Just Famous Enough

on expression vs. performance

Norma Jeane Mortensen (Marilyn Monroe) and friends, 1941 - Getty Images

I have a friend who is an established, celebrated actor, but not a movie star, and she’s achieved the exact perfect level of fame. I can walk down the street without being noticed, she says, but people are nice to me at a restaurant.

I worked with famous people for most of my career, and very closely with one of my absolute favorites for over a decade. To exit the office with him was like showing up with Mickey Mouse. Everyone, of every age, wanted a hug, a touch, a conversation. It could take half an hour to walk one city block. The amount of physical invasion was overwhelming, and I was irritated with them (well, not the children), for suddenly forcing me into the role of bodyguard. “You have to be nicer to people,” he sometimes said, as I glowered nearby. Making movies was fun, he pointed out. Being a public figure was obviously a blessing, borne of immense fortune, but it was also his job.

When I mentioned to a publicist friend that he handled fans with a finesse and good humor that I never would have been able to muster, she said all of her clients were trained in an approach she called the “warm moment:” a handshake, eye contact, a thank you, and quick sidestep. A dance move taking less than five seconds per interaction, it became necessary at a certain tipping point, when every public appearance required a performance of friendliness and gratitude, no matter how the circumstances, or how the artist was feeling, deep down. It all seemed to me a tragedy, but also only healthy response to a world that wants to nibble at their edges.

I’ve lost so many friends to fame — friends with whom I used to sit backstage at dingy comedy clubs, and split a bag of potato chips, and exchange pep talks. The art comes first, I might say. You’re expressing something only you can express, and the work will appear. And I was mostly right. I was thrilled when they snagged their first movie, or SNL slot. And then I saw how the walls closed in. There’s that first walk down the street when people are screaming their name, insisting they get into character. Then someone sends over a bottle of wine at dinner, which seems nice, until you realize that they feel they’ve bought your time, and they sit down to join. Then comes the building up of the agency team - this shiny guy for commercials, that one for voiceover, your name brought up over and over in terms of “revenue streams.” Then the creeping realization that most people you interact with want something from you—a speck of your stardust, an instagram shout-out, to slip you a script. As the love for your work grows, the world also becomes a hostile, exhausting place.

I remember going to a writer friend’s backyard birthday party in my 30s, about a decade into my Hollywood career, and heavily pregnant. When I am pregnant, my main symptom is stupidity. So I was having a pleasant conversation with a man it took me an unusually long time to realize was Brad Pitt. I pulled the birthday boy aside. Why the F is Brad Pitt here?? I hissed — we weren’t too cool for that kind of talk yet. “I don’t know,” he said, genuinely startled. “I think he came with Spike Jonze.” Why is Spike Jonze here, I asked, a little too loud. He shrugged, and I looked around and knew, somehow, that it was the beginning of an end. “Why don’t we see _______ any more,” my husband might ask, about so many of our youngish, scrappyish friends from that party, and I sigh. We lost her to the machine, I joke. She’s probably taking a breather at the Clooneys’. I don’t blame them for sealing themselves off with family, or other famous people. Anything outside becomes too much.

I can almost understand why people are bizarre about celebrities. They represent an amount of money and attention that’s unfathomable, one that seems like it would spackle over a lot of practical and existential threats, especially in this economic climate. But what amount of money would it take, to serve yourself up for public consumption every time you left the house? For every text, every dating mishap, every spoken word to be dissected and headlined and obsessed over? To feel like one of these regurgitated, out-of-context comments could make or break a career? A lump sum of, say, twenty million dollars would solve so many problems for so many people. But then after the bills are paid, and all future financial needs met, what does the rest of the money do for you, if you can’t just walk to the store, or kiss a stranger at a party?

I’ll never be famous, I hope. Being famous-adjacent has been illuminating. But I think of how strange and lonely an existence it must be, for my old friends who used to be “just” artists. I thought about them often while on book tour, where I was asked many times who my audience is, or who I have in mind when I’m writing. My honest answer is that I have to treat my writing as an act of expression. It’s like vomiting in a bush, I say. It’s dancing in a dark room by myself, to get my wiggles out. I love readers, I am a reader. It’s a blessing when other readers connect with the work. But the second I start to write for an audience, I feel that expression start to tip into performance, and I catch myself, and reel it in. Because that becomes a contract I’m not sure any of us wants to enter.

xoxo

Announcements: My Grub Street Diet, a wine/craft night, NOLA, and a variety show (I’m hosting)!

Recs: This sweet thread, these Omegas (I have now tasted every brand), this podcast episode I reference multiple times a week, this well-priced hotel bedding (I did strip an actual hotel bed to find out). Also, color me intrigued.

Food: Back-to-school means I’m back on my “ARGH I’ve forgotten to eat” schedule, which requires a lot of 90-second egg salad. It’s 3 boiled eggs, mashed together with mayo, grainy mustard, a dash of nutritional yeast, a dash of smoked paprika (my secret ingredient), salt, pepper, and a squirt of lemon. Today I ate it on toast, topped with pickled onions.