but it's too late, it's over now.
Celebrities, like kings, have two bodies -- the body natural, which decays and dies, and the body politic, which does neither. But the immortal body of the 'image', even though it is preserved on celluloid, on digitalised files or in the memory of the theatre-going public, always bears the nagging reminder of the former ('She looks great. Isn't she dead by now?') As their sacred images circulate in the demotic swirl of the profane imagination, celebrities foreground a peculiar combination of strength and vulnerability, expressed through outward signs of the union of their imperishable and mortal bodies. Let those marks of strength be called charismata; the signs of vulnerability, stigmata. They work cooperatively, like muscles in opposable pairs, and their beguiling interplay, now widely heralded among acting teachers, has a long history as well as popular currency as the source of public intimacy.
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When stigmata so far overrun charismata, the embarrassed celebrity becomes too available to the identification of the audience, and that special quality of apartness, which Glyn describes as 'unbiddable', disappears, taking 'It' down with it.
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The publicity department at Paramount arrounged for Bow and Glyn to spend time together and to be seen in public doing so. To that end, striking redheads both, they sped around Los Angeles together in a large Packard, accompanied by the actress's great red chow dog and a redundant driver provided by the Studio. Bow, who at best regarded speed limits and traffic lights as advisory, insisted on taking the wheel, while Glyn kept her upper lip stiff in the passenger's seat and the terrorised chauffeur wept and prayed in the back. What inter-societal connection opened up between these two women in their work together cannot be rationally specified, but one did, and it must have had to do with 'It', which for both of them, in their different genres, meant the ability to stand as if naked in the middle of a crowded room as if alone.
- Joseph Roach, "Public Intimacy: The Prior History of 'It'"