Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

What Price Fame?

Miley Cyrus has had it with Twitter. I knew it would come to this eventually – if not for Ms. Cyrus, then for some other tweeting celebrity. There is no doubt that for stars, the intensive connectedness of social media leads inexorably to a total lack of privacy.  I suppose that lack of privacy is just what some stars are aiming for, to feed their publicity machines, but I would imagine the joy found in the adulation of strangers pales eventually. So I'm not surprised that Miley eventually hit her limit (though I do admire the irony of quitting Twitter only to explain why via YouTube – see below for the video!).

Fame is a strange notion. We've always admired people for their humor, intelligence, knowledge, and for other skills and abilities – but it seems that fame based (or partly based) on celebrity itself is a relatively recent invention. In the last hundred years or so, we have created a whole new kind of notoriety with the help of the mass media, and now with social media like Twitter. To learn about the roots of this orgy of fame, I turned to Samantha Barbas's Movie Crazy. Barbas explains how the first film stars came to prominence, and discusses the movie studios' publicity machine, both of which are interesting stories. But more fascinating still is her history of fandom itself. She shows that early film fans helped shape the movie industry through fan club activities and through their letters to studios and stars. They didn't run things – studio moguls did – but they did have an influence. For example, producer David O. Selznick only agreed to cast Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind after he received hundreds of fan letters encouraging him to do so – imagine what a different flavor the film would have had if Gable's fans hadn't won out and the role had gone to one of the other top contenders, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn!

Miley Cyrus is no has-been – she's at the top of her game, fame-wise, but many child stars slide down into the abyss of un-famousness as their youth fades. Jeff Guinn and Douglas Perry investigate the personal and professional consequences of becoming no-longer-famous in their book The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. Guinn and Perry discuss the fame and not-fame of entertainers like American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, and Fame star Irene Cara, but they also consider the cycle of fame for people who are notable by circumstance, like Susan McDougal, who served time as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal, and Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have saved Howard Hughes's life and later to be his heir based on a handwritten will.

Of course, the ins and outs of fans, famous people, and the idea of fame are also discussed at length in literature and drama. One of my own favorite Hollywood classics is on this theme: director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. Bette Davis stars as Margo Channing, a successful but aging Broadway star. When devoted fan Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is introduced to Margo, the star takes the young fan under her wing, and gives her a job as her assistant. But Eve is interested in more than just basking in Margo's limelight – she orchestrates a series of mishaps that result in her going on stage as Margo's understudy, on a night when all of New York's theater critics are in the house. Clearly Eve's skill at manipulating people to follow her schemes has the potential to make her a star, and destroy Margo in the process. It's just a question of whether Margo's own capable strengths will keep Eve at arms length.

Is it gauche to point out, after all this, that if you're a fan of Twitter, you can follow Multnomah County Library there to your heart's content?

* Here's Miley, doing her best to explain why she needs her privacy: