Playing the fame game: Maybe the rules haven’t changed all that much

For countless centuries, talentless worthless people became famous and were revered, not because they achieved anything, but because they were royalty.’

AMY WINEHOUSE ending up on the front page of the Financial Times this weekend marked the end of a summer of celebrity meltdown. Pop stars behaving badly have always garnered headlines, but this summer was different. Different, first of all, because of the sheer volume of disaster.

Paris Hilton went to prison, then got out of prison, then went back to prison, and on her final release, indicated that she planned to be a contributor to world health, happiness, peace and prosperity from that point on. Neither Amnesty International nor Concern have yet reported that she’s volunteered to work with them, but give her time.

Nicole Ritchie, who got done for driving under the influence of drink and drugs, was pictured looking like a stick insect with big bug eyes courtesy of her anorexia and designer sunglasses, and then got pregnant, which allowed reporters to worry in print about the health of her infant.

Britney Spears managed the most spectacular and sustained meltdown, She shaved off her hair, went into rehab, went swimming on impulse in her underwear and is being accused of child neglect by her former husband, who wants custody of their kids, although God knows why, since the last time he had a loan of them he got HER parents to babysit for him. He’s a busy man. You know yourself: a non-career requires a lot of commitment.

The revolving door to rehab also got a whirl from Lindsay Lohan, with fellow recovering addicts reporting that she was settling down nicely to the routine of group confessions and individual toilet-sluicing, which seems to characterise expensive detox clinics.

It’s this domestic cleaning aspect of rehab I don’t get. Why does every addicted star, from Liz Taylor down, end up in the recovery clinic making their bed and mopping the floor? What, precisely, does this teach? That we’re all equal? Yeah, right.

The theory seems to be that, while Britney earns $700,000 a week whether she’s working or driving a car with one of her little sons on her lap in the driver’s seat, once you stick a mop in her hand, she will learn humble realism, new skills and a refreshed sense of personal responsibility. Anybody who wants their old lobby washed down will only have to ring Britney and they’ll be in business.

Or maybe it’s a way of pointing to a horrible future facing drug abusers: if you don’t stop filling yourself full of crack, you’ll end up doing your own cleaning.

The fact that the meltdown stories figured in more than the tabloid gossip magazines has led to a thesis that holds that, in the past, people were famous and revered because of their achievements, but that now, completely untalented worthless people can become famous for being famous.

Not so. For countless centuries, talentless worthless people became famous and were revered, not because they achieved anything, but because they were royalty. The women were separated from their families in or before their teens, isolated from reality, surrounded by servants, dressed in the designer gear of the day, and subjected to the equivalent of photo opportunities with portrait artists. Very much as today’s showbiz discoveries are treated.

These days, Britney Spears is seen as rich trailer-trash because she fails to wear underwear and the pictures of her failure get international coverage. Royalty did a version of the same thing, permitting particularly favoured courtiers to be present when they went to the loo or got dressed. In the absence of the papparazi and the TV cameras, royal families arranged to eat meals in public, so that people could file by for the thrill of seeing them eating their egg at breakfast time.

THE parallels between royal behaviour and that of modern celebs are eerie. Take, for example, the TV programme that made Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie famous. Called The Simple Life, its appeal lay in having two idle rich girls pretend to be peasants working on farms — just as Marie Antoinette played at being a milkmaid in the Tuileries.

Bad behaviour has always generated transient fame. Bad behaviour has always been stimulated by the possibility of creating such fame. Bonnie and Clyde, two impoverished nonentities, gained household name status by killing and stealing. There can be no doubt that if the media had not glamourised them, they would probably have been more minor, less lethal criminals. And glamourising them was an effort. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway made a generation of filmgoers forget that the characters they played were in fact physically repellent, personally dirty, weasely, underfed, unattractive, nasty little gurriers.

The current myth that fame, in the past, was dependent on talent, hard work and positive achievement, is just that: a myth.

In some cases, international fame and hushed reverence were generated by outrageous cruelty. Think of General Sherman, the man who did a scorched-earth progress through the Confederate States as the Civil War in America was ending. Sherman’s troops marched through Georgia, burning and pillaging as they went, destroying beautiful buildings and crops, thereby scattering communities, causing countless deaths by starvation and disease, and leaving a seedbed of resentment evident in the deep south to this day. They also stimulated the writing of one memorable song: As We Go Marching Through Georgia, although Sherman hated that particular ditty so much, he said if he’d known about it in advance, he’d have marched AROUND Georgia to prevent it being written… What’s different, now, is that two audiences have come together. For the centuries when royalty played the role now taken by Hilton, Spears, Lohan and Ritchie, the plebs couldn’t read. In the early days when they became literate, the stories of the celebrities they wanted to know about figured exclusively in gossip publications. The broadsheet newspapers dealt only in what the elite decided was “real” news: political speeches and reports of war. So, although gossip magazines repeatedly ran stories suggesting, for example, that Cary Grant was as gay as Christmas (although not using that description) as far as the mainstream media was concerned, this was not an issue.

The tut-tutting about the polluting of the mainstream media by inclusion of junk celebrity coverage misses the point that — in this country alone — more people than ever before are using the media to access information about the economy, property and business than ever before. Business news is almost as popular as celebrity coverage, and so it was inevitable that a business newspaper would find Amy Winehouse’s bloodied self-destruction relevant for its readers.

In every era, each person who becomes famous believes they have earned and are entitled to their fame. In every era, those who perceive themselves to be deservedly famous look down on those who get famous for other reasons.

Remember Marilyn Monroe and baseball great Joe Di Maggio? She came back from whisper-singing to the troops in Korea, bowled over by the reception she’d got.

“You never heard such applause,” she told him. He looked at his wife, stunned by her ignorance of his past.

“Oh, yes I have,” was his bitter response.