On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Briefly celebrated for Typee and resenting the expectations of his new audience, Herman Melville complained, “All fame is patronage. I want to be infamous.” The cultivation of fame is conventionally regarded as inappropriate behavior. A reporter once asked Al Pacino how he deals with fame. He answered by quoting a line from the play “The Local Stigmatic”: “Fame is a perversion of the natural human instinct for validation and attention.”

But if you make your living via your presence and identity, then fame is essential to achieving your purpose. As Augustine says of Jesus in City of God, “His face shone on the mount, his fame in the world.” Lady Gaga, ripping a page out of Madonna’s playbook, tells us that fame results from desiring it more than other people do. She would shame us into recognizing the modesty of our yearnings. If Lady Gaga bores people at a party, they think it’s their fault. Perhaps one day she’ll be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There are more than 3,000 halls of fame in America.

In Look At Me!, social psychologist Orville Brim says you’re famous when “known by name, recognized by sight, and talked about or written about by a nameless public unknown to them.” But this is a loose definition – and he later draws additional loose distinctions between fame, celebrity, and recognition. Extrapolating from his research, he estimates that 4 million Americans “say that becoming famous is the most important goal in their lives.” Brim claims his study is among the first to consider “the fame motive” – unlike other books that have examined fame itself and its role in social and economic dynamics.

In his introduction, he sums it up: “One seeks to become famous in order to compensate for the acceptance and approval that others have withheld,” thus echoing Pacino’s comment without categorizing the motive as perversion. Of course, Pacino has the inside scoop on the phenomenon, not Dr. Brim.

“My aim in this book is to describe the origin and life course of the human desire for fame,” an approach that calls for categorization, data, and analysis. Brim provides this material. Yet he also says, “But this book is not a scientific study, nor is it meant to be a popular or self-help book. It is, rather, an extended essay about one aspect of human nature.” The essayistic portions of Look At Me! are the best parts — speculative, allusive, and entertaining. But as for illuminating the fame motive, the obvious is glaring to begin with.

The narrative loses momentum when Brim’s clinical perspective takes over, as when he announces that there are no less than seven types of personal recognition, comprised of the famous person’s name, face, voice, and their combinations. But he recoups with “Coming to the End,” a sober and sometimes even moving chapter on the demise of fame in one’s life: “Eventually, most of us see that we’re going to be disappointed no matter what we do.” And ultimately, he entirely abandons his professional neutrality and comes down squarely in Pacino’s camp: “My own observations lead me to believe that the fame motive seriously damages the possibility of a good life.”

Along the way, Brim offers several fine anecdotes and takes some shots of his own. Of John Keats’ self-penned epitaph, “Here lies one who name was writ in water,” Brim says, “In my view, this might be called a passive-aggressive reaching for fame. Much more than a plain ‘John Keats, 1795-1821.’” But there may be no more melancholy story than that of Saul Steinberg whose poster “View of the World from 9th Avenue” made him famous. He said:

“I am a most discreet man. I have refused to be photographed. I rarely grant interviews. I want to be left alone. My dream has been to have a quiet recognition among my artist colleagues. Now this whole episode has made me comical. It has reduced me to ‘the man who did that poster.”

*****

From Sunday June 20, 1948 to Sunday June 6, 1971, the road to fame passed through the Ed Sullivan Theater at 1697 Broadway. My parents took me to the show during my school vacation on February 21, 1960 (I was nine years old). The talent was famous from beginning to end: comedians Jack Carter and Myron Cohen, the Jerome Robbins ballet company, singer Earl Grant, the Barry Sisters singing duo, mezzo soprano Giulietta Simionato, and Ricardi the magician. Even then I knew the comics since we watched the Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night where they appeared many times (Carter 49, Cohen 47).

Sullivan began his career as a Broadway gossip columnist and succeeded early on TV in part through his ability to book well-known talent cheaply. With no notable charms of his own, Sullivan thrived as an authoritative conduit of celebrity. During each show he would acknowledge the celebrities in the audience. On the night we attended, Rocky Marciano rose to applause just to my right. Fame incarnate.

As Gerald Nachman shows in his engrossing book, Right Here on Our Stage Tonight, Sullivan cultivated a reputation for wholesome good taste while producing his first program, “Toast of the Town,” the precursor to “The Ed Sullivan Show” – even though he bumbled his way on-air and the critics panned him. When Lincoln-Mercury decided to sponsor the new show, Benson Ford wrote, “Sullivan is a phenomenon … Wherever he goes, women hold up babies for him to kiss, traffic stops, policemen smile. I’ve even seen Ed choke up. Ed is a one-main interfaith council, a chamber of commerce and an unequaled sales force. The crowds love him.”

Asked to describe her father, Betty Sullivan Precht said, “He was not a warm, friendly person. He was very stubborn, very ambitious, but these qualities didn’t always show. Everything was kept inside him. He was not a demonstrative person – except with sports figures, whom he loved introducing on the show – Mickey Mantle and so forth. His sportswriting days were the happiest he had. He was Irish, and he had a temper.”

He was also highly principled. These were days when white performers were told not to make physical contact with black performers during broadcast. Nachman writes, “One viewer wrote in, ‘We enjoyed Ella Fitzgerald right up to when you had to make the point of hugging her right there in our living room!’ Sullivan wrote angry replies to many racist letters.” He kissed Pearl Bailey and shook hands with Nat Cole whose own show was cancelled when no sponsors would support it.

Nachman’s book is no less than a remarkable reconstruction of post-war America as perceived through its changing tastes and values. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was a metaphor for an entire culture, both setting and reflecting a sense of shared standards of decency and excellence. Sullivan assumed that the average viewer was capable of laughing with Phyllis Diller, appreciating an aria, and enjoying The Supremes in a single hour on a Sunday night.

“The Ed Sullivan Show” could risk an act considered unusual because the audience had confidence in Sullivan’s ability to draw everyone back to the center. Ed explicitly assured everyone that The Beatles were actually very fine young men. Everything would be OK after all. The week after The Fab Four first performed on the show in 1964, Sullivan’s headliner was Mitzi Gaynor.

He was able to pay the big stars while others could not. In 1961 his budget was a whopping $110,000 for one hour. He paid $7,500 for major acts, scaling down to $2,500 for novelty acts. At the same time, Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” budget was $52,715 for nine hours a week. This disparity led to “The Great Sullivan-Paar War” during which “Sullivan said he would no longer pay big money for people who agreed to perform on the Paar show at union scale ($320), vowing that any guest … would receive the same amount from him.” Myron Cohen cancelled a Paar appearance. Diller did the Paar show and accepted $320 from Sullivan, saying “I’d rather have friends than money.” She claimed Sullivan had no sense of humor and knew nothing about comedy – yet for years his show was the top TV showcase for comedy.

Sullivan controlled every aspect of the show from bookings to production. He was infamous for trimming acts and routines to fit his format. “Ed was notoriously wary of songs with sexual innuendoes and of fleshy female singers with revealing necklines,” writes Nachman. “He ordered them to mask their décolletage with a fringe of tulle, kept on hand to camouflage any overly hanging breasts.” Elvis Presley brought a new challenge. “He’s hanging some kind of device in the crotch of his pants,” Sullivan said to his director, “so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. Do what you have to do to fix this.”

“Saturday Night Live” and late-night talk shows may be all we have left from the age of the great variety shows, broadcast live. But Right Here on Our Stage Tonight is written with such liveliness and fluidity that Sullivan’s time feels present on every page.

 

[Look At Me! The Fame Motive from Childhood to Death, by Orville Gilbert Brim. Published October 1, 2009 by the University of Michigan Press. 197 pages, $65/$25 cloth/paper]

[Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! – Ed Sullivan’s America, by Gerald Nachman. Published November 5, 2009 by the University of California Press. 472 pages, 40 b&w photos, $29.95 hardcover]