Julie Burchill
BODY LANGUAGE
My friend comes back from New York to visit, and the first thing she says as she comes through the door is, “Have you heard that really rude record?”
I try to narrow it down: “What, rude- sexy? About sex?”
“No, just rude! It’s the rudest song you’ve ever heard!”
It took us 10 minutes to find it on MTV: Larger than Life by the Backstreet Boys. The chorus goes, “All you people can’t you see, can’t you see/How your love’s affecting our reality/ When it goes wrong/You can make it right/ And that makes you larger than life!”
Hear that, girls? You’re not just a many-mawed monster, good only as a market for shoddy merchandise – because you love the Backstreet Boys, you’re a star, too! Hmm … I think I prefer the straightforward contempt of Guns ‘n’ Roses, who were wont to urinate on their devoted fans from hotel balconies.
On another level, at the launch of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, Demi Moore was reported to have gestured at the nearby celebrity-watching crowds and remarked to Tina, “Can you imagine how we look to those people?”
What Moore looks like is, probably, a woman who hasn’t had a hit film since Drew Barrymore was a druggie; whose massive investment of time, money and energy in her physical appearance has resulted in a body that, the more of it she reveals, the more tightly the paying punters seem to hold on to their cash, and that proved insufficient glue to keep her boastfully “hot” marriage together.
And there she was talking to a woman who looks like Lulu. I couldn’t swear to it, but I bet the expression on those pilgrims’ faces wasn’t so much sheer, molten awe as mild curiosity, like the faces of people looking into the monkey house at the zoo. Look, they’re almost human.
Celebrities have very little idea how indifferent most people are to them. As Planet Hollywoods and Fashion Cafs take a nose-dive; as docusoaps, animal shows and decorating and gardening programmes trounce big-budget TV star vehicles; as The Blair Witch Project (with not a star in sight) becomes the most profitable film ever; and as video games continue to eat into the profits of the music industry, there seems only one conclusion: if you want to get ahead, make sure you’re smaller than life. Hey, babe, take a walk on the mild side. Even men’s sexual fantasies, apparently, are mostly about women at work or the girl next door.
The members of the Fame Club will hang on to their illusions for as long as they can, of course: what exactly would an individual with as few inner resources or as little life of the mind as Demi Moore do or be if she weren’t famous? The Fame Club acts as sanctuary and soft cell to all the needy souls who find that life as a little person inflicts far too much psychic damage on them – it’s a place where they can meet to lick each other’s wounds and whisper in each other’s ears of their specialness. The Fame Club throws up the strangest alliances: Demi and Tina, Puff Daddy and Ivana Trump, Fergie and Billy Connolly.
Once in a while, however, a star is born who shows no understanding of the Fame Club’s rules and lays about them with all the glee of the little boy pointing out that the emperor really does have no clothes.
They remind us that you don’t strictly have to be a bum-sucking toe-rag to make it. Jennifer Lopez is delightfully dismissive of the co-stars who have tried to bed her and the dishwasher blondes who walked off with the roles that were rightfully hers because they once sat on Steven Spielberg’s knee when they were a babe.
Sophie Marceau recently made a splendid show of herself: Michelle Pfeiffer? “So boring.” Titanic? “Boring and completely stupid.” Robert de Niro? “A funny little man I didn’t even recognise.” The late President Franois Mitterrand, who once sought to impress her over dinner? “Really weird and touchy.”
For whatever reason, stars have become smaller. When we look at photographs of Bogart and Bacall, Gardner and Sinatra, Monroe and DiMaggio, they give meaning to that raddled old whore of a word, “charisma”. But when we see pictures of Brad and Jen, Tom and Nicole and Gwyneth and Whoever, we know that we could find 10 couples in the local disco who appear more sexy and compelling. I have always felt that the true test of whether a celebrity couple has it is whether we can imagine them having bigger, better and weirder sex than us. I can just about believe that Ava Gardner had more fun in bed than me, but Tom and Nicole? Come on – Pinky and Perky hit the wilder shores of love with greater regularity.
Stars are not the people who are best at what they do; they are merely the people who want it most. Madonna, the biggest star in the world, demonstrates this more than any other: a million girls are better-looking, better dancers, better actresses, better singers, but did any of them want it more?
The stalking of stars is a terrible thing, but it’s surprising that it happens as little as it does. To achieve fame, a person must work obsessively at pushing themselves into the consciousness of millions of complete strangers; this is very odd in itself, and easily as odd as the act of stalking.
“Look at me! Love me!” demands the star. Can they really be so surprised when the odd unbalanced civilian takes them at their word? When the star is stalked, he or she has achieved the logical outcome of their ambition: to one sad soul, at least, they really are the most important thing in the world – truly, larger than life.