The three faces of celebrity
Within days we got three high-profile deaths: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. The reaction of my generation was very interesting. "Ed Who?" "Farrah? I think I know who she is... from ... somewhere..." "OMG! MJ dead! OMG!"
McMahon was in his 80s and died of the manifold ailments, infirmities and complications endemic to old age in the 21st century. His heyday peaked before I was born, in the medium I largely missed growing up in the Soviet Union: as a second banana to Johnny Carson. I only found out about that when I read his obituary in the New York Times. To me he always was that weird old guy showing up at your doorstep to tell you that you won five million dollars, the kind of job has-been "TV personalities" do; I could never figure out (or really bother to look up) what he actually had been. Yet this was a guy who worked hard as a businessman and entertainer, lived a pretty stereotypical rich guy life with two divorces, fluctuating pecuniary situation and finally death by old age. This sometimes happens in the show business.
Farrah Fawcett was a different animal. Discovered, as most female actresses, for being gorgeous, she had a career that seemed (again, based on my reading of her NYT obituary, heh) to revolve around her first capitalizing on youth and hotness, and then, as she matured, on trying to overcome it. As many female stars who find out that everything above their boobs is pretty much ignored in this business, she had a rocky road. And then she found she had cancer and put it all into a documentary. A documentary that, having witnessed cancer first-hand, I had no balls to watch. In my view, nevertheless, she died a hero just for that. Being in her sixties, she peaked a little bit before my time. Nobody in USSR knew about Charlie's Angels. I learned about her when it was sort of too late. Hers was one of the more typical Hollywood careers: meteoric rise to fame, realization that it wasn't her talent that mattered, and then a sudden, though mostly dignified, crash to earth.
And then there's Michael Jackson. A man who, as everyone is suddenly discovering, defined an entire generation. Even in USSR we knew who he was. His songs are such an accepted background of Generation X that even if you don't like him as an artist (and I never really did), you accept his everpresence as a given, you recognize his talent as geniune and great. As much as he tried to keep his slow, tormented, bizarre meltdown private, he couldn't help it: it was literally carved into his face. Something people may not realize: the man was a cutter, trying to excise the last traces of his abusive father that stared back at him from the mirror every morning of his life. That he had a multi-million budget only made the situation worse. It allowed him to act out on an epic scale. The fact that the world laughed at him for it without understanding anything must have only intensified the pain. He illuminated our formative years, that guy, but he had to burn in the process. The 90s, for him, were so much smoldering coal.
These three individuals circumscribe the range of celebrity experience: relative obscurity that leads to a good, solid and long life, through middling-to-fair, typical career with its exhilarating ups and somewhat unpleasant (yet still lucrative) downs, and the chaotic, exhausting, tormented life of an international, historic superstar. Yet in the end the fate of these people aren't that different from our own. Yes, all three likely died with more toys than most (especially Jackson), but their lives were the lives of ordinary people, extraordinarily magnified. You and I know folks like this. Regular, reliable hard workers; artists, striving to be true to themselves in a world that merely wants to sell them at a profit; troubled ones, abused as kids and fucked-up as adults, cutting themselves in front of the mirror, their lives a roiling mess. They are us, made visible.
May these three rest in peace, like everyone else who passed in everyday obscurity during the past few days.
McMahon was in his 80s and died of the manifold ailments, infirmities and complications endemic to old age in the 21st century. His heyday peaked before I was born, in the medium I largely missed growing up in the Soviet Union: as a second banana to Johnny Carson. I only found out about that when I read his obituary in the New York Times. To me he always was that weird old guy showing up at your doorstep to tell you that you won five million dollars, the kind of job has-been "TV personalities" do; I could never figure out (or really bother to look up) what he actually had been. Yet this was a guy who worked hard as a businessman and entertainer, lived a pretty stereotypical rich guy life with two divorces, fluctuating pecuniary situation and finally death by old age. This sometimes happens in the show business.
Farrah Fawcett was a different animal. Discovered, as most female actresses, for being gorgeous, she had a career that seemed (again, based on my reading of her NYT obituary, heh) to revolve around her first capitalizing on youth and hotness, and then, as she matured, on trying to overcome it. As many female stars who find out that everything above their boobs is pretty much ignored in this business, she had a rocky road. And then she found she had cancer and put it all into a documentary. A documentary that, having witnessed cancer first-hand, I had no balls to watch. In my view, nevertheless, she died a hero just for that. Being in her sixties, she peaked a little bit before my time. Nobody in USSR knew about Charlie's Angels. I learned about her when it was sort of too late. Hers was one of the more typical Hollywood careers: meteoric rise to fame, realization that it wasn't her talent that mattered, and then a sudden, though mostly dignified, crash to earth.
And then there's Michael Jackson. A man who, as everyone is suddenly discovering, defined an entire generation. Even in USSR we knew who he was. His songs are such an accepted background of Generation X that even if you don't like him as an artist (and I never really did), you accept his everpresence as a given, you recognize his talent as geniune and great. As much as he tried to keep his slow, tormented, bizarre meltdown private, he couldn't help it: it was literally carved into his face. Something people may not realize: the man was a cutter, trying to excise the last traces of his abusive father that stared back at him from the mirror every morning of his life. That he had a multi-million budget only made the situation worse. It allowed him to act out on an epic scale. The fact that the world laughed at him for it without understanding anything must have only intensified the pain. He illuminated our formative years, that guy, but he had to burn in the process. The 90s, for him, were so much smoldering coal.
These three individuals circumscribe the range of celebrity experience: relative obscurity that leads to a good, solid and long life, through middling-to-fair, typical career with its exhilarating ups and somewhat unpleasant (yet still lucrative) downs, and the chaotic, exhausting, tormented life of an international, historic superstar. Yet in the end the fate of these people aren't that different from our own. Yes, all three likely died with more toys than most (especially Jackson), but their lives were the lives of ordinary people, extraordinarily magnified. You and I know folks like this. Regular, reliable hard workers; artists, striving to be true to themselves in a world that merely wants to sell them at a profit; troubled ones, abused as kids and fucked-up as adults, cutting themselves in front of the mirror, their lives a roiling mess. They are us, made visible.
May these three rest in peace, like everyone else who passed in everyday obscurity during the past few days.