Sharon Marcus's Reading List

"I thought Will Smith’s memoir was really, really good. He had an excellent co-writer, Mark Manson. Some people might say, ‘Oh, Will Smith’s memoir is only good because Mark Manson wrote it’—people often tend to belittle celebrities for not being 100% responsible for their own success. That’s not the right way to think about it. Will Smith recognizes talent, picked an amazing co-writer, and deserves credit for that, too. What I liked most about Will was Smith’s self-awareness and self-analysis. He’s very upfront about how his emotional limitations motivated him to become a celebrity. He foregrounds his growth and change as a person, even recounting some of his therapy sessions. He shares insights about what made him a celebrity and kept him a celebrity. The book stresses how he was shaped by growing up in a household where his father was violent towards his mother. Early on, he writes about having a childhood defined by fear and shame about his fear, specifically his failure to protect his mother against his father, which is a very typical response; children in that situation tend to feel like they should be stopping the violence, and if they aren’t, it’s their fault. He talks about how he responded to the family situation by becoming an entertainer and trying to be funny. All of this ended up inflecting his early days as a performer: he would perform in order to get love because he equated making people laugh with being loved. He writes, “To me, love was a performance, so if you weren’t clapping, I was failing.” He points out that this also makes for unhealthy relationships because he craved constant applause. It was a bottomless pit: there was no end to the amount of love that he needed. Maybe less so to me. I grew up in a household with domestic violence so intense and frequent that police were often called to my house. I appreciated reading about someone else who grew up in a similar situation. It’s more common than we acknowledge and it’s always better to talk about realities than to hide them. I appreciated him talking about how much it shaped him in adulthood, how it made him hypervigilant. He describes a moment early in his career where he was in a meeting with an executive challenging something about Smith’s show. He and three of his friends, who were from the same community, started getting really tense, worried that the guy was about to physically attack them. He realizes soon after that he had completely misread the situation, that he has to train himself to understand that not the whole world is his father. First, he attributes his skill at becoming a celebrity to coping mechanisms he developed in his family: his need for approval and his hypervigilance made him unusually attuned to what audiences wanted. He was literally a crowd-pleaser. Second, he discovered, when he first heard rap music, that he had a talent for crafting words and an affinity with a form that was taking off when he was a young man. Most big stars coincide with a new medium or technology that fits their skills. The 19th-century French global celebrity Sarah Bernhardt was not only a great actor; her career also coincided with the moment when photography, steamships, and train travel made it easy for the world to learn about her. I began to listen to rap music in the 1980s and reading Will helped me to organize that piecemeal listening into a historical narrative. I’d forgotten how stigmatized rap was in those early days. Smith reminded me how radio stations would have taglines like ‘all music, no rap.’ When the Grammy Awards first instituted an award for rap music, they didn’t televise that particular segment of the ceremony. People who performed rap were threatened with jail, especially in the South, and had to go to court to be able to exercise their First Amendment rights. The Four Seasons wouldn’t let touring rap artists stay at their hotels. At one point, he describes someone who broadcast 2 Live Crew from offshore to get around an FCC ban on profanity. “In the United States, celebrity often fuels a myth of upward mobility and equal opportunity for all” Will Smith realized there was a spot for a rapper who was goofier and more clean-cut than many of the biggest stars. Because people weren’t afraid that he was going to start cursing, he got more radio spots. Even as a teenager, he combined musical talent with business acumen. Celebrities are not just singers, actors, athletes: they are also entrepreneurs whose product is themselves. Every big star is as good at being a celebrity as they are at dancing or playing a sport or rapping or acting. Smith was even more strategic about maintaining and increasing his celebrity. Who becomes a star is fairly arbitrary. But once celebrity is attained, what separates the megastars from the flashes in the pan is their ability to analyze and leverage how celebrity works. Smith is very upfront about being extremely ambitious and wanting to be the biggest star possible. That’s why, in the 1990s, he shifted from TV to movies, at a time when movie stardom mattered far more than TV stardom. Before shifting to film acting, he analyzed the highest grossing movies of all time. All of them had special effects, creatures, and love stories. He decided to do Men in Black because it had all three elements. Similarly, he describes being at an event where he sees Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all at the height of their movie star fame. He went up to them and said, ‘I want to do what you do. What’s your secret?’ Schwarzenegger responded, “You are not a movie star if your movies are only successful in America. … Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World.” Smith saw Tom Cruise doing global publicity and thought, ‘I want to be bigger than him. What can I do that Tom Cruise can’t?’ He realizes that he has something Tom Cruise lacks: he can sing. Tom Cruise couldn’t promote his movie in Spain and say, ‘I’m going to do a live concert outside the theater for people who couldn’t get in because the movie sold out.’ Will Smith did that. He notes that those crowded live performances then got covered in the news, which further extended his stardom. As he puts it, “In my mind, I was never promoting a movie – I was using their $150,000,000 to promote me. ” After he established himself as a star of comedies and action films, he shifted to more dramatic roles. And then, in middle age, he realized that none of what he had achieved as a celebrity was equivalent to personal growth. In fact, it was often detrimental to it. He had substituted making money for his family for being there for them. The end of the memoir focuses on how he finally learned not to define himself only in terms of work and success. Some may say, ‘Oh, boohoo, you’re a multi-millionaire, how tough for you to have to have to learn not to define yourself by work.’ I disagree. I think that the United States is overly obsessed with work and that is most visible when we look at those who actually could afford to take it easy. I find it dispiriting to see privileged, wealthy people not know how to find meaning or self-worth outside of work. Good for Will Smith for sharing how challenging it was for him to learn how to stop working, even for a day. Finally, some readers feel that Will overshared about Smith’s sex life, but I say it’s not really a celebrity memoir until someone overshares about their sex life."

"The other book I thought was truly extraordinary was Tarana Burke’s Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. Burke is the activist and community organizer who coined the phrase ‘Me Too’ while working with Black women and girls to heal from sexual assault. Her book tells the story of how she came to the key insight of that work: you can’t empathize with others unless you empathize with yourself. She writes: “if unkindness is indeed a serial killer, then my revelation is that I was my own murderer.” She describes how she was only able to help others effectively after she opened up to them about also having been a victim. That way, the women she talked with knew they were not alone, and they could see that she had survived, which gave them hope. Burke writes about having been sexually assaulted by an older boy in her neighborhood when she was 12. She didn’t tell anyone and very quickly internalized it as something bad that happened to her because she was bad. The main focus of the book is her relationships to other women: women who let her down by protecting men who sexually assaulted girls and women, and the women she let down, as a teenager, by being cruel and even violent towards them, and as an adult, by not yet being able to hear their stories. A pivotal moment in her account describes a girl in a program for young leaders telling Burke that she was assaulted. Burke completely shuts down and can’t help her. This puts her on the path to realizing that if she can’t embrace what happened to her and face it instead of compartmentalizing it, she’ll never be able to help the people who matter to her. She writes, “I didn’t see my story as my gift, only as my shame.” She’s not glad that it happened, but she sees that having been assaulted enables her to connect to the many other women who’ve been assaulted, to help them heal and thrive. The book opens with the Me Too hashtag going viral, but it ends well before the Me Too movement takes off, around the time Burke moves to Philadelphia with her daughter. The arc of the story is not so much about what led to the Me Too movement but about what led Burke to the insights that undergird it. The key moment is when Burke finally experiences the pain of her assault. As is common with trauma, she didn’t fully experience it at the time, she just shut it away. Finally, as an adult, she takes a week to let herself collapse and dissolve: it’s like a nervous breakdown, but also like a religious conversion. She emerges from this harrowing experience with a new sense of purpose and a vision of what she has to do. Another arc of the book has to do with relationships between women, which Burke treats as even more central to feminist politics than women’s relationships to men. The very end of the story narrates her reconciliation with her mother. (A lot of the best celebrity memoirs of 2021 focus on parent-child relationships. That’s another thing you get from reading them: detailed accounts of family dynamics, which interest me as an avid reader of novels.) Tarana Burke’s mother was in many ways very supportive, but she was also controlling, and a strict disciplinarian who rarely made room for her daughter to talk about feelings or pain or anything imperfect. Life was about surviving and making sure you didn’t get in trouble. In the final pages of Unbound, Burke describes going with her mother to an event in her childhood neighborhood. While there, she sees the man who assaulted her. He doesn’t recognize her. She sits in the car with her mother—whom she has, at this point, finally told about what happened to her—and says, ‘I can’t believe he didn’t recognize me, this man who in many ways defined my life. Am I so meaningless that he can’t even see me?’ And her mother says: “’he didn’t recognize you because you turned out to be a smart, beautiful, accomplished woman despite him trying to take that from you.’” At this moment, Burke finally feels truly seen by her mother. One of Burke’s points throughout the book is that the violence men inflict on women drives a wedge between women, including between mothers and daughters. As the book ends, we see how all the work that Tarana Burke has done with others and on herself has finally allowed her and her mother to have a much better relationship."

"Miriam Margolyes is the oldest person in this group, born in 1941. As someone who studies Victorian literature I knew about her performance of Dickens’s Women , but I haven’t seen her in much. She has a very distinct persona, out of control, ribald, even a bit obscene. She’s not known for being a careful person who’s concerned about what people think; in fact, she likes to shock, and the book’s unbuttoned quality plays to that image. Margolyes grew up Jewish in England, and talks quite a bit about that. She has identified as a lesbian since she was in high school and was fairly out at a young age, which was unusual for her generation; it’s rare to read about women who were openly gay before the 1970s. She describes forming a group called ‘gay Yids’ in the 60s and wearing a ‘gay Yids’ button to the BBC when she did voice work there in 1965. From a gossipy point of view, I learned about a lot of women in the theater who didn’t necessarily identify as lesbians but had a lot of affairs with women. When I talk to young women today about sexual identity, I’m surprised to learn how many of them feel they can’t call themselves lesbians if they’ve ever slept with a man or might ever want to sleep with a man. I’m going to start recommending that they read Miriam Margolyes, because she is not worrying about this one bit. She identifies 100% as a lesbian, because women are who she really cares about, and she has also had sex with a lot of men. By her account, it sounds like her main hobby while a student at Cambridge was giving blow jobs. She has had an unconventional sex life in multiple ways; she and her partner of decades have never lived together. She has interesting things to say about the varied reasons she had sex with men and women: she liked the attention; it made her feel powerful; she was bored. She tells a story of how, late in life, she came across a man masturbating in a park. He sees her and keeps masturbating because he’s an exhibitionist. Instead of screaming or running away or chastising him, she says, ‘Let me help you with that.’ And she does. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . If you want to read about a person who truly isn’t like most other people, you will enjoy this book. That said, the book is somewhat disorganized. It’s mostly chronological, but then there’ll be a chapter about her thoughts on Zionism. Reading This Much Is True is like hanging out with an aunt who’s had a little too much to drink and is letting it all hang out. I thought it was fantastic. At one point, she says, apropos of nothing, “I’ve always felt that smoked salmon was an essential ingredient of any social occasion. But it must, like a woman, be moist.” This too, is a self-help book in disguise, by which I mean: a guide to living. Margolyes has interesting things to say about failure and success, about facing and overcoming challenges. She was never a megastar, but always earned a living doing voice work and acting, despite not being conventionally beautiful, which for women usually severely limits their ability to make a living as performers."

"This is a very different book than the others. It is mostly written in the present tense. Many of the short chapters are addressed to Strong’s young cousin, Owen, who dies of brain cancer just as COVID starts spreading in New York City. Other chapters are addressed to a generalized ‘you’. Much of the book takes the form of diary entries taking us through the first year of the pandemic, with Strong living in New York and navigating a relationship with a man she meets right before New York City goes into lockdown. Many of the diary entries include extended flashbacks recounting Strong’s childhood, education, and work as a Saturday Night Live cast member. This Will All Be Over Soon is a short book by a highly emotional person who often provides a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Strong describes having a lot of anxiety and depression which make it difficult for her to get perspective on her emotions. This memoir reminded me of Abbie Jacobson’s 2018 memoir I Might Regret This. Jacobson is 38, Strong is 36. I think that many in this generation feel that the best way they can help other people is by being as forthright as possible about their own experiences and giving other people the space to do the same. That ethos isn’t for everyone. Some people really hated this book. I read some Amazon reviews that complained, ‘She’s so preoccupied with her feelings. I wanted to read this book to find out about how she became a star!’ “Celebrities are not just singers, actors, athletes: they are also entrepreneurs whose product is themselves” This is not that kind of celebrity memoir (and Strong isn’t that big a star). Another Amazon reviewer wrote, I think quite accurately, ‘this book is so disorganized and free associative, it would never have been published if the author weren’t famous.’ That’s true, but I think it’s too bad that books like this have a hard time getting published when they’re written by regular folks. It would be great to read more accounts by ordinary people who kept journals during the first year of COVID. We often protectively forget what it felt like to live through a scary event. I know I have already started to forget what life was like in New York City during the first weeks of the pandemic. I appreciated Strong’s book as a historical account that helped me access my memories of that time. There may be a personal element to my appreciation of Strong’s book. My wife of 20 years died of cancer in February 2019. Almost a year after that, when I was beginning to tiptoe back into some semblance of normalcy, the pandemic began. I appreciated reading a book about someone who endured a major loss that was not COVID-related and had to process that while living with the uncertainty of COVID. This book was actually recommended to me by a friend who lost her husband to cancer during the pandemic. Like her, I found it helpful as a reflection on what it’s like to contend with multiple forms of loss and grief. It’s not an easy read. Strong is a comedian, but she doesn’t try to laugh her way through things. There are very few jokes, which seemed appropriate. I thought it was instructive to see that even a comedian won’t always use humor to cope. If we compare this book to Will Smith’s, where he reflects on how in his youth he often tried to address everything by being funny, we see how brave and mature Strong is in her willingness to treat loss and pain as genuinely sad."

"I’ve always had a fondness for Jamie Foxx, and Act Like You Got Some Sense is a fun, well-written book. He picked a very good co-writer, Nick Chiles, who helps Foxx’s voice come through. This book is something of a tie-in to the Netflix show Foxx made with his daughter (who produced it) about a father-daughter relationship. As always, celebrity memoirs are part of the brand the celebrity is selling and are designed to make money. Rather than tsk-tsk and say, “that’s so terrible,” I’d ask whether the book is worth our money and time. I think this one is. Act Like You Got Some Sense is a guide to parenting, told through stories that impart lessons Foxx learned about parenting, often by failing as a parent. I would especially recommend this book to mothers, who in my experience hold themselves to (or are held to) much higher standards than fathers. They know it’s impossible to be perfect, yet they still always feel like they’re failing. The main message of this book is that you’re inevitably going to fail, but it’s okay: the most important thing you can do as a parent is show up and be present. If you do that, your children will ultimately forgive your screw-ups. Foxx takes a jokey approach: “When you take the kid to school on Monday, you actually have to get up and take them again on Tuesday. Damn, they got to go every day?” But his joke captures the relentlessness and boredom of parenting and the unheroic nature of being a good parent; he helps us see that parents might not always give themselves credit for simply showing up, over and over again – but they should. One reason Foxx can see the value of simply being there for his daughters is that his biological mother did not raise him but left him with her parents, and his father pretty much abandoned him. He eventually reconciles with his mother, but he doesn’t reconcile with his father, and decides not to attend his funeral. He says he had to think about what that meant to his children, whom he tries to teach the importance of forgiveness. On this score, he writes, “The lesson I have for my daughters is that sometimes you just have to let go of things, of people, of emotions that are weighing you down.” What I also found interesting about the book is that he deliberately chose never to marry and to be a very involved parent. He has a daughter apiece with two women that he dated but never married. With the mothers’ cooperation, the girls were raised as sisters. I liked reading about a non-normative approach to family life and parenting. I’ve read many accounts of how people handled parenting after getting married and divorced, but few that describe someone who, not as a single parent, deliberately separated parenting from marriage and cohabitation. It’s useful to read about the nuts and bolts of being a good and thoughtful parent outside the framework of the nuclear family. I would say so. The Will Smith book has carefully timed little jokes interspersed throughout and the Miriam Margolyes book is amusingly eccentric. Foxx’s book is structured as a series of short comedy sketches that are fables about how to be a good parent. Each chapter has a particular topic, such as ‘how do you handle children’s exposure to social media?’ The chapter then provides an extended anecdote, usually told in stand-up comic mode, that offers both a precept and a piece of practical advice. Something else I appreciated about Foxx is that he explicitly says, “I am a feminist.” He makes this point not as an activist, but as a father of daughters. He notes that women are usually evaluated in terms of their physical appearance and talks about encouraging his daughters to be rewarded for things other than looking good. He says that as a realist, he aims to give his daughters tools for dealing with the challenges they will face as women, because even though women are equal to men, they’re not treated equally: “Women deal with a lot more shit than men.” It’s probably sad that I find it so refreshing to hear him say that, but it’s something I rarely hear men acknowledge unprompted. Foxx considers it part of his job as a father of daughters to help them navigate the world Tarana Burke described, one that routinely inflicts horrific damage on women. Foxx’s book also has plenty to offer those interested in learning more about him as a person and understanding his path to celebrity. He writes a lot about his childhood, about his career, and about balancing work and family. Like Margolyes, he frames some of what he learned as lessons ordinary people could adapt to their situations. For example, he describes taking a required dance class in college. He’s terrible at executing steps, and doesn’t see how he is going to pass the class, which he needs for his major. But he can play the piano, so he offers to accompany the other students for course credit. He turns that experience into advice: ‘Whatever you want to do in life, figure out what your version of playing the piano is, and use what you’re already good at to succeed in something that you might find more challenging.’ A useful life hack, even for those of us who are never going to be Academy Award winners."

"Sarah Bernhardt wrote My Double Life at the peak of her fame. I chose her autobiography because of her centrality to the history of celebrity. Sarah Bernhardt was born in France in 1844 to a Jewish Dutch courtesan who made her living in Paris. No one ever knew who Sarah Bernhardt’s father was. She discusses him quite a bit in her autobiography, but she never names him. That establishes, right from the start, her willingness to be a social outlier: she trumpets her illegitimacy. She was very enthusiastic about not being like other people and the image she presents of herself in her memoir is the one she cultivated as a star: defiant, eccentric, willful and rebellious. Bernhardt’s career coincided with the emergence of photography, sound recording and, when she was in her sixties, film. She made use of each of these technologies to take control of her own image. Beginning in the 1860s, ordinary people could easily buy cheap photographs of celebrities. These images were sold in stationer’s shops, tobacco shops, anywhere that books or newspapers were sold. If you lived in a more remote location, you could easily order small-format photographs through the mail. People kept albums of these images and enjoyed perusing them just as today we enjoy looking at pages on Pinterest or Tumblr or fan sites. Sarah Bernhardt also coincided with the rise of the mass press. In the 1830s, more and more people began to buy and read newspapers, which were getting cheaper and being published more frequently. In order to keep people’s interest, editors had to publish not only news about the economy and what was going on in the legislature, but also entertaining tidbits, which included gossip about celebrities. The daily newspaper also covered live theater in great depth, since from the 1870s through the 1900s, theater was the primary form of entertainment. During this period, often called theater’s golden age, many stage actors became famous. But Sarah Bernhardt didn’t just become famous as an actor—she also became famous as a personality. She often appealed to the public when contesting bad publicity in the press. Her autobiography reprints many newspaper articles that she feels were unfair to her or misrepresented the facts, and she rebuts them at length. She uses her autobiography to settle scores and set the record straight. It’s impossible to understand today how important theater was. Twelve million people a year went to the theater in places like London or Paris or New York, and even the smallest towns had at least one theater or opera house. People of all classes attended some form of live performance three or four times a week. Travel also played a very significant role in Bernhardt’s superstardom, as touring still does for music stars today. Sarah Bernhardt became a superstar because she could take a steamship and get from France to the United States in six weeks—which she did five times over the course of her life. When she came to the US, she would stay for a year. The railway networks in place by the 1860s meant that she could almost everywhere in the US. She didn’t just go to Chicago and New York and Philadelphia. She went to Louisville, Memphis, Leavenworth, and many places I’ve never been or even heard of. Also, because of another technological innovation in the 1860s, the telegraph cable, news about Bernhardt travelled quickly. People in Leavenworth would read about how her performances were selling out in New York. They didn’t want to feel provincial, so they wanted to see her too. What this teaches us is that celebrity is an intersection of live presence and virtual representations. No one becomes a celebrity through live presence alone, and, conversely, no one becomes a celebrity solely through virtual representations. If the public doesn’t feel that it could at least in theory see the person, it’s less compelling; the crucial elements of realness and unpredictability are lacking. To this day, movie stars will go live on late night TV so that the public can have a sense of how they seem in ‘real life’ versus onscreen. The interplay between the representation and the presence makes celebrity. Bernhardt used insights gleaned as a performer to tell a good story. She grabs the reader’s attention by embedding her story in historical events, like the Franco-Prussian war, and by affiliating herself with people who were even more famous than she was and likely to command recognition a hundred years from now. “Victor Hugo was so moved by her performance that he sent her a gift of a diamond in the shape of the tear he shed watching her act” She emphasized her relationship with the great writer Victor Hugo, in part because she knew that his written works would be preserved and his name recognized long after his death. She also wanted to point out that Hugo was so moved by her performance in one of his plays that he sent her a gift of a diamond in the shape of the tear he shed watching her act. His admiration elevated her. At the same time, in the 1870s, Bernhardt’s willingness to perform in Hugo’s plays helped a new generation connect to his work. Hugo was already quite old in 1871. Bernhardt was the it-girl of the moment, who helped make the venerable Hugo more contemporary and more current. I did a lot of research to reconstruct Bernhardt’s acting techniques. Today, when people see a clip of her on YouTube in the 1912 film of Queen Elizabeth , they say, ‘Nobody would think she was a good actor today!’ Her acting style was designed for the stage and on film it looks very exaggerated and over-the-top. I thought it was important to try to understand why her contemporaries thought she was a great actor. By unearthing very detailed and thoughtful reviews and comparing them to accounts by ordinary people who went to see her, I was able to establish how she used her body and voice in ways that thrilled theatergoers. I also learned that audiences at the time wanted to be moved. Now we sometimes find that kind of emotional response, especially to live theater, a bit embarrassing. We’re much more willing to be moved by musicians; we turn to popular music to feel big sweeping emotions. How people respond now to Taylor Swift or Beyonce offers a good comparison point to how people felt when they saw Bernhardt perform."

"She was a very important scriptwriter who worked with D W Griffith in the early days of silent film. Loos was known for two things as a scriptwriter. She was able able to write scripts that turned actors into stars, as her script for Red-Headed Woman did for Jean Harlow. She was also known for being able to get sexual innuendo past the censors, thanks to her wit and her grasp of how the film industry worked. An example of that is her screenplay for the film The Women . A Girl Like I helps us to chart the transition from theater to film. Born in 1889, Anita Loos started out in the world of theater. Her father was both a newspaperman and a theater owner. Steeped in the world of entertainment from a young age, Loos understood how it depended on publicity and news coverage, and how that publicity and news coverage can be manipulated and angled. Loos tells a lot of charming stories about the theatrical world that film replaced. She was a child actor who played both male and female roles, Little Lord Fauntleroy one night and the female heroine of the melodrama East Lynne the next. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We are used to thinking of film as killing theater, but initially, the main way people saw films was in traditional theaters. Films started out very short, just three or four minutes long, and many vaudeville theaters showed a few films in between live acts. Anita Loos learned about film while working in the theater. She describes watching movies from the other side of the screen while changing costumes backstage. That story is probably apocryphal, but it’s such a lovely image. Loos decided to start writing film scripts at a young age. She paid attention to the different kinds of stories featured by distinct film companies and wrote a script for Biograph suited to their house style. To figure out where to send it, she climbed up to where the film projector was located and found a can of film with the Biograph address on it. She signed her cover letter ‘A. Loos’ and Biograph addressed their letter accepting it ‘Dear Sir.’ After that, she made her way to Hollywood. Loos’s memoir is very interesting on the early interplay between Hollywood and Broadway. When D W Griffith decided he wanted to make serious films, he knew he had to go back to live theater to get real actors. Los Angeles was flooded with people who wanted to work in the movies, but they were all amateurs with zero experience. Many of them got work and learned on the job and became great film actors, but some of the biggest film stars came from Broadway. Mary Pickford, for example, had a long career as a child star in theater before she became America’s sweetheart in films. The same was true of D W Griffith’s favourite movie actress, Lillian Gish. She worked for years in live theater before becoming a film star. Both. She charts the rise of celebrity in film—how a medium that didn’t start out using stars came to define stardom. Films initially lacked stars and didn’t even name the actors featured in them because directors and producers wanted to save money. They knew that if actors became crucial to attracting audiences to films, they would demand higher salaries. But at a certain point, the film industry realized that audiences want to identify the people they’re seeing on the screen. If they like them, they might want to see another movie with that same actor. So producers made their peace with having stars who commanded higher pay and exercised some power. Loos writes, “They tried to keep them anonymous as long as they could and then they couldn’t.” To counteract the star’s power, producers often tried to impose very restrictive contracts on them. By the 1930s, movie stars had much less power or autonomy than theater stars had enjoyed in their nineteenth-century heyday. Another phenomenon that promoted film stardom was the rise of the film magazine. Loos talks at great length about the first major movie magazine, Photoplay , which turned her into a star by publishing photographs and articles about her calling her “the soubrette of satire.” As soon as one of those articles was published, she got hundreds of fan letters; she reprints some of the more hilarious ones in her memoir."

"Anita Loos recounts the very early stages of what became known as the Hollywood studio system. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, that system produced glamorous film stars whose images were protected and massaged by the studios that made them famous. Then, in the 1960s, the studio system began to collapse, a fitting event for an era known for its young people’s willingness to question authority and established institutions. This led to a growing interest in the seamy underbelly of glamorous celebrity. Mommy Dearest, published in 1978, appeared at a pivotal moment in the history of celebrity, and also helped to change celebrity culture. Christina Crawford’s book helped create a public as fascinated with celebrities going bad as with celebrities being good—a public obsessed with celebrity scandal and with exposing the flawed person behind the beautiful image. Joan Crawford was one of the great stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Born in 1904, her heyday was the 1930s, when she became known as someone who had made herself a star from nothing. She was not trained in any way. She just came to Hollywood and clawed her way to the top and then had an extremely glamorous image that she protected. She presented herself as someone who was able to become and stay a star by virtue not only of talent, but also of hard work and discipline. “Christina Crawford’s book helped create a public as fascinated with celebrities going bad as with celebrities being good” In the 1940s, however, Joan Crawford was labeled box office poison along with other stars like Mae West and Katharine Hepburn—mostly women, mostly very strong women. Her career started to collapse. At that time she adopted, in fairly quick succession, four children. It was illegal then for single women to adopt, but she managed to get around that. In this book, her oldest adopted daughter revealed what had been an open secret in Hollywood for many years: Joan Crawford was a physically and emotionally abusive parent. The stories are horrific. I don’t want to dwell on them, but I think it’s important to give examples because the level of abuse was very, very serious. She routinely tied her son to the bed at night when he was as young as four years old and would not allow him to get up to use the bathroom. Once, when she caught him playing with matches in front of dinner guests, she marched him out to the dining room, lit a match, and held his hand over it until his skin burned. Another time, photographers were at Crawford’s house taking pictures of her because the studio had named her ‘mother of the year.’ Christina and her younger brother were playing and Christina accidentally caught her brother’s hand in a door. He cried out and this disrupted the photo shoot. Joan Crawford’s response was to take Christina’s hand, put it in the door, and close the door deliberately on her hand. These stories in particular are important because people were present and later corroborated them. Christina Crawford had several goals in writing Mommie Dearest. She wanted to bring the fact of child abuse to national attention and point out that it’s not only poor people or the mentally ill or drug addicts who abuse their children. Even the most privileged people can be perpetrators. By raising awareness of the prevalence of child abuse in all classes and by helping child abuse survivors to come together, Crawford produced real change. “Crawford also considers the desire to be a celebrity a form of pathology that converges with abuse” Christina Crawford also set out to expose celebrity as what she calls ‘the big lie.’ She points out that celebrity exists not only because celebrities themselves exist and publicity machines exist, but also because the public buys into stardom as a fantasy of perfection. She sees it as her job to make us question our need to idealize celebrities, and to show that celebrity itself can be an abuse of power. Her mother was able to get away with abusing her children in the full sight of people that she worked with, because as a celebrity no one wanted to expose her. People were afraid that if they confronted her, they’d lose their jobs. Christina Crawford also considers the desire to be a celebrity a form of pathology that converges with abuse. If you’re the child of a celebrity who abuses you, you’re going to be very sensitive to the ways that those two things interact, but not all celebrities are child abusers and many child abusers are not celebrities. Christina Crawford sees stardom and child abuse both as forms of bullying and gaslighting; Joan Crawford thought she could make up her own rules and force people to believe in her lies: ‘I’m a great mother, I’m Mommie Dearest, I’m wonderful.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Christina Crawford tries to empathize with her mother; she sees Joan Crawford as driven by a bottomless need for love that meant she couldn’t really deal with other people as full human beings. This was another way that her celebrity coincided with her pathology. Joan Crawford, as her daughter portrays her, was most comfortable when people were in the position of fan. She actually had several fans who worked for her, for free, cleaning her floors and helping to answer her fan mail. Christina’s analysis of Crawford as a mother is that she wanted her children to be fans as well. But even as Christina Crawford denounces celebrity as, at best, covering up abuse and, at worst, itself a form of abuse, she is fully aware of how to work the celebrity machine. She talks at many points in the book about how her mother taught her about the press’s fascination with celebrities. She had to know that her status as the daughter of a celebrity would be crucial to the success of her book. There are hundreds of thousands of abusive parents and abused children; few of them are famous. If someone had written a book like Mommie Dearest about an abusive parent who was not in the public eye, it would not have received the same attention. Christina Crawford cannily used her very painful but insightful experience of celebrity culture to turn celebrity into a platform for bringing attention to a huge social problem that people had been reluctant to confront. Many people do really bad things and get away with them. Unfortunately, privileged, wealthy, connected people, in whom a lot of industries have a vested interest, are even more able to get away with crimes than others. Anita Loos talks about a famous case in the 1920s in which a comic actor raped a woman, who died as a result. Loos reports how the actor, though acquitted in the courts, saw his career destroyed as a result of the scandal. She drily remarks, “Hollywood incorrectly inferred from this that notoriety and scandal would hurt their stars and that stars were not above the law.” In fact, she says, stars often were treated as above the law, not least because the public likes notoriety and scandal. Her example is Elizabeth Taylor, whose involvement with married men made the public more interested in her. But while stealing other women’s husbands is not a moral thing to do, it’s not a crime. It doesn’t violate someone else’s entire sense of physical and psychological selfhood. What Michael Jackson did, what Joan Crawford did—those are actual crimes for which people can and should be sentenced to prison time. So, on the one hand, people let celebrities get away with things that they shouldn’t. On the other hand, when the celebrities are brought to account—often, unfortunately, after their deaths and after the damage is done—it does raise awareness in a way that ordinary cases don’t. She was trolled, to use a more contemporary term, by people who she called ‘angry disbelievers.’ A later edition of the book includes testimony from people who knew her at the time who were willing to go on record about what they had witnessed. It was not a secret that Joan Crawford abused her children: she did it in front of other people and people knew about it. Even in an era where corporal punishment and very strict treatment of children were quite common, people referred to Joan Crawford as a cruel and bizarre parent. It’s not a very well-written book, and there are some shocking spelling mistakes. But it is readable, because Crawford is a very emotionally present narrator. The book is also very balanced, considering what she went through. She makes an effort to understand what her mother was going through and what her mother’s psychology was, while at the same time being very open about her rage at the abuse she suffered. It’s quite common for children who are never allowed to express a full range of emotions as children to have a lot of rage bottled up inside them. Christina Crawford writes often about how angry she was, and still is at the time of writing. She doesn’t try to sugarcoat herself. The book doesn’t read like an exercise in self-justification, or even as an act of pure vengeance. She also doesn’t try to hide that there’s an element to this book that’s about settling the scores. She’s setting the record straight. Her mother spent decades telling one story, a false story, and she’s going to tell a story that she believes—I think accurately—is more true. That makes for a compelling read."

"Yes and no. This is the book that most people would say is the foundational work in celebrity studies, but Dyer begins by rounding up all the preceding work that’s been done on the topic. Dyer acknowledges in passing that stars began in the theater, but since his departure point as a scholar is film, that’s what he focuses on. One comes away with the impression that the only celebrities are film performers, even though that’s not what Dyer actually argues. The most interesting contribution of Dyer’s book is his commitment to taking pleasure seriously. He focuses on how stars give us beauty, pleasure and delight. He ends the book with this beautiful passage where he says we can analyze stars backwards and forwards, and that’s what I’ve done in The Drama of Celebrity . But at the end of the day, what’s also important is how they overtake us. He writes, “When I see Marilyn Monroe, I catch my breath; when I see Montgomery Clift I sigh over how beautiful he is; when I see Barbara Stanwyck I know that women are strong.” That’s what he’s trying to understand, as much as anything else. He’s very embedded in a Marxist analysis of culture, but he also questions it. He runs through the answers that certain Marxist cultural critics—like Theodor Adorno—have given for why people like celebrities and says they don’t satisfy him. He’s unwilling to argue that people enjoy stars because we’re all mindless cogs in a capitalist machine. The film industry does try to manipulate the public into liking stars, but not all manipulation works. “Media industries attempt to manipulate the public—it would be silly to deny that—but audience response can never be fully controlled” That’s a really important point. Everybody would concede that media industries attempt to manipulate the public—it would be silly to deny that—but audience response can never be fully controlled, not least because audiences are extremely diverse and heterogeneous, and most of us are not simple-minded. Dyer points out that systems are leaky. Even if you create what you hope will be an airtight system for getting the word out about an industry’s products, people are going to react in ways that you can’t predict. A lot of people have said that the point of stars has been to reinforce the status quo. Let’s say it’s the 1950s in the US, and people believe that young women should be perky and focused on pleasing men, which yields a star like Sandra Dee in the Gidget movies, with her giggling and her blonde ponytail. Dyer’s point is that the status quo itself is complicated. Yes, Gidget movies were promoting very banal 1950s stereotypes about femininity, but they also show Sandra Dee doing something that only boys in her films do: she learns to surf. Her character is doing something quite feminist while being stereotypically feminine in the sense of weak and silly. Dyer also contends that stars rarely have only one meaning or represent just one thing. Rather, stars embody contradictions and debates. The very notion of the Hollywood star is contradictory: stars are special, but they’re also just like us. Dyer coins a term to refer to this multitude of celebrity meanings: ‘structured polysemy.’ Every star generates multiple meanings, but only a finite number of them. So how you understand one star’s meaning relative to another requires analzying the different, often contradictory, but limited set of meanings that attach to a particular star. I do build on his work, but at the end of the day, because of when and where Dyer was writing, he remains more invested in the idea that stars represent ideology than I do. I see him as a transition point from the Frankfurt School and its dismissal of stardom as propaganda for capitalism. Dyer’s primary framework is still capitalism, but he has a more complicated view of how capitalism operates (and misfires). One key difference between Dyer’s work and mine: he is more interested in what stars mean rather than how they mean, and he derives star meanings from the films in which they appeared. Had I been doing a Dyer-type study of Sarah Bernhardt as a celebrity, I would have taken the plays that she starred in as crucial for understanding her celebrity image. But that was not my method. At the end of Stars , Dyer says that there are two major future directions for scholars of celebrity: the publicity materials generated about stars and audience responses to celebrities. I would say I accepted those invitations."

"We are very hungry right now for positive role models and for examples of people who can be in the public eye without losing their dignity or attacking the dignity of others. At the 2016 Democratic convention, Michelle Obama famously said, ‘when they go low, we go high.’ Becoming embodies her desire to go high. Becoming also adheres to what we expect from the genre of celebrity biography. People want to know about the private lives of public people; Michelle Obama obliges us by providing an insider view of life in the White House. We learn about her first kiss, about the fact that she failed the bar exam the first time she took it, about her going to couples counseling with her husband. This is not a biography that withholds the tidbits one craves when reading about a famous person. But I would say Becoming is also part of a distinctive subgenre: autobiographies by reluctant celebrities. She describes herself as an ordinary person on an extraordinary journey. Over and over again, she reminds us that she never wanted fame. As a child, she was friends with the daughter of Jesse Jackson and she discusses throughout Becoming what that taught her about the toll that celebrity—political celebrity in particular—takes on a family. She describes herself as someone who hates chaos, who likes her life to be controlled and how she lost all of that. She emphasizes the constraints of being constantly in the public eye. Her complexity as a person is attacked because she is constantly viewed through racist stereotypes that the public and the media impose on her—for example, seeing her as ‘an angry black woman’ when in reality she’s not an angry person. Then there are the constraints of everyday life: how when you live in the White House, as she did for eight years, you can’t open any windows because it’s a security breach. She talks a lot about her struggle to maintain privacy for her family. And because she’s a reluctant celebrity, we can sympathize with that. Often when we read celebrities complaining about loss of privacy, it can be difficult to be sympathetic because you think, ‘You seek this out.’ But I think Michelle Obama is being honest when she says that if it had been up to her, she would have chosen not to be a celebrity. This is that rare case of someone for whom celebrity is a sacrifice. It’s not a reward or a goal or privilege, but a viscerally painful experience. Yes, and she describes how their family life actually got better when he became president, because he could control his schedule more and be with them for dinner every night. The worst years were when he was a state senator and their children were very young. His schedule was completely unpredictable. She talks about how he would say he would be home soon and so she’d keep the kids up and the dinner warm and then it turned out soon meant ‘after I have this 45 minute conversation with my colleague.’ She’s always been quite irreverent about her husband, which most people find refreshing. She talks about how she came up with a solution that worked for them. She and her daughters would eat at the same time every day, and she would put them to bed at the same time every day. That way her husband would know that if he wanted to see them, he had to get home by that time and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. It’s her willingness to share stories like that that makes Becoming feel like an authentic tale—though at the same time, one does always have the sense that she’s being quite careful about what she discloses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Something else that I really noticed about Becoming that I think has to do with Michelle Obama’s sense that celebrity is as much of an imposition as an opportunity: she sees herself as having an obligation to use her celebrity to help others. Plenty of people who initially have selfish reasons for pursuing celebrity eventually use their influence to help others as they mature. But for Michelle Obama, because celebrity isn’t that fulfilling in and of itself, to make something of it requires that she do something for other people. So while she doesn’t like being in the limelight, she finds she can use her position as First Lady to foreground issues that she cares about—like veteran’s health or children’s nutrition. She charts how she learns how to do this over time. Her desire to help others squares with values acquired from her family and her community—that those who have more power and privilege have an obligation to help others, because they could not have achieved what they did on their own. Michelle Obama is attentive throughout the book to all the people who have helped her at every stage in her life. Part of her attraction to Barack Obama is his belief in making the world a better place—and how he uses his own personal charisma to that end. I think she could have. It comes across as an option at one point. She’s been giving speeches without notes and she’s not experienced at dealing with the media and at one event she says something along the lines of ‘for the first time I’m really proud of my country.’ People took that out of context and denounced her as anti-patriotic. After that, she went to her husband’s team and said, ‘Maybe I’m a deficit for you. Maybe I should just drop out.’ They tell her she can do what she wants, but that they think she’s an asset, not a problem. There have been First Ladies who have been very, very behind the scenes. I think Melania Trump is very, very behind the scenes. Trump doesn’t adhere to the same rules as other presidents, so it’s not a great comparison, but I certainly think Michelle Obama could have been less in the public eye than she was. There are a lot of disadvantages to being a celebrity. In her autobiography, Sarah Bernhardt says that publicity and celebrity are “a monstrous octopus” and that most people don’t know how to handle it until they’re in their 40s. Our society promotes fantasies about becoming a celebrity. Some quite young people, when they become famous, think they’re realizing those glorious fantasies, but—as is the case with almost every fantasy—the reality is usually more complicated and alloyed. I also think that, objectively speaking, it has become more difficult to be a celebrity. There is less and less privacy now that everybody has a phone with a camera and a recorder. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Suicide and harmful drug use are rampant problems not unique to celebrities. When someone who already has problems becomes a celebrity, then the pressures of stardom can exacerbate those problems. If newly fledged celebrities don’t have the right support around them and if they already have a lot of psychological issues, the stress of having no privacy, the stress of acquiring so much money so fast, the stress of having so many people offering all kinds of things to you because you’re famous and they want to get close to you—those are strains that many can’t handle. But you can also make the same point about poverty. I’d be more concerned about having a discussion about how being poor adds to the stress of having addictions or psychological problems. To flip your question around: I find it remarkable how many celebrities, some very young, seem quite well-equipped to handle the challenges of celebrity. Taylor Swift seems like somebody who’s handling her celebrity really well. Elizabeth Taylor started out as a child star, and though she had her a rocky moments, she wasn’t destroyed by her celebrity—far from it. We could say the same thing about Kim Kardashian. Usually, if you dig a little bit and ask what’s going on, the stars who thrive tend to have supportive families, rather than predatory or absent family members. In the Amy Winehouse documentary that came out a few years ago, her mother seemed very passive and absent, and her father was a grifter trying to use her. She had no one around her truly committed to taking care of her."