Celebrity Nation by Landon Jones

Author:Landon Jones [Jones, Landon Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps surprisingly, especially given their relative wealth, the life expectancy of celebrities is shorter than that of people who do not have to cope with the slings and arrows of fame. In a sample of one hundred stars, Jib Fowles, a professor of media studies at the University of Houston, found that stars on average do indeed die much younger than the rest of the US population.11 “The average age at death for Americans was 71.9 years, while for the stars it was 58.7—a full 13.2 years younger,” he reported. Even more disturbing, Fowles found there was “a remarkable differential [in the average age of death] between the sexes.” Female celebrities fared much worse, dying on average at age 54.3, an astonishing 21.5 years earlier than the average American woman, who died at 75.8. Fowles concluded that the stresses built into the job of performing as a celebrity are far more hazardous for women than for men. Ominously, Fowles’s study was conducted in 1992, well before the arrival of the pressure-cooker environment of the internet and social media.

Celebrities are highly aware of who and what the media wants them to be, down the finest detail. As Kenneth Gergen writes, in Rational Being: Beyond Self and Community, “We are bombarded, for example, with advertisements regarding the most desirable body shape, clothing styles, color of the teeth, texture of the hair and so on. The media inform us of what is ‘in’ in the way of music, books, restaurants, film, and wine. Everywhere we encounter the ‘top 100,’ ‘the top ten,’ and ‘number one.’ “12

Here is Eric Clapton: “All we want to do is be left alone to make music but because we are ‘rock stars’ a whole different set of expectancies are thrust upon us. That we have instant opinions about everything, that we should set an example to the youth of today by making public statements about drugs, that we should dress and behave like the freaks we are supposed to be.”13

No wonder celebrities named the media as their number-one stressor in Charles Figley’s survey. There is essentially an unspoken Faustian bargain between the celebrities and the media. If the celebrities cooperate with the media (and the more they feed the media’s needs, the bigger they become), they hold on to their fame and fortune, but at the cost of their individuality, their privacy, even their independence. And the more famous they become, the more vulnerable they become. Howard Bragman, the Hollywood crisis management guru, calls it “the piñata syndrome.” As he puts it, “It’s really about the media. They’re only lifting you up so that they can take sticks and beat you and see what comes out.”14

What this amounts to is that our addiction to fame has become a key component of the American dream—but one that betrays us. F. Scott Fitzgerald previewed it in his judgment about the wealthy Buchanans in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then

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