drank deeply of this heady brew, and became intoxicated. Politicians, religious leaders, orchestral conductors, sports stars, and business titans were all hailed for their astonishing connection with crowds.
But it wasn’t just a case of natural magnetism seducing the masses; practical techniques could be mastered in the pursuit of such persuasion. Preachers and politicians elicited frenzied responses21 by adopting the vocal and gestural pyrotechnics first revealed in 1827 by the speech scientist Dr James Rush. He was fascinated by the musicality of syllable length and pitch, and dedicated thousands of hours to shouting and flailing his arms in bizarre ways until he’d found the most effective combination for rousing people to communal ecstasy. It was an impressive commitment to science, but I imagine his neighbours hated him.
So is celebrity charm a natural phenomenon, or just a question of good technique? I’d argue for a bit of both. At the start of this book, we saw the enormous impact of David Bowie’s death, so it might surprise you to learn that he’d struggled to become famous in the first place. After five years of musical failures, it took a gimmick song about the moon landing – the eerily beautiful Space Oddity – to finally see him break into the charts, but it still took a further three years, and three more albums, before he had another major hit. Throughout the disappointment, Bowie kept readjusting his approach, and part of that experimental empiricism involved learning how to tease fans by always leaving them wanting more, or by bewildering interviewers with wilfully vague answers.22 Bowie deliberately practised ambiguity as if it were a martial art, realising the emotional distance made people strive all the harder to get to know him. As it turns out, it was an approach not so far removed from Lord Byron’s strategy.23
But, I really must stress, he also had natural charisma – I mean, just look at him! He was just so Bowie! He was innately alluring. Those eyes were tractor beams pulling us in; one ocean blue, one moodily black (caused by a teenage punch to the retina). He may have developed sophisticated techniques of enchantment, but he already oozed charm as if he’d evolved his own charisma gland. Bowie was a rock’n’roll muskrat in immaculate makeup.
Uniqueness matters, but celebrity itself isn’t just a showcase for dazzling individuality. It’s also a brash capitalist system. The historian of celebrity Simon Morgan has pleasingly compressed this idea into a lovely short sentence: ‘The celebrity is a known individual who has become a marketable commodity.’24 In other words, a celebrity is someone who, for whatever reason – whether they’re beloved, hated, heroic, beautiful, provocative, weird, or downright dangerous – causes the springing up of their own micro-economy. All told, celebrity culture is a lucrative industry that profits from human novelty, extracting vast sums from selling access to famous lives and bodies. I agree with Morgan, but I think his wording is a tad imprecise. A ‘known person’ with a marketable brand could include David Attenborough, whose image is used in publicity materials by various environmental charities, but you know where I stand on him.
For all the apparent glamour of celebrity, stars are constantly objectified by both the industry that monetises their fame and the audiences eager to pay for access.25 The celebrity theorist P. David Marshall sees the rise of star culture in the twentieth century not as a consequence of democratic capitalism, but rather as a fundamental keystone propping up the whole edifice in the first place.26 For him, celebrity wasn’t a noisy, neon consequence of modernity, it helped cause modernity.
This might well be true, but it happened much earlier than the early 1900s. For decades, celebrity’s origin has been fixed in that pop culture factory that gave us Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. But historians have started rocking up to the party, eagerly clutching their dusty old theatrical bills along with their bottles of Merlot, and they’ve brought radical thinking to the classic story. Thanks to their archival beavering, we can find that capitalism, culture, and celebrity were already rampantly productive bedfellows in the early 1700s.
The evidence for this ideological ménage-à-trois is strong; and in Western Europe we find plentiful reasons for its arrival. In Britain, the long eighteenth century – or what Brits call the Georgian era (named after the four King Georges who reigned in succession, plus William IV, who obviously didn’t get the memo) – witnessed a sea change in politics, as the monarchs lost power and Parliament flexed new muscles. But other things were happening too: there was the lapsing of stringent press regulation, compounded by weak libel laws, which now allowed a hefty dose of free expression.
Up sprang the first daily newspapers in 1702, thanks to increasing literacy, a burgeoning and aspirational middle class, and a reduction in printing costs that made visual media more available. Suddenly it was easier and more profitable to launch into a juicy gossip session. I should caution that newspaper readership wasn’t large at this stage, maybe a few thousand copies per title, but it grew through the century as more people were able to feast on that banquet of innuendo.27 It was an era of press democratisation aided by new technology, changing culture, and the idiosyncrasies of the legal system. Celebrity arrived in Britain thanks to the removal of key obstacles coupled to the development of new opportunities.
A second factor in celebrity’s rise was the drab tediousness of the royal courts of London and Paris. Whereas the playboy monarchs of the 1600s, Charles II and Louis XIV, had embraced lavish spectacle, chucking huge resources at ballets, plays, art, and masked balls, both Versailles and Kensington became boring without them. In particular, Louis XVI cared more for the mechanics of clocks and locks than extravagant parties, and George III was particularly fond of reading farming almanacs. This meant that creatives who’d previously orbited the courts in search of patronage and prestige – the aristocrats, artists, actors, fashionistas, and writers – instead muttered their excuses and drifted off to the novel excitements of urban London and Paris. These vibrant, swelling cities became playgrounds to a new, dynamic popular culture rising from below. Meanwhile, King George regaled his family members with the joys of crop rotation.28
As Jürgen Habermas argued,29 a ‘public sphere’ now emerged; people wanted to engage in public discussion and be heard, and the newspapers responded by serving up hearty portions of gossip and scandal about politicians, actors, writers, and artists – the sorts of people who’d previously drawn little public attention. These were the first true celebrities, and commercial exploitation of this new fascination soon followed. There was money to be made in talking about others; there was money to be made in being talked about. In the words of the historian Stella Tillyard, ‘celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity’.30
Okay, so celebrity culture definitely existed in the early eighteenth century, but might we roll the bandwagon further down the road, back into prior centuries? Well, first we’ll have to agree on a definition of celebrity, so here is my checklist:
Celebrity criteria checklist
1. Possess unique personal charisma.
2. Widely known to the public.
3. Brand disseminated by widespread media.
4. Private life consumed as dramatic entertainment by the public.
5. Commercial marketplace based on the celebrity’s reputation.
Under these five terms, the hunt for earlier celebrity seems doomed – all those transformations that made the 1700s so conducive to celebrity culture hadn’t got up and running in the previous century. But there are historians making compelling cases for pre-1700s celebrity, so let’s hear them out.
Consider, for example, the charming, beautiful, funny, and saucy actress of English Restoration theatre, Nell Gwyn, who, between the 1660s and 1680s, clambered from the lowest rung on the social ladder onto the London stage, and then into King Charles II’s bed, where she stayed for many years as his beloved royal mistress. Nell’s bold confidence was the key part of her brand, but her breasts were her most famous physical asset. Samuel Pepys called her ‘a bold, merry slut’ – a slut was an unkempt woman – but there’s no doubting her sexual power. Gwyn’s amorous adventures with the most powerful man in the country rendered her a national security risk in the eyes of satirists and pamphleteers, but also made her thrillingly titillating. She metamorphosed from commoner to faux-aristocracy, and even returned to the stage after having given birth to the King’s bastard, thereby endangering the dignity of the Crown in an era when the previous monarch, Charles I, had lost his head to the executioner’s axe. No small thing, that.
As Julia Novak says: ‘Gwyn was a celebrity in her own day, treasured and despised, publicly discussed, repeatedly portrayed by court painter John Lely, and frequently written about, especially by Restoration satirists. In an age that witnessed a surge of misogynist satires, the king’s mistresses proved a popular target.’31 Elaine McGirr writes: ‘she was a celebrity actress before she was a celebrity mistress’,32 and highlights how artistic representations of Gwyn were individualised and specific. Although overenthusiasm by previous art historians often led to paintings of any busty beauty being falsely labelled as the celebrated actress, authentic portraits by Peter Lely are nevertheless unmistakably distinctive. Her flirtatious gaze is ever-present, while her eyes, lips, and bosom are alluringly full. Gwyn was a charismatic, provocative, socially mobile exception to all of society’s norms. Plus, she was really funny. It’s no wonder King Charles was besotted with her.
People enjoyed her performances, but they also scrutinised her body and pried into her sex life, perhaps fantasising about how she seduced the Merry Monarch each night in his bedroom. They could also possess her image; indeed, even her nude body. Samuel Pepys was one such customer to hang Peter Cross’s portrait of a naked Nell, depicted as a winged Venus holding Cupid’s arrow, over his desk at the Admiralty (surely it was NSFW?). All of this certainly sounds like celebrity, doesn’t it? It’s a really enjoyable argument, and I was almost convinced, but I’m not sure we have enough evidence for widespread coverage in a very early press media.
How widely was the satire read? Were thousands of Londoners hungrily scooping it up, or just a few hundred malcontents at court? Nor do we know how many portrait engravings were sold, and to whom. Only a handful of Peter Cross’s Venus engravings survive, and Samuel Pepys was a privileged man, and certainly not representative of ordinary people. Novak and McGirr make a very decent case. Gwyn’s fame does feel surprisingly modern; it’s almost a prototype for what came later, but I think it falls just short of celebrity. Instead, I think it’s best described as fame, but I’ll explain why later on.
And what do we make of Shakespeare’s playwriting compatriot Ben Jonson, who, fresh from London theatrical successes, walked from London to Scotland in 1618 and was met by many adoring admirers along the route eager to take him to dinner and bask in his presence?33 Or what to do with Shakespeare’s favourite clown, Will Kemp, who, in 1600, embarked on his ‘Nine Day Wonder’, in which, as a cash-raising PR stunt, he morris-danced from London to Norwich and then published a pamphlet celebrating his achievement?
These men were popular creatives known to thousands of theatregoers; they were cheered by members of the public who lined the route to say hello; they were perhaps also earning a pretty penny in the process. Is that celebrity? Jennifer R. Holl has made an intriguing case for Shakespearean celebrity, arguing that the late-sixteenth-century theatre became a social space for thousands of Londoners where news and opinion were shared. Kemp, and another actor, called Richard Tarleton, were much beloved performers who may well have had devoted fans. But I’m not totally convinced that celebrity can exist without printed media, and this was a time when even the most reputable people were only mentioned in a smattering of printed materials.34
The same argument applies to any claim to medieval celebrity. In a world of mass illiteracy, prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century printing revolution, how would celebrity images and ideas have spread? We know the powerful Christian Church ran its own communication intranet through which crusades could be advertised, but I struggle to see how celebrity culture could have been sustained. And yet … Medieval Europe was criss-crossed with pilgrimage routes which brought people from all over the continent to the shrines of dead saints, or even the humble abodes of living saints (those ‘beatified’ by the community as being especially godly). These places soon blossomed into economic powerhouses where eager tourists flocked, like seagulls to a bag of abandoned chips, hoping to witness a miracle.
Hereford Cathedral in western England was one such site, funding the erection of its proud new tower off the lucrative brand of its dead bishop, Thomas de Cantilupe, who was canonised in 1320 thanks to his Lazarene powers of raising the dead. This was quite the neat trick, given that he was also dead. Saint Thomas de Cantilupe was a posthumous miracle-worker, and his personal brand was therefore potent and widespread. His corpse could do actual magic, and pilgrims travelled to his shrine in pursuit of their own miracle cure – how’s that for natural charisma! So were medieval saints celebrities? It doesn’t tick all five of my boxes, but it’s definitely an exciting argument, made most notably by the historian Aviad Kleinberg.35
Let’s keep reversing our wagon all the way to the Greco-Roman world of some 2,000 years ago. Might there be a stronger case for ancient celebrity in these famously sophisticated cultures, where huge cities brought vast, seething populations into close contact? In his ground-breaking classic on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown,36 Leo Braudy extended his range back to Homeric poetry and the golden-maned hero Alexander the Great, arguing that the human urge to be celebrated as unique – a vital prerequisite of celebrity branding – was alive in the Bronze Age, over 3,000 years ago. More recently, Robert Garland makes the same point of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who, when publicly mocked in a theatrical comedy, stood up from his seat to defiantly assert his proud identity before the crowd. He wanted to be known by the mob.
Leo Braudy cautiously notes how ancient fame and modern celebrity are noticeably different. Garland, however, has written a cheerfully amusing book called Celebrity in Antiquity37, and argues for a proto-stardom* in which cynical ‘media tarts’, royals, politicians, charioteers, gladiators, and poets fought hard to earn public attention, often driven by an unquenchable thirst for reputation. He describes Emperor Nero as a deranged narcissist who locked audiences in theatres and performed songs not so much to them as at them, demanding that they applaud his genius. During a tour of Greece in 67 CE Nero demanded the sacred Olympic Games be held in an off-year so that he could compete, but then changed the events to better suit his hobbies. Accordingly, he ‘won’ every competition he entered, including the chariot race – an impressive feat, given he’d actually crashed. Nero claimed victory anyway, arguing he would’ve won otherwise. He was very much the Donald Trump of the ancient world.
Nero was one of Rome’s most controversial tyrants, but he had plenty of competition in the douchebag stakes. Ruling some 130 years later on, Emperor Commodus became so enraptured by the acclaim given to famous gladiators that he jealously strode into the Colosseum himself, eager to soak up the cheers. Whereas Nero changed the rules or denied the reality of displeasing outcomes, Commodus simply cheated by mutilating defenceless animals, or fighting against human amputees armed only with soft sponges. Commodus aspired to be a triumphant sportsperson, but the crowd saw only a deluded despot slaughtering the harmless and the armless. This embarrassing behaviour was akin to when Boris Johnson played rugby against children, and smashed into a tiny child with his full adult bulk. Johnson went on to be prime minister, but Commodus was promptly assassinated for his cringeworthy behaviour.
Garland’s book is an enjoyable provocation, but it’s hard to know if his suggested celebs were hailed by the ordinary people who shared their cities and sewers, or whether we’ve been duped into thinking of these people as celebrities only because they’ve been preserved in ancient, elite writings? Were there any popular gladiators who became celebs, for example? We might assume so, given Commodus’ jealousy. Also, according to the Roman poet Martial, a charioteer called Scorpus was so widely beloved that he earned huge cash bonuses from senior politicians and was depicted in gold-plated statues. A century later, the gender-fluid teenager Elagabalus – one of Rome’s most controversial emperors – fell for a beautiful blond charioteer named Hierocles and ‘married’ him, elevating this former slave to his equal and even trying to make him heir to the entire empire. This was deemed unacceptable by fellow courtiers and both were also promptly assassinated.38
So, Roman gladiators and charioteers could graduate from life in the gutter to hobnobbing with the elite. But ancient nobility fawning at their sweaty feet isn’t solid proof of ordinary Romans doing the same. One of my favourite Monty Python sketches depicts archaeologists finding the snapped-off toe from a giant animated foot; they take it to the British Museum and, with only a single bone available, reassemble the foot as they think it would’ve looked. The result is an adorably ungainly pink elephant. Might we similarly misassemble Roman history by putting far too much emphasis on a tiny handful of reports centred on high-status individuals? As G. S. Aldrete notes, ‘almost all surviving literary and much of the artistic evidence regarding Roman sport and spectacle was produced by and/or intended for the consumption of a tiny group of elites … we lack any accounts whatsoever from the millions of ordinary Romans who constituted the vast majority of spectators’.39
Okay, let’s look a little later, and further to the east. Constantinople was the seat of power for the Byzantine Empire (the eastern chunk of the Roman Empire which outlived its Western counterpart by a cool 1,000 years), and here the populace was obsessed with chariot-racing. In 520 CE, the frenzied crowd, crammed into the enormous hippodrome, began rioting. Ostensibly, the dispute was between rival fans of the Blue and Green teams, but the rioting mob’s demands were simple and singular: they demanded that their hero, Porphyrius, come out of retirement to race once more.
Though born in what’s now Libya, he was an honorary son of the city. His name was praised in poems inscribed on the hippodrome’s central gallery; his heroic image was visible in bronze statues and stone relief carvings around the city; one of his statues may have stood next to a masterpiece depicting none other than Alexander the Great. Porphyrius was the empire’s most famous man, besides the Emperor Justin. His races had been seen not just in Constantinople but also on tour in Antioch, Beirut, and Nicomedia. In 520 CE, he was sixty years old, but the crowd was adamant they would see him race again. It was to be one of ten riots associated with chariot-racing in only a thirty-year period.40 The mob got their wish.
Porphyrius’ career had been exceptional, not least for the fact that he’d escaped the usual mangling which killed so many other drivers. Unlike Hierocles, he’d not gravitated towards the corridors of imperial power to be destroyed by its shadowy jealousies, but nor had he shunned politics either. In 507 CE, Porphyrius had led a violent anti-Semitic attack on the Jewish quarter in Antioch, burning a synagogue before erecting a crucifix in the smouldering embers. Clearly, being a ringleader in an atrocity suggested he was both a horrible arsehole and a charismatic leader, capable of rousing the passions of strangers.
Porphyrius was undoubtedly famous, and perhaps – thanks to all those statues – even recognisable on the street. But, if we recall the five-point checklist, was there a market economy attached to his brand? Did he flog olive oil in cheesy commercials? Was his name painted on the signs of taverns? Did people pay money to read about him, and his sex life? We just don’t know. As the famous aphorism goes: ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’; just because we don’t have proof of a thing doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But nor can we assert it did happen without sufficient proof. Porphyrius was famous, but I don’t have enough evidence to call him a celebrity.
So, if we’re going to get an answer on whether there was ever a Roman celebrity, it’s time to bring out the big guns …
Stop what you’re doing and grab the nearest person. Got someone? Okay, now ask them to list three famous Romans. I bet you £20 that Julius Caesar makes that list. As Maria Wyke has shown, Caesar is surely history’s most famous Roman, and has defended his championship belt for centuries.41 The reasons are obvious: he was charismatic, clever, and privileged; he was also a ruthless soldier, smashing the Gauls with such ferocity that even fellow Romans accused him of what we’d now call genocide.
Other notable conquests included chilly southern Britain, and the much less chilly Queen Cleopatra, who bore him a child. He ended a civil war in Egypt and started one in Rome. He defeated his mighty frenemy Pompey the Great, squabbled with the celebrated Cicero and Cato, lived in the age of Catullus, and – most famous of all – crossed the Rubicon river with his loyal troops, snatched up supreme political power, and was then murdered by his own friends for corrupting the Roman Republic. Regardless of moral judgements, Caesar really put in the hours. Fair play to him, the guy got stuff done!
Given all that, it’s no surprise that he was extensively discussed in ancient chronicles. But it’s arguably since his death that his fame has grown, his biography having proved fertile territory for subsequent stories, songs, plays, films, and TV shows that transformed his tumultuous life into compelling narrative drama, often infused with contemporary topicality. For us, Julius Caesar is as much a product of Shakespeare’s quill as of ancient history. And such retellings have, in turn, exerted their own influence on later events.
Before rising to become France’s egomaniacal emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte had been a nerdy Corsican teenager enthralled by the ancient stories of Caesar and Alexander the Great. When he got the chance to invade Egypt in 1798, he not only walked the same sands as his boyhood heroes, but also kickstarted classical Egyptology by bringing a 160-man team of handpicked scientists, artists, and archaeologists to investigate the ancient culture he’d read so much about. It’s extraordinary to think that the course of modern history – the Napoleonic Wars, the naval heroics of Admiral Nelson, the discovery and decoding of the Rosetta Stone – was, in some small way, Napoleon writing his own Caesar fan fiction with ink made from the blood of a million men.
In death, Julius Caesar ticks all five of my boxes. He’s now a bona fide posthumous celebrity – but what about during his lifetime? Upon crossing the Rubicon river in 49 BCE, Caesar began minting coins depicting his head adorned with the laurel wreath of martial victory. His image was thus widely circulated. Statues were also erected. Soon after, in 46 BCE, he crushed Pompey in battle, and around the same time was granted an unprecedented quadruple triumph for victories against foreign enemies. A triumph was an opulent spectacle to make the Super Bowl half-time show look like a covers band in your local pub; it was an enormous military parade centring on Caesar, dressed conspicuously in purple and gold, showcasing his glory before a huge Roman crowd. From the treasure trove of war loot, he doled out cash to the troops and the plebs, sponsored huge public entertainments, and funded the building of a temple to Venus.42 In a city of a million souls, his name was surely spoken tens of millions of times – and that’s not even counting the other Roman provinces beyond the capital city’s walls. It was all going swimmingly.
But soon people noticed Caesar was still sporting his triumphal robes and red boots – the hated footwear of the wonderfully named Tarquinius Superbus, the archaic king who’d been deposed and replaced with the Roman Republic. Caesar was dressing like a monarch, in a political system famed for ditching its monarchs. In January 44 BCE he was honoured with the title of Dictator Perpetuo – Dictator for life – which, as job titles go, wasn’t very subtle.* Before a large crowd, his friend Mark Antony tried to place the crown on his head, but Caesar waved it away to great cheers.
If this staged humility was meant to endear him to most Romans, it looked like cynical populism to his Senatorial enemies. On the Ides of March, they plunged their knives into his body twenty-three times in an attack of such wild ferocity that some accidentally stabbed each other in the melee, adding a frisson of comic farce to political violence. Caesar’s toga was drenched with gushing blood until it matched the hue of his hated boots. He died in infamy, but his name would endure eternal.
So was Caesar a celebrity? Well, his image and name were widely spread through coinage, sculpture, legal decrees, and his sponsorship of public events. Of my five-point celebrity criteria checklist, he nailed the widespread renown and probably the charisma too. We might even generously say the coinage counts as a form of media. Millions of people knew who Caesar was. But do we have evidence of people making money from his existence, trading upon a public desire to engage with his persona? Were millions familiar with his international bed-hopping and personal vendettas? I’m not sure we have the necessary evidence. Instead of celebrity, what Caesar managed to acquire was the opulent cloak of royal authority – an elevated status often compared to celebrity, but royalty isn’t celebrity. Or at least it didn’t use to be.
Both royals and celebs carefully manipulate their image to communicate glamour, health, power, authority, prestige, and uniqueness. They perform their public identities, projecting artfully constructed personas; and the fictions are so dominant, and so pervasive, that a glimpse of either looking slouchy in sweatpants while picking their nose is a potent image for which we’ll pay good money. In particular, the celebrity industry deliberately fosters this dichotomy. It elevates the poised, glamorous persona as the apotheosis of allure, so that we’re thrilled by the long-range paparazzi snaps of celebs looking tired and frumpy. There’s a goldmine to be plundered in building them up to knock them down, and it’s a violent game of dodgeball that begins as soon as someone arrives in the public arena, ready or not.
Royalty’s image construction is outwardly similar, projecting glamorous excellence. However, unlike celebrity, the traditional royal image could never slip, for the glamour of the royal aesthetic represents much more than just the individual; the monarch is a political idea, it’s the nation in fleshy form. In medieval Christian theology, a monarch had two bodies: one mortal and one political. When the silver-haired ruler wheezed their last breath, or took an assassin’s dagger to the gut, the cry went up: ‘The king is dead. Long live the king!’ A monarch was both person and ideological concept, the individual perished but the Crown was immortal. We see this in the portraits issued by England’s long-reigning Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, which froze her regal beauty in the prime of health;43 all the while her body sagged with age and her teeth blackened through sugar consumption.44 They’re astonishingly sophisticated artworks, pregnant with symbolism about the robust health of the monarchy, but there’s little of the real woman in there – I believe the most revealing thing about them is what she chose to hide.
Usually, royalty upholds the status quo. Celebrity, by contrast, initially appears to be disruptive. It chucks stones through the windows of traditional privilege, then proffers a ladder for low-born scruffs to clamber in through the broken glass. It’s a profitable system designed to tickle a fickle public through repetitious novelty; a constant churn that’s achieved by shaking the ladder to dislodge those at the top. The rhythms of this brutal turnover are jerkily aggressive compared to the gradual, generational handover of power that royal inheritance provides. But, in truth, celebrity is not actually all that disruptive, because we’ve already heard how famous provocateurs perform a social function as arbiters of public taste and decency.
So celebrity and royalty are similar but separate. However, they have sometimes fused together. When Max Weber wrote his masterwork on charismatic power, he created three categories: charismatic authority (heroes with dynamic personalities), traditional authority (hereditary rulers upheld by custom), and legal authority (political office upheld by law). During Weber’s lifetime, royalty seemed to be in trouble. Even though ermine robes and shiny gold hats are tremendously dapper, he assumed the concept of monarchy was under threat from exciting celebrities and shouting revolutionaries.45 As it turned out, some monarchs had already spotted the danger. The most obvious response was a sudden upswing in historicised pomp and ceremony, with the British monarchy suddenly giving it large on military parades and faux-medieval ceremonies to convince unruly subjects of the eternal legacy of the Crown.46
But royals didn’t just try to drown out celebrity with gaudier, noisier parades; they also embraced its techniques. In the mid-nineteenth century, both Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany welcomed photography as a way of bolstering their fading charisma. The risks were palpable: while increasing access made monarchs reassuringly present in the public’s lives, it arguably cheapened royal prestige, with these images being sold side-by-side with those of common actresses, musicians, and even criminals. It was the equivalent of a Hollywood A-lister appearing in a late series of Celebrity Big Brother; we’d obviously watch the hell out of that, but we’d lose respect for them when we saw them squabbling over whose turn it was to do the washing-up. But these royals mostly got away with it, not least because they refused to totally commit – Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to pose for photos, but he blanked requests for autographs. Portraiture had a prestigious heritage, autographs did not.47
In 1934, the royal wedding of Prince George, Duke of Kent, and the glamorous Princess Marina of Greece was also surprisingly ‘modern’. He was thirty-one, she was twenty-seven, and the public treated her more like a celebrity than royalty. She was pretty and fashionable, loved to smoke cigarettes and dance at parties, and the press were thrilled by the romance. As the historian Edward Owens notes: ‘More than on any previous occasion, [the wedding] was a royal event driven by publicity, intimacy, and a coterie of courtiers, clerics, and newsmen who were committed to elevating a “family monarchy” as the emotional centre-point of national life.’48 The Windsors embraced the public curiosity and laid on a wedding low on pomp and circumstance, but high in narrative charm. It was a clever strategy, unfortunately undercut soon after when King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry the scandalous American divorcée Wallis Simpson.
Continuing the trend, Britain’s current monarchy has re-energised its twenty-first-century brand through the media-savvy tactics of Princes William and Harry, and their wives. Though born into the most rarefied of families, the young Windsors grew up in a youth culture which has profoundly shaped their tastes. Prince Harry likes grime music! He calls people ‘mate’! The Duchess of Cambridge wears Topshop! The Windsors have cunningly bolted the accessible aesthetics of celebrity to the structural privilege of ancient royalty, creating a powerful hybrid that shields them from serious media intrusion (the tragic fate of their mother has strengthened their arm in this), yet granting them a movie star glamour that makes them likeable to a younger generation.
The fact that both princes married gorgeous commoners also sells the idea that royalty is no longer a bastion of snobbish exclusion; it’s not democratic, but it’s becoming more demotic. Even oiks like us have the tiniest chance of marrying into ancient hereditary power. And while such increased accessibility could’ve devalued the power of traditional pageantry, it turns out the world goes even more doolally for a royal wedding when it involves a celebrity. One third of Brits watched Meghan Markle, an American actress, wed Prince Harry in 2018, and some estimates put the global audiences at nearly 2 billion.
This strategy has boosted the monarchy’s popularity after years of tabloid scandal. Yet they should be cautious. The same tactic eventually failed with Princess Diana – whose celebrified brand dragged the royal family into prolonged crisis before her tragic death reset the machine – and, as I write this, Meghan Markle seems to have inherited Diana’s mantle of being the beautiful tabloid punchbag, not least because she’s American, a woman of colour, and a former actress, all of which seem to bring out the worst in certain media commentators.
Diana wasn’t the first case study in disaster. In the 1780s, Queen Marie-Antoinette, having found the stuffy protocol of Versailles too restrictive, began seeking a life away from her husband’s stifling court. She attended the theatre and opera while incognito, but the sort of ludicrously obvious incognito that made everyone go: ‘Er … isn’t that the queen?’ Much like Caesar, she had all the subtlety of a foghorn. She also began issuing startlingly intimate and informal portraits of herself wearing what looked to be underwear, but were in fact simple new gowns designed by her fashion guru, Rose Bertin, who capitalised on the Queen’s patronage by then selling these gorgeously elegant designs to the public from her Parisian showroom.49 Yes, even in the 1780s, people could choose to dress like the stars.
Marie-Antoinette was recast from austere queen consort into trendsetting celebrity; but it meant the distance between her and scandalous actresses shortened year on year, until soon her sex life was up for grabs, with rumours of frenzied masturbation, scandalous lesbianism, and extramarital shagathons dominating Parisian gossip. The pornographic satire was incredibly visceral.* When the French Revolution erupted in 1789 – born from a variety of complex socio-economic causes – Marie-Antoinette was beyond saving. It wasn’t just her exorbitant spending on diamond necklaces, alienation from the struggling poor, and alleged pro-Austrian treachery that doomed her. The monarchy’s mystique had been slowly eroded by caustic celebrity drama. The queen had become no different to any other salacious courtesan.50 Royalty had lost its mysterious power. And so she lost her head.
So royalty and celebrity can overlap, which brings us back to the Julius Caesar question. If he wasn’t a celebrity, what was he? Well, I think he was the same as Nell Gwyn. I think he was famous. This is another word we chuck around with indiscriminate abandon, leading to its modern definition becoming baggier than a wizard’s sleeve. Famous means anyone or anything with a public reputation. A building can be famous, or a doughnut, or a train crash, or a cartoon tiger used to sell breakfast cereal. We happily use fame and celebrity as synonyms – I’m sometimes doing it in this book, when I can’t be bothered to think of a better alternative – but distinctions can be made. The problem is, those distinctions are really elusive. But it’s high time we gave it a go …
Probably composed by the poet Homer in the mid-eighth century BCE, the Iliad recounts an episode at the end of the ten-year siege of Troy, undertaken by a Greek coalition led by the kings Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus. Their enemy is King Priam of Troy and his sons Paris and Hector. As you may know, Paris is the beauteous hunk who’s done a runner with Menelaus’ stunning wife, Helen, and so this decade-long conflict is largely the fault of insanely good chemistry between two stunners. However, the poem’s real protagonist isn’t any of these people; instead it’s Achilles – the semi-mortal warrior famous to sports physiotherapists everywhere.*
You might only know two things about Achilles: first, that his divine mum, Thetis, has dunked him in the protective waters of the River Styx, thus rendering him totally stab-proof except for the heel where she’d grasped his dangling body. Secondly, that he then gets shot in that heel and snuffs it. Confusingly, neither of these plotlines is found in the Iliad; they actually come to us from later sources, including the Roman poet Statius. But we’re focusing on Homer’s classic because an existential dilemma underpins the poem, and this tension forms the bedrock of Western culture’s traditional interpretation of fame.
In Homer’s version, Achilles is sulking because King Agamemnon has nabbed his beautiful war trophy, Princess Briseis, whom he planned to keep as his sex slave (yes, Achilles is fascinating, but he’s also a jerk). Insulted by Agamemnon’s ‘theft’, Homer’s pouty anti-hero sulks on the sidelines, like a moody teenager dragged on a family caravanning holiday, while everyone pleads with him to get stuck back into the fighting. But we soon realise Achilles isn’t just a petulant brat, he’s also brooding over his own mortality. Because of his semi-divine power, he gets to determine his future. It’s been revealed to him that he must make the ultimate choice:
For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.
Thetis has laid out two options to her not-quite-immortal son: he can choose a long, boring life of inconsequence by going home; or he can die young at Troy, but shine eternal with radiant glory. Achilles sensibly prefers the sound of a future retirement doing the proverbial crossword and watering his begonias, and is all set to sling his hook when his explosive rage is triggered by his best friend (and perhaps lover?) being slain by Hector. Incensed, he exacts brutal vengeance on the Trojan prince, defiles Hector’s corpse, and refuses to return it to King Priam for burial. This violent deed signs his contract with destiny; no comfy retirement for him, it’s to be big-time glory all the way.
Oddly, Homer doesn’t actually kill off Achilles in the Iliad, so it’s left to later reworkings of the poem to dramatise the celebrated moment when Paris – Hector’s grieving brother, and the selfish prat who caused all the trouble – shoots the poisoned arrow into the vulnerable span of his ankle. It’s one hell of a shot, so fair play to the lad, though the gods have steadied his bow. Frankly, I don’t know why Achilles didn’t just order a pair of armoured boots; surely a cobbler and a blacksmith could’ve bodged something together? Anyway, footwear quibbles aside, Achilles’ death earns him posthumous fame, or what the ancient Greeks called kleos. In doing so, he became the archetype for the illustrious hero whose eternal renown compensates for a life cut short. Achilles earns glory. Sounds nice, right?
Intriguingly, Homer’s sequel poem, the Odyssey, finds Achilles regretting his glorious fate as king of the Underworld; he’d much rather be resurrected as some mud-caked peasant than sit on his eternal, ghostly throne. Achilles has learned a hard lesson that many modern celebs have since discovered: the pressures of fame can make mundane anonymity seem appealing. Despite Homer’s surprising ambivalence towards glory, the cultural celebration of heroic death continued in early medieval poems, such as ‘The Battle of Maldon’ and The Song of Roland, both of which celebrate outnumbered warriors choosing to die honourably rather than flee to fight another day. In short, kleos/glory/fame – or, whatever you wanna call it – usually came to mean immortality earned by kicking the bucket while swinging a sword. Yet, truth be told, it wasn’t solely reserved for the dead.
Our word fame derives from Fama, the Roman goddess of rumour-mongering, but she wasn’t some benign gossip nattering at the hairdresser’s about a friend’s dirty weekend with a married man. While the Greek equivalent, Pheme, was a beautiful goddess with long flowing tresses who parped the horn of reputation, the Roman version was starkly different. In his classic foundation myth the Aeneid – a parallel text to Homer’s Troy story, but one following a Trojan warrior on his journey to Italy – the great writer Virgil describes Fama as a ‘dreadful monster’ whose body bristles with feathers and wings; and from the tip of each feather are extra eyes, ears, and mouths representing how rumour spreads. Her need for neither sleep nor shelter means she’s constantly on the move, travelling great distances overnight, and she grows in scale to match the popularity of her slanders – she might start small, as a new rumour is first nervously uttered, but then she expands until her head is lost in dark storm clouds, and only her torso and feet are visible.51 In short, Fama is less goddess, more B-movie monster intent on trashing Tokyo.
Until now, we’ve used fame/kleos as Daniel Boorstin would’ve wanted, meaning a lasting, deserved form of glory. But let’s look closer, because Virgil’s personification of public recognition is terrifying. Fama’s name derived from the Latin verb fari, ‘to speak’, and this reveals one of the inconsistencies of ancient reputation. In Virgil’s depiction, Fama was equally the goddess of widespread praise as of career-destroying scandal; the only criterion for her involvement was that a person’s name be on people’s lips, for reasons good or ill.
Indeed, to make sense of the confusion, the scholar Gianni Guastella draws a distinction between Fama-Rumour and Fama-Glory52 – the former being short-lived gossip, almost akin to celebrity status, and the latter being that enduring reputation meted out to Achilles and those stupidly brave medieval warriors. So here’s where things get annoyingly vague: ancient fame could be temporary or permanent, positive or negative. That in itself is rather inconvenient to the fame = glorious renown idea. But – given that Mercury, the messenger of divine opinion, was often depicted as a handsome, honest man with winged sandals to propel him at speed – it’s pretty revealing that Virgil’s courier service for public opinion was a chimeric beast which would’ve made even Godzilla piss himself in fear. That really doesn’t sound like a good thing.
Virgil wasn’t alone in finding fame unsettling. The great Roman orator Cicero had first earned his reputation with victory in a landmark legal case, and he was still widely admired when Mark Antony’s assassins hunted him down, during the bloody repercussions from Caesar’s murder, and displayed his severed head and hand on Rome’s speaking platform, the rostra. Before his brutal end, Cicero had written about fame, and in particular this perceptive line addressed to his son: ‘If someone from his early years has some claim on fame and distinction, whether bequeathed by his father … or by some fluke or chance happening, the eyes of the world are directed upon him. People enquire about his activities and about the sort of life he is living. As if he were caught in a dazzling spotlight, no word, no deed of his can remain hidden.’53
This observation might easily apply today to a newly appointed cabinet minister whose old speeches are inspected for problematic opinions. Fame invites the invasive gaze and has done so for two millennia. Both Virgil and Cicero seemingly judged public opinion a fickle and dangerous creature, neither reliable enough to trust nor toothless enough to ignore. Virgil was a modest man who, the ancient historian Suetonius tells us, hid from his admirers and blushed when they praised him. But one wonders if such modesty wasn’t gawky introversion, but rather a defence mechanism against the perils of over-exposure. His scary depiction of Fama makes public notoriety seem the work of some alarmingly inhuman natural force, akin to being in the path of a tornado or finding oneself stalked by a ravenous predator.
Yet this terror wasn’t generated by fickle gods and savage nature, but by human behaviour – gossip, jokes, slander, envious innuendos, heartfelt compliments, and the rest. Another ancient writer, Plutarch, admitted: ‘Men in public life are responsible for more than their public words and actions: their dinners, beds, marriages, amusements and interests are all objects of curiosity.’ To be famous was to be scrutinised by strangers, and to have one’s private life interrogated. Fame wasn’t only heroic glory, it could be a curse. Particularly when the public didn’t always like what they saw.
Let’s rewind back to Homer. In the Iliad, Achilles acquires his immortal kleos by slaying Hector, but this act of bloodshed also transforms Hector too. Like a Bronze Age Obi-Wan Kenobi, struck down by Darth Vader, he becomes more powerful in death. Though he initially flees from his vengeful enemy, Hector is eventually tricked by the gods into showing courage against a pissed-off, semi-divine killing machine. He gets a sword in the throat for his troubles, but there’s no shame in losing to a furious beefcake with molten grief powering his mighty limbs. However, had Homer wanted to vilify Hector as a coward, and tarnish him with disgraceful fame, he could’ve used a specific Greek word: duskleês. But, weirdly, it barely shows up in classical literature. The Greeks seemingly preferred kleos as their go-to label for everything, even a bad reputation, despite the headache this produces for modern historians.54
You might be assuming the Romans corrected this problem. After all, modern English gives us the thrilling infamy as a badge of shameful disgrace, and that sounds properly Roman, doesn’t it? Curiously, the answer is ‘No!’ Infamy’s negative meaning only entered English usage circa 1380, during the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. For the Romans, infamia wasn’t a moral judgement, but a legal term for an outlaw stripped of legal rights, or it was a sociological category for being low status – a slave or gladiator, perhaps.55 Even at the height of his various controversies – even when accused of genocide – Julius Caesar never lurked under infamia’s dark umbrella. He just had bad fama. Oh, and before you get your hopes up about notorious, don’t bother. It’s medieval Latin for someone ‘of note’, whether good or bad.* Our negative meaning, which promises such thrilling transgression, dates back only as far as Shakespeare’s day.56
In short, then, the ancients were an annoying bunch whose choice of vocabulary is a proper nuisance. Didn’t they realise how awkward this all was? Actually, maybe they did. As a way of highlighting the jarring dichotomy between glory and gossip, ancient tradition declared the heroic Alexander the Great to have been born on the exact day on which a heinous crime was committed, meaning glory and infamy would forever be linked. The sinister culprit was Herostratus, and he’s given his name to the diagnosis for the deviant thrill experienced by mass murderers when their names appear in rolling news coverage; it’s an impulse so dangerous that some psychologists wonder if we shouldn’t broadcast reports of terrorist attacks at all, for fear of inspiring the next one.57 This disturbing desire for fame by any means is dubbed Herostratus Syndrome, after the arsonist who burned down the Temple of Ephesus, one of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’, in 356 BCE.
Herostratus was caught and tortured into confessing. He’d wanted to acquire glorious kleos and – being low-born, talentless, and poor – figured his best shot was destroying something famously beautiful. Recognising this vainglorious motivation, the authorities punished Herostratus by erasing him from history. He would be made aklees (stripped of his kleos), so that no one would ever know his name. And yet … we do! His crime was so appalling, ancient writers couldn’t help themselves. Herostratus lured them into the irresistible outrage which granted his wish and keeps him posthumously alive. He’s a real-life Voldemort, a Sauron of history. He whispers to us from the shadows, imploring us to be offended. He has a Wikipedia page and a syndrome named after him. He’s the focus of this paragraph. His kleos is undeniable. Dammit, the bastard won!
Ancient fame was strangely two-headed. The traditional idea that it was awarded as posthumous glory, by elite juries of subsequent worthies, certainly applies to the heroes of myth and poetry, but it doesn’t fully reflect the experiences of real people who found themselves roasted by the burning glare of public fascination. Virgil and Cicero didn’t seem to think so, anyway. To be famous wasn’t just to be painted on a vase, looking buff with your shirt off; famous was also to be unique, known to many and rendered vulnerable to the sharp opinions of strangers. It was about rumour. It came from the verb ‘to speak’. It got personal. And it applied to the living.
I see glory and fame as similar but separate ideas, so I’m on board with Gianni Guastella’s division of Fama-Rumour and Fama-Glory.58 Plus, there’s my other category, renown, to consider. Though that’s a public reputation which brings plenty of attention, I believe it can also arrive without the aggressively invasive rumour-mongering, as we’ve seen in the career of Sir David Attenborough. All told, we have a few things to consider, and there are some murky overlaps, but I believe celebrity differs from fame, glory, and renown because they don’t rely upon the support of capitalistic mass media; they could all thrive in a pre-modern age, before newspapers, photographs, branded merchandise, and the internet.
Julius Caesar was hugely famous, a Greek scientist like Archimedes was renowned, Achilles was posthumously glorious, but none of them were celebrities. If you’ll let me coin a slogan: ‘All historical celebrities were famous, but not all famous people were celebrities.’ Feel free to tattoo it on your forehead. Glory, renown, fame, and celebrity are inextricably linked, and it can take a migraine-inducing feat of patience to untangle them, but Daniel Boorstin was wrong to think modern celebrity usurped the others. Instead, they’ve coexisted for centuries, and still do today.
We see this in Casanova’s memoirs, which were written in French. As Nicola Vinovrški summarises: ‘The adjectives he used most frequently to describe well-known people were célèbre and fameux. On some occasions, the word fameux had negative connotations and was akin to notorious. Most frequently, he used la renommée to indicate fame but also used célébrité. Infâme … was an insult and it applied to people who were not necessarily well known. To describe making an impression in public, Casanova almost always used briller [the verb ‘to shine’]. He described being well known as being talked about, frequently using the metaphor of creating noise (faire du bruit).’59 Notice how Casanova replicated ancient custom by making fameux mean both positive and negative fame? It’s no wonder we get so confused with our synonyms for famousness. We’ve learned from the best.
You might assume things are much more straightforward with infamy and notoriety, but no! Despite being negatively charged fame particles, they curiously mirror positive ones. A famous villain will be widely known, distinctive, and the subject of media coverage – this might equate to negative renown if only their wicked deeds are widely known, or if they’re an absolute tosspot of a politician. But a famous criminal or hated provocateur might also become the subject of media gossip about their private life, or even the focus of a commercial market. Alarmingly, Jack the Ripper – with his lucrative industry of gothic fright – ticks all five boxes on my celebrity checklist. He’s infamous, notorious, and a celebrity. He’s also, much to my horror, glorious, I suppose, though not in the positive sense of the word. He’s acquired posthumous kleos through committing dramatic, disgusting atrocities. He’s the modern Herostratus.
Where does that leave us? There are obvious overlaps, and the blurred edges are somewhat maddening, but I do see some important distinctions: those with both positive and negative glory/kleos have a powerful posthumous reputation; those with renown are noted for their achievements, but not their private lives; those with fame suffer the slings and arrows of personal gossip, and perhaps are known for their achievements too, but they lack a commercial economy of their own. But standing separate to them all is celebrity:
CELEBRITY (noun): A unique persona made widely known to the public via media coverage, and whose life is publicly consumed as dramatic entertainment, and whose commercial brand is profitable for those who exploit their popularity, and perhaps also for themselves.
Phew! Do you need a lie-down? I feel like I need a lie-down. Thankfully, things get a lot simpler from here. Now we know what a celebrity is, it’s time to find out what they look like. Or, rather, how the celebs of yesteryear manipulated their visual image to maintain their careers.
* I would gladly welcome it back into our lexicon, if only to enjoy TV shows called things like Celebriousness Mastermind and Celebriousness Tattoo Fixers. Delightful!
* Google ‘Young Tennyson’, the dude had great cheekbones.
* Meryl Streep is in her seventies now, but she tastefully disrobed in earlier films.
* That last sentence is a real blockbuster. Imagine bribing your sibling to stay outside an exclusion zone because they keep trying to ride on your coat-tails. I bet Christmas was awkward …
* I know, I know. I really tried to think of a better word … I promise.
* He should’ve plumped for Vice-President of Senatorial Logistics.
* If you’re feeling brave, google it – you’ll see her alleged lover riding a giant cock as if it’s a two-legged horse.
* I tore my Achilles tendon and calf muscle playing football, and my whole leg went blue. I don’t recommend it.
* The Notable B.I.G. doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?