The Great Gatsby is as much as anything a novel about appearances, about Gatsby remaking himself from J. Gatz to the Great Gatsby by putting on the right clothes, by living in the right mansion.
—Neal Gabler
How many celebrities will truly achieve greatness? A handful. There are very few people who are radically different. There are six billion people on the planet, most of whom are totally ordinary.
—Matthew Freud
I met Max Clifford on a summer Friday afternoon in London. His office is tucked away on cobblestone alley off Bond Street, the illustrious address of hedge fund managers, oil tycoons, and the well-heeled jet set and celebrity elite. This was a fitting locale for Clifford, Britain’s most celebrated and hated public relations guru, or “p.r. agent in the raw,” as one profile described him.1
My visit happened to be on June 26, 2009, the day after Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest. I called Clifford’s assistant earlier that morning just to see if he was still available, thinking that the media would undoubtedly be hounding its celebrity guru for his twopence on one of the biggest celebrities of all time. But Clifford is a man of his word, whether you like what he says or not, and he kept his appointment with me.
Clifford’s conversation, often delivered in perfect sound bites, further enhances his almost caricature-like public persona. The week before I met him, I was at a dinner party with friends who were disgusted that I was meeting Clifford. To them, and many Brits, Clifford represents everything that is wrong with the modern-day media and the cult of celebrity: the kiss-and-tell scandal-saturated newspapers and the paying off of aspiring stars who sell their privacy to the media. As one commentator put it, “Clifford has the instinct of the natural bully to imagine himself on the moral high ground even when standing knee-deep in the sewer.”2 And there is truth to that observation. Clifford is undoubtedly responsible for a not insignificant chunk of the tittle-tattle and scandal that keep newspapers and tabloids going. Right there in the center of the frenzy of gossip splashed across the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the News of the World is Clifford, “pulling the levers and pressing the buttons like a sweating disk jockey,” as another described him.3
Clifford has represented soccer star David Beckham’s supposed mistress, Rebecca Loos, as well as mistresses of high-level Parliament members, scorned lovers, reality TV stars, along with a bevy of A-listers. He represents these diverse clients with an intense righteousness and seemingly steadfast loyalty. In one scandal, Clifford represented Lady Buck, a Spanish rags-to-riches socialite who was having an affair with the British defense minister, Sir Peter Harding. She sold her tale for six figures and Harding resigned from his position. Yet despite Buck’s obvious money grabbing and general exploitation of her private life, Clifford maintained the conviction that she was the wronged one. During the height of the scandal, Clifford was heard having a phone conversation with Buck, thundering into the receiver, “They’re coming out and saying the most terrible things about you and you’re just supposed to say nothing?”4
Clifford contends that most of the time his job consists of keeping stories out of the news, though that’s not apparent from the dozens upon dozens of framed front-page U.K. newspaper stories on his office walls: “Jude Cheats on Sienna” (Hollywood actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller), “Beckham’s Secret Affair,” “Branson’s Feud with Elton over Diana” (media and transportation mogul Richard Branson, Elton John, and Princess Diana). And perhaps Clifford’s most famous coup: “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster,” the March 13, 1986, headline of the Sun, which detailed comedian Starr eating his girlfriend’s hamster between two slices of bread after she refused to make him a sandwich. The story remains unverified, but as Clifford is quick to observe, it nevertheless made Starr a star, which is the ultimate endgame, after all.
Despite the scandals and frenzy that a Clifford headline may catalyze, Clifford himself appears calm and pleasant. With his perfect white smile, bouffant silver hair, and golden tan, he looks more suited to the palm trees and celebrity of Los Angeles than the capricious cool weather of London. And for all the deserved and undeserved vitriol spewed his way, Max Clifford represents people he thinks deserve to be heard, which is the mantra he repeats no matter whom he is representing. That Friday afternoon, no doubt like any other Friday afternoon, attractive women with shiny, perfectly groomed hair were sashaying about the office. One in particular was dressed in something only a semantic shade away from a cocktail dress, accompanied by sky-high bright red stilettos. The office was serene and under control, with Wimbledon playing quietly on a TV discreetly mounted on the wall along with a giant silk screen portrait of reality TV star Jade Goody, painted in Warhol’s famous Marilyn style.
Jade Goody was Clifford’s most recent high-profile rescue. Goody was a problematic Horatio Alger type who went from working class to Big Brother to Bentley-driving multi-millionaire. Along the way, Goody was both celebrated for her “everywoman” persona and reviled for racism and bad language and her uneducated ways. In the end, she died a saint. The evolution of her status occurred over a period of about six years. Following her initial stint on Big Brother in 2002, she became a fixture of the British gossip and tabloid press. While she did not win, the show launched her public presence and celebrity brand, resulting in a perfume, an autobiography, a column in a celebrity glossy magazine, and yet more reality TV shows culminating in Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. This latter endeavor brought on a slew of additional business opportunities, another perfume, and another (updated) autobiography.
However, Goody’s celebrity was often closer to notoriety. During her time on Celebrity Big Brother, she sparked international debates because of racial slurs (she called a fellow contestant of Indian ethnicity a “papadum”). In her earlier reality TV performances she mistook Cambridge, the famous university town, for a London borough. Goody was never your traditional platinum blond, size-two starlet. Nevertheless, the Brits were obsessed with her. She appeared genuine, outrageous, and, despite her missteps, appealing and accessible due to her lack of pretense or preciousness. She came from working-class roots, the daughter of a drug-addicted father who overdosed and died. She grew up to become a dental nurse and bore two children out of wedlock. “Jade Goody was the first person in the modern reality TV era who people identified with in a major way,” said Mark Frith, former editor of heat. The publication went from failing men’s magazine to leading celebrity glossy all by putting the Big Brother stars like Jade Goody on its covers.5
Unfortunately, Goody’s story became, as often happens in the celebrity world, paradoxically more tragic and more celebrated. In the summer of 2008, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and within six months it had metastasized and became terminal. Despite her sometimes appalling public behavior and unsavory racist remarks, there was an overwhelming outpouring of sincere sympathy from both the media and the general public. Goody’s short life (she died at age twenty-seven) would always have been mourned, but by the time she died she had rectified her image, had become an international news story, and had made millions of dollars by selling her story to the tabloids. Each day the Sun reported on her impending death: the spread of cancer, her rushed marriage, her last wishes, and so forth. We knew as much about her death as that of a close loved one. “I’ve lived my whole adult life talking about my life,” she said on her deathbed. “I’ve lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I’ll die in front of them.”6
In the center of it all was Clifford, whom Goody employed shortly after her diagnosis to do her wheeling and dealing. He sold her story to the press, brokered the deal with the Sun, and was, by many accounts, responsible for her transformation from trash-talking B-lister to legitimate poster child of strength and perseverance in her losing battle with cancer. So much had Clifford repaired her reputation in the year since her diagnosis that the increase in cervical cancer screenings after her death was dubbed the “Jade Goody effect.”7 Her story’s profits gave Goody’s children a trust fund and made Clifford an even richer man. By his own account, Clifford conducted interviews on her behalf and scripted her responses. “Because I was doing 98 percent of her interviews, I knew what she wanted to say. [I would tell her,] ‘No, love, you don’t mean that, you mean this.’” Clifford’s machinations worked brilliantly and helped transform her into a celebrity whose death prompted even Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make a public acknowledgment of her life and influence on British society.
Goody’s story is remarkable for a number of reasons. Even in the midst of tragedy, it is another spectacular example of Clifford’s sphinxlike celebrity mastermind. There is also real reason to wonder why we as viewers and readers were so grotesquely interested in Goody’s last days. After all, Clifford was able to get a deal with the Sun and OK! only because their readers were interested in the first place. We were engrossed by Goody from the get-go and she was able to capitalize on our interest all along the way. Clifford wouldn’t have taken her on if she hadn’t been worth selling to the media, and if we, as her public, didn’t find her inherently compelling.
Since her first Big Brother stint in 2002, Jade Goody attained a public presence as prolific and ubiquitous as any other celebrity. But why? Goody was not beautiful, she was not brilliant, she did not come from aristocracy or wealth. Her father wasn’t famous. Goody was utterly ordinary. Unlike Warhammer World’s Jervis or the clever academic who ends up with his own TV series, Goody was no relative celebrity to an adoring, albeit small, fan base. Despite her complete ordinariness, Goody became a mainstream, everyone-knows-your-name star who was featured in the gossip columns next to Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham. However, Goody’s celebrity was not a function of being an icon of perfection, of her notable beauty or eccentricity, or of her talent. Nor was her celebrity a function of being “just like us.” Instead, Goody represented a demagogic impulse of the media, someone that both the press and Goody’s audience championed precisely because she was contrary to the conventional archetype of stardom. She was slightly chunky, had a nice smile without being beautiful, was uneducated, and misspoke regularly. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story like Sean Connery’s or Jennifer Lopez’s, who, despite the odds, were able to get a foot in the door to demonstrate their extraordinary talent to Hollywood. No, Goody had no obvious or unique talent. In all of her documented life, she portrayed the aspects of human fallibility and imperfection. When she became a star, Goody remained herself. “Jade was a natural exhibitionist,” Clifford explained, “and she happened to be in the right show at the right time. It was her honesty and vulnerability and not knowing the capital of a country and that was part of her appeal. That’s what it was with Jade.”
Jade Goody’s celebrity rested entirely on the fantasy that any one of us could become a star too.8 Although she did not possess any ostensible star qualities, Goody acquired the fancy car, the mansion, the wealth, and the high-profile life of someone society would deem remarkable. Goody demonstrated that mainstream, all-encompassing celebrity can be bestowed upon a person who is no more remarkable than the viewers and fans who pay attention to her. She represented the rise of a new class of celebrity, never more present than in today’s society: the democratic celebrity. “Ordinary people have never been more visible in the media,” the Australian media critic Graeme Turner remarked, “nor have their own utterances ever been reproduced with the faithfulness, respect and accuracy they are today.”9 Goody is not an exceptional case: Dozens of democratic stars exist, and their star power is unique to modern society.10 As the Sunday Times television critic A. A. Gill observed, “The democracy of dream-achievement provoked the leitmotif of the decade: the culture and triumph of amateurism…the feeling that people without experience, expert knowledge, skill, learning or aptitude had something extra, something special to offer.”11
There are three principles underpinning democratic stardom. First, the celebrity of these stars relies on their fans identifying with them rather than adoring them. Goody is revered for her ordinariness in the extraordinary world of celebrity. Second, like all forms of celebrity, democratic celebrities run the gamut of talent-driven to all-residual. They may be discovered on American Idol for their beautiful voices or simply famous for being famous, like Goody. Third, democratic stars circumvent the normal vetting process, and that is part of their appeal. The development of technology, the rise of reality TV shows (and their great popularity), and the use of social media to perpetuate all forms of celebrity have reduced barriers to entry unlike at any other point in history. Reality TV stars, popular bloggers, MySpace and Facebook members who have thousands of friends, in another era would not have had the conduits to become mainstream stars. New forms of media and publicity allow individuals to become celebrities without being rejected by an elite Hollywood agent telling them they don’t have what it takes. Consider thirteen-year-old blogger Tavi Gevinson, who stunned the fashion world when she started blogging eloquently at age eleven about high-end designers. By 2009, her blog, Style Rookie, which has attracted over four million viewers, got her front-row seats at fashion runway shows and mentions in Vogue, Elle, and the New York Times, among countless other publications. In the summer of 2009, she appeared on the cover of Pop magazine, designed by Damien Hirst. Tavi started her blog on her own and we made her a star by reading it; it was irrelevant whether Creative Artists Agency or any other gatekeeper to stardom thought she was good enough, because we did. Tavi, like Goody, beat the system.
American Idol and the Making of a Star
But democratic celebrity does not imply that these individuals have nothing to offer; rather, they now have new opportunities to attain mainstream celebrity. There is perhaps no more vivid example of democratic stardom than American Idol, which has managed to enthrall American viewers for nine seasons straight, with a viewership peaking at thirty million. The show is hosted by Ryan Seacrest and features a coterie of telegenic stars who act as “judges,” including several rotating, attractive females, and Simon Cowell, who also hosts Britain’s similar star-making shows, Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent. (Cowell, who announced in the spring of 2010 that he would be leaving American Idol, also happens to be represented by Max Clifford.) Since 2002, American Idol has given people the belief that their perfectly pitched singing in the shower really could result in a Grammy and hundreds of thousands of record sales—if they could just get on the show. American Idol makes the promise of such reward explicit in its subtitle: The Search for a Superstar.
In its nine seasons, the show has gone on to produce legitimate stars, voted in by both the judges and television viewers who can call in and text their votes. Jennifer Hudson, a season-three contestant, won a Grammy as well as an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in Dreamgirls. She was featured on the cover of Vogue and hangs out with any A-lister of her choosing. Chris Daughtry, the fourth-place finalist on the fifth season, landed a record deal with RCA with his rock band, Daughtry. The band’s first album sold more than one million copies in just five weeks, making it the fastest-selling rock debut album of all time. Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, both American Idol first-place winners, have gone on to become multimillion record sellers and popular topics of conversation in various celebrity tabloids. Clarkson has reached number one both on the U.K. and U.S. singles charts, selling more than twenty million albums worldwide. She is one of the top two hundred album sellers in music history. At seventeen years old, Fantasia Barrino was a single teenage mom without a job. She won season three of American Idol and has since played a leading role in Broadway’s The Color Purple and has been nominated for eight Grammy Awards. The list of American Idol participants who have become mainstream stars goes on.12 Even those who do not become megastars reap the benefits of making it onto the show. Including performance fees and royalties from merchandise sales, a winner makes at least $1 million in the year or two after their participation on the show. But any contestant in the top five makes around $100,000 and often three or four times more if they land a record deal.13 American Idol is one of the most compelling shows in television history precisely because it achieves exactly what it sets out to do: making stars out of seemingly ordinary people.
One might say that Kelly Clarkson is more extraordinary than ordinary, and she’s got infinitely more star power than Jade Goody. Without American Idol, however, Clarkson never would have become a superstar, just as Fantasia would have remained a mom with a child out of wedlock instead of a Broadway actress and Grammy-nominated musician.
Part of the American Idol method of success is telling the stories of the contestants’ lives, enabling viewers to identify with them as ordinary people who have been given a chance to become a star. The viewers’ participation in the selection process is essential to democratic celebrity. “American Idol is very interesting in terms of reality versus appearance because it’s predicated on the idea when you look at the people who have succeeded…These are people who never, never, never would have made it through the normal course of the recording industry,” said the author and media commentator Neal Gabler. “Kelly Clarkson…who had that big, powerful voice but not the drop dead good looks that everybody in the recording industry now seems to have, was made a star by the audience. The audience said, ‘This is real…Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Clay Aiken, they’re real, they belong to me, and I will make them stars.’”14
Inarguably, despite the democratic principles underlying the show, American Idol has created its own system of selecting individuals to become stars. While Clarkson got a chance that she would not have been given if she had simply showed up at the doors of record companies in Los Angeles or New York, she still had to go through a rigorous audition process with the show’s judges and be the favorite of a tough audience that voted for her over the other contestants. American Idol is not a free-for-all. But then again, no form of celebrity is. After all, even Tavi the fashion blogger and M the endless Facebook updater are vetted and chosen by their respective audiences. Not all participants succeed, and some mediums are better than others at creating stars. Shows like American Idol produce more stars than the average hastily put together reality TV program, or any random person starting a blog.
At the outset, it is doubtful that the producers of the early reality shows (Big Brother, MTV’s The Real World) anticipated the extent to which their programs would create celebrities out of otherwise ordinary people. Because these programs did cultivate such a fan base and a longer-term celebrity career for some of the participants, a deluge of reality programs have been broadcasted in their wake. The more successful reality shows have structured marketing campaigns and are often advertised heavily, and most producers aim to cultivate a following around the participants. Despite having some of the qualities of Hollywood or the music industry, the premise for these programs remains democratic: Unless specified (e.g., Celebrity Big Brother), the participants are ultimately selected from the wider populace. Calls are not placed to Creative Artists Agency; auditions with Hollywood directors are not held. In its tasteless, tacky, clever, and impressive forms, most reality TV still aims to be an entry point that provides a chance at stardom to those who would not likely have one through the more elite channels of celebrity.15
Creating Our Own Stars
Whatever its stripe, celebrity fundamentally relies on the choices that we as fans and audience members make about individuals. We choose to care about Jennifer Aniston’s love life and choose not to care much about Cate Blanchett’s. But democratic celebrity is more than just the audience deciding to buy the celebrity glossy featuring one star over another. What we want from our democratic celebrities (at least at the outset) is unlike what we want from Hollywood A-list stars. First, we identify with (rather than idolize) these celebrities. “Viewers are invited to imagine ‘it could be me or someone I know,’” remarks the media scholar Henry Jenkins.16 Second, we delight and participate in the democratic star’s ability to buck the system. Whereas buying a magazine or going to the movies costs anywhere from $4 to $15, watching someone on TV, following him or her on Twitter, reading a blog, or downloading a YouTube video costs very little if anything at all. Therefore, when we elect to follow democratic celebrities, we make choices without any real constraints, and thus these stars are better reflections of our preferences.17 We read one person’s blog over another; we watch the YouTube video we want to; we phone in our favorite American Idol contestant. Sure, someone has to make it onto American Idol for us to vote for him or her, and, yes, there is a constant barrage of marketing and publicity associated with the more commercial versions of democratic celebrity. Ultimately, however, we are able to participate in the outcome if we are so inclined, which is not an option with the latest boy band single or blockbuster from Hollywood. Unlike the classic Hollywood studio system that created its own stars and foisted them upon us, we create the democratic star ourselves if we choose to be involved in the process. Democratic celebrity relies on our empathy or sympathy with the stars as individuals. We might vote for Fantasia because we get a glimpse of her hardship and struggles, and we want to help determine her success.18
American Idol is just one of many reality TV shows and other democratic channels through which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. VH1 attained its highest viewership ever in 2006 (increasing by 15 percent from 2005), and much of this success was attributed to the launch of Celebrity Rehab (the plotline is all in the title) and Fantasia for Real, which is former American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino’s reality TV program. Starting in 2004, Project Runway, Bravo’s reality show that helps turn one aspiring young fashion designer into a legitimate fashion star, was the highest-rated program in the channel’s twenty-seven-year history (starting in 2009, the show began broadcasting on Lifetime). Dancing with the Stars’s finale brought ABC more than twenty million viewers, and of course American Idol continues to bring in viewers by the tens of millions. According to one estimate, there may be one thousand reality show contestants on TV at any moment, with at least twenty networks offering approximately four reality programs and at least two hours of programming per week (this latter figure doubling in size during the summer season).19 Reality TV is only one form of this type of stardom, all of which rests on the ability to create what the media scholar Mark Andrejevic has called “mass individuation” and “the democratization of publicity as celebrity.” 20 In other words, each one of these hundreds of people who attain fame through reality TV, Twitter, or various other social media seems fundamentally unique and worthy of celebrity, despite being one of many. Our love for democratic stars rests partially on the premise that their uniqueness is not that different from our own.
The Mechanics of the Democratic Star
On June 16, 2006, an unknown girl in a small Midwestern town became a global sensation when she posted home videos of herself and her friends on YouTube. Her alias was lonelygirl15 (real name Bree), and the videos documenting her life were innocuous and dull. Yet upward of fifteen million viewers kept watching her. She was homeschooled, her parents apparently strict and religious, and she was not exceptionally funny or bright. Yet for some reason, whether because of her quaint charm or middle-American wholesome good looks, or perhaps just because there was a morbid fascination with exactly how dull (and lonely) her life was, lonelygirl15’s videos made her an international phenomenon. Her videos were some of the most watched on YouTube, and viewers eagerly awaited the next update on her unexciting, no-need-to-be-updated life. “She is a high school girl with swooping eyebrows, boy problems, and a webcam willing to listen,” Wired magazine wrote. “The room behind her could be anywhere in America—there’s a pink floral-print bedspread, a half-dozen stuffed animals, and a framed picture of a rose on the wall.”21 So why did viewers care? Why did they keep watching?
By early September, viewers were suspicious that perhaps lonelygirl15 was a fake. Or as New York magazine put it, “Along the way, people have started questioning whether she even exists, and for good reason: She’s just a little too charming, her videos a little too well edited, and her story a little too neatly laid out.”22 These suspicions ultimately resulted in several viewers setting up a sting operation through making contact with lonelygirl15 on her MySpace page. Using IP address–tracking software, they were able to trace her e-mails from her MySpace page to Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills. Concurrently, it was also discovered that lonelygirl15 had a U.S. federal trademark 78957059, which was filed on August 22, 2006. In this filing, it stated that lonelygirl15 had been used in interstate commerce since May 24, 2006. It turned out that lonelygirl15 was actually Jessica Rose, a New Zealand–born actress living in Los Angeles, and her creators were Ramesh Flinders, a filmmaker and screenwriter from outside Los Angeles, and Miles Beckett, a medical school dropout turned filmmaker. The videos were being filmed in Flinders’s bedroom. The story that lonelygirl15 was a fraud broke at 1:41 a.m. on September 12. Every major newspaper from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times and thousands of blogs covered it that day. Two days later, Jessica Rose, aka lonelygirl15, made a surprise visit to Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show. She didn’t seem so lonely anymore.
At the time, it seemed the sky was the limit for Rose. The media was agog over this new type of star that could emerge from YouTube without the constraints of the Hollywood star machine. And so what if she had a little help from some pros at CAA? The bottom line was that Rose had made the big time, appeared on Jay Leno, an opportunity even A-listers covet, and succeeded without having to navigate the conventional channels. In 2007, Forbes ranked her the number one web celebrity, Maxim covered her, and she won a few awards for her Internet stardom. However, three years later most people don’t know Jessica Rose. She has not been featured in any major blockbusters and she does not grace the covers of magazines. In 2007, she appeared in a Lindsay Lohan film, I Know Who Killed Me, and a few smaller films as well as on web outlets that haven’t received much press. Rose’s life doesn’t seem very different from what it was the week before her story broke. Despite her best efforts, there were no big results from Rose’s Internet celebrity. And herein lies the paradox of the democratic star: While it ostensibly seems much easier to get one’s foot in the door, keeping oneself in the limelight is much harder. Hollywood is difficult to break into, but Hollywood stardom has a longer life span. If everyone has a chance to attain celebrity through democratic stardom, keeping people interested over time becomes that much harder. As the economist Tyler Cowen remarked, “It’s never a secure position, precisely because entry is easy.”23
In its early stages (before agents are hired and Perez Hilton is blogging about you), democratic celebrity is different in how it is maintained. Hollywood, sports, and political celebrity have their own built-in vetting processes. Hollywood agents and directors choose who to represent or star in their films. Scouts and agents make the big choices about who gets to play professionally. The Republicans and the Democrats hold party conferences and fund-raisers that either build more support for an already selected candidate or test the temperature for potential stars. If Creative Artists Agency picks a young starlet and does her bidding, she may or may not get parts, but someone is working around the clock to procure her a media profile, invites to events where she will be seen, auditions, and so forth.24 But YouTube stars and bloggers do it all themselves.25 The democratic star does not have a structured star machine to rely on; he does not have agents and handlers to help him perpetuate his star power. He can’t afford to wait for his nonexistent publicist to put out a press release. Thus, as much as M bemuses me with his endless status updates about his magazine and his trips back and forth between the coasts, he is doing his job perfectly. I am reminded of his existence and how important and busy he is. Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, has her agent to groom and perpetuate her star power.
Jay Maynard, aka Tron Guy, is a perfect example of the intense but fleeting nature of democratic stardom. Maynard, a computer programmer and denizen of Fairmont, Minnesota (population 11,000), went from geek to Internet celebrity after pictures of him in a luminescent costume inspired by the Disney science-fiction movie Tron showed up all over the Internet. Maynard actually never intended on becoming a celebrity but capitalized on his star power when it came around. “I think everyone wants to become famous kind of idly. I never expected to become famous,” he said. “What happened was that I submitted a story to Slashdot [a technology news website]. It was a follow-up to other stories about other Tron fan costumes…I thought maybe a couple of people would be interested…The story just spread across the Internet instantly…People were making pretty seriously derogatory comments. Like ‘that guy in spandex.’ They didn’t think that anybody that was my shape should ever put on tights. I knew darn well going in that I wasn’t shaped like Bruce Boxleitner, the guy who plays Tron.” But that latter point was irrelevant. Soon, Maynard ended up on the Jimmy Kimmel show and an episode of South Park, and was a headliner for the Internet celebrity conference ROFLCon. Once Maynard’s celebrity status was established, he worked his own media machine to perpetuate his star power. As he told me, “I make a policy of never turning down an interview request. Part of this is because it’s my chance to show there’s more to me than just a fat guy in spandex.”
For about a year and a half, Maynard experienced acute celebrity, requests for interviews, and a constant media profile. Maynard started a website (www.tronguy.net) and a LiveJournal. And his Tron photo shoots continued. But like most Internet celebrity, public interest slacked off without a structured system to perpetuate Maynard’s public persona. For Maynard, this result was inevitable: “I honestly believe you cannot get Internet fame seeking it out. Those who have tried have universally failed.”
If you look at the statistics, the way Maynard’s celebrity played out is to be expected. When I spoke to YouTube executives about the rise of Internet celebrity, they explained the immense difficulty in perpetuating stardom, despite the website’s egalitarian mantra. In the fall of 2009, more than twenty hours of content were uploaded every minute on YouTube, a 60 percent increase in just a year and a half. Considering that most uploads are an average of one minute each, you get a sense of how hard it is to stay on top. As one YouTube executive put it, “You are up against a sea of competition.” And this is another aspect of how democratic celebrity plays out: The sheer number of contestants all vying for the same place makes democratic stardom much harder to sustain than conventional Hollywood or sports celebrity. Uploading a video to YouTube might take five minutes and no one needs an agent to do it, but the only YouTube celebrities who make it in the long term are those who have viewers who “subscribe” to see their videos regularly, or those whose video is featured on the YouTube home page. He continued, “Hollywood is push celebrity, while YouTube is pull. Users troll the web and find what they care about or not. We give them the tools, but then they have to find [what they want to watch] themselves.”
The paradox of democratic star power is that, yes, everyone has a shot at it, but no one is given special status.26 Hollywood anoints a very finite number of people to become stars, but it backs up this selection through financial and time investment and an intricate network of publicists, agents, and media devoted to the creation of one particular star, making his or her chances of success much higher. In the world of democratic celebrity, there is always another compulsive blogger to take your place. And as viewers we barely notice the difference among them all. Given that the democratic star is up against twenty hours of content uploaded every minute on YouTube, the strategy must always be oversaturation.
In this respect, American Idol is unique as a form of democratic celebrity. While its premise (picking unknowns from the masses) is fundamentally democratic, once selected, its contestants are initiated into the American Idol star-making machine, which includes adverts, media blitz, and prime-time broadcasting. Also, all the winners and many of the top contestants are offered record contracts in the postseason. Thus, it is no surprise that the stars of American Idol have a longer shelf life than most other democratic stars, even if the audience is initially drawn to these stars because they identify with them and because the contestants challenge the conventional stardom frameworks. American Idol actively brands and seeks profits from its contenders and does this through contracts binding the contestants to the show for up to seven years, giving American Idol the right to use their images for promotional purposes.27 There is the American Idol brand (which has even been a featured Dreyer’s ice cream flavor), but also marketing, licensing fees, and royalties from the sale of music performances by its contestants, all of which adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars.28 American Idol is therefore invested in perpetuating its contestants’ careers, even if just a season ago these stars were nobodies.
The Dark Side of Democratic Celebrity
There is reason for pause before we revel in Twitter and reality TV celebrity as fairer versions of star power. The traditional star machine of agents, publicists, and magazine editors is discriminatory, but these professionals perform a very important function: They vet the celebrities and in many ways test their fortitude along the trajectory of stardom. The barrage of agents, producers, directors, and media can regulate and control the process by which one becomes a star. Without these gatekeepers, the rise to celebrity can be destructive for some individuals who go from zero to hero in under two weeks and cannot handle the pressure of being a newfound celebrity.
Most Hollywood celebrities value their position; they also have an entourage of people equipped with media and publicity skills to smooth their path to stardom. Publicists and agents help protect a celebrity by screening unwise offers. They work full-time dealing with the media demands. They make the decisions about what media outlets a star will talk to, squelch rumors, and deal with all entities that want something from the star they represent (whether cosmetic contracts, interviews, or movie deals). Democratic stars may hire a publicist once they have become famous, but they usually have to become celebrities before anyone invests in them. The established system by which stars are selected, handled, and represented works by both providing expertise to its fledgling stars and protecting them. Although entry and acceptance into this star machine involve a far more difficult and formal process, the Hollywood mechanism appears more merciful and works to defend its celebrities against the meteoric rise and fall that many democratic stars face. At least since the Greek tragedies, society has relished watching the rise and inevitable fall of its heroes, but reality TV has established a recurring mechanism to create stars out of nothing only to watch them combust into nothing again. As Peter Bazalgette, the TV mogul and producer of the U.K. Big Brother, put it, “We’ve always had people who are famous for being famous. There is nothing new about the public wishing to put people on a pedestal, then knock them down again. The difference now is that it has been realized.”29
A recent example of this process is Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle, who in the spring of 2009 went from an average woman from a small town in Scotland singing in her local church to international sensation in three minutes. Her awkwardness and frumpiness were painfully clear on her first audition for the show (which is almost identical in format to American Idol, with Simon Cowell as a judge on this program as well). Cowell made no attempts to hide his amusement and disdain. He asked her what she wanted to be and she said, “A professional singer.” Cowell replied with a smirk: “Why do you think that’s never happened?” to which Boyle said, “I’ve never been given the chance before,” and then opened her mouth to sing a breathtakingly beautiful version of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” More than one hundred million people around the world watched the video of her performance on various media sites. In that moment, her winning Britain’s Got Talent seemed all but a fait accompli, with one judge, Piers Morgan, remarking after he voted for her to remain on the show, “That’s the biggest yes I’ve ever given anybody.” Boyle was euphoric, dancing onstage after she was voted onto the next round.
In the following months, though, Boyle’s personal life was scrutinized, ridiculed, and obsessed over: She lived in her family’s state-supported housing in a small village with her cat, Pebbles. She had been greatly devoted to her mother, who had passed away a few years earlier. She seemed kind, if odd and rather overwhelmed, but willing to ham it up for the cameras. In the endless media frenzy, however, Boyle seemed unable to handle the pressure and invasiveness. She swore at the media, she locked herself up. And while she went on to make it to the final, she lost to a young dance group called Diversity. Boyle had a breakdown and was ultimately checked into a mental health facility. In the days after Boyle’s hospitalization, the media went wild. She was seen as a freak show by some, the encapsulation of the “American dream” by others, and also a candid reminder never to judge by appearance alone. But there was an underlying current of disapproval directed at Britain’s Got Talent: They did not shelter Boyle, they did not protect her, and some went as far as to say the show exploited her. Mary Beard, a professor at Cambridge, railed against the show in a London Times op-ed: “Susan Boyle is a vulnerable and exploited middle-aged woman. She is not a star in the making, being given a lucky break thanks to BGT.”30 In a commentary for the BBC, the psychologist Glen Wilson remarked, “Most reality TV is in some respects exploitative, but Britain’s Got Talent seemed to me to be particularly so.”31 Even Cowell later expressed regret for how the show handled Boyle’s obviously deteriorating capacity to deal with her newfound celebrity. In an op-ed in the Daily Mail he wrote, “Looking back on it all, it has become clear to me that we didn’t handle the situation with Susan as well as we could have.”32
Unquestionably, Boyle was unsteady and vulnerable, and no one was there to help her handle celebrity that she could not have foreseen in a million years. And yet, her celebrity continued. Her debut album, released in November 2009, was Amazon’s largest presale in history. According to Billboard, her version of “I Dreamed a Dream” debuted as the largest sale in history for a female vocalist. Despite Boyle’s success, however, there were still rumblings of her being on the verge of a breakdown. What this story makes clear is that there can be a sinister aspect to democratic celebrity. It can happen too quickly, it can be overwhelming, and very often the people who experience such a sudden rise have no framework within which to navigate their newfound stardom. There is no system in place to check the potential invasiveness of the media. The lack of handlers also means that there is less control over the development and outcome of any situation in which these stars might be involved. Hollywood publicists stamp out rumors and are experts in dealing with scandals; they act as mouthpieces and have connections with reporters and gossip columnists who can spin a story a particular way. Some publicists might know Oprah personally and be able to arrange a spot on her show for a star to defend himself or herself. Max Clifford guides his stars through tricky interviews and screens every media call.
Without the experts around, however, anything is possible. A case in point is the reality TV show gone awry, Jon & Kate Plus 8, which initially aired in 2008 as the story of a happy couple living in a Pennsylvania suburb with their very large family. Then Kate was accused of having an affair with her bodyguard (both denied it vehemently), and Jon was accused of having several affairs, sneaking out of the house, and partying with college girls. The disintegration of their marriage was happening in real time on TV. TLC, the cable network that aired the show, experienced a record viewership of almost ten million. The celebrity print media jumped on board too. From March to October 2009, Jon and Kate were on the cover of the big celebrity tabloids more than fifty times, trumping every other star’s coverage. When Jon graced the cover of In Touch with a tell-all exclusive, the magazine sold nearly one million copies. Other tabloids reported similar figures associated with Jon and Kate on their covers.33 When the couple’s marriage fell apart, TLC comically changed the show’s name to Kate Plus 8 to reflect the impending divorce. Jon challenged this decision, and the show has since been canceled. The unraveling and attendant public spectacle can hardly be terrific for the couple or their children. Inquiries were made into whether Pennsylvania child labor laws had been violated.34 (The charges have since been dropped.) What is clear about democratic celebrity is that, while it is free and easy to attain, it often exploits people who would be better off away from the spotlight.35 “‘Reality’ grew to mean a particular type of closely choreographed and edited ultra-reality—a hyperventilating, tearful, exhibitionist spectacle initially hailed as the democratization of television,” the British newspaper columnist A. A. Gill commented. “Or, alternatively, as the lunatics taking over the asylum.”36
The PR guru Matthew Freud told me, “Sigmund Freud, my great-grandfather, was one of the first to achieve fame while alive. And my father [Sir Clement Freud] was quite famous, on thirty million televisions every night. That was a very weird thing to grow up with. With television, fame moved closer to our orbit. Now everyone is famous—that guy was an X Factor star, that guy won the lottery…People who we aspired to be like, we suddenly became.” The ultimate problem is that democratic stars are “just like us.” The everywoman turned celebrity may not be ready for stardom or able to manage its accompanying crush of attention both positive and negative. “The less connected the achievement of celebrity was to some training,” Graeme Turner writes, “the more arbitrary it was—the less equipped the person concerned was to handle the inevitable discovery that fame had nothing to do with them and that it could disappear overnight.”37 Further, it is their ordinariness that both attracts and repels us and can cause democratic stars to crash and burn. Freud elaborated: “Suddenly it became apparent that these people weren’t exceptional. No matter how dull you are, you can be famous. Then the media builds them up and then gives them a sucker punch. So it’s not surprising that these unexceptional people are, in fact, unexceptional. Exceptional and celebrity, there used to be a correlation between the two. The last cycle of reality TV stars were unspeakably ordinary. Susan Boyle being a small footnote.” Or as Max Clifford explained, “More and more in the last ten years, they [the media] take ordinary members of the public, they become famous for five or ten minutes, sometimes fifteen minutes. Tabloids feed off of them, they feed off of the tabloid newspapers in the short term. Very few celebrities go on…very few last more than five or ten minutes. Media has to keep creating new celebrities, to go through the motion of creating them, ridiculing them and then forgetting them.” This dynamic illustrates the cruelest aspect of democratic celebrity: experiencing stardom only to have it taken away. Clifford continued: “Celebrity is like a drug. The more you get, the more you want. And fame is just as deadly as any.”