Dialogue: Lack of talent proves no barrier to fame

LINDA PORTER* wonders why people feel a need to bestow fame and its trappings on those of questionable talent.

Have you ever wondered if Mozart was continually hounded by autograph hunters? Or mobbed in the quaint streets of Vienna by the 18th century equivalent of the paparazzi?

Or if Sir Francis Drake had a problem with people wanting to touch him, or with souvenir hunters rooting through his rubbish bin searching for mementos from foreign lands?

Or if William Shakespeare was constantly followed by hysterical, screaming girls crying, "Bill, we love you"?

I cannot think of an author today who has that problem. I wonder why.

Perhaps it is a part of the whole phenomenon. Most authors are fairly talented. But today, more than ever, you don't need to be talented to be famous. Talent does not even enter into it a lot of the time but luck, good marketing and great public relations do.

When John Lennon mused that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, it caused an uproar. But he wasn't far off the truth.

The Beatles were among the first and still remain, together with many newer and more outrageous phenomenons, the icons of our age. We worship at the altars of their fame - concert stages, movie screens, television sets.

We make pilgrimages to their homes and birthplaces - Graceland, the ostentatious home of Elvis Presley in Memphis, Althrop, the stately ancestral home of Princess Diana in England, and 20 Forthlin Rd, Liverpool, Paul McCartney's modest semi-detached childhood residence.

Thousands of us make the journey to these and places like them each year. For some, it's a lifetime goal. For others, it's a chance to make big money.

We buy, sell, and collect their artefacts,including clothes, shoes, makeup, musical instruments, handwritten notes and any number of other items.

The sky's the limit as far as what it is, and how much we'll pay for it. Anything goes under the hammer.

A gaudy purple lipstick used by Madonna (the singer, I hasten to add) with a certificate of authenticity sold for $US39.95 ($82) at ebay.com. (I would have bought it but it wasn't my colour).

At the other end of the scale, Marilyn Monroe's nude-look evening dress sold at Christie's for $1.2 million.

I'm not saying that some of these people don't deserve our admiration or respect. But have we taken it too far? I think we know that we have, but we're now almost powerless to stop it.

Fame, and its trappings, have become our ultimate goal. If we can't have them ourselves, we acquire them vicariously, and we don't really care about the cost to that person's privacy or life. After all, it is "the price of fame." The Princess of Wales was the prime example of this.

It's not just something that occurs overseas. Some New Zealand women's magazines, in particular, seem to be continually pushing the envelope of what they think we want and need to know about the celebrity status of the rich and famous, and the plain pushy.

Is it all part of the job for our television newsreaders and presenters these days? Are they expected by their bosses to go out there, and talk publicly about their "days of hell," "narrow escape from death" or "hot new romance"? I guess they must be, and what does that say about us?

For many, the Beatles really are bigger than Jesus. If Western religions could harness the power of celebrity, they would be filling churches faster than you can say Leonardo Di Vinci. No, sorry, that be should be Leonardo Di Caprio.

* Linda Porter is a Hamilton freelance writer.