Withered by star glower

Withered by star glower
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 10, 2013

Last week I had a disheartening conversation with a gaggle of schoolgirls in an icecream shop. My 6-year-old son and his little sister were capitalising on the ‘free taste tests’ from an icecream lady who was tirelessly handing them morsel after morsel on tiny spoons. While two small children debated the merits of bubblegum over banana, I turned to the three teens behind us. “Sorry! Are you in a hurry?” I asked. “This is the most important decision my kids’ll make all week. When I was an icecream scooper, we weren’t allowed to give free tastes!”

The girls laughed and one replied: “Like who’d ever work in an icecream shop!” I was taken aback. “Yep,” I said, “the icecream was so hard, my arms would ache from dragging the scoop through it. I got paid six-bucks an hour.” The girl in the middle snorted. I persevered: “Have you girls got part-time jobs?”

“Nah,” they said, ‘”We’re only 13.”  

Curious, I asked: “So any ideas about what you want to be yet?”

“Famous!” said the girl on giraffe legs, and for a moment I thought she was joking.

“Famous for what?”

She shrugged: “Whatever. Just famous.”

On the walk home with my sticky children, I wondered if those teenagers believed fame was their birthright. Had they been brainwashed into thinking celebrity status comes without hard work?  

Today, the travelling circus we call reality TV sells us overnight successes. It thrusts people into the spotlight for brief applause then discards them as the parade moves on.

The last star I met was Bette Midler. In 1997, I interviewed her in Los Angeles. Her film That Old Feeling was about to premiere in Australia. It was a stinker and I expect she knew.

I walked into a posh hotel suite to find a woman with a huge head sitting on top of a pint-sized body. Her feet and hands were tiny – dainty extremities overwhelmed by a jutting bosom and a mop of frizz. She was sweating under a bank of studio lights which made her skin so dewy, I could barely make out where her face stopped and her neck began. Unaware that journalists should be lap-dogs during the Hollywood interview, I ploughed straight in and asked:  “Do you ever get tired of fame?”

She stared at me, then barked: “Do you?!”

I spluttered something about being a nobody, but it was too late. She sulked for the next 10 minutes. Refusing to make eye contact, she gave my questions one syllable responses, not caring a jot about what Australian audiences would make of her. The interview was a disaster. The dressing down tirade I got from her publicist afterwards was excruciating. I’m still not sure what riled her: my impertinent question or the fact she couldn’t answer it.

I thought fame was unattainable when I was a kid. There were few celebrities in my patch of town, though a girl in my year had a dad who read sport on the TV news. That gave her instant social status at school. She had the kind of prestige that this single child of divorced parents could only fantasise about.

At age eleven, I would tear home on my bike to an empty house, knowing Simon Townsend’s Wonder World was about to start. Our Thorn TV, on its sturdy wooden legs, needed a good ten seconds to warm up and deliver a flickering screen.

Sprawled into a brown corduroy beanbag, I was captivated by the most famous show on kid’s telly. Simon Townsend was a reluctant celebrity. I remember reading in the newspaper that he’d been embarrassed when kids mobbed him at a school visit. I admired him even more for that.

Mum’s rule was no telly after school, but my secret trysts with Simon Townsend made me desperate to become one of his roving reporters.

At puberty, the closest I came to hero-worship was plastering the walls of my bedroom with centrefolds of heart-throb Rob Lowe and posters of Abba.  Celebrities were good wallpaper but their world didn’t intersect with mine.

Now the likes of Kim Kardashian (famous for what, I can’t remember) are slaves to their own publicity. Craving constant attention, they obsess as much about their following as the star-struck fans who stalk them on social media. The more bizarre the celebrity behaviour, the more the money rolls into their account.

I keep thinking about those girls in the ice-cream shop. They didn’t want to become famous for being talented at something they loved. They were convinced stardom was a shortcut to wealth and happiness. But it was their sense of entitlement that puzzled me most.

I tell Mum about them and she remarks: “In our day, if you behaved like a show pony, you were considered undignified. Famous people earned respect when they were humble.”

She was right.

I hate to say it, Bette, but that day we met, you were obnoxious. I liked you better when you sang your way to the top.