The Meaning of Recognition (57 page)

But the chance of getting murdered is only the most spectacular question of life and death that fame raises. Leaving out the malevolence of the mentally disturbed, and the professional cynicism
of the press, there is quite enough extreme behaviour from ordinary people to make the everyday life of someone famous scarcely worth living. This is the main reason why the famous actually need
the biggest income that they can get, because they will have to spend a large part of it on protection from people who are otherwise clinically sane, but who, faced with the dazzle of someone they
admire, temporarily lose all conception of the privacy of others. Julia Roberts needs her twenty million dollars a picture, because she needs nineteen million dollars’ worth of perimeter
defence in order to stop the fans entering her house and sitting down with her to dinner, each of them convinced that she is as lucky to meet them as they are to meet her. And of course she would
have the same chance of dining undisturbed in a public restaurant as Napoleon had of successfully invading Russia. That was why he invaded Russia, in fact: to get away from the press. On the island
of Elba, he spent most of his time giving interviews. And that’s a true story. When he got tired of giving interviews in exile he would reappear in Europe to fight yet another last battle. It
was like Cher’s farewell tour, but with fewer lighting effects.

*

Unwanted attention is the real reason why stars isolate themselves, and by doing so they pay another penalty. At any big premiere, or even in any small nightclub, there is a
special roped off area reserved for stars. It isn’t just so that they can meet their next wife, or so that their current wife can meet Salman Rushdie, it’s so that they won’t be
talked to death by normal people like you and me. Each of us has something interesting to say, but the stars can’t afford to listen, or they will be worn out. Nor can they sign every
autograph they are asked for, or carpal tunnel syndrome will end their careers early. The late George Harrison, when asked for his autograph, used to say: ‘I can’t. It’s
Tuesday.’ On Wednesday he would say: ‘It’s Wednesday.’ It was years before anyone noticed that he never gave his autograph. He had the technique worked out for remaining
reasonably private in public, although those techniques availed him nothing when a screwball got into his kitchen. The British comedian Eric Morecambe, one of the best-loved faces in the country,
was woken up on the stretcher after his first heart attack by one of the stretcher-bearers, who said his daughter would never forgive him if he didn’t get an autograph. And these are ordinary
people whose obtuseness should be forgiven because for them the encounter with the famous one is unique, and it never occurs to them that for the famous one it would happen a thousand times a day
if there were no haven. Yet the cost of being in the roped-off area is that the press will hate you, and so a new layer of harassment is added, by which people who have been raised up by fame are
given the reputation of being above themselves.

The natural result of this inexorable process is a well-founded wariness, which is bound to look like aloofness when seen from the distance at which they must keep the rest of us if they are to
survive. Even the most magnanimous and naturally gregarious celebrities are bound to ration their supply of bonhomie if they are to get through the day, and if we catch them at it, we are equally
bound to think that they are putting on airs. And of course some of them really do. In many cases, talent arises from an unstable personality, and if the talent brings fame then the instability is
less likely to be assuaged than exacerbated. But even the most normal artist can be forgiven for enforcing the contract to the letter. Robbed of everyday life, you don’t want to be robbed in
your professional life as well. One of the many nice things about Mel Gibson is that he can laugh at the hoo-hah: he has retained a degree of Aussie dinkumness that armours him against the hype.
While filming a TV special about him in Los Angeles, I went with him to a TV show on which he was promoting one of his movies, and I was pleased at the way he laughed at the outrageous size of the
fruit basket that had been put in his dressing room. For most stars, the fruit basket can never be big enough. But if there had been a small fruit basket, we would have seen the Passion of the Mel.
When I was doing my first TV series at Granada television in Manchester, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood were both there to tape a production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Their lawyer measured
the dressing room that had been provided for them and it turned out to be two feet narrower than the width specified in the contract. The builders were called in, and for several days rehearsals
were interrupted by the uproar of pneumatic drills. When I was introducing a Frank Sinatra concert for the opening of Sanctuary Cove, Sinatra’s lawyers went down on the floor with a tape
measure to make sure that the fasteners holding down the red carpet were no more than the specified eighteen inches apart. I have seen these things happen with my own eyes. And these are the sane
people.

Luciano Pavarotti is sane too: the most delightful group of men you could hope to meet. But he has his requirements. When he guested on my New Year’s Eve show in England, he had to be
flown in from Italy on a private jet, and the private jet had to be big. It wasn’t precisely a Boeing 747, but it was big enough to carry a football team. Luciano was a gifted footballer in
his early days, by the way, and you kind of wonder why later on the Italian team didn’t ask him to keep goal. They would have been impossible to defeat. The car we sent to meet Luciano at the
airport had to be a BMW 8 series because although he can fit into a 7 series, he doesn’t want to be seen struggling to get out of it. All this was understandable, as was his refusal to
descend the stairs on our set. Since the set would obviously have descended with him, we went along with his requirement to walk on from the side. But he also refuses to sit down on set without a
table on front of him. When we tried to cheat and put in a table made of glass, the lawyers arrived. Luciano sincerely believes that if the set is correctly arranged, he will look as thin as a
reed. He has been encouraged in this belief by his entourage.

The entourage for Diana Ross look like the remaining brothers of Malcolm X. They are there to ensure that Miss Ross will not be expected to do anything not specified in the contract, which
includes singing. Instead, she mimes to playback. Not even one improvised musical phrase during a conversation is permitted. I could go on about Barbra Streisand for the rest of the night. I could
go on for as long as she kept me waiting, which was five hours. Fame has turned her into a monster of control. Fame has convinced Bono that he is some kind of economist. But these are talented
people, and talent should be forgiven anything. And yet it is sad to see how the fame earned by talent can affect the personality. Robert Redford is always, on principle, an hour late for any
meeting with anybody. If he ever has a cardiac arrest from the accumulated strain of having his facelifts lifted, he had better hope that the doctors in the emergency unit aren’t working to
the same timetable as he is.

Did my own small measure of fame affect my personality? I don’t think so. I was always paranoid. I was paranoid in Class IB at Kogarah Infants School, when I won the spelling bee but
Laurie Ryan was still given the first early mark just because he had kacked his pants earlier in the day. Next day I beat him to it. But my own small measure of fame did affect my expectations,
especially when I travelled. When I went down the jetway into the aircraft, I got far too used to turning left. At the destination, I got far too used to looking for the limo driver holding a card
with my name on it. I got far too used to never booking my own tickets, to being greeted by the hotel manager as if I had just arrived from Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, to
getting the suite instead of a room, to the bathroom with enough towels for a symphony orchestra. But above all I got far too used to being recognized, until one day, far too late but better late
than never, it occurred to me that being recognized is not the same as recognition. In that regard, television ruins everyone who appears on it. You get used to so many people wanting to say hello.
Some of them are coocoo, but most of them are friendly at the very least. And that, I finally realized, is what’s wrong. It’s a too-easy familiarity. You are being hailed for being
somebody, even when you have done nothing.

So a few years ago I fired myself from the small screen and tried to find the path back to normality. I don’t claim sainthood for this, and I suppose it could be said that I want it both
ways. I want to be well-known enough to be asked to an event like this one tonight, and I want to be anonymous enough to disappear back into the crowd I came from. The two desires are incompatible:
I realize that. But I think it’s a conflict we’re all going to have to face, because we can’t go on like this. Our best hope is that the celebrity culture is already discrediting
itself. We should help it on its way downhill, and do our best to get back to a state where fame, if we have to have it, is at least dependent on some kind of achievement. If people want to be
somebody, they should do something first. There is no excuse for my generation of Australians not knowing the difference, because our early youth was spent in a land without television, and the
sharp division between earned fame and pointless celebrity could be heard, if not seen, every week. It could be heard on the radio.

For me it was the difference between Bob Dyer and Jack Davey. Bob Dyer was the Americanized host of
Pick a Box
and my mother and I were agreed that he didn’t do very much except
shout. Actually it is no cinch to run any kind of game show and in retrospect I can see that Bob Dyer was quite skilful at marshalling the human traffic, but it’s equally certain that he had
no particular verbal prowess beyond yelling ‘Happy motoring, customers’ and cranking up the tension as he gave the quaking punter the tantalizing choice between the money or the box.
‘The money . . . or the box?’ shouted Bob Dyer. Then he would whisper it. ‘The money . . . or . . . the box?’ The box could have the big prize in it: a Westinghouse
refrigerator, a Lotusland inner-spring mattress, or a diamond-encrusted J. Farren Price wristlet watch from Proud’s. Or the box could have the booby prize in it: a packet of
Bonnington’s Irish Moss gum jubes, containing petroloxymel of garagene, from a rare seaweed washed up on the coast of Ireland. But both my mother and I were agreed that for a real booby
prize, the box should have had Bob Dyer in it. We were Jack Davey fans and that was that. It was because Jack Davey did something. He made the language live.

Sitting in front of our Stromberg Carlson radio set, which was bigger than the Kosi stove, I was introduced by Jack Davey to the concept of word play, which is essentially the interplay of the
expected and the unexpected, and therefore a matter of construction far more complex than a mere pun. Almost anyone can make a pun, which is why we flee those who do. Hardly anyone can do word
play. Jack Davey’s writers could, and he knew exactly how to deliver it. In the show’s tightly written script, it was established that the woman who lived next door was seeking Jack
Davey’s affections. It was further established that she was large and powerfully built. In one programme, she said to him, ‘I’m going to chuck you under the chin.’ This
announcement was followed by a sound effect of a body whistling through the air and landing heavily at some distance, with a clattering of tin cans. ‘Struth,’ said Davey, ‘she
chucked me under the house.’ It might not sound like a great joke now, but my mother and I laughed for a week. I had no idea how he did it. I presumed that he had written the line himself.
Actually he hadn’t, but he easily could have. Jack Davey could think like lightning on his feet. Later on, in another programme, he introduced me to the concept of the educated joke –
the joke that depends on a certain cultural sophistication in the audience. This time it was a quiz show, and Davey was improvising, picking up on unexpected things, a knack that can’t be
scripted. You can script the link material, but to interact verbally with the contestant you have to look up from the page and snatch the opportunity out of the air. In the final, hard round of the
quiz, Davey asked a contestant the name of the supporting actress in a certain film, and the contestant gave the wrong answer, i.e a name that could not have been on Davey’s script of
questions and right answers. The contestant said ‘Mercedes McCambridge.’ There was the briefest pause before Davey said: ‘Mercedes McCambridge? Sounds like a well educated
Scotsman in a sports car.’ My mother and I laughed for another week, and when I look back on it, I realize that it was then that I discovered my stock in trade. Actually I hadn’t really
understood the joke at the time. It had gone over my head like a frisbee. But I had been delighted by its flight. That was the thing I would do, if I could.

I would like to think that it was the thing I did on television, some of the time anyway. But most of the credit I got was just for having my face there. It was never much of a face in the first
place, and as you can see, it has by now achieved the same condition as Pompeii. To pay myself what compliments for realism I can muster, I never tried to spruce it up. I never had my eyes enlarged
or my teeth replaced, and above all, to use precisely the right phrase, I never tried to conceal the ravages of my excess testosterone. One of my producers had a wig designed for me but I never
wore it. Later on it was given its own talk-show, which is still running. But my face got famous anyway, just for being there, and I finally realized that there was something wrong with that. By
that measure, anyone can be famous, and that’s madness. We have to get back to sanity. It will be a battle, but Australia is probably the best place to fight it.

Australia, partly by geographical luck and partly because of the much-underestimated collective wisdom of its political class, has so far managed to avoid both the worst excesses of
Britain’s uniformly squalid tabloid press and America’s demented obeisance before anyone who claims to be unique. Australia, considered as a culture, is held together more by radio than
TV, and radio has much less of this madness about glamour. Whatever you might think of John Howard’s policies, the population that elected him proved by their votes that they had not yet
succumbed to the delusion that a politician should look like a film star. Among Australia’s flourishing community of left-wing commentators, there is even a rumour that the young John Howard
looked like Ben Affleck, but the Liberal party’s cosmetic surgeons went to work on him to make him more electable. If that proves to be a fact, we should rejoice in it. We should rejoice that
ordinary Australian people can still pay heartfelt respect to those who have done something, and grant them a further existence beyond the necessarily brief period of their initial glory. In
Adelaide earlier this year I was invited to tea by the Governor of South Australia, Marjorie Jackson. It pleased me that the Lithgow Flash had been granted lasting recognition for her achievements.
To respect achievement is the only antidote for being poisoned by glamour. But the antidote must be taken before the poison. People should do something before they are allowed to be somebody.
Getting back to that reality will be a struggle, but we should make a start now, while we are still sane enough to see that our world is going mad. The prize is a life that our children will find
worth living. For that we must fight, and for once an adverb by George Bush applies exactly. We must fight vociferously.