The Politics of Fame

Eric Burns

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781978800700
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Celebrities can come from many different realms: film, music, politics, sports. But what do all these major celebrities have in common? What elevates them to the status of household names while their equally talented peers remain in relative obscurity? Is it just a question of charisma, or does fame depend more on the collective fantasies of fans than the actual accomplishments of celebrities?In search of answers, cultural historian Eric Burns delves deep into the biographies of some of the most famous figures in American history, from Benjamin Franklin to Fanny Kemble, Elvis Presley to Gene Tierney, and Michael Jordan to Oprah Winfrey. Through these case studies, he considers the evolution of celebrity throughout the ages. More controversially, he questions the very status of fame in the twenty-first century, an era in which thousands of minor celebrities have seen their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. The Politics of Fame is a provocative and entertaining look at the lives and afterlives of America's most beloved celebrities as well as the mad devotion they inspired. It raises important questions about what celebrity worship reveals about the worshippers—and about the state of the nation itself

PART 1

1

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fame

The first American celebrity was Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was overseas, not at home, that Franklin’s fame reached its apogee. Dispatched to Paris in 1776 by the various colonial governments, he found himself admired, adulated, lionized. No advocate of false modesty, Franklin was delighted by his reception.

Franklin’s assignment was to enlist French support for the colonists in the Revolutionary War. He was seventy years old at the time, and most of his life was behind him. Never before, though, had a human being filled his days with such astonishingly varied productivity.

There were his inventions: bifocal lenses; a primitive storage battery; a copperplate press to print currency; a phonetic alphabet; a stove that bore his name and that could, because of its unique arrangement of flues, heat a room twice as effectively as a conventional stove while using a quarter of the fuel; designs for both copy machines and hot-water systems; a chair that turned into a stepladder and another chair with one arm extra wide so it could serve as a writing surface; a musical instrument called the armonica, for which both Beethoven and Mozart would compose pieces; and—of all things—swim fins, for whose invention Franklin was honored by being the only Founding Father inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

For those who did not know how to swim and thus had no need for fins, he also had a plan: “In a long letter that conjoined the physics of floating bodies, the psychology of desensitization to fear, and the pedagogy of new tricks to old dogs, Franklin laid out a concise program for basic drown-proofing.” And because his brother John was suffering from the use of a conventional catheter to pass urine, he invented the first flexible catheter known in America, and made certain that his brother received one as quickly as possible: “I went immediately to the silversmith’s and gave directions for making one (sitting by till it was finished) that it might be ready for this post.”

And, of course, he also thought up a government like no other in human experience. Obviously, he had help with the latter—a great deal of it, going all the way back to Cicero, the greatest statesman of the Roman Republic, whose ideas proved influential to many of the Founding Fathers. Nonetheless, Franklin’s role in creating the United States was distinctive; important; and, in some cases, decisive.

There were his discoveries: the electricity in lightning, which he rendered harmless for dwellings by yet another invention, the lightning rod; the repercussions on human beings who have been exposed to freezing temperatures for too long a time; “the effects of air currents on objects of various shapes”; the currents of the Gulf Stream, their various patterns, and their impact upon both navigation and weather; the evaporation times of various liquids and the reasons for, and consequences of, differences in those times; the reasons for the ocean’s salinity; and the factors involved in causing the common cold and its contagiousness.

There were his civic improvements: a new, safer, and brighter form of street lighting; improved postal service among the colonies; the lending library; a volunteer fire department; an association to provide insurance for both businesses and individuals; the founding of both the American Philosophical Society and the institution that would become the University of Pennsylvania; the idea of daylight savings time; and, as the biographer Walter Isaacson is one of the few to point out, the “matching grant fund-raiser.”

Simply writing the list—even reading it—leaves one short of breath. So much better did the public good become as a result of Benjamin Franklin.

As a result of Franklin’s embodying a host of prodigies in a single human form, and as a result of his having been sent to France to apply for assistance against the mutually despised British, Parisians welcomed him as they had never welcomed a stranger before. “The celebrated Dr. Franklin arrived at Paris the 21st of December,” wrote a diarist in the capital, “and has fixed the eyes of every one upon his slightest proceedings.” Another diarist, his own eyes fixed on the American, noted, “Doctor Franklin arrived a little since from the English colonies, is mightily run after, much feted by the savants.”

Even the nobility, presided over at the time by Louis XVI, was pleased to entertain the American representative, despite the fact that he had been dispatched by a budding nation opposed to government by heredity.

It did not seem to matter. Franklin was a star, and even in 1776 stardom meant more than politics. Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that Franklin’s manners in the presence of the nobility were meticulously correct and therefore put his political opponents at ease. The king and his attendants “appreciated the respect with which [Franklin] treated them, as well as the understanding he showed of the delicacy of his assignment.” As Will Durant put it with admirable brevity and perceptiveness, Franklin “paraded no utopias, talked with reason and good sense, and showed full awareness of the difficulties and the facts. He realized that he was a Protestant, a deist, and a republican seeking help from a Catholic country and a pious king.”

With both royalty and commoners alike eager to receive him, Franklin found that his hosts’ regard for him reached the tipping point in a remarkably short period of time. In fact, it had approached that point even before he arrived. Parisians “bought biographical sketches of Franklin … bought his collected works … [bought a] volume of Poor Richard’s maxims [that] went through several printings in the next few years”—all of this by way of preparing for his visit.

When he was finally among them, the French picked up the pace of collecting. They stocked up on Franklin merchandise, dozens of new pieces of which were now in the marketplace, with the visage of the most erudite American appearing on “clocks, rings, busts, medallions, and other pieces of jewelry, vases, snuffboxes, candy boxes, and, according to some reports, the bottoms of chamber pots. You could lift the lid to relieve yourself and smile down at the American master of all trades, who would smile back up.”

Another version of the chamber pot tale comes from the historian David McCullough. “Reputedly,” he writes, “the King himself, in a rare show of humor, arranged for [Franklin’s likeness] to be hand-painted on the bottom of a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, as a New Year’s day surprise for one of Franklin’s adoring ladies at court.”

Perhaps both versions are true. Regardless, the location of Franklin’s face in a portable waste disposal container seems less an honor than an insult to us now. These, however, were the early days of celebrity product lines; the kinks had yet to be worked out, the consulting firms to be called in for proper branding.

Remarkably, some of the French, fashion conscious as they had already been for a long time, now underwent a complete reversal in taste and began adorning themselves in Franklin’s unpretentious, decidedly unregal mode of attire. Women led the way, as they “began to style their hair in a manner reminiscent of the fur cap that Franklin so often wore.”

The more notable among them, those who hosted literary salons and fashionable dinners, flooded Franklin with invitations. He accepted as many as he could and was as likely to seat himself on a woman’s lap as on one of the salon’s elegant chairs. For Franklin was not only the first of America’s celebrities, he was the first to realize how easily he could take advantage of his position to woo, and be wooed in return by, the ladies. In fact, he is thought to have engaged in so many affairs that he was regarded as the reigning expert in the field, advising a young acolyte that “in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones” because “there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc’d may be attended with much inconvenience,” because “the Sin is less. The debauching of a Virgin may be her Ruin,” and because “regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey.”

The humor in the preceding, though not especially coarse for the time, is mitigated by the fact that Franklin’s wife would not make ocean voyages and had therefore remained in the colonies. A plain woman with few intellectual resources, Deborah Read Franklin was incapable of holding her polymathic husband’s attention. She was, however, capable of feeling the sting of rumors that traversed the Atlantic from Europe. Writing with excessive restraint, Cokie Roberts says that Franklin’s wife “finally admitted that she was concerned about what she’d heard about him and other women.”

As long as he was not savoring the delights of their wives, French males came equally under influence of the American’s clothing style, or lack thereof. Franklin’s lack of fashion sense—as perceived by those in Paris who had previously dressed with such elegance in silks and brocades, velvets and laces—became all the rage. Tailors designed deliberately rustic garb to copy the Franklin look and could barely keep up with the demand, so eager were people to attire themselves, as was said at the time, “à la Franklin, in coarse cloth … and thick shoes,” with a waistcoat cut loosely and either a fur cap or a white hat atop the pate. Before long, to dress up was to dress down.

Fortunately for Americans, and more importantly, Franklin’s mission turned out to be a success. He persuaded the French to provide men and materiel for the support what became the United States. As the biographer Gordon Wood writes, “Probably only Franklin could have persuaded [Foreign Minister Charles Gravier] Vergennes to keep on supporting the American cause, and probably only Franklin could have negotiated so many loans from an increasingly impoverished French government. Certainly no one else could have represented America abroad as Franklin did. He was the greatest diplomat America has ever had.”

It has been said that the colonists would not have won the Revolutionary War’s decisive battle of Yorktown without the assistance of French spies. Franklin’s role in procuring the assistance of those spies is not known. However, that he did play a role cannot be doubted.

Two years after the battle’s end, it was finally time for Franklin to return home. He probably could have departed earlier, but he feared leaving his heart in Paris. The feeling was mutual: “The French were sorry, in some cases bereft, to see him go. He had worn his fame as comfortably as his clothes, delighting in the tributes he received and in the expression of regard that followed him home.” There were a number of French lap sitters who probably would have followed him home too, if arrangements could have been made. Shortly after he departed, he received a letter from the socialite Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy. “Every day I shall remember that a great man, a sage, has wanted to be my friend,” she told him. “If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me.”

Franklin returned to America in 1785, his ship sailing up to Philadelphia’s Market Street wharf on the gentle tides of late summer. His welcome was more splendid than he had imagined. “We were received by a crowd of people with huzzas and accompanied with acclamations quite to my door,” Franklin proudly related. He tried speaking to his companions as he made his way home, but could not be heard, nor could he understand what most of his fans were saying. They were shouting too loudly, expressing their gratitude too enthusiastically, bumping into one another in their glee.

He did not mind at all. Franklin was delighted by his fame—an innocent, almost childlike pleasure—as he delighted in the more modest acclaim he had received in the colonies before departing for France. He had admitted his pleasure to a friend, and the friend understood. He told Franklin that such a feeling was common in human beings, and a trait of which the Almighty would approve. Franklin agreed heartily. Writing back, he said that the desire for renown “reigns more or less in every Heart, tho’ we are generally Hypocrites, in that respect, and pretend to disregard Praise, and that our nice modest Ears are offended, forsooth, with what one of the Antients calls the sweetest kind of Music.”

One of those ancients was Cicero, the leading statesman of the Roman Republic. Franklin often cited him “as his authority on a variety of matters, such as the importance of virtue to a public man and the duty of a society to care for its less fortunate citizens.”

In fact, it might be said that Cicero was the founding father of the Founding Fathers. The model of government that he advocated is not so very distant from the original constitution of the United States in the careful balance it set between the executive and the legislative and the constraints, now largely vanished, that it placed on pure, untrammeled democracy. When George Washington, meditating on the difficulty of ensuring stable government, said, “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves and that systems on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious,” he could have been quoting Cicero.

Thus were America’s creating geniuses fans of a man who had done so much to create the Roman Republic almost two millennia earlier.

Franklin passed away less than five years after taking up residence in his native country again, drifting into death as peacefully as possible on clouds of opium that stilled the pains of fever, an aching chest, an almost constant cough, and struggles for breath that were just as frequent. As the end approached, he asked that his bed be made up properly, so that he could “die in a decent manner.” And so he did, remaining, as so befitted him, “lucid to the end.” It came after he had passed his eighty-fourth birthday.

In his last days, he continued to look back on his renown with pride, agreeing at the end of his life with what he had written some twenty years earlier on the first page of his acclaimed autobiography: “Having ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Eric Burns
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Note to Readers
• Prologue
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author