The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex - Hardcover

Orth, Maureen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805075453 ISBN 13: 9780805075458

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2004

Synopsis

Vanity Fair's veteran special correspondent pulls back the curtain on the world of celebrity and those who live and die there

Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth always makes news. From Hollywood to murder trials to the corridors of politics, this National Magazine Award winner covers lives led in public, on camera, in the headlines. Here she takes us close-up into the world of fame-bridging entertainment, politics, and news-and the lives of those who understand the chemistry, the very DNA, of fame and how to create it, manipulate it, sustain it. Moving from former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Michael Jackson, the ultimate child/monster of show business, Orth describes our evolution from a society where talent attracted attention to a place where the star-making machinery of the "celebrity-industrial complex" shapes, reshapes, and sells its gods (and monsters) to the public.
From divas letting their hair down (Tina Turner) to Little Gods (Woody Allen and Princess Diana's almost father-in-law Mohammed Fayed), political theater (Arnold's Hollywood hubris, Arianna Huttington's guru-guided gubernatorial quest), news-gone-soap-opera (I Love Laci), and even the Queen Mother of reinvention (Madonna as dominatrix/children's-book author), Orth delivers a portrait of an era. She shows us the real world of the big room where the rules that govern mere mortals don't matter-and anonymity is a crime.

About this title

About the Author

Maureen Orth's first book, Vulgar Favors, appeared for three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. One of the first women to write for Newsweek, she has reported for many magazines and was a network correspondent for NBC News. She began at Vanity Fair in 1988. Her late husband was Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News and moderator of Meet the Press. She lives in Washington D.C.

Reviews

Maureen Orth was a staff writer for Newsweek in 1977 when Elvis Presley died. It took two days for her to convince her editors it was a story worth traveling to Graceland for. Orth covered the funeral -- and produced the first mainstream media account to suggest that the cause of death might not have been, as officially reported, a heart attack. The King and his overdose didn't make the magazine's cover; that honor went to Bert Lance, the budget director for President Jimmy Carter. The big news? Lance hadn't been indicted.

"It was inconceivable in those days," Orth writes, "that the death of a show business icon could bump off even a second-rate White House story." The New York Times, she notes, which last year saved front-page space for the mauling of lion tamer Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, gave Elvis's death a single paragraph.

Orth is more than a historian of contemporary society's most absurd and tawdry moments; she has witnessed many of them firsthand. The Importance of Being Famous, based upon her pieces from Vanity Fair, is a rich and haunting journey among the creepiest scandals of the '90s and some of that decade's most compelling personalities.

To most serious journalists, this kind of mega-story, seething with rabid hacks, is a nightmare. To Orth, it's a paradise of possibility. Tenacious and apparently fearless, she has come to specialize in plumbing the unexplored depths of sordid tabloid sagas like those of Michael Jackson and Andrew Cunanan (the subject of her first book, Vulgar Favors). Other feature writers and literary ice dancers of her generation dream about being Tom Wolfe or writing scripts for Hollywood. Orth stayed on the job, toiling in, as she puts it, "a war zone of media monsters and million dollar spin."

One would imagine that a collection of old profiles and features wouldn't have much appeal or staying power. But separated from the distractions of the glossy magazine format -- those Annie Lebowitz shots with the spooky golden-pink lighting that makes subjects look alive and dead at the same time -- these pieces are astounding for their sanity, prudence and remarkable reporting.

Delightfully, one is rushed back to 1991 and the giddy era of lavish entertaining with a profile of Susan Gutfreund, the social-climbing wife of John Gutfreund, head of Salomon Brothers Inc., just as his T-bill trading scandal was about to drive him into societal oblivion. We visit a forlorn and "shattered" Margaret Thatcher, directionless without her job at 10 Downing St. Just as we're growing weary of Thatcher's reserve, we find ourselves in Madonna's apartment. She's called it quits with Warren Beatty. "Body of Evidence," one of her earlier cinematic embarrassments, is about to come out. She yearns to have children. But in the meantime, she's sitting on her silk art deco sofa and showing Orth her new book. It's called Sex. She plans to liberate America with raunchy pictures of herself. Remember?

"I am not allowed to turn the pages," Orth writes. "She turns them." Orth registers shock at a picture of a naked body that's pierced in a very, very private area. She utters the words, "that's pretty scary," while looking at a photograph of a skinhead holding a stiletto under the Material Girl's crotch. Madonna responds with her usual lack of irony. "It's meant to be funny," she says, "not scary."

Orth isn't merely a shoe-leather type. Nestled among the straight-ahead reporting are gems of wickedness. Elizabeth Taylor is the "Madame Curie of Fame Extension." Monica Lewinsky has "acquired a case of advanced attention addiction." And Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, "surely the most ruthlessly focused and opportunistic woman I have encountered" (and that's saying a lot) keeps "slipping in and out of selves, and no one takes the time to plow through her messy discard pile."

By far the most compelling story is that of Woody and Mia. It takes a special kind of guts to go up against a national treasure like Woody Allen. And reading this tale again is so troubling and sad, it's easy to see why the nation has largely chosen to forget about it.

At the end of each piece, Orth offers an update{ndash}often loaded with surprises. We learn that Madonna, now a mother of two, wasn't really trying to liberate people with her Sex book. Instead, as she disclosed to the Sunday Times last year, she was thinking, " 'How much money will I make? How much attention will I get?' It was very self-involved and that's kind of where I was then." In the Allen update, we learn that he and Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, have married and adopted two little girls of their own. Allen's daughter Dylan, the subject of the child abuse allegations against him, now calls herself "Malone" and is at college. Allen's biological son, Satchel, who calls himself "Seamus" now, is a prodigy who finished high school at 11 and will graduate from Bard College at 16.

The days of burying Elvis inside the paper are long gone, of course. The media have become so attuned to celebrity scandals, and dependent on them, that the genre has been expanded to include sordid tales of ordinary people who, like Scott and Laci Peterson, are made into celebrities for little rhyme or reason except to populate cable TV. The excesses of the media zoo are increasingly a bigger part of Orth's scandal coverage, and, as with everything else she investigates, she does it with balance and with hard-won wisdom and perspective that are rare.

Reviewed by Martha Sherrill

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Vanity Fair columnist Orth calls the world of celebrity a war zone of million-dollar monsters and million-dollar spin. She proves her thesis through a series of lacerating essays and interviews exposing personalities who'll "sacrifice everything including, sometimes, their lives, to be famous." Orth views the Laci Peterson saga as America's number one reality soap opera and examines the media's hysterical need to provide alternative scenarios about the case just to keep the story in the news. The author is witty, probing and painfully candid in her sympathetic piece about the violence Tina Turner suffered under Ike Turner's brutal control, but argues that Turner endured the beatings so long because of her own desire to be successful. Orth also uses icons Judy Garland, Madonna and Michael Jackson as examples of stars who portray themselves as victims to hold the limelight. The need for fame encompasses a "contact high," demonstrated by money manager Dana Giacchetto, who was convicted for defrauding his "less famous accountsâ€"the A-minus or B-plus listâ€"so as not to lose face with the A-plusers." Even more grisly is Orth's account of Andrew Cunahan, who shot Gianni Versace and then himself, hoping for worldwide attention and immortality. Orth dissects such diverse personalities as Margaret Thatcher, Woody Allen, Karl Lagerfeld and, poignantly, Dame Margot Fonteyn, who sadly reflects, "I have lived my life in what I call the empty hotel room." Orth combines merciless clarity with compassion in analyzing her power-hungry and tragic subjects.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Orth's first book, Vulgar Favors (1999), offered a perceptive look at serial killer Andrew Cunanan and the society that nurtured him. Her follow-up provides an equally perceptive look at celebrities and the society that nurtures them. Collecting a number of her Vanity Fair essays (with new bridging material), the book takes us inside the worlds of such notables as singer Tina Turner, author Arianna Huffington, Sein Fein president Gerry Adam, and, again, murderer Cunanan. The book's variety reinforces the idea that celebrity has many meanings, and Orth's work--in-depth, broad ranging, free of sensationalism--reminds us that the celebrity profile doesn't have to be a fawning puff piece. One of the essays here reconnects nicely to today's headlines: a 1994 profile of Michael Jackson discussing the child-molestation charge that was pending against him then. Ultimately, though, this book doesn't need to rely on current events to make its mark. Orth's subject is the phenomenon of celebrity, an ever-newsworthy topic, and her graceful handling of it should ensure a wide readership. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From The Importance of Being Famous:
I tell these stories to illustrate the differences between then and now and maybe to point out a little of what has been lost. In my earlier days, stories about famous people were still mostly about their achievements, the content of their work, and how it got done. Michael Jackson dangling his baby from a hotel balcony would have been considered a tragedy or an oddity, but the scene would not have been replayed hundreds of times a day on TV at a moment when the country was preparing for war. But now, with so much entertainment just pap and politician's insights boiled down to trite sound bites, we tend to hone in on the drama of our stars' and politicians' real lives. Their reality has become the soap opera, the big show. Even if it's clearly a rigged-up carnival. (Would Nicole Kidman, who has now proven herself as a serious actress, be getting all the terrific parts she does if she hadn't also made herself into mass-marketable tabloid fodder as Mrs. Ex-Tom Cruise?) But what parts of these well-crafted little dramas are actually real and which are invented for public consumption?

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805075453
• ISBN 13: 9780805075458
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384