Joshua Gamson - Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America

JOSHUA GAMSON

For Zelda and Bill, in continual and loving celebration

Although I am tempted to blame them on television, the shortcomings of this book are my own. Although I am tempted to take full credit for them, the insights of this book would not have been possible without the support and companionship and ideas of many others.

Financial support made it possible for me to focus my energies and eat at the same time. The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley provided a fellowship for the first year of research and writing, and a Spencer Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation saw me through the second year.

Kenneth Turan at the Los Angeles Times and Cathy Fischer at Home Box Office were key to helping me get started in Los Angeles. They generously spent time orienting me to the entertainment industry and connecting me to interview subjects. Friends Britt Tennell and Carolyn Helmke made entertaining and insightful celebrity-tourism companions. In the San Francisco Bay Area, two teachers, Barbara Blinick and Jeff Steinberg, kindly opened their classrooms to me.

My thinking and writing were pushed along by the sharp, thoughtful comments and criticisms of a number of colleagues and friends. They often pushed in different directions, and I benefited from struggling with the variety of opinions. In particular, I am grateful to Todd Gitlin, Ann Swidler, David Kirp, Michael Schudson, Michael Burawoy, Gaye Tuchman, Charles Ponce de Leon, Leo Brandy, and Zelda Gamson. Naomi Schneider at the University of California Press went to bat for me and the book and saw me through the review process with directness, humor, and support. I am especially grateful to my father, Bill Gamson, who at critical points listened and helped me talk my ideas through, wandered with me through my brain, and sorted out the directions it was taking me.

In addition to my family, numerous other friends, Mark Murphy in particular, kept things in perspective when the project took over too much of me. They carried me away when I claimed I needed to work, accompanied me to foreign films when I had overdosed on American popular culture, and laughed with me when Jodie Foster and Madonna began making regular appearances in my dreams. For that I cannot thank them enough.

Finally, the voices heard throughout this book are those of numerous industry workers and celebrity watchers who volunteered to spend time and share their thoughts with me. With respect and gratitude to them, I hope that their voices and others join mine to keep the discussion going.

The oddity of Angelyne is as obtrusive as the breasts in her eighty-five by forty-four foot portrait near Hollywood and Vine. In that 1987 mural, as in subsequent Los Angeles billboards, Angelyne is leaning back under her own giant pink name, looking out from behind sunglasses and from under a bleach-blonde hairdo, one shoulder bare, Dolly Parton chest pushed front and center. She acts like a celebrity, according to Los Angeles magazine, stopping "for any Kodak-ready spectator, effortlessly gliding through her repertoire of soft-core poses," signing "scores of autographs on a never-ending supply of full-color picture postcards, adding a kiss to each, leaving her perfect-pink-lips imprint."' Yet Angelyne has never done anything noteworthy beyond the attempt to have note taken of her. According to People magazine, she is "untalented by her own admission" and "has nothing to offer but her inflated, billboard-size image."'

Talent has nothing to do with it: she wants to be celebrated not for doing but for being. "A celebrity is famous for being a celebrity," her assistant, Scott Hennig, explains to me. "She wants to be famous for simply being Angelyne, for being the magical, Hollywood blonde bombshell of the twenty-first century."3 (And she is not, according to her own and various other accounts, a put-on character that she takes off at home, but simply Angelyne.) Her dismissal of talent is not accidental, but part of Angelyne's philosophy of celebrity. "What do you think a celebrity is?" she asks. "It's someone sent to us as a gift, to bring us joy."4 She was born a celebrity-in-waiting and needed only to be introduced to the world. As she puts it in an interview in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, "I never felt `normal' until I became a celebrity."5 Angelyne, says the Herald Examiner's theater critic, is trying to "demonstrate that `everyone can make it!'-presumably, with qualifications no greater than Angelyne herself. Warhol's prophecy fulfilled with a vengeance! A teeming horde of roseate superstars so multitudinous they swallow up the entire populace and eradicate, once and for all, the distinction between artist and spectator."'

From the beginning, however, her celebrity was consciously engineered. Her high-capitA promotion was first assumed by Jordan Michaels, a rock 'n' roll manager and promoter,' then taken up in 1982. by Hugo Maisnik, a display-printing veteran who financed her image on bus shelters and later on billboards. "This is a multi-million-dollar project," says her assistant, perhaps, but not necessarily, waxing hyperbolic. Mais- nik has developed an Angelyne-doll prototype ("it's beautiful, with enormous breasts") and has even considered using a laser technique to project her image "a mile wide on the clouds" ("just imagine it, Angelyne's picture and name, in bright pink lights, flashed across the sky worldwide"). "I look forward to Angelyne without Angelyne," he says, "when just her name is an entity in itself."8 To some degree the strategy has worked. She has appeared in scores of magazines and on television programs not only in Los Angeles but in Australia, England, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Germany, and Sweden, claims over 2.,ooo members in her American fan club, and even converted her billboard-generated notoriety into a small movie role (in Earth Girls Are Easy), in which she played a character exactly like the billboard Angelyne. Angelyne herself noted the simplicity of her strategy back in 1987: "I can feel myself getting more and more famous every day."9 (See figure i.)

It is tempting to dismiss Angelyne as just another sexist stereotype, given the most visible pieces of her strategy: the objectified body and commodified sexuality, the auto-shop calendar image, the appeal to the "male gaze."" And of course she partakes of those things, although in such an exaggerated form that her image could easily be taken as ironic commentary on itself. It is also tempting to dismiss her as amusing and trivial and unlikely to join the ranks of the glamour queens she emulates and cites. And she does also partake of the trivial.