Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction

205 Pages·2008·0.91 MB·English

by  Jake Halpern

FAME
junkies
The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite
Addiction
Jake Halpern
Copyright © 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-45369-6
To my brother, Greg
Contents
Introduction: Hooked on Fame xi PART I
The World of Aspiring Child Celebrities
1 Going to Fame School • 3
2 Mobs of Fame-Starved Children • 24
3 A Home for the Famous and the Almost Famous • 53
PART II
The Celebrity Entourage
4 The Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants • 81
5 The Desire to Belong: Why Everyone Wants to Have Dinner with Paris Hilton
and 50 Cent • 105
6 When Reflected Glory Isn't Enough: Confessions of an Upwardly Mobile
Celebrity "Slave" • 125
PART III
The World of Celebrity Worshipers
7 Monkeys, Us Weekly, and the Power of Social Information • 141
8 A Choice of Worship: Rod vs. God • 159
Conclusion: Some Reflections from Hollywood's Premier Retirement Home •
185
Note on Name Changes 199 Appendix 200 Acknowledgments 214 Notes 217
Introduction: Hooked on Fame
Several months before he became famous, seventeen-year-old Jerrell Jones
visited the Black Pearl tattoo parlor, in downtown St. Louis, and made an
unusual request: he wanted a six-inch-long bar code, complete with a minute
serial number, etched on his forearm in dark-green ink. As far as Jones was
concerned, his decision to get the tattoo was just one more step on the path to
fame. Prior to this, he had run away from his home in the suburbs and spent
several months living the life of a vagabond on the streets of St. Louis, sleeping
in abandoned cars and writing rap lyrics by the flame of a cigarette lighter.
During this time he renamed himself J-Kwon, and began to prepare for the fame
he felt was imminent. "I got the bar code because I knew that someday I'd be a
product," he told me in 2003. "I knew they were going to sell me."
He was right.
J-Kwon eventually enlisted the help of two local rap producers, known as the
Trackboyz. Together they recorded his debut album, Hood Hop, and sold it to
Arista Records. It wasn't long before hangers-on began to swirl around J-Kwon
like debris in a cyclone. They included several personal assistants, one of whom
was a teenager known as "Versatile"—though J-Kwon soon renamed him "Four,"
in homage to the rapper Nelly, who apparently had an assistant named "Three."
Another member of J-Kwon's extended entourage was an almost-famous rapper
named 40 Grand—or "Uncle 40," as J-Kwon sometimes called
him—whose primary job was to recount his own failures and serve as a kind of
living cautionary tale. The dozen or so members of J-Kwon's entourage followed
him around, gave him advice, offered him protection, lavished praise on him,
and did whatever they could to seal their mutual fate and garner a oneway ticket
out of obscurity.
As J-Kwon's hit song "Tipsy" began to get more airplay, the frenzy surrounding
him mounted. While visiting a Foot Locker at a St. Louis shopping mall, he
drew such a crowd that mall officials closed off the store and asked him to call
ahead in the future so that they could arrange for extra security. After a show in
Birmingham, Alabama, a mob of fans grew so rowdy that J-Kwon needed a
police escort back to his hotel. In Los Angeles, which he visited to appear on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a woman approached him and said that the
seventeen-year-old rapper had changed her life and that she wanted to have his
baby.
In the span of just a few months I witnessed J-Kwon evolve from a marginalized
teenager into a bona fide celebrity. I chronicled much of what I saw in an article
for The New Yorker, but long after its publication the story remained firmly
embedded in my thoughts. Talk of celebrities may be ubiquitous, but fame itself
is still the rarest of commodities. And everybody—including J-Kwon, Uncle 40,
Four, the screaming hordes in Alabama, the would-be mother to his child in Los
Angeles, and me—all of us were beguiled by it. On some fundamental, almost
primal level, it seemed as if we were all hungry for a taste of it.
I will be the first to admit that writing about fame is a stretch for me. I grew up
far from the glitz of Hollywood, in the Rust Belt city of Buffalo, New York, with
a leftist father who for years wore a massive Castro beard, and a mother who
accumulated advanced degrees but, despite my best efforts to teach her
otherwise, constantly confused Bob Marley with Barry Manilow. The closest I
got to "glamour" was donning my moon boots and polar parka to trudge through
the snow for a screening of Wres-
tleMania at my neighbor's house. Even years later, during my first encounter
with a Hollywood agent, I asked so many obvious and apparently naive
questions that he finally snapped, "Kid, where the hell are you from, Buffalo?"
My first real exposure to celebrity culture was in the mid-1980s, during my early
adolescence, when my parents briefly acquiesced to my demands for cable
television. Almost immediately my show of choice became Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous, which first aired in 1984. On wintry evenings, as gale-force winds
howled through the deserted streets of North Buffalo, I cozied up to the warm
glow of the TV and let the host, Robin Leach, whisk me into a rarefied world of
private yachts and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Perhaps needless to say, these
things weren't too common in Buffalo—especially during the 1980s, when the
city was still reeling from the loss of the steel industry.
Looking back, it seems odd to me that Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was so
popular. In other times and places the flaunting of such discrepancies in wealth
has incited revolution, but for some reason this show did precisely the opposite:
it enthralled millions of middle-class viewers like me. I was a ridiculously
skinny, uncoordinated kid, so I avoided sports, read way too many books, and
talked pretty much continually. I must have set off an almost Pavlovian response
in schoolyard bullies. Robin Leach seemed to provide a reprieve from all this.
For thirty minutes his show allowed me to escape from the cramped confines of
our family room—with its water-stained ceiling and buzzing radiators—and
enjoy an intoxicating dose of glamour.
One of the many things that still fascinate me about Lifestyles of the Rich and
Famous is that no rich or famous people were actually on the show. We, the
viewers, saw only these people's possessions. In a way, the whole show
functioned as one continuous "point-of-view shot," which is what facilitated the
voyeurism of it all. And I'm pretty sure that's why I liked the show so much.
Once a week it allowed me to imagine that I was in Malibu, or Beverly Hills,
mingling with the glitterati, bark-
ing orders at my butler, or receiving fan mail in my mahogany-paneled study. At
the time, I was only nine years old, but I was clearly already nursing delusions of
grandeur and beginning to fixate on the idealized notion of what it meant to be a
celebrity.
My parents eventually became so annoyed with my weekly devotion to
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that they actually gave away our television
set, thus ending my obsession with Robin Leach and the world he advertised. To
fill the void they bought me a bicycle, and when the weather permitted, I
channeled my time and energy into cycling. Still, I suffered momentary relapses.
I'd go to a friend's house for a sleepover, and before I knew it I was glancing at
the television and pining for the sound of Robin Leach's English accent.
Even today a similar urge lingers. The big difference now is the number of
"celebrity news" outlets. All you have to do is click on E!, the twenty-four-hour
celebrity-news network, or buy a copy of Us Weekly and turn to the "Stars—
They're Just Like Us!" section for news about Brad and Angelina's latest tropical
vacation. And I still get sucked in. I'll be walking through an airport, hustling
toward my gate, and the next thing I know I'm standing beneath a television set,
watching a segment on Julia Roberts's adorable children. As I'm absorbing every
last word of this pap, somewhere in the back of my head the faintest of voices is
asking, "Why on earth do you care?"
Joel Resnick is a red-carpet dealer. On any given day he has about 3,000 yards of
red carpet at his office in Flemington, New Jersey. He runs the Red Carpet Store,
one of the nation's leading suppliers of special-event carpeting. His company's
Web site notes, "Whether you are looking for a way to elevate your private party
to a 'Red Carpet' event, are catering to the Stars, or are looking for a
conversation piece for your own home, the Red Carpet Store has got you
covered." Resnick has been in the red-carpet business for only a few years, but
he has already made quite a name for himself: he did the carpeting for the MTV
Music Awards and the 2004 Summer Olympics, among other events.
Resnick does much of the work himself—he takes the orders, cuts the materials,
binds the edges, and ships the carpets. Sometimes, when the event is in New
York City, he actually nails the carpet to the floor on-site. He first did this for the
2003 MTV Music Awards, and what he saw there made a huge impression on
him. As he was laying the carpet, die-hard fans begged him for scraps. Not
wanting to disappoint them, Resnick tossed over a few frayed strips of red cloth
and watched in amazement as the fans gushed with appreciation. Afterward he
began selling larger (two-foot-square) souvenir swatches on eBay for $20.00
apiece.
"Selling red carpets is a high profit margin," Resnick told me. "It is relatively
cheap material and people are willing to pay top dollar for it, and that is a
beautiful thing." When I asked him why Americans are so captivated by red
carpet, he was quick to answer: "It's like diamonds. They are not actually that
rare, but the minute kings and queens started wearing them, everyone wanted
them." It's all about the power of association, concluded Resnick, and in this
instance our obsession with celebrities has simply carried over into the realm of
fabrics.
Resnick's story isn't all that surprising. After all, we live in a country where the
ultimate competition for celebrityhood— American Idol—has more viewers than
the nightly news on the three major networks combined. And our interest in
celebrities doesn't appear to be waning. The circulation of the major news and
opinion magazines (including Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and the
Atlantic) increased by only 2 percent between 2000 and 2005, while the
circulation of the major entertainment and celebrity news magazines (including
People, Us Weekly, InStyle, and Entertainment Weekly) increased by 18.7
percent. The cult of celebrity is also making an impact on the $175 billion
clothing industry. In 2002 celebrity labels accounted for just 6 percent of this
industry; by 2005 that number had jumped to more than 10 percent. Industry
analysts expect it will hit 15 percent by 2009. But perhaps the most telling
statistics involve our heroes. Ever since the early 1960s the Gallup Organization
has
been conducting a poll about which man Americans most admire, and compiling
a list of the top twenty or so overall finishers. In 1963 that list included a number
of political figures—Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and
Martin Luther King Jr. among them—but not one entertainment celebrity, sports
star, or media personality. By 2005 the list included six such people: Mel
Gibson, Donald Trump, Bono, Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
Rush Limbaugh.
More worrisome than any of this, however, is the effect that our national
obsession with fame and celebrities has on children—especially girls. A survey I
organized, with the generous help and guidance of statisticians at Boston College
and Babson College, yielded some interesting findings. The survey was
distributed to 653 middle school students around Rochester, New York, a
community whose demographics in many ways reflect those of the nation as a
whole. In one question students were asked to choose from a list of famous
people the one they would most like to have dinner with. There were a range of
options including "None of the above." Among the girls who opted for the
dinner, the least popular candidates were President George W. Bush (2.7 percent)
and Albert Einstein (3.7 percent). Far ahead of them were Paris Hilton and 50
Cent (15.8 percent each), who tied for third place. Second place went to Jesus
Christ (16.8 percent), and the winner was Jennifer Lopez (17.4 percent). Another
question asked, "When you grow up, which of the following jobs would you
most like to have?" There were five options to choose from, and among girls, 9.5
percent chose "the chief of a major company like General Motors," 9.8 percent
chose "a Navy Seal," 13.6 percent chose "a United States Senator," 23.7 percent
chose "the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale," and 43.4 percent
chose "the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star."
It is commonly said that Americans are obsessed with celebrities, but this
observation raises the question, What, exactly, makes someone a celebrity?
Indeed, the word "celebrity" seems to encompass everyone from high-profile
sushi chefs to Olympic
shot-putters to Supreme Court justices. But for the purposes of this book I was
most interested in the quintessential entertainment celebrities—J-Kwon, Brad
Pitt, Madonna, even Paris Hilton—whom we often see parading down the red
carpet. I wanted to know, Why do countless Americans yearn so desperately for
this sort of fame? Why do others, such as celebrity personal assistants, devote
their entire lives to serving these people? And why do millions of others fall into
the mindless habit of watching them from afar?
In search of answers, I began to imagine a journey of sorts— a plunge into the
vortex of fame, where celebrity was not just a persistent distraction but a full-
blown, all-encompassing obsession. My plan was to examine three separate
subcultures: the first inhabited by aspiring celebrities, the second by personal
assistants and other entourage insiders, and the third by die-hard fans. Each
subculture is the focus of one section of this book.
Before I went anywhere, however, I wanted to consider some of the ideological