The Blessed Curse of Recognizable Celebrity
On Rewards and Afflictions Of Fame
Years before I started acting I had a fascination with actor’s lives.
I was curious about the impact celebrity had on them, with a sense I might become one of these odd beings if that was a path I chose. I wanted to know what to expect and how they coped with fame. I wasn’t hungering to be famous, had no illusions of grandeur, but had a kind of presentiment. I was concerned with the pressures of fame, with your life being thrown upside down, the lack of privacy, the invasion of your life when millions of people recognize you at a glance walking down a street, having drinks with your wife, buying toilet paper.
What changes, how much, and did I actually want this kind of life if I could have it? I enjoyed being alone; I liked the peace of it, and writing fit me well. I craved the solitude of plumbing my thoughts and getting them on paper, of that serene rushing sound of words roaring out with Debussy or Miles Davis playing, rain on the roof and the wind howling outside in January. I came to writing before acting, and relished the idea of being a known and respected artist by your name and books only, being anonymous in public, and doing your work by yourself.
But there was another side of me aching to get out.
A side I had already shown as a singer and athlete. I was as much an actor as a writer, I realized, and so would study interviews with actors I liked and respected, wanting to know that their lives were not nightmares because they’d given up their anonymity. I wanted to know what I might be in for. Many of them were rich, of course, but I knew, or feared, that once you crossed into the world of fame and celebrity and “hit the jackpot,” there was a price to be paid that money couldn’t entirely compensate you for.
You were public property, a kind of walking and talking commodity and amusement park that could be picked over, hounded, ridiculed, badgered, stalked, envied, hated, obsessed over, and yes, loved, or something akin to it. You were possessed to a degree by the people you entertained.
Robert Redford said he was standing at an airport urinal once, and the guy next to him looked over and said: “Redford, you blew it!” The man was probably drunk, he said, and he didn’t stick around to find out what he meant. In time when people approached him and asked, “Aren’t you Robert Redford?” he started answering: “Only when I’m alone.” The blessing of “success” as an actor had become an overwhelming nuisance.
I didn’t aspire to have Robert Redford’s celebrity, or that of any great film star, but once you entered this arena you never knew what might come of it. I only wanted to work with the best people and do high quality work.
Greatness in quality of work and magnitude of fame cannot be equated anyway. There’ve been dozens of infamous hacks, celebrities of all stripes who are not particularly gifted, not great actors or singers or artists of any kind—they are simply famous. They had something that grabbed the public eye and took off with it. You needed to know you were ready for that if it came, that if your picture was on the cover of a gossip rag printing crazy stories about you, you could deal with it. You had to be ready to be treated completely differently by everyday people than you were before, while you were exactly the same person as before. You wanted to know that you wouldn’t turn into a fat headed asshole and creep, that if you became rich your values of decency and kindness wouldn’t change drastically, that you could hold onto your humanity and goodness and humility no matter how much attention the world gave you or how many people began to senselessly worship you.
These were things I wanted to know about, that too many people seemed to think nothing of in advance. Too many assume that fame is the greatest result in the world, and consequently have been blindly destroyed by their own celebrity, turned into monsters, maniacs, drug addicts, alcoholics, sex addicts, rageoholics, because they crossed that line into recognizable fame and it poisoned their lives. Marriages, relationships, families destroyed. And some of the most famous people in the world are also the loneliest. It wasn’t a small contemplation.
But once the acting bug bit I hardly had a choice.
I had to act, just as much as I had to write. I had to have the yin and yang, the internal and the external, and without both didn’t feel a sense of balance. After years of theater, I started doing TV and film, the parts mounted up, and gradually I began to notice odd looks in public. Rather than being friendly looks, many were frowns because the person glaring is trying to figure out who the hell you are or where they’d seen you. It’s human nature. I’d be sitting in a restaurant with my family and see a number of people around the room staring. It’s gratifying, but peculiar too. It goes with the territory, and the strange thing is, the more successful you become as an actor, that is, the more good work you do, the more you are known everywhere you go, and the less privacy you have. So there is this trade off that is necessary to the profession itself, by its very nature essential to the profession. There’s no way around it.
I was both amused and horrified recently to hear George Clooney and Brad Pitt talk about slipping in the back door of a hotel as incognito as possible, waiting at the elevator, going “Come on, come on…” then hearing a scream from the lobby, “There they are!” and watching a stampede coming down the corridor and trying to slip in and shut the door before it reached them. So this is the price they pay for years of hard work and dues, for being who they are now. This is “success.”
Many actors handle it well, and do their best to let celebrity work for them.
Many are kind and generous, some aloof and snooty, but usually only as a defense mechanism, a way of warding off intrusions. Some of the biggest stars are some of the most down to earth people, trying desperately to hold onto and maybe reclaim their humanity. And as I worked with many, a number of Oscar winning actors included, what I became most aware of is, that many not only don’t have life easier due to their celebrity, but have many more complications because of it, along with exactly the same problems the rest of the world has. If they had earned notoriety, they had also earned more trouble.
Ten years ago I heard Whoopi Goldberg say she’d been sued 136 times, and she had to answer every frivolous lawsuit. And we’ve all seen what the gossip rags do to these people. Although I believe most famous actors really enjoy being that, their lives are littered also with mines, saboteurs, detractors, tripwires, the detritus of excess, and the constant pitfalls of being fed off of by the “press” and public. They are simply vulnerable human beings dealing with personal problems and scuffling through life with all and more of the heartbreaks, losses, and physical sufferings that we all have, but doing it in public.
They are not immune to anything. If they are well compensated for their work, everything is expected of them also. If they’ve risen to lasting notoriety, they’ve gotten there usually by enormous sheer will and hard work, and their standards for themselves are excruciatingly high and exacting. Doing second rate or sloppy work is unacceptable to them. When carrying a film the pressure is immense, the hours endless and exhausting, and if they don’t come through they fail publicly and miserably. I’ve witnessed all of this firsthand.
Truman Capote said that in America we treat our celebrities differently than they do in Europe. In Europe people are loyal to their artists and heroes for life, unless they perpetrate some unspeakable crime. In America we enjoy building our celebrities up as high as possible, lifting them onto a very lofty pedestal, then relish watching them come crashing down. We worship them like golden gods, then sacrifice them like lambs, in a way punishing them for assuming they were above us, glorying in their defeat. It is a kind of ruthless and cathartic cycle that has something to do with our worship of wealth and power. Sure we’re loyal to a few, but they better not step out of line or make some very human personal mistake or they’re gonna get it. There’s truth in what Mr. Capote said, and he knew whereof he spoke.
To a degree celebrities, especially actors, are loved and hated simultaneously.
They seem to have everything when many have nothing. We know they’re living life to the hilt while many of us are barely making it. Billy Bob Thornton said on Piers Morgan last year that he hardly goes out any more, because there seems to be an open season on celebrities these days, and I think he’s right.
But when tempted to envy or resent a famous actor, imagine this: your wife, an actress herself, is doing love scenes with another stunning gentleman in Paris, say, while you’re crawling through a jungle with snakes and tarantulas in Guatemala for six months doing a war thriller. When you’re both done and reunite, will she be the same person she was before? Will she still be your wife? And then you’re both off on other projects, and all the while the gossip rags are saying you’re both having affairs with your directors or co-stars, you’re strung out on drugs, blowing up on the set, and both of you wonder how much of it is true.
Is this really as glamorous as you thought? Is having millions of dollars in the bank and millions of people worshiping you worth trading for the love of your life, for the longevity of your family? And who can you really trust, who is not your friend or wanting to be around you for anything other than what you can do for their career or bank account?
I know some of you are thinking, oh, the poor famous saps, sitting in Cabo with other celebrities sipping margaritas while I grind through traffic to a job I really don’t like, and still can’t pay the bills. Of course, all of that’s true, but there’s so much more beneath the surface. And when your job is done for the day, you don’t have to be hounded, stared at, invaded wherever you go. You can take your wife or husband out for a nice dinner and it will not be interrupted by fans who want a piece of you and damn well expect you to give it to them. You can live a life of public solitude and drive home and not be harassed by people with cameras who are following you, dying to get a picture of you screaming back at them, and not have to fight for a little bit of peace.
Celebrities have it pretty good, but don’t think they’re not paying a price for it, and a bigger one than you might imagine. At the same time, they’re entertaining us, making us laugh, giving us remarkable performances, keeping our lives from being humdrum, inspiring us and telling us stories that change and enlighten and give our lives more color and dimension and meaning.
They are our jesters and scapegoats and heroes. They are living and dying like we are, but doing it all in the glaring light of an insatiable gossip machine, fed by us, where gossip itself is a commodity, and the truth is made up half the time. And without these poor rich famous souls, who would we have to entertain us besides our politicians? What a dreary and meaningless life that would be.
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective,” “Hidden Figures,” “Just Mercy,” and a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
