Dead Famous

When I was thirteen years old, a footballer called Alan Shearer was sold to Newcastle United for a world record fee of £15m, and, to be frank, my brain basically melted. I was so astounded, I gave a presentation about it in my English class at school. Fifteen million. For one footballer! But, in 2017, a new world record fee was set. Neymar is a Brazilian wing wizard with magical feet and a hilarious flair for the melodramatic. When fouled, he doesn’t so much fall over as spiral across the turf like someone’s stuffed him in a sleeping bag and rolled him down a mountain. But on the few occasions when he’s upright, he’s scintillatingly brilliant. So Paris Saint-Germain raided their piggy bank and handed Barcelona £198m to own this mercurial genius. Yes, that’s right, ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT MILLION POUNDS.

Extraordinarily, that was the cheapest part of the transfer. There were also agent fees, and bonuses, and legal fees to cover. PSG had to acquire his image rights, so they could use him in their global branding. Oh, and they had to pay his wages: a cool £775,000 per week, or £41m per year. With bonuses, it’s more like £56m. All in all, that transfer cost PSG nearly half a billion quid. Neymar, meanwhile, pocketed both his wages and another £14m from personal sponsorship deals with Nike, Beats by Dre, Gillette, McDonald’s, and more. Basically, he was earning my entire annual salary in the time it takes him to pick up one of his socks.

So why is he worth so much? Part of the appeal is Neymar’s mammoth global celebrity. He’s intensely revered in his native Brazil, and lives the glamorous celebrity lifestyle: fast cars, gorgeous girlfriends, luxury-casual clothing, diamond earrings, and a variety of iconic haircuts, including a dazzlingly ill-conceived hyper-mullet. He’s the glamorous face of globalised football. PSG didn’t just acquire an elite player: Neymar is his own micro-economy.

Only two decades have passed since Alan Shearer melted my brain, but now football has entered a new gold-encrusted paradigm of financial muscularity. The sport’s becoming more popular in America and Asia, but the enormous escalation in transfer fees and wages isn’t just driven by new audiences, but by longstanding fans paying more for the privilege of being fans. They’ll fork out £60 for a replica shirt, and the same again every time they enter the stadium. More crucially, they’ll find another £50 every month for the sports packages that deliver beautiful, slow-mo, pausable HD TV. Neymar’s celebrity helps drive the economics of the game; but the game’s economics have also propelled his celebrity. We pay so much to watch because he’s famous, and he’s famous because we pay so much to watch.

Modern sport is utterly removed from its amateurish, historical roots, but if we go back far enough, there might just be a couple of case studies that dwarf Neymar’s vast earnings. In the mid-second century, a Roman charioteer called Gaius Appuleius Diocles competed in 4,357 races and won 34 per cent of them. This was a phenomenal achievement in a twenty-four-year career because most charioteers were lucky to survive even a couple of years without being mangled beneath wheels, pulverised by galloping hooves, or crushed against a wall. Life as a Roman soldier was a walk in the park compared to chariot-racing.

Diocles hoovered up a mind-boggling 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money during his career. If he’d saved it up in a piggy bank, then splurged it all at once, he would’ve been able to fund the entire Roman Empire’s military for about three months. There’s no way to compare ancient economies to our own, and modern warfare is incomparably expensive, but, if you want to play a fun game, Peter Struck points out that covering the US military’s wage bill for three months would now set you back $15bn.¹ If we’re happy to speculate like this, then Diocles’ ancient earnings make Neymar’s fortune look like a child’s pocket money.

Much like the Brazilian footballer, who’s regularly eclipsed by Lionel Messi’s genius, Diocles wasn’t necessarily the best; Pompeius Musclosus, who raced for the rival Blue team, won more victories. But Diocles seemingly wasn’t driven by glory alone; he prioritised races with the biggest prize money.² In such a terrifyingly dangerous sport, who could blame him for choosing to gamble on only the most lucrative events?

Of course, I’m cheating a bit here, because I’ve previously argued celebrity didn’t exist in ancient Rome, and I’m not backtracking on that just for Diocles, either. But he’s still an intriguing case study in the economics of fame. Here was an athlete whose value was spectacular because he was a public spectacle. Romans paid to watch him compete, and their entry tickets funded his winnings. The more he won, the more he earned, and the more people wanted to watch him; his success fuelled a narrative of obsessive fandom. It made his rivals hate him all the more, and so made their victories all the sweeter. But at the heart of it all was cold, hard cash.

It’s money I want to focus on in this chapter, because the history of celebrity produces surprises when it comes to cashflow. I began with football, my favourite sport, but its enormous financial power is a very recent development. In 1979, Britain’s highest-paid footballer, Peter Shilton, was earning only ten times the national average wage. Indeed, sport wasn’t a reliable way to become a well-paid celebrity until maybe four decades ago, and there were far fewer sporting celebs in past centuries than there were from the worlds of music, theatre, writing, politics, and war. That said, if we riffle through the annals of history, we do glimpse a few in the early 1800s.

My favourite is the man who first inspired this book, the American bare-knuckle boxer Bill Richmond, who was liberated from slavery during the US Revolutionary War. He was brought to Britain by the progressive aristocrat Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland, who paid for him to be educated and apprenticed as a craftsman, after which Richmond should’ve lived a boring life of married mundanity in Yorkshire. Instead, he took up prizefighting at the age of forty, when most fighters were considering retirement.

Richmond was probably Britain’s first black sporting celebrity, and he was widely admired, though his ironic, paradoxical nicknames, ‘the Black Terror’ and ‘the Lilywhite’, reveal how race dominated his reputation. But if black people at the time were often portrayed as savage simpletons – or, as physical outliers like Sara Baartman – Richmond challenged such stereotypes with his cultured wit and gentlemanly manners. He was widely hailed as a top bloke. He befriended aristocrats and royals, hung out with Byron and Hazlitt, sparred for the visiting Tsar of Russia, was bodyguard at the coronation of George IV, and was celebrated by sportswriters as a smart fighter and technically innovative trainer. But it didn’t make him rich.

Richmond was comfortable for a while. In classic fashion, he bought a London pub that became the informal home of the boxing community, so all the bare-knuckle fighters orbited around him like bruised moons, but he couldn’t afford to keep it for long, and, when I came to research his life for an intended biography, I found his later years dominated by cashflow problems, gambling debts, and failed businesses. Richmond died in 1829, and his good name earned him a brief obituary in The Times, but his impoverished wife, Mary, was slung straight into the workhouse.³ Bill Richmond’s celebrity had been built on his speed and dexterity: he’d literally danced rings around much bigger men,* and he’d fought into his early sixties, but bodies always fail. When his bones began to creak, there wasn’t enough in the kitty to fall back on.

Jump forward a few decades, and the situation was changing a little. Boxing success also foisted celebrity status upon the American prizefighter John L. Sullivan, emphatically nicknamed ‘the Boston Strong Boy’, which makes him sound like a plucky toddler wearing his dad’s shorts. He rose to become the Heavyweight Champion of the World in both gloved and bare-knuckle boxing in the 1880s–90s, and was among the earliest sporting celebrities in America, not least because his fight with Jake Kilrain was perhaps the first to receive nationwide coverage. However, his journalistic allure wasn’t just built on pugilistic achievements, or notions of boyish charm; Sullivan had a volcanic temper, an epic drinking problem, and womanising tendencies, and his weight fluctuated wildly. A police officer arrested him for punching a horse.⁴ I mean, who does that?!

Sullivan was a violent, chaotic man who guaranteed a story, regardless of whether a bout was scheduled. He fitted the bill for ‘troubled sports icon’. But he worked his fame to the max, touring the nation across eight months and making over 200 personal appearances on his ‘knockout tour’ in which he challenged local audiences to face him in the ring – any man still standing after four rounds would claim a cash prize. Some were stupid enough to try.⁵ Seeing the end of his fighting career coming, he used his sporting celebrity to launch other careers as sports journalist, public speaker, and even actor, making him the anti-Stallone: a boxer famed for acting rather than vice versa. He died of the effects of alcoholism aged fifty-nine, despite having kicked the habit, but he’d clung to the limelight enough to pay the bills. He wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor like Bill Richmond.

Meanwhile, between his 1865 debut and his death in 1915, Britain’s premier athlete was the cricketing titan, W. G. Grace, owner of sport’s most iconic beard. In his twenties he’d been a swift-footed sprinter with the body of a CrossFit-obsessed hipster, but he’d swelled in middle age to resemble a bat-swinging Brian Blessed. Luckily, speed wasn’t the essence of his game; thwacking balls was his metier, and he was magnificent at it, meaning he carried on being a cricketing master long after he stopped being able to touch his toes. But there was a strange shadow looming over his career.

English sport was class-obsessed, and Grace was a middle-class ‘gentleman amateur’ who played for expenses only, as opposed to the working-class ‘professionals’ who drew a wage from their team. For most of his career, he worked as a suburban doctor and wasn’t really meant to be a superstar cricketer, and certainly wasn’t meant to earn so much from it. But his iconic physique and ball-smashing brilliance offered up countless opportunities for enrichment, particularly through lucrative international tours, so he stretched the definition of amateur until it audibly twanged. He was more a shamateur; a lot of money probably passed under the table, making it hard for biographers to track Grace’s income.

We know his celebrity had a quantifiable value. Ticket prices doubled when he played, and there are stories that occasionally he’d refuse to be judged ‘out’ by the match official because ‘the people came to see me bat, not you umpire’. Perhaps the most obvious sources of income for the historian to seize upon were public benefits arranged in his honour. In 1895, the Daily Telegraph collected £5,000 for Grace in an exercise of national gratitude which also, conveniently, boosted the paper’s circulation. Indeed, several other celebs piggybacked on his fame by scribbling letters to the editor announcing their donations in gratuitously performative style, looking to be seen as generous.⁶

This system of public benefits might seem odd; normally it’s the sort of thing we do for fallen heroes in times of hardship – the boxing community held a collection for Bill Richmond’s wife when she was widowed⁷ – but, in prior centuries, it wasn’t just offered as a farewell pension for a declining favourite, but instead exploited audience fervour at the height of a star’s appeal. And we find it most commonly in the world of theatre and opera. So, let’s ditch sport and skip off to the nearest auditorium for some highbrow culture.

Because they’re worth it

In 1734, London welcomed a thrilling new import. He was the great Italian castrato, Farinelli, who was blessed with a truly astonishing voice: the power of a man’s lungs, yet the pitch of a soaring soprano. The trick, as the name suggests, was pre-puberty castration. To sound angelic, boys aged eight to ten were dunked in a hot bath then had their testicular ducts, and sometimes the testicles, sliced away by a surgeon. It was illegal and dangerous, but some reports claimed 4,000 Italian boys endured the agony every year. If true, hundreds possibly died.⁸ Those who survived to adulthood never went through puberty’s testosterone tsunami, meaning they grew into distinctively feminised bodies.

Farinelli had all the hallmark traits: he was tall, baby-faced, long-limbed, and gently curvaceous, possessed no Adam’s apple, and could hit a high C6 note with incredible volume.* If you spliced Freddie Mercury, Justin Bieber, and Christina Aguilera together, and made them belt out some Handel, you might get somewhere close.* But, on top of his unusual physicality, which was a draw in its own right, Farinelli was also a sublime technician with unworldly breath control. Castratos were the finest singers of the age, and he was the best of them. So, you can imagine the kerfuffle when Farinelli first showed up in London, at the height of his powers.

But it’s not the opening performances I want to regale you with. Instead, here’s a newspaper puff piece from the following year:

’Tis expected that Signor Farinello [sic] will have the greatest Appearance on Saturday that has been known. We hear that a Contrivance will be made to accommodate 2000 People. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has been pleas’d to give him 200 Guineas, the Spanish Ambassador 100, the Emperor’s Ambassador 50, his Grace the Duke of Leeds 50, the Countess of Portmore 50, Lord Burlington 50, his Grace the Duke of Richmond 50, the Hon. Col Paget 30, Lady Rich 20, and most of the other Nobility 50, 30, or 20 Guineas each; so that ’tis believ’d his Benefit will be worth to him upwards of 2000 [pounds].⁹

The opera house was rammed with awestruck admirers, though it was probably only 940 people, the theatre’s safe maximum capacity, not the vaunted 2,000. But you can see from the quote that this was no ordinary gig; the greatest lords and ladies in the land were each donating huge sums, and the public were asked to do the same. Most would’ve already basked in his brilliance the year before, so the generosity wasn’t the frenzied hysteria of mere novelty. Instead, this was a benefit night – a contractual rider that bookended Farinelli’s seasonal obligations.

Once all the scheduled performances of plays or operas had been laid on, Farinelli emulated the big-name stars of the age by demanding a gig where all the profits went straight into his pocket, or were split with the theatre manager. The other performers were expected to give their time as a favour, or in return for a modest fee. Farinelli was both star performer and needy charity. Imagine a comedian introducing a variety bill with the line: ‘Tonight’s performances are all for a good cause: I want a new Ferrari.’ It’s an odd idea, though the stars did have to cover the production costs themselves, so there was some risk involved.

But benefits weren’t just lucrative. They were popularity barometers, a way of inviting the public to prove their love through crowdfunding. It was a pre-internet model of patronage, three centuries before fan-funded Kickstarters; it boosted the star’s salary and confirmed career trajectories. A sparsely attended benefit was a deafening bong on the bells of doom because it meant bored audiences might not show up to the waning star’s next play. Understandably, then, performers needed benefits to go well; they called in all their favours and cranked up the full wattage of their charisma to maximise bums on seats. Such vital self-promotion required cunning strategies. Several noted actresses of the mid-1700s sold benefit tickets directly from their homes, surrendering a tantalising glimpse of their private life in return for fan loyalty. It wasn’t so different to modern celebs taking a fat cheque off Hello! magazine to show us around their fancy new kitchen.

As the theatre historian Felicity Nussbaum notes: ‘From the 1720s to the 1760s, three Drury Lane actresses – Catherine Clive, Susannah Cibber, and Hannah Pritchard – earned from one-third to one-half of their annual incomes on benefit nights, and each cultivated a devoted following. The most celebrated stars could bargain for acting in their drama of choice, and each of these actresses further improved the theatre’s receipts by cleverly asking David Garrick to co-star with them.’¹⁰ Benefits were hugely profitable, but it was easy to misjudge it.

Some thespians were accused of ignoring their ordinary fans because they were so desperate to woo the posher patrons in the comfy boxes. It was one thing to be grateful, but a star couldn’t be seen to neglect the people in the cheap seats. All fans expected to be appreciated. The other risk was particularly felt by female performers, who lived under constant scrutiny of their bodies and sexual morals. It’s no surprise the classy matriarch of late-eighteenth-century theatre, Sarah Siddons, neutralised this threat by selling benefit tickets from the theatre box office, rather than opening herself up to scandalous rumours of men visiting her home.¹¹

The golden wage of piracy

Charles Dickens was at war. In 1837, his debut novel, The Pickwick Papers, had propelled him to enormous literary stardom, but Dickens’s amusing book had been immediately seized upon by pirates; not the peg-legged, parrot-owning buccaneers of the high seas, but aggressive publishers and theatre producers who laughed in the face of copyright law. Dickens, then known by his pen name, ‘Boz’, was having none of it. He knew that, since 1710’s ground-breaking Statute of Queen Anne, authors and their publishers had owned their creative work. He held the copyright, and he could defend it. Or, at least, that was the theory. In reality, the law was widely flouted by plagiarists and it was uselessly mute on the question of stage adaptations. Over the next five years, Dickens valiantly raged against unauthorised stage productions of his works, sometimes compromising by licensing his text to those producers willing to pay a few bob for his blessing. Often, though, he was totally defeated.

As for printed piracies, the law was supposedly on his side but proved disappointingly meek. In 1837, his publisher sued Edward Lloyd, publisher of The Penny Pickwick, which was ‘written’ by Thomas Peckett Prest. It was a book which trampled all over Dickens’s intellectual property, but the judge declared it was a parody so far removed from the original that no reader would assume they were the same book. These knock-offs sold in their tens of thousands for a mere penny, often outselling the original text. The same had happened to Lord Byron some fifteen years earlier, forcing his publisher to release mega-cheap versions of his poems to stem the illegal tide.¹² This was a nuisance for the superstar poet, not least because his extravagant lifestyle saw him run up huge debts, so he needed the cash, but sometimes piracy was reassuring proof that everybody was talking about you, and Byron loved to be talked about. His ego may have been soothed, even if his wallet felt a little light.

Dickens was similarly ego-driven, but was even more obsessed with money, having experienced traumatic poverty in his childhood. He saw these knock-offs as both insults to his work and threats to his livelihood. Some of Dickens’s most-hated ‘piracies’ were cheap clones with the occasional change of spelling – who could forget such classics as Oliver Twiss and Nickelas Nickleberry – while others, such as Pickwick in America!, were essentially illegal fan fiction that appropriated Dickens’s beloved characters and continued their adventures in new scenarios. The obvious thing about fan fiction is that it’s not usually more profitable than the original text,* and Dickens reacted with trademark outrage, barking in his so-called ‘Nickleby Proclamation’ that ‘some dishonest dullards, resident in the by-streets and cellars of this town … [publish] cheap and wretched imitations of our delectable Works’.

When he first toured America, in 1842, he found the situation to be even worse; writers were utterly unprotected from exploitation. But he returned home to some good news, learning of an update to British law that strengthened copyright beyond the life of the author. This stiffened his determination. In 1844, he sued his enemies once more, and this time he won. The defendants were a double act called Lee and Haddock* – who’d foolishly claimed their dodgy version of A Christmas Carol wasn’t a parody, as had worked for The Penny Pickwick, but was instead an improvement on the original! It takes cojones to steal someone’s work then proclaim you’ve made it better. Dickens presumably tap-danced with delight at his win, only for the dastardly duo to immediately file for bankruptcy. Dickens – who hated the legal system at the best of times – was forced to pay legal costs when he’d presumably been expecting compensation. This bitter victory was the last of his plagiarism adventures in the law courts, and you can probably see why.¹³

Pirates stole more than just creativity; they also hijacked an author’s revenue. Why would someone pay full price for Nicholas Nickleby when Nickelas Nickleberry was only a penny? But this wasn’t an experience solely limited to celebrity writers. Indeed, one of the criteria in my Chapter 3 checklist was that celebrity doesn’t just mean getting rich; it’s being famous enough for others to make money from a person’s fame, often without permission.

Today, we see this in the gossip magazine industry, in which countless journalists, photographers, bloggers, and editors earn a living talking about famous people; they dissect their images, judge their bodies, explore the cracks in their relationships, and pit stars against each other in dramatic feuds. Often celebrities play along, giving tell-all interviews or arranging for paparazzi to ‘secretly’ snap them while they frolic on a beach. But compliance isn’t essential, and the public pays for celebrity gossip regardless of how it’s sourced. This parasitic commercialisation of fame is the bedrock of celebrity culture. Of course, most modern stars have very healthy bank accounts, but much of the cash bypasses them entirely. Most celebs are the product rather than the retailer.

We see this exploitation in the way the superstar actor David Garrick appeared as his celebrated character Abel Drugger on unauthorised tobacco cards and bookshop adverts in the mid-1700s.¹⁴ One hundred years later, in 1888, the same was happening to the stars featured in the Duke’s Cigarette Cards titled ‘Histories of Poor Boys Who Have Become Rich, and Other Famous People’, which featured collectible images of Tennyson, Edison, Barnum, Bernhardt, Carnegie, and Twain, among others.¹⁵ There’s no evidence to suggest these famous people gave permission to be depicted on commercialised collectibles.

In the 1760s, the industrial innovation of Josiah Wedgwood, Britain’s premier potter, introduced cheap celebrity art to the middle classes. They could buy a Sarah Siddons chess set featuring her as the queen of the board, or maybe just a nice statue of her as Lady Macbeth for the mantelpiece.¹⁶ Statuettes were also made of famous boxers, soldiers, actors, politicians (such as John Wilkes and later, in the nineteenth century, Richard Cobden), and even claimants to hereditary fortunes, such as the infamous Tichborne Claimant, who rose to bizarre notoriety in the 1860s when he said he was the Baronet of Tichborne, who’d allegedly drowned in a shipwreck.* Also available were pottery personifications of fancy continental celebs, such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the perfect gift for the aspiring Francophile in your life.

One of the biggest celebrities in late-eighteenth-century Paris was an American. As his nation’s foreign ambassador, Benjamin Franklin found his celebrity amusingly surreal. As well as the paintings and engravings, there were also ceramic medallions made of his balding pate, and – as Antoine Lilti shows – Franklin popped up on snuffboxes, statues, cameos, rings, dishes, cups, and whatever else looked vaguely in need of a pudgy geriatric American. He wrote to his daughter about it in bemused bewilderment:

These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon, so that he durst not do any thing that would oblige him to run away, as his physiognomy would discover him wherever he should venture to show it. It is said by learned etymologists that the name Doll, for the images children play with, is derived from the word IDOL; from the number of dolls now made of him, he may be truly said in that sense, to be i-doll-ized in this country.’¹⁷

A similar befuddlement was expressed by W. G. Grace when, in the 1880s, he passed a teenage boy smoking a pipe that featured his famous bearded face carved into the clay bowl. The celebrated batsman clocked it with an amused double take, and the boy later recalled: ‘On looking around, I saw him pulling his whiskers. With a shake of his head, he called me back, and asked me if he could look at the pipe. Proudly I handed it to him. He asked me how much it cost, and when I told him twopence, he said, “It cost more than that to get it as black as that.” I smiled and he then asked me if I would sell it. I tried to tell him he could have it with pleasure, but before a word could come he had put 2s. 6d. in my hands and turned on his heels, laughing.’¹⁸ It’s an oddly charming vignette, but it must have been quite odd to see smoke puffing out of his own head.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, celebrities’ images were used without their permission to sell products and promote other people’s services. When the beautiful Cléo de Mérode arrived in New York, her dancing proved rather disappointing in its lack of Parisian kink, but she was nevertheless seized upon as a brilliant sales engine: her biographer Michael D. Garval has found adverts for Mérode underwear, belts, nightgowns, cigars, dolls, and fake flowers, all of which exploited her name in the hope that an association might entice customers.¹⁹

And it wasn’t a solely European or North American phenomenon. Though the Indian film industry was slow to adopt the celebrity star system, and only developed a gossip industry for movie stars in the 1950s, Kathryn Hansen has found that Marathi theatre stars, such as Bal Gandharva – a man who played female parts due to the ban on actresses – had his face appear on ‘medicinal tonic, soap, keychain, Gandharva cap, and toilet powder’.²⁰ Similarly, the Indian film actress Leela Chitnis modelled for Lux soap in 1941.²¹ From the moment celebrity burst into life, stars were used to sell stuff. But it wasn’t until the late 1800s that most realised they could get paid for their sponsorship work.

Greedy and needy

In the mid-1700s, British theatre witnessed an explosion in salaries for celebrity performers, as cunning managers spotted the huge box office appeal of special individuals. Though actresses were often derided as sexual provocateurs, Felicity Nussbaum has shown that many out-earned their male co-stars, while all the big-name actors trounced the income of bestselling novelists, who earned sod all by contrast (writing remains a poorly paid profession, I’m disappointed to report). Kitty Clive outperformed the much-admired Charles Macklin in 1742–3; in 1747, Hannah Pritchard pocketed an extra £200 over John Rich, while Sarah Siddons claimed £30 per night for a thirty-week run in the 1790s, and doubled that in Manchester, putting her in the top bracket. Of course, by 1814 the new superstar was Edmund Kean, whose miraculous debut, and subsequent successes, saw him perform to around 35 per cent of all Londoners.* In return for his one-man rescue of the Drury Lane theatre, he picked up £50 per night.²²

For three centuries, celebrities were often harnessed like donkeys to haul other people’s products, but they also extracted generous incomes from the public’s desire to devour their public personas and talents. This resulted in people from ordinary backgrounds being thrust into the big leagues of pseudo-aristocracy, where they flounced around in the fanciest of hats and drove the shiniest of carriages. But the money often ran out when their assets started to fade: a career built on wit and intellect might endure into old age, but beauty, youth, sex appeal, physical strength, and zeitgeist-surfing novelty are all temporary. Some of the most celebrated names of the long eighteenth century died in miserable poverty, including Emma Hamilton, Bill Richmond, Dorothy Jordan, Mary Robinson, and Beau Brummell. But when the going was good, it was great. Sometimes too great …

Farinelli’s celebrity status as a musical Peter Pan ensured he shifted his benefit tickets; but historians have puzzled somewhat over its vast success compared to the disappointing sales of his opera company’s other shows, which lost a ton of money.²³ Maybe he was a better singer than actor, so crowds thinned out once they’d heard the novelty of his voice? Maybe his benefit was lavishly rewarded because people wanted to be seen to be generous, as was the case with those virtue-signalling celebs who wrote into the Telegraph announcing their donation to W. G. Grace’s benefit? Maybe Londoners were bored of him but didn’t want to dissuade the next big European import from coming over? Whatever the reason, contemporary reports say Farinelli trousered something like £5,000 from performances, benefits, and gifts from wealthy donors. If true, that was a veritable fortune in the 1730s – something like £10m today – but it hadn’t been wall-to-wall success, night after night.

Despite the fact that it was probably a good time for him to leave, not everyone was delighted when Farinelli announced he was heading off for the sunnier climes of Paris and the Spanish royal court. The Daily Post crashed into his shins with a brutal, two-footed tackle:

until the Winter Season and the Heaviness of our Purses invite him back again to London. But if our Brains were not as heavy as our Purses, such shameless Fellows would have no Business among us. Farinelli, what with his Salary, his Benefit Night, and the Presents made him by some of the wise People of this Nation, gets at least £5000 a Year in England, and yet he is not asham’d to run about like a Stroller from Kingdom to Kingdom, as if we did not give him sufficient Encouragement.²⁴

This accusation of his being a fair-weather, fly-by-night money-grubber was harsh, but he wasn’t the last star to be tarnished with the ‘greedy’ slur.

One of the strange dualities of celebrity is how financial success both confirms proof of genius – if we’re all paying them so much, they must be good! – and is also a scourge with which to thrash them. Every time a footballer’s salary is reported, we see furious people screaming that the money should go to nurses. Sadly, the public won’t pay £50 a month to watch slow-motion replays of medical staff sticking an IV drip into lovely old Mildred from Aberdeen. Footballers command that ludicrous salary because that’s the power of the marketplace and the value of our collective attention.

Between 1850 and 1852, Jenny Lind toured the USA, and her manager, P. T. Barnum, portrayed the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ as the sweetest, most Christian angel. But, behind the scenes, she was a fierce negotiator. By leveraging rival interest from other managers, she sparked a bidding war and squeezed Barnum like a satsuma until he offered a minimum fee of $1,000 per show, for 150 shows, plus first-class accommodation, dining expenses, and a travelling entourage of support staff.²⁵ And she demanded most of it up front, forcing Barnum to borrow heavily and risk everything. The extreme finances of this monster tour leaked to the press – presumably thanks to Barnum himself, who knew the promotional power of tabloid hubbub – and instigated a nationwide debate about whether a devout Christian, and a woman to boot, should earn this sort of money. Most newspaper columnists defended Lind, but presumably some Americans weren’t so forgiving.

As we know, in 1882 Oscar Wilde followed Lind across the Atlantic. His tour was also a financial success, but he too encountered a probing culture of celebrity journalism that both hailed the exciting newcomer and challenged his temerity at daring to earn such sums. In an interview with a Rochester paper, Wilde defended himself against rumours repeated in other papers:²⁶

This was too much for Mr. Wilde. He pushed back his hair and threw his cigarette away. Finally he said:

‘Well, I got $1,000 a night in Boston, and shall get the same here. Of course, in little cities I don’t expect so much. But it is merely filling in the time … I am extremely impressed by the entire disregard of Americans for money-making …’

‘… as shown by the remarks made by many of the western journals. They think it a strange and awful thing that I should want to make a few dollars by lecturing. Why, money-making is necessary for art. Money builds cities and makes them healthful. Money buys art and furnishes it an incentive. Is it strange that I should want to make money? And yet these newspapers cry out that I am making money!’

Not long after, the musical comedienne Anna Held countered rumours of her bankruptcy by arguing quite the opposite. Bankrupt? Mais, non! She had plans of perhaps one day buying up 200 acres in Quebec and opening a garden restaurant. Her notorious husband and promoter, Florenz Ziegfeld, whom she kept at arm’s length from her chequebook – probably with good reason – warranted barely a mention in this future fantasy. The money was clearly hers, and hers alone.

While designed to curb gossip of her supposed money woes, the assertion that she was actually swimming in filthy lucre produced a scornful response in the press. Cartoons were printed of her squatting atop piles of money, while outraged journalists screeched in bewilderment that a mediocre, skinny-hipped songstress could’ve accrued such a windfall from the public’s fervent adoration. She was undeserving of her riches, presumably because, in their eyes, she was undeserving of fame. The story had begun as a vicious insinuation that she was broke, but ended up being about her vulgar wealth. The follow-up to this media blitz was inevitable: hearing that she was loaded, fans and strangers alike pestered her for charitable gifts, assuming she would bail them out of their personal difficulties.²⁷ Anna Held’s money was never just her own. Somehow it was considered a public resource.

Throughout celebrity’s three-century story, the idea of the star as communal property has lingered in the air like a pungent fart, so it’s no surprise that ordinary people assumed a celebrity might be considered a sort of national ATM. Held was one of many stars to receive begging and presumptuous letters; they also flooded in through the heroic Grace Darling’s letterbox, and, in the early 1800s, crammed the pigeonhole of France’s great actor François-Joseph Talma, who was inundated with requests not only to meet fans in person, but also to assist them in legal battles, join them in dodgy gambling rackets, or help them book places to stay in Paris, as if he was some helpful travel agent.²⁸

Among the most heartbreaking requests for celebrity generosity were those from children writing to Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s, begging her to buy them the Shirley Temple dolls their parents couldn’t afford. Such was Temple’s enormous popularity with kids – she was the most famous child in the world, and kids loved her for it – these young fans became desperate to own anything associated with the pint-size princess of the silver screen. The movie studio, realising that toddlers grow up fast, cottoned on to Shirley’s limited shelf life as a marketing asset, and decided to throw her at everything: breakfast cereal, drinks, her own fashion range sold from the Sears catalogue, and the aforementioned dolls. These came in four sizes, the cheapest being only a couple of bucks, but their unaffordability was painfully felt by those kids too poor to scratch even that together. And so they turned to a political celebrity portrayed in the media as America’s proxy mother.²⁹ Here’s one of the letters, uncovered by the historian John F. Kasson:

You have nieces and sons who were young and some still are wanted a thing very much but tried hard to get it and can’t. I a girl from Chicago have tried so so hard to get five suscriptions [sic] to get a 22 inch Shirley Temple [doll] which the Daily Chicago Tribune is giving away. It is cheap for at 65 cents a month you get daily paper. You have millions of friends couldn’t you please ask them to take for one year at 65 cents a month the Daily Chicago Tribune. I don’t know how I’d ever thank you if you got them. I know one thing I’d pray with all my heart in Holy Mass and when receiving Holy Communion pray to God to bless you all. Please please do help me. Here is a picture of the Shirley Temple. If you do get them send them as soon as you can.

I’ve no idea if Mrs Roosevelt responded, but I love imagining her signing up to thousands of newspaper subscriptions and waking up to find the White House lawn being bombarded by a horde of bike-riding paperboys. Regardless of the outcome, it’s the hidden economics lurking in this letter that I find fascinating. Here was an example of celebrity’s commercialised interconnectedness: young fans unable to afford access to one heroic icon contacted another instead, but didn’t ask Roosevelt to buy the dolls for them; they wanted the First Lady to acquire them through a sponsored advertorial deal negotiated between the toy manufacturers, movie studio, Temple’s agent, and the Chicago Tribune. These kids were being sucked into a complex chain of business arrangements; their urge to acquire the doll probably felt like an act of undiluted intimacy with their celebrity favourite, but there was a profit-driven industry churning away in the background.

A tour de farce

In 1820, Edmund Kean embarked on an exciting adventure: he crossed the Atlantic to begin a tour of North America, following in the unstable footsteps of George Frederick Cooke – another shambling alcoholic – who’d done the same a decade beforehand. But Kean was even more famous than Cooke, and the Americans were ecstatic to receive him. Given what we know of Kean’s spectacular flair for self-sabotage, you might be already stifling your giggles at the prospect of how he managed to bungle this opportunity. But his shows were triumphs (sorry!). The money poured in, he kept it together, and the American people were dazzled and charmed.

Hang on, let me just check my notes … Oops, sorry, yes, you were right. Then he got to Boston …

Kean was warned that Bostonians didn’t go to the theatre in the summer off-season, but he scheduled performances anyway, expecting his stardom to have the attractive power of a giant magnet in a paperclip factory. No such luck. Night after night, Kean peeked out from behind the curtain to see an embarrassingly sparse audience. He claimed only twenty had bothered to show up for one particularly awful date. But the show must go on, right? Wrong. Kean felt insulted, and – because no tickets had been sold – refused to perform until the managers forked out an extra $200 for his wounded reputation.³⁰

Never the calmest of diplomats, he then published an open letter in the press, intending to defend his honour, but it came off sounding like a passive-aggressive whinge at Boston’s lack of sophistication;³¹ clearly, he was a genius who’d come all this way, and they didn’t appreciate him enough. This went down like a kite made of anvils. Soon it escalated into a scandal, eagerly reported back in Britain, and the upshot was a very stern warning never to set foot in Boston again. Edmund Kean returned to Britain flush with cash, but somewhat deflated.

At home, things got worse. In 1825, while escaping his high-profile sex scandal mentioned in Chapter 5, he decided to try another US tour. Surely, he’d be welcomed back with open arms? He was the great Edmund Kean, and five years had passed! In New York, he was pelted with oranges. He again tried to apologise in the press, saying he’d go to Boston next.³² As Kean took to the stage in November, the Bostonians rioted, with thousands of people tearing up the seats and smashing chandeliers. Incensed at his earlier insult, the mob broke their way into his dressing room, intent on doing him a violent mischief. Fortunately, he’d already been smuggled out of the theatre and was hiding at a theatre employee’s house, so the enraged audience marched to this man’s property, ready to beat the crap out of Kean. Luckily, the manager’s wife said she was heavily pregnant, and this calmed things down. Edmund, meanwhile, cowered under a linen press in a back room.*³³

Out on the road

The first British stage celebrities to tour America were both chaotic, charismatic addicts whose brilliance was offset by controversy. But while Kean’s tours weren’t exactly triumphs, they marked a key moment in the story of globalised celebrity. Previously, plenty of small-time acts had crossed the Atlantic to lead wandering lives as itinerant entertainers,³⁴ and Ann Hatton – the fame-chasing sister of Sarah Siddons – had found modest success with her opera, but Kean was perhaps the first huge star to step off the boat bathed in the golden light of reputation. Yet his tours came a full century after celebrity had first emerged: so why had it taken so long? Wasn’t there money to be made in the 1700s?

The most obvious reason is that Britain and America had gone to war in 1776, and egos were still sore from the outcome. Secondly, American cities were tiny compared to London and Paris; when war broke out, New York’s population was thirty times smaller than London’s.³⁵ So the market was much less tempting. But geography also played a key role. Touring was physically and logistically arduous; it took months, and transport networks were less than comfortable. Benjamin Franklin had gone the opposite way to Europe a few decades before, but he was an ambassador on an official posting, and he wasn’t trundling around France in a bumpy stagecoach.

Tours weren’t a new concept. In eighteenth-century Europe, such luminaries as Farinelli, Rousseau, and Clara the Rhino had all displayed themselves in foreign territories thanks to the promotional power of the printing press. America, however, was massive. And there was a whacking great ocean in the way. Kean signed up to months at sea, and weeks spent commuting between cities in uncomfortable carriages. It was profitable but grimly deficient in glamour. His experience of the crossing would’ve been broadly similar to Ben Franklin’s eight Atlantic voyages undertaken in his eventful life, with each one promising at least six weeks of being tossed by the waves, or even longer with unfriendly winds.

But by the 1840s technology was slowly smoothing the way. Ocean-going steamships could zip across the Atlantic in a mere two weeks, and that fell to just eight days by the 1860s. The rapid shrinking of those 3,000 miles now helped to foster a vibrant culture of transatlantic celebrity that made the USA a lucrative destination for Europe’s finest, while Britain and Ireland warmly received famous Americans, most notably the anti-slavery campaigners Frederick Douglass (1845), Henry ‘Box’ Brown (who then lived in Britain for twenty-five years), and the bestselling novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1853).

America’s vast internal geography had also hamstrung its own domestic celebrity culture. Things only started to open up in the mid-nineteenth century when the world welcomed the revolutionary triad of the telegraph machine, railway, and photography. Oh, and don’t forget postal reforms; the invention of stamps and envelopes had an effect too, as did the escalation of industrialised news printing. But, even in the 1860s, many Americans lived in a nation of such sprawling size that different regions experienced their own local pop culture.³⁶

While printed material was universally available, Broadway’s premier live acts and opera companies were only just starting to play the big cities beyond the eastern seaboard. When a show had grown stale in New York, the coming of the railroad³⁷ now facilitated relocation to new cities where it was fresh and exciting. By the 1860s, so-called ‘monster shows’ packaged together multiple acts in travelling festivals, as entrepreneurs battled to outdo each other’s publicity-baiting offerings.³⁸

So, while steamships shortened the gap between Europe and America, rail transport supersized potential audiences. The thrilling speed of movement, and the ability to carry large cargo, allowed star performers to visit new provinces formerly out of reach – in 1898, Anna Held invested $22,000 on a luxury railway car, complete with kitchen, piano, dining room, staff sleeping quarters, and plush private bedroom, so she could avoid bedding down in bad hotels. It was this same carriage which was so famously burgled in 1906.³⁹ Perhaps she should have also invested in a guard dog, or borrowed a prowling cheetah from Sarah Bernhardt?

But railways also allowed huge stage productions to go out on the road (or, rather, down the tracks). Perhaps the most impressive example was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which triumphantly toured America and Europe for years, despite the enormous challenge of moving the tents, costumes, horses, props, guns, and human cast. They got it down to a fine art, provided we ignore the occasional disaster. On the Mississippi, their steamboat sank in 1885 – they sued the shipping company for lost earnings and the death of many animals – and, in 1901, a train carrying the circus was hit by an oncoming freight train, causing the deaths of over 100 specially trained horses.⁴⁰

It was in this bustling era of mass transit and mass communication that performers started to realise just how much money could be earned through transatlantic touring. Kean had stuffed his pockets with £6,000, which was a hefty payday for the 1820s,* but in 1880 Sarah Bernhardt did fifty American dates and the box office takings totalled 2,667,600 francs. If we use average wages as our metric, this box office triumph equated to the annual salary of 1,400 skilled labourers, which in 2019 lands us somewhere around $80m.* Much of that would’ve gone into her own pocket, presumably to pay for her menagerie of terrifying, carnivorous pets we heard about in Chapter 5. Indeed, her business manager described the tour as ‘a businesswoman, on a business trip’.⁴¹

In 1894, Britain’s beloved male impersonator, Vesta Tilley, was lured across the ocean by the vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor for a modest $300 per week. She proved a smash hit and eclipsed the other imported celebrity that year, Cléo de Mérode, so it wasn’t surprising that Tilley kept being asked back. By 1912, the money on the table was $4,000 per week – or half a million bucks today* – but she declined the offer, as she didn’t want to work Sundays.⁴² It was a modest fee compared to Charles Dickens’s second American tour of 1867. Dickens was alert to his failing health, and wanted to lay a gargantuan nest egg for his kids. He was aware of the tackiness of selling his art, and his best friend was aghast at the idea, but Dickens was able to justify it to himself: ‘Securing for myself from day to day the means of an honourable subsistence, I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to be incompatible.’

Dickens’s massive American reading tour saw him narrate his own classic novels,⁴³ bringing fans closer to the author in both physical proximity and emotional depth. They witnessed his performance skills, heard his voice, and gazed upon his legendary beard as he recounted his celebrated stories. It was a powerful experience and thousands of fans queued overnight in the cold, and even bedded down on portable mattresses, to buy the expensive $2 tickets which were soon being hawked for much more. This caused its own scandal; was it not hypocritical for a writer famed for his attacks on poverty to be charging so much? Jenny Lind had survived the argument a decade earlier, but, clearly, she hadn’t ended it.

Dickens’s US extravaganza seemed rather crass to critics; he appeared to be overtly touting his fame as a product. Whereas his first tour had been motivated by curiosity (and his vengeful wrath at copyright infringers), this one looked and smelled like a moneymaking exercise. But he tried to give it an authentic quality too; as Malcolm Andrews shows,⁴⁴ Dickens commodified public friendship, but was genuine in his affections. He offered intimate access to his persona, his characters, and his physical being; he tried to connect emotionally with fans who responded to his writing style of chatty, beloved uncle. He’d wanted to be an actor as a teenager, and loved the gasps and tears extracted from his rapt audiences. Conscious of their desires for an emotive experience, he toured the theatres before each performance, roping off areas that had poor acoustics, so all of his fans could hear him clearly. He cared. But he also did it for the moolah.

We see this excitable bean-counting in his letters: ‘Copperfield and Bob last night with great success. My present profit is over £1,000 per week!’; ‘We have had a tremendous night. The largest house I have ever had since I first began. 2,300 people. Over £200 in money.’⁴⁵ Dickens even sometimes referred to his paying public as dehumanised wallets, with spectators simply representing box office takings: ‘The room will not hold more than from eighty to ninety pounds.’⁴⁶ Dickens had always been obsessed with money. As a little boy his middle-class comfort had been upended into traumatic poverty by his dad’s detention in debtors’ jail. While the family was banged up, little Charlie was sent out to earn a measly living working in a boot polish factory, where he met a lad called Fagin. He was just twelve.⁴⁷ When literary fame later came knocking, and his family expanded to accommodate a wife, sister-in-law, and a cavalcade of kids, the pressure of being the family’s sole breadwinner gnawed away at his psyche. Despite his reputation, and a gold-plated bank account, Dickens dreaded debt.

And so his 1867–8 British and American tour saw him performing the role of ‘Mr Charles Dickens’ literally to within an inch of his life. He wrote to his worried best friend and biographer John Forster: ‘You have no idea how heavily the anxiety of it sits upon my soul. But the prize looks so large!’ He was self-medicating with laudanum, sherry, and champagne to help him sleep, and eventually the exhaustion caught up with him. Several Midwestern appearances were cancelled, most controversially Chicago, which was still smarting from the time he’d snubbed them in his 1842 tour. They didn’t take it well, but, when told of the outrage, Dickens sardonically replied: ‘I would rather they go into fits than I did.’ Even acknowledging his limitations, and calling off shows, he still took on too much. The tour guaranteed his family would never go broke, but it physically broke him. Dickens pushed his deteriorating body through a gruelling cycle of seventy-six public readings, in eighteen cities, so that he could scoop up £45,000 (about £30m today). It was to be a profitable self-sacrifice. He died two years later of sheer exhaustion, aged only fifty-eight.

Mr Ten Per Cent

For all his faults and vanities, Dickens was a hugely creative writer with the relentless drive of a worker ant pepped up on amphetamines. But he couldn’t do it alone. Celebrity in the mid-1800s became an increasingly professionalised industry, and he was joined on tour by his rock’n’roll entourage. There was his valet, Henry Scott, in charge of the wardrobe department; George Allison was the lighting guy responsible for installing Dickens’s gas-lamp rig in every theatre; there was the clerk, Mr Wild, and there were always one or two local boys hired to escort him around and guard his hotel room from frenzied fans and snooping journalists.

But the most important jobs of all – booking the venues, replying to fan mail, hectoring local journalists, and printing the posters – fell to his tour manager, George Dolby, who was savvy enough to anticipate the challenge ahead and consult the master of promotion, P. T. Barnum, to pick up some handy pointers. In the end, word of mouth proved the best promotional strategy. Dickens had acquired millions of fans over some thirty years, and he’d to fight off the autograph-hunters and stalkers in every new city. Dolby’s job wasn’t drumming up business, it was extracting maximum profit from every leg of the tour.⁴⁸ He turned out to be a natural and took his cut in return; a cool £2,888. It proved a most harmonious relationship.

Dickens wasn’t the only celebrity to lean on practically minded support staff. Dolby followed up his Dickens gig by becoming Mark Twain’s tour manager, but elsewhere there was an array of associated professionals – managers, publicity agents, bookers, promoters – to keep the show on the road, or drum up excitement before a celebrity waltzed into town in their finest shoes. One of the earliest celebrities to hire a tour manager was Franz Liszt, whose pan-European stardom was placed in the capable hands of Gaetano Belloni in 1841.

Belloni was in charge of bookings and finances, but he joined Liszt on the long slogs between tour dates, frequently sitting side by side with the fleet-fingered pianist while Liszt’s bespoke carriage – bought for 2,000 francs in 1840 – bounced along the roads, traversing rain and snow, and then rolled elegantly into the sophisticated cities of Europe. A luxurious carriage assured comfort and safety, but it also sprinkled Liszt in yet more shimmering glamour, allowing Belloni to make a meal of their arrivals by leaping out and opening Liszt’s door with razzle-dazzle flair. It was a performative ritual akin to a modern bodyguard opening a limo door, or ushering a celebrity from their private jet.⁴⁹ Just as Clara the Rhino had been escorted by swordsmen, it turned Liszt’s arrival into a public spectacle.

In the early 1900s, becoming a press agent became a lucrative career, as theatre and then cinema established themselves as nationwide industries. Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t limited to middle-class dudes, and some of America’s best-known theatrical agents were female journalists who shimmied across from news reporting into the entertainment biz: Anna Marble became responsible for filling the New York Hippodrome’s 5,200 seats, while Nellie Revell worked with many of the biggest Broadway and circus impresarios.⁵⁰ Rather than hidden operatives, weaving their manipulative magic from the murky shadows, Marble and Revell were often themselves discussed in newspapers or drawn in cartoons, and so acquired their own public reputations that needed managing. Revell even became known as ‘the world’s most famous invalid’ after a debilitating spinal injury forced her to write her Variety magazine column from a hospital bed.

The circus required a lot of promotion, particularly when it travelled to a list of towns that had to be targeted separately. Buffalo Bill worked hand in glove with his manager, Nate Salsbury, who organised the Wild West Show’s scheduling and finances, but later in the century they also hired P. T. Barnum’s protégé, James Bailey, who specialised in the logistics of moving massive circuses. The other vital cog in the machine was the press agent, Major Burke, whose job it was to think up publicity stunts (a picnic for local orphans!), invite celebrity guests (Queen Victoria!), and woo local journalists with the promise of spectacular entertainment for their readers (Horses! Guns! Buffalo!).⁵¹

We began this chapter with sporting celebrity, so allow me to mention one of the earliest, and most influential, sports agents – Christy Walsh. Having smuggled his way into Babe Ruth’s hotel in 1921, disguised as a beer delivery boy (or maybe it was ice cubes; the stories come in a variety of flavours), Walsh propositioned the baseball superstar with a deal. Asked how much Ruth earned to write in the papers, the slugger said $5. Walsh promised to make it $500. They drank a beer to celebrate. Walsh soon boosted Ruth’s brand profitability by hiring ghostwriters to produce articles in Ruth’s name. In fact, Walsh invented the term ghostwriter.⁵² These same scribes could also be relied upon to write positive praise in the papers, making sure to bury any potential scandals beneath tactical puffery.

With their assistance, Walsh set about mythologising Babe Ruth in the press, including setting up a bogus scientific investigation into why baseball’s Most Valuable Player was physiologically superior to normal humans. But he also spotted how woeful Ruth was with money, and – noticing the vulture of career-ending injury swooping overhead – became determined to protect his client. Walsh signed Ruth up to pensions, annuities, moneymaking appearances, and tours, and also fined him $33,000 for financial carelessness, with the money going into an untouchable savings account. Indeed, the signing of the ‘fine’ cheque was published in the papers, as proof of Ruth’s newfound fiscal responsibility – yes, even a rainy-day pension fund was turned into a photo op by this master of media manipulation.⁵³ Christy Walsh was more than an agent – he ran Ruth’s life, later joking: ‘I did everything but sleep with him.’⁵⁴ And it worked.⁵⁵

In 1927, the New York Tribune declared: ‘If there were any way of appraising the drawing power of the Babe I think that he would be shown to be the greatest moneymaker as an entertainer for all time.’ It was an exaggeration, but a telling one. Babe Ruth was perhaps the first modern sports star to match the celebrity status of movie stars. Indeed, dubious reports claimed his life insurance policy was $5m, compared to Chaplin’s $3m.⁵⁶ His involvement with a dynamic and far-sighted manager saw him scoop up $73,247 in 1927 from being a celebrity, while his generous baseball wages added a further $70,000. All in, 1927 hauled in the equivalent of $10m in modern money. And some of that dough came from product endorsement, with the Wall Street Journal declaring: ‘He scores homers by allowing his name to be printed on boys’ underwear, caps and shoes … He gathers in royalties from manufacturers of all kinds of soft drinks and holiday souvenirs.’ There were also chocolate bars, notebooks, and cigarettes. Not bad for a guy who’d been getting $5 per article.⁵⁷

Babe Ruth had been transformed from athlete into commercial brand, and corporations rushed to license his name for their products. I’ll admit Babe Ruth underpants wasn’t quite what I expected, but why not? He’s sometimes been claimed as the first sports star to have done this commercial deal, but that’s to forget England’s own bat-wielding demigod.

I endorse this message

In 1891, the world’s most famous cricketer – indeed, some might claim the world’s most famous sporting celebrity – arrived in Adelaide. W. G. Grace had toured Australia before, in 1873–4, but it hadn’t been a flawless visit; he’d ruffled feathers by shunning local media, and by ditching his professional teammates while he dined with the gentlemen amateurs and his new wife. But eighteen years on – now a much heftier, squidgier, boozier superstar – he was still one of the finest batsmen anywhere, even if his days of elite sprinting were now a wheezy impossibility. Plus, his fame was unrivalled. The tour was a risk, his fitness was in doubt, but there was no way he wasn’t getting on that boat.

As the ship docked, crowds of gasping onlookers rushed aboard to shake him by the hand; they were drawn to his magnificent, silver-flecked beard that didn’t so much quilt his face as hang off his ears and swing beneath his neck like a sloth dangling from a tree. Indeed, later he would be nicknamed ‘the Beard’, long before Steven Spielberg nabbed this hirsute honorific, and Grace’s face fuzz was so iconic that fans would rush anyone who looked a bit like him, including a chap called Henry Warren who, many years later, stepped off a train and was immediately quizzed about cricketing statistics by a keen photographer. Grace saw the funny side, and gave Warren a signed photo.⁵⁸

On that tour, Grace also became an ambassador for Goodfellow’s Coca Water, a medicinal stimulant marketed as combating fever, alcoholic tremors, and vomiting.⁵⁹ Grace was secretly a big drinker who’d somehow been claimed as a teetotal champion by the temperance movement, so there was a dubious irony to this choice of product. But Goodfellow’s were presumably delighted to have him aboard. He’d already been the face of a short-lived outdoor game called Stapleton!, which was killed by the rise of lawn tennis. In 1888, he’d more wisely taken up a role at W. H. Cook & Company, which was developing a ‘Magic Bat’ to sell to cricket-mad wannabes across the land. This was the perfect gig for him; the earliest example I’ve encountered of an athlete flogging sports equipment to a public willing to be seduced into thinking athletic glory is theirs for the taking if they just buy the right stuff.* The company could’ve made a fortune, but two years later, before the Magic Bat was even released, Grace cheerfully endorsed a rival company which sold a bat with an inbuilt spring for better balance. As business geniuses go, I’m not sure W. G. Grace would’ve made it to week two of The Apprentice.

In 1895, having obviously enjoyed his medicinal drinks promotion, he crossed into the food industry and, almost inexplicably, became the face of Colman’s mustard. As his biographer Richard Tomlinson points out,⁶⁰ there’s no evidence he got paid for this. His problems with money, or keeping it, were considerable, so maybe he just forgot to ask, but it’s also possible he squirrelled it away and we’ve just not found the receipt. W. G. Grace was very aware of his market value; he’d negotiated huge sums to tour overseas. Even if the finances are hazy, there’s no doubting the power of the Colman’s campaign. His reputation as the tall, broad, bushy-bearded goliath of cricket made him a brilliant image to stick on their posters. Mustard is a strong flavour, and so was Grace. He batted proudly on their tins and on their vibrant billboards with the tagline ‘Colman’s Mustard Heads the Field’.

The face of …

One final advertising deal to note: in 1902, Grace posed for photos with his son while playing Cricket, a Table Game, which was essentially Subbuteo for people who prefer sport to be played in cream-coloured pyjamas. It looks quite fun, and was very much on brand for him, but it flopped. Even one of Britain’s foremost celebrities couldn’t guarantee the success of a retail product. This brings us to an obvious question. Does celebrity advertising work? In recent decades, research by academics and corporate marketeers has consistently proven just how effective it can be. We’re fascinated by famous people: we recognise them, trust them, fancy them, and aspire to be them. Their recommendations mean more, their glamour projects a resplendent glow onto whatever shiny gubbins they tell us to buy. They influence us.

So what’s the secret to a successful marketing campaign involving a celeb?⁶¹ Early research in the mid-twentieth century studied trustfulness and likeability, but – noticing how some endorsement campaigns were disasters, despite using well-liked stars – Grant McCracken argued for a ‘Meaning Transfer’ model⁶² that suggested advertising works best when the meaning of the celebrity’s brand fits with the product. Athletes selling car insurance makes less sense than athletes selling sports drinks; there needs to be a reason for them to be there. The best campaigns feel obvious, but plenty of ads ignore this advice, hoping we’ll be wowed by positive associations with the tenuously connected star.*

It’s worth mentioning too that, as well as transferring their celebrity allure to a product, the celeb can also transfer negative associations. When a beloved star has a catastrophic scandal, the spores of this insidious notoriety transfer onto the products they endorse, and corporations have to disinfect themselves to stop the black mould growing all over them. Celebrity giveth and celebrity taketh away.

Chapter 7: Show Me the Money!

Moneyball