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conveying the gossip from the coffee houses.
The tittle tattle.
Reynolds and Gainsborough grew rich by selling cheap
prints from engravings of their portraits of the rich and
the beautiful. Actor manager David Garrick became rich
and famous when he took over the Theatre Royal Drury
Lane and revived the fortunes of theatre in all of London
as a result of his skills. The Georgians period also saw the
advent of celebrity endorsement when Josiah Wedgwood
began using royal personalities to create an aura around
the name of his company that gave the brand a value
beyond the attributes of the product itself.
Horizantale For Evermore
After a busy career as, what the French charmingly but
graphically called
une horizantale
, Kitty Fisher at the
age of 26, married the errant son of the MP for Rye and
retired to the Weald of Kent. Within four months she was
dead, probably from smallpox but maybe poisoned by her
lead makeup. Kitty was laid to rest dressed in her finest
ball gown at Benenden Church. Hemsted Park, of which
she was mistress for so short a time, would in the
centuries to come house the top public girls’ school
Benenden, alma mater to the Princess Royal and Rachel
Weisz – otherwise known as Mrs. Daniel Craig.
Blue Plaques & Provenance
It is common practice in describing an institution to name
the people associated with it. I could have named other
Benenden Old Girls such as Harriet Spicer who founded
the Virago Press or Dame Elizabeth Forgan who launched
the BBC DAB radio service and went on to become
Chair of the Arts Council but neither of these ladies has
as much celebrity cachet as a royal or an A list actress.
We might want to think of ourselves as above all this
but if that were so would English Heritage bother with
blue plaques? If you see a beautiful armoire in the V&A
doesn’t it just add a teensy bit more appeal to know that
it once belonged to Marie Antoinette at the Palace of
Versaille? Does not provenance add interest? No?
Are you sure? I’m not meaning to challenge your notion
of yourself it’s just that, as we shall see, an interest in
celebrity would seem to be embedded in the very
condition of being human. Apparently we can’t help
ourselves. It’s in our DNA.
No Celebrity Without Curiosity
Many of us probably share a negative opinion to some
degree regarding the modern cult of celebrity and would
prefer to live in a world that values the talented and
rejects the notion of fame for fame’s sake. Should
we make more of a distinction between the fame that
comes from great achievement and the self-promoting
celebrity that seems born of purely narcissistic desires?
Should we be talking about the achievement and not the
person? Is not HM Queen Elizabeth an exemplary
example of a world famous figure that keeps her private
life and thoughts to herself and do we not cherish her
all the more for this impeccable discretion?
That the Queen maintains a very private life is not the
same as the public not being interested in it and there’s
the rub. Few individuals enjoy the press immunity
granted to Her Majesty and when it comes to the
media we must surely accept that we are the consumers.
If public interest was confined to the achievement or
great acts of an individual and there was no public
curiosity about their private affairs there would be no
celebrity. And thus no celebrity would be motivated to
promote themselves - a tendency that also goes back
some way. Homer, Plato and Horace observing the
self-promoting antics of Olympic athletes grumbled that
true heroes had disappeared and that fame was becoming
disconnected from honour and accomplishment.
The Function of Celebrity
Perhaps mankind needs celebrities? Tom Payne author
of
Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult
Of Celebrity,
believes that famous people fulfill the need
within us to bond by gathering around a story:
The bonding thing is almost like what we experience
when we’re in a congregation or a church or a mosque
or wherever we are. We gather around a story, and we
bond around it.
Payne sees contemporary celebrity culture, and in
particular the
build them up and then knock them down
phenomenon, as a modern version of sacrifice to the gods.
But perhaps the truth is simpler - we just like to talk
about other people. Maybe gossip is the basic human
instinct that underlies our interest in and indeed our need
for celebrities. The word gossip comes from the Old
English words god and sibb meaning godparents and it
was first applied to women attending a mother during
childbirth passing the time by talking about other people.
