Author Probes Celebrity : Pain of Fame From Aristotle to Zsa Zsa

I want to be great. . . . When everybody can look at my caricature and say, “That’s him, that’s Richard Pryor,” then I’ll be great. I know now that I can reach that level.

--Comedian Richard Pryor

Earthly fame is but a gust of wind.

--from Dante’s “Inferno”

In the fall of 1971, while plowing through his accumulated summer mail, literature professor Leo Braudy found a thick manuscript at the bottom of the pile. To his surprise, his ex-wife had written a book about the breakup of their marriage.

In that moment, Braudy became acutely aware of the glories and pitfalls of fame.

With publication of the book, “Between Marriage and Divorce: A Woman’s Diary” by Susan Braudy, he became increasingly aware that “going public” meant social recognition. At the same time, he said, it meant being entrapped by the gaze of others.

That led him to begin collecting examples of the warping effect of fame on individuals and also to examine the lives of the famous throughout history.

Last month, Braudy, the Leo S. Bing Professor of Literature at the University of Southern California, published “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History” (Oxford University Press, $27.50). The result of 10 years of study, the encyclopedic work portrays fame from Aristotle to Zsa Zsa.

In the living room of the spacious Spanish-style Silver Lake home he shares with his second wife, Dorothy, a painter, Braudy spoke of fame in Los Angeles.

‘Most Extreme Version’

There is a particular brand of fame in Los Angeles, he said. “As the urban center most on wheels, Los Angeles has the most extreme version of fame. The audience speeds by at such a rate that stars need to be very flamboyant to catch their attention, even if only for a second.”

Commenting on the widespread fascination with the private lives of stars, Braudy spoke about “celebrity media,” such as People magazine and the TV show “Entertainment Tonight.” “The celebrity media cater to a double impulse--to admire and to envy the famous. We have learned that many of their lives are sad, so they have become just like us.” On the other hand, he said, that raises the possibility that “we can be just like them. . . .

“As heirs of Western civilization, we place a cultural emphasis on the value of public recognition. We tend to seek fame in one arena or another--from Little Leagues to beauty contests to business and professional competitions--because our society has taught us that fame somehow raises our self-worth.”

The root meaning of the word fame, he said, is to be talked about by people. Society does not celebrate only power and achievement, he said. “When we pay attention to mediocre performers and publicity-seeking criminals or terrorists, we also celebrate the idea of fame itself.”

“Throughout the 20th Century the popular feeling has grown that famous people are both more real than we are and less real.” They are more real, he said, because of the heightened form of their reality, and less real because that heightening promises constant availability to us, a willingness to give up their private lives, to be invaded because they are on show.

“For performers who can’t bridge the gap between what they are selling and what they really are, collision is inevitable.”

Marilyn Monroe is one example in the book whose despair and suicide in Braudy’s view illustrates the outcome of “the desire for fame as a personal attempt to mediate the disparity between what they are, what they want to be and what they are perceived as being.” Braudy wrote that, “youthful success especially can mean that one becomes symbolic before one is real, created by others before one can create oneself.”

In Hollywood this confusion between different images becomes more apparent to him the longer he lives here, said Braudy, who has been a resident of Los Angeles for three years.

Despite the high visibility of celebrity today, Braudy said, the phenomenon is not new. Fame has a long, sometimes infamous history that holds unsuspected clues to human nature.

It provokes difficult questions that are interwoven into the tapestry of human life. Who is the real self behind the public image? What are the real rewards of achievement? What price glory?

The Twin Offspring

“To the extent that we are all stars waiting to be discovered,” Braudy said, “no one is surprised to find that stardom and shyness, public assertion and private withdrawal are the twin offspring of the desire for fame and recognition.”

Although many may long for it, not everyone can be famous. And, in earlier times, even fewer could win the prize. In the classical world, the prototypical famous person was the general/politician, who was replaced in late antiquity by the saint, and in the Renaissance by painters, sculptors and playwrights.

Alexander the Great was perhaps the first man to lust for fame for himself, Braudy said. Alexander created a vocabulary and a group of gestures that were reproduced by others. He deliberately modeled his ways on the legendary warrior Achilles.

Visiting the site of Troy, he laid a wreath on the tomb of his hero and then, taking up a shield said to belong to Achilles, Alexander replaced it in the shrine with his own, which would be there for the edification of Roman tourists hundreds of years later. Eventually, people believed that Alexander, like Achilles, was divine, a trait of fame in those times.

Synonymous With Ruler

Renowned Roman leaders Pompey, Caesar and Augustus also intentionally carved out their powerful public images. Caesar was so successful at stage-managing his image that his name has come to be synonymous with ruler, even though he sat on the throne for a mere two years.

With the advent of Christianity, the central tug-of-war between public and private lives was launched. The Romans’ urge for recognition by their peers, their ostentatiousness and self-assertion clashed boldly with the Christians’ inwardness and hope for approval in the eyes of God.

“As a result,” Braudy said, “even today many of us cultivate the art of showing off while seeming to be modest. We want to be recognized, but we’re concerned about the harm that may come to us if that recognition causes us to be envied.”

After the American and French revolutions, opportunity for celebrity flourished. With the coming of the printing press, photography, and eventually film and television, the democratization of fame spread throughout the Western world. Actors, rock stars, athletes, politicians: All could act as models for their fans.

“The fans or audiences of famous people wish to become justified, purified, or authenticated by associating with their heroes,” Braudy said.

James Boswell, the 18th-Century biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, became the classic fan and eventually became famous himself. “It is certain that I am not a great man,” Boswell wrote in 1764, “but I have an enthusiastic love of great men, and I derive a kind of glory from it.”

‘We Have Forgotten Posterity’

Today, Braudy said, fan is a word reserved for the followers of famous people who are still alive. In the 16th Century, Shakespeare was still suspicious enough about immediate fame to think that only fame after death was truly substantial. “These days,” Braudy said, “immediate fame is the only fame that seems to count. We have forgotten posterity, the invisible audience.”

Why do people become fans? “It’s a feature of our modern age that people understand themselves less by introspection than by projecting aspects of themselves onto famous people,” Braudy pointed out.

Fans use the famous in a variety of ways. “Famous people give us ideas about how to look and dress. By identifying with them emotionally, we can express parts of our personalities vicariously. And they expand our sense of self by articulating its possibilities on stage or screen.”

Bizarre acts for personal publicity, such as assassinations of famous heroes like Martin Luther King or John Lennon, “are an extreme, twisted version of the projection everyone does,” Braudy said.

“The desire to be appreciated by people you don’t know is an essential part of the nature of fame and a great justification for one’s work,” he said. “But it’s also a great trap, because it can never really be fulfilled. Ultimately, approval from others can never substitute for self-approval.”

Delicate Balance

For this reason, he said, those who write or paint or do something for an audience have to maintain a delicate balance between the extent to which they do it for others and the extent to which they do it for themselves.

Past standards of fame could be changing, Braudy said. “Now that there are so many ways for names and faces to appear in public, the meaning of that appearance seems less personal. When each occupation, neighborhood or club has its own events, publications and T-shirts, fame also carries with it a comfortable element of familiarity.”

Society could be on the verge of growing out of this extreme urge to be famous, Braudy said. “I think we’ve carried the fame concept to its limits. When you consider how mass media are now producing celebrities practically by the hour, we seem to be approaching the Andy Warhol vision of a society in which everyone becomes famous for 15 minutes.”

If society really has reached the point where the trappings of fame are generally available, Braudy said, then the basis of fame might shift from achievement to being. “Perhaps we’ll begin giving proper appreciation to inner worth and untouted merit.”

Braudy said he is concerned that his book will become famous rather than read. “I really don’t crave fame for myself. Writing this book has cured me of that.”