When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016 – and once the world had retrieved its jaw from the floor – a joke began to do the rounds: ‘Obama showed that anyone can be president. Trump shows that anyone can be president.’ For many, Trump fell way below the quality threshold for ‘Leader of the Free World’. He was unworthy in character, capacity, and conduct; a mendaciously dangerous liar who enabled the worst, most bigoted fringes of society while declaring war on the abstract concept of truth. How people voted for him, while claiming to be good Christians, baffles me. But what I can say with confidence is that Donald Trump arrived as a celebrity candidate, and that’s how the media chose to cover him.
Celebrity is part of the entertainment industry, but so is scandalous notoriety, meaning Trump’s behaviour shed its moral gravity and instead became a soap opera. It didn’t matter that he was despicable, he was TV ratings gold; Trump was an event, a human story of relentless headline-grabbing controversy. His bizarre and shocking rants began to acquire their own dramatic arc. Instead of the usual media cycle of ‘blunder, backtrack, apology, resignation’, Trump just ploughed on with his insensitive, inflammatory ineptitude, never apologising and never accepting his unfitness for office.
Like Nero at the Olympics, he changed the rules to suit his strengths. He’d served his media apprenticeship on The Apprentice, a reality show where the loudest provocateurs hogged the screen, so that’s the role he decided to play. The cameras were always trained on Trump; even his empty rostrum was eagerly monitored on live news, every rambling speech breathlessly covered as if it were announcing some impending alien invasion. He got airtime like no other candidate in history, an estimated $5bn worth of free exposure.1
Exposure should have exposed him. But celebrity is a powerful force. That a controversial TV star – one famous for firing people from a job they didn’t even have – could become president revealed how easily news journalism could be hijacked by the entertainment industry. Or was it vice versa? Trump made money for the news networks, and became a celebrity president for a celebrity era. If we look back at some of the previous White House incumbents, we can certainly argue that JFK was movie star hot; Ronald Reagan had been an actor; Bill Clinton oozed charisma; Barack Obama was elevated as a transformative hero – they’d all possessed a certain glamorous fame – but they were also renowned politicians. All had held public office before sitting down at the Resolute Desk. They weren’t true celebrities, and, even if you think they were, they weren’t only celebrities.
Trump, by contrast, barely understood politics at all. His Twitter feuds with basketball stars, or North Korea’s supreme leader, weren’t part of some master strategy. There was no end goal in sight. Instead, he lived by Andy Warhol’s credo, ‘Don’t pay attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.’ Trump cared not for consequences, only limelight. It was performative narcissism by a man woefully unprepared for the job. And that loops us back to that opening joke, ‘anyone can be president’. It’s a punchline that apes Daniel Boorstin’s frustrated refrain that a celebrity is ‘someone known for his well-knownness’; it’s the notion that fame – once earned through ability – has been neutered into meaningless, unearned notoriety.
Boorstin’s critique was published in 19622 and was a powerful challenge to a post-war culture which, in his eyes, had allowed advertising, celebrity, commerce, spin, manufactured opinion, and publicity stunts to transform America into a bewildering desert of illusory mirages. Celebrities were ‘human-pseudo events’, their artificial fame unrelated to merit or worthiness; pop culture was a handmaiden to manipulative forces trying to sell an American dream that promised to fulfil every desire, so long as people kept buying the latest model. Boorstin warned the reader: ‘We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic”, that they can live in them.’ His ideas have certainly been influential, but it’s not Boorstin who gets namechecked in debates about celebrity culture. Instead, we invariably turn to the predictions of a pop artist with weird hair.
In 1968, Andy Warhol prophesised: ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ Ironically, this quote is now itself famous, though it’s often misquoted; the ‘world fame’ bit usually gets sliced off. But what did Warhol really mean? Was he being literal? Some academic chin-strokers have argued he was predicting a future where the flattening of social hierarchies, and the triumph of his Pop Art aesthetic, would make everything of equal value; everyone would be famous because nobody would be more deserving of fame than anyone else. Warhol later said something similar about Studio 54 (his favourite nightclub), noting that everyone boogying there was a star, meaning none of them were. But ‘world-famous for fifteen minutes’ probably wasn’t intended to be so philosophically nuanced.
It’s more likely that Warhol was just piggybacking on the artist Larry Rivers, who, in 1967, said: ‘Everybody will be famous.’3 Rivers, however, wasn’t talking about the global population, or a thrilling future of aesthetic equality; he was commenting on the pace of change in the 1960s New York art world. The community was seemingly bursting with innovative creativity and art lovers were trying to keep up with all the emergent styles. It felt to Rivers like an explosion of constant, exhausting novelty. Call me a cynic, but I read ‘everybody will be famous’ not as gnomic prophecy but as eye-rolling sarcasm. It’s an ironic exaggeration, an extrapolation of exponential growth based on a few extra hipsters showboating their way around New York’s coolest galleries while wearing sunglasses indoors.
Indeed, when Time quoted Warhol in October 1968, it was in this same specifically artistic context: ‘Whole new schools of painting seem to charge through the art scene with the speed of an express train, causing Pop Artist Andy Warhol to predict the day “when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”’ He didn’t mean everybody, did he? Soon after, a scathing book attacking contemporary art quoted Warhol again,4 but by now he was saying: ‘There’s going to be a day when no one will be famous for more than a week. Then everyone will have a chance to be famous.’ A few months later, Warhol’s work was displayed in Sweden and that’s when his famous quote reached prominence: ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ Only quarter of an hour, Andy? What if we need the toilet when the paparazzi come knocking!? Thankfully, in 1969, the New Republic printed a tweaked update stating Warhol meant ‘for at least fifteen minutes’. Phew! I’m not sure my bladder could’ve held out otherwise …
For such a memorable line, Warhol really took his time to nail it down. Was he just trolling us with grandiose soundbites? Maybe he liked the concept but couldn’t settle on the detail? A quote from 1979 suggests he was happy to muck about with it: ‘I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”’5 This was him cheekily referencing a journalist who’d accidentally mangled the quote. But perhaps his playfulness masked genuine sincerity. Did Warhol foresee the impending internet, with its game-changing democratising power? Did he really think universal celebrity was lurking around the next corner? I doubt it. But he knew things were changing. And he had a front-row seat at the birth of reality TV.
In 1973, a fateful year for telly addicts, PBS broadcast The American Family, a ground-breaking observational documentary about the Loud family from California, who were to become the first reality TV stars. The standout ‘personality’ was Lance Loud, a flamboyant young man who was openly gay and seemingly enjoying life, something which transformed him into a hotly discussed public figure. He was mocked, criticised, admired, and championed. Undaunted, Lance seemed to grasp his newfound fame with confident purpose, making it clear that his TV persona was semi-fictional.* The TV version of Lance Loud wasn’t real; he was a construct of manipulative editing. The reality TV blueprint was there from the outset.
More extraordinary, however, was the coincidental fact that Lance had previously been Andy Warhol’s penfriend. As a teen, the young fan had dyed his hair silver in Warholian adoration and had enthusiastically written to his idol. The artist had written back, and they’d graduated to chatting on the phone. The communication was cut off when Warhol was shot and nearly killed in 1968, an attack that shocked him into becoming a recluse. But when Lance suddenly appeared on TV, and then became a burgeoning gay icon, they reconnected as adults. Admittedly, this was some five years after Warhol’s famous prediction, but perhaps he felt a little vindicated? Someone he knew had received their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’.
Warhol’s logic does stand up (even if he played with his prediction so much that we question his sincerity). In our hyper-connected age of social media, it’s possible that anyone could get famous. The avenues to notoriety are now so numerous, and the daily churn of gossip so immense, that all of us might yet become briefly known to millions of strangers. It might be for committing a terrible crime, or for hilariously falling over on camera, or for saving a child from a burning building, or for swearing accidentally when being interviewed on the news, or for giving a hilariously stupid answer on a TV quiz show.
Talent might be utterly irrelevant. But I quibble strongly with Warhol’s ‘everyone will be famous’. It’s absurd to think every person on the planet – nearly 8 billion humans! – will experience a metamorphosis so extreme, and so short, as to make a mayfly’s life seem epic by comparison. We can’t all be famous. Celebrity needs a paying audience. We can’t all hang around in a circle, bedecked in sunglasses and designer jeans, paying each other to be our fans like some absurdist version of the Reservoir Dogs standoff.
Since the arrival of Lance Loud, the idea that anyone could be launched into the celebrity stratosphere has understandably intensified, and the barriers to entry perhaps seem to be lowering. Boorstin’s acolytes allege that celebrity no longer requires any qualifications; that anyone can become famous. Firstly, it’s wrong to assume there were always more obstacles or quality filters in previous eras. Celebrity has long been a vehicle for astonishing social mobility, often recruiting its revolving cast of shiny hopefuls from the ordinary masses. Jump in your time machine, punch 1680 into the display, and you’d see a proto-celeb like Nell Gwyn – a barely literate actress, born into poverty, and possibly in proximity to prostitution – become famed for her stage performances and her seduction of the king. Transport yourself to the early 1900s and you’d see Charlie Chaplin become the most famous actor on the planet, despite spending his childhood in genuine London poverty.
Of course, celebrity isn’t always low-status either – Lord Byron was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, even if said spoon was removed by his drunkard dad who pawned it then did a runner, abandoning his family to meagre accommodation because the family pile was in tumbledown disrepair. But, without question, celebrity culture has often elevated the lowliest to the upper echelons of privilege. Anyone could be a celebrity because, in many ways, that’s sort of the point of celebrity. It’s a form of class-skipping prestige, a parallel aristocracy drawn from below and powered by human spectacle; the roots of this surprising mobility can even be unearthed as far back as the ancient world, where gladiators and charioteers escaped their shackles to hobnob with the rich and powerful, or even to marry emperors.
But surely there’s a difference between then and now? Indeed, there is. The bandwidth has increased. Many more celebrity careers can be maintained today than was possible in the past. In 1709, the year of Henry Sacheverell’s speech, the famous satirist Jonathan Swift conceived of his ‘Chamber of Fame’, a sort of precursor to what we now call Halls of Fame, but he found space for only 132 worthies. Here’s how he described the layout of the room:
there are to be three tables, but of different lengths; the first is to contain exactly twelve persons; the second, twenty; and the third, a hundred. This is reckoned to be the full number of those who have any competent share of fame. At the first of these tables are to be placed, in their order, the twelve most famous persons in the world, not with regard to the things they are famous for, but according to the degree of their fame, whether in valour, wit, or learning. Thus, if a scholar be more famous than a soldier, he is to sit above him. Neither must any preference be given to virtue, if the person be not equally famous. When the first table is filled, the next in renown must be seated at the second, and so on in like manner to the number of twenty …6
One hundred and thirty-two celebrities in total? Oh, Mr Swift, you adorable thing! There are now way more movie stars crammed into a single room at the Oscars, let alone adding up all the stars of television, music, sport, publishing, etc.
But TV stars, film stars, popstars, and sports stars simply didn’t exist in the eighteenth century. The first three of those categories are blindingly obvious to us, but sporting celebrity might feel like a strange omission. There were a few well-known athletes back in the Georgian era, but sports lacked their vital infrastructure and rules. Cricket was a popular pastime, but rugby didn’t officially get going until the 1840s, baseball wasn’t popular until the 1850s, tennis had to wait until the 1870s, and American football diverged from rugby in the 1880s.
My own beloved football (soccer) team, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, was born twenty-four hours after Thomas Edison opened his first electrical power plant in Manhattan, in 1882. Organised sport is very modern. And the sharing of its joyous highs and lows was so much harder until radio and television came along. Even sports journalism only got up and running in the early 1800s, mostly for horseracing and boxing, and only became widely read in the late 1800s. All considered, then, sporting celebrity is either 2,000 years old, if you count the ancient charioteers, or barely 200 years old. And I’d rather argue for the latter.
As for music stars, they existed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries – initially in opera, and then later in variety, music hall, and jazz – but pop music is a mid-twentieth-century innovation built on the technological platforms of the phonograph, radio, and jukebox. Pop requires both recording and reproduction technology. Until music could be recorded, live performance was everything. If someone lived out in the sticks, or even if they were a city-slicker but their favourite singer was an Italian castrato breezing into town on a whirlwind tour, they might’ve heard them perform only once in a lifetime. Famous songs were much more available than famous singers. Between 1900 and 1910, at least 100 different songs sold a million copies in America7 – but as printed sheet music, not audio. Until the phonograph got a stranglehold on the market, just after the First World War, home entertainment involved bashing the tune out on your own piano, with your family and dog singing/howling along in accompaniment.
It’s no surprise that celebrity has often been decried as a modern phenomenon because people were looking in the wrong place for historical precedents. It’s not that celebrity is new, it’s that film stars, sport stars, and popstars are new; their heritage is patchy because structural, technological, and sociological obstacles determined what sorts of career were possible. The earliest celebrity in this book is a furious clergyman with a poodle perm, which I don’t think anyone was hunting for.
As we canter to the end of this book, let me briefly turn from the past towards the present (and maybe the future). All around us, a whole new revolution is happening online, where social media influencers are redefining fame once more. The digital landscape has incubated a novel form of pseudo-celebrity, particularly one beloved by younger audiences, where the qualifications for success are often being able to exhibit nothing more than chirpy, chatty normalness – a constant stream of ‘Hi, guys! Me again …’ videos about going to the shops and eating a frozen yoghurt. There are also the eSports online gaming stars, the pouting models, the ab-encrusted fitness vloggers, the jokers who create viral memes and prank videos for their legions of fans.8
I’ve watched them with intrigue while writing this book, but I don’t classify these online personalities as celebrities. Social media influencers can have massive followings, but their cultural impact tends to be small and their presence in the world is tightly focused, often limited to digital platforms. Of course, their income model isn’t so dissimilar to celebrity; they too get rich by doing advertising endorsements. Indeed, in 2018, The Atlantic magazine9 reported wannabe influencers were advertising products for free, without having contacted the brand. Their logic was ‘fake it till you make it’; do unpaid adverts to convince fans they’re officially sponsored, because that’s the metric for online success, and fans want to follow successful people. Once enough fans click ‘subscribe’, the corporations should hopefully offer real sponsorship money to reach this sneakily assembled captive audience.
How do influencers differ from celebrities? A celebrity is someone who features in mainstream media, and might be expected to pop up on the radio, on TV, in newspapers, in magazines, in cinemas, on social media, in shop advertising, etc. They don’t have to be famous to both your grannie and your milkman, but they might appear in the Daily Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’ or be a question in a pub quiz. That’s not to say YouTube stars can’t successfully cross over, because it does happen. In 2017 I started to receive a lot of amusing tweets about how I look a little bit like Joe ‘The Body Coach’ Wicks, an über-buff diet and exercise guru with a cheeky-chappy persona. I’d never heard of him, but he’d managed to grow his online audience so much that book publishers and TV producers decided to pounce. This inevitably brought him into the eyeline of my Twitter followers, who thought it would be funny (it was funny) to photoshop my head onto his ludicrously toned body.*
Through his newfound media platforms, Wicks suddenly became familiar to a large audience of general consumers; cultural omnivores who daily feast on a variety of media. And, as soon as the bandwagon had developed sufficient momentum, the standard media protocol was enacted: tabloids began printing paparazzi photos of him walking in the street, looking dapper at red carpet events, and kissing his glamorous model girlfriend. He was no longer just a kale-munching, squat-busting internet bloke with a niche audience; he’d been transformed into a celebrity health guru, but also into a celebrity people wanted to know about. His face now appeared in front of those who didn’t know who he was, but – through that continued media exposure – they began to recognise him.
This, for me, is the key distinction between celebrity and influencer. A celebrity is often in our eyeline, regardless of whether we give a damn. Obviously, there are celebs we love, and whose activities we deliberately seek out, but a lot of the time we’re not being devoted fans so much as passive audiences exposed to a vast media tapestry of celebrity images. And yet, thanks to that exposure, we may still think of these people as being famous and might be able to identify a photo of them. Their image lives in the wider world. By contrast, influencers are sustained by a direct relationship with fans who deliberately opt in to following them.10 Every follower gives tacit consent to the interaction, and may feel intense parasocial feelings for this online star, but the rest of us may have no idea the star even exists. The influencer doesn’t live in the wider world, they live in a corner – admittedly, it might be a massive, diamond-encrusted corner – of the internet.
However, there are obvious similarities too. Once established as being famous, celebrities increasingly use social media to circumvent journalists and go direct to their fans. This doesn’t stop the media covering them, or feasting on their social media posts as gossip fuel – so it isn’t evidence of a withering away of celebrity culture – but it is moving a little closer to the tacit opt-in relationship of influencers and their followers. There are also similarities in how both groups sell access to their lives; celebrities allow magazine photographers into their homes and weddings, doing big-money deals for tasteful coverage of rites of passage and glamorous occasions, while YouTubers monetise intimate ordinariness through embedded adverts that tinkle away for three seconds before we get to gaze at their bedrooms.
Celebrity and influencer may yet fuse completely, forcing a redefining of celebrity’s meaning. Indeed, several scholars have already dubbed internet influencers ‘microcelebrities’, a term defined by Theresa Senft as meaning ‘a new style of online performance that involves people “amping up” their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites’.11 I’ve focused this book on the history of celebrity, but its future may produce some radical surprises. By the time a robot historian comes to judge this book (hello, future robot historian!), it might do so with the same tutting disappointment that I reserve for Daniel Boorstin; perhaps all celebrity culture will one day be opt-in, web-based, and fundamentally different to what has gone before. Or perhaps we’ll all be microcelebrities, as Warhol predicted. Time will tell.
But I don’t believe we’re all destined for fifteen minutes of fame, or a world filled by 8 billion influencers. And I’m pretty relieved about that. My attitude to celebrity used to be ambivalent, but, the more I read, the more I think celebrity sounds like a lucrative, but existentially grim, purgatory that I’d hate to endure. I’m lucky to have a rewarding career as a public historian, but sometimes it involves appearing on TV. As someone recovering from crippling body image issues, I find this part of my job hard. Seeing myself on screen makes me feel nauseous, and it’s doubly harrowing seeing viewers’ comments on Twitter, as they discuss my body, hair, voice, choice of clothes, and the way I gesticulate wildly when I get excited. Even when people are complimentary, I squirm.
I’m not a celebrity. But I’ve had a couple of weird experiences in which my involvement in a popular TV show resulted in me getting an unsettling glimpse of what happens when fans go too far. I once had to involve the police. If we’re really all due fifteen minutes of fame, I hope that I’ve had mine already, because – besides the usual caveats of war, disease, and the deaths of my loved ones – I can’t think of anything worse. But, of course, on a wider scale, celebrity isn’t going away. It’s one of the most powerful forces in global culture, and its significance as a barometer of morality, taste, and opinion will continue to dominate our lives, just as it shaped public attitudes and popular culture in the past.
The story of how celebrity built our world is complex and has resisted standard patterns of linear progression; this book gave me so many headaches over the past four years. But, if I’ve done my job properly, next time you see a celebrity superstar, hopefully your brain will briefly flash up a mental image of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, and you’ll remember that the gorgeous stars at the Oscars really aren’t so different from a bellowing clergyman in a stupid wig. Well, okay, they’re a bit different … but you know what I mean.
* In a TV interview with Dick Cavett, Lance Loud claimed the editing made him seem ‘obnoxious’, and that he didn’t really enjoy watching the show, but he was glad he’d done it.
* Doing the reverse, and popping his head on my scrawny torso, would be deeply depressing for all involved.