In Death, He Transcends Mere Fame

In death, John F. Kennedy Jr. proved to be that rarest of celebrity: one who unleashes a national outpouring of shared grief.

Celebrities lurk in front of every camera in this era of 500 cable television channels, but those whose deaths became occasions for spontaneous demonstrations of emotion in recent decades can be counted on one’s fingers--and most of them are Kennedys.

Princess Diana was the most recent before John Kennedy Jr. In the 1960s, his father and uncle, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, were firmly in this camp. In the nearly 30 years before Diana, Elvis Presley is one of the few who was even in the same league.

What special qualities established such emotional bonds with millions of Americans whom they had never met? The answer, scholars and other experts believe, is a paradox: These few were special because, in some ways, they had a common touch.

Call them America’s icons or idols or something else. Americans, said Yale sociologist Joshua Gamson, want them to be “normal.” Americans are intrigued by power and privilege, Gamson said, but they also distrust those with these qualities--unless the well-born or famous can prove that deep down, they are regular guys.

“Few pull it off,” Gamson said, because the balance of “better than you” and “just like you” is so delicate. John F. Kennedy Jr., like Princess Diana, walked the tightrope deftly.

“We want celebrities to be unlike us, but we also want them to be like us,” agreed Marvin Heiferman, curator of “Fame After Photography,” an exhibit at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. “John F. Kennedy Jr. fulfilled that. He wasn’t asking for the spotlight--but he was always ready for a camera. He knew what to do, shirtless or not, hat on or off. Dressed in a tuxedo or not, he knew.”

For Many, a Shared Emotional Experience

Kennedy’s death, Gamson said, became for many a shared emotional experience, rare in a nation fragmented by differences.

“There’s not that much emotion in this country’s public life,” he said, “and these are opportunities for people, even in a thin way, to acknowledge an emotional response to each other. People say to each other, ‘Hey, this actually makes me sad, I’m actually sad,’ and there’s a sort of ‘I’m moved-you’re moved’ acknowledgment. These events build solidarity.”

In many ways, Kennedy was an icon simply because he was the son of an icon, the handsome grown-up who, as a boy of 3, saluted his martyred father’s coffin.

In a country riven by divisions of generation and gender and ethnicity, the “national myth” of the Kennedy clan is uniquely unifying, said Neil Postman, a professor of culture and communications at New York University. The promising life and tragic death of John F. Kennedy Jr. thus extended a “narrative” that binds Americans together, he said.

Yet others cringed and complained about the obsessive interest and saturation coverage of the death and life of John Kennedy Jr., an eerie male reenactment of the instant mythologizing of Princess Diana.

“It certainly was a tragedy,” said Jane Moon, 64, a San Antonio career counselor for the Army. “Three beautiful, successful people. At first I was sad. And then I was saturated. I pretty much have blocked it out now.”

To a generation born after President Kennedy died, JFK Jr. isn’t necessarily the kid saluting a coffin of a historical figure but the guy who set the record for male appearances on the cover of People magazine (Diana holds the female title). The Internet was coursing with hormonal odes to the chiseled celeb from teenage girls.

Unlike Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and other famous people whose deaths triggered national mourning, Kennedy and Diana have no lasting artistic or political legacy to leave behind and may have a shorter shelf life as icons, said Ray Browne, a retired professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

“If you die young and you die mysteriously and violently, it always is good for your reputation,’ said Browne. “We brood over the fact that God would allow the young and the beautiful to be taken away from us.

“The nation just got through Princess Diana and now we have another young and beautiful person taken away from us, and that’s some heavy timber. We say speak no ill of dead. We should also say speak no exaggerated accomplishments about the dead.”

As the week wore on, the repetitious tributes revealed a certain scattershot quality to the public interest in the Kennedy death. “It is, in fact, a major outpouring, but it is a confused one,’ said Marshall Fishwick, an expert on popular culture at Virginia Tech. “His achievements were not extraordinary. We live in an age of popular excess.”

To transcend mere fame, two stern conditions must be met, scholars of American celebrity agree. First, you must be seen as having endured the public spotlight reluctantly but graciously, even generously. And second, you must have weathered personal tragedy or humiliation with dignity, all in the relentless glare of public scrutiny.

Perfect in Death, Imperfect in Life

In short, if you wish to be perfected in death, you must be imperfect in life.

“The overcoming-adversity story line is exactly about being a normal hero,” said Yale’s Gamson, author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.” “The overcoming part is about heroism. And the adversity part is about facing what normal people face.”

Like Kennedy, such celebrities are better than us. But they are also like the best in us.

As Americans learned last weekend, it is only when celebrities die that the public takes their true measure. As the British essayist William Hazlitt wrote about Lord Byron, the 19th century romantic poet who also died young, “death perfects a person.”

This, said USC’s Leo Beal Braudy, is what separates the merely famous from the posthumously iconic.

“Some people, death merely freezes,” Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History,” said. “Others, it perfects.”

Researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.