Celebrities rush in where Lear refused to tread
PAUL JOHNSON
The nicest party I attended during the Jubilee season was arranged by that princess of the genre, Belinda Harley, to enable the Queen to meet leading figures in the arts. It was crowded with famous faces and figures, and what struck me was that the only one present with no claims to celebrity status was the Queen herself. She behaved like an old, hard-working professional, doing her job. which was to meet, shake hands and converse with as many people as possible in the allotted time. I suspect she will be the last monarch not to behave like a celebrity. Of course we have had celebrity monarchs before: Edward II, for instance, camping about among the top actors and sports stars; Richard II, always in the monastic gossip columns for introducing chic innovations such as the pocket hankie and the two-pronged fork; and, of course, Edward VIII, with his 'Windsor knot' and his rakish naval cap, photographed shaking cocktails with the rich riffraff. All of them came to a bad end. The Queen knows that a true sovereign does not need celebrity status. Alas, not only Prince Charles but also Prince William are already branded with that mark of Cain, the celebrity cringe, in which half the face demands attention and the other half complains about it.
This is the age of celebrity, actively promoted by New Labour, which officially divides the nation into 'VIPs and ordinary people'. Tony is a celebrity; so is his wife, her sister, the dreadful father-in-law. New ones are created by selling them peerages. Indeed, the upper chamber ought to be called the House of Celebrities, since most genuine lords no longer sit there. Then there would be no uneasiness about Jeffrey Archer reoccupying his seat when he comes out of the slammer. Celebrities come and go all the time — their shelf-life is an average of two years — but he is clearly a stayer; indeed, the archetypal celebrity.
One characteristic of celebrities is that they move around with a little gang. On the one occasion I saw Madonna, in the Ivy, she had seven followers with her. No doubt some of these people perform useful functions — hairdressers, manicurists, tax advisers and the like. But celebrities are unique in expecting attendance from them in the social hours. Puff Daddy has an unusually large entourage which enables him to keep planes waiting, hold up traffic, etc. Some act as bodyguards, who beat up anyone who objects to the way he behaves. It is notable that Hitler, long before he became Chancellor, always surrounded himself with seven or eight sycophants and roughs, especially when he went out to restaurants in Munich. It was by studying this behaviour-pattern that Unity Mitford contrived to meet him.
The need to be the centre of a court that provides moral support, undemanding company, ascent, praise and unvarying sympathy is as ancient as fame itself. Alexander felt it, especially when drinking (as did Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, the aged Oscar Wilde). Caesar stipulated it be composed of the amply complacent (Let me have men about me that are fat'). I call this need the Lear Complex'. The old King, having divested himself of sovereignty, still expected to be treated like a celebrated figure, a VIP whose importance was marked by his knights. They hunted with him, drank and listened to his rambling reminiscences, men 'so deboshed and bold', complained Goneril, that they turned her `grac'd palace' into a 'riotous inn'. It is a fact that such 'trains' always behave badly and get their leader into trouble. Shakespeare knew all about the case of the Earl of Essex, whose bold front but lack of inner assurance — so typical of celebrities — caused him to surround himself with property-less knights. He created many of them himself, much to the Queen's fury, when he was Irish viceroy, and it was these noisy popinjays who egged him on to rebellion and so to the scaffold. The contemporary term for such militant hangers-on was 'swaggerer'. Hence Mistress Quickly's terror of Falstaff s bedraggled train, a parody of Essex's, men like Pistol who provoked fights and drew from her the anguished cry, 'I'll have no swaggerers here!'
It was the same with Byron's train, which included a swaggering doctor. This tiresome man knocked off the cap of an Austrian officer at the opera and got nflord into trouble. But Byron asked for it. As a celebrity, he insisted on no fewer than 14 travelling servants, including, like modern pop stars, an accountant, to whose meticulous arithmetic we owe Doris Langley Moore's fascinating book on Byron's finances, Accounts Rendered. Not content with men and mistresses, his celebrity status demanded a menagerie. Shelley noted 'ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon. . five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane'. The house, he added. 'resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels'.
It is unusual, however, for writers, being solitary souls, to have a train. Perhaps Marlowe did; hence his undoing in a tavern brawl. Hem
ingway, like Byron, was an exception. He liked a gang of inferiors to accompany him on his drinking bouts — I saw him at the Dome in Montparnasse with five or six yes-men. He got this urge, I think, from observing celebrity toreros. A bullfighter must have his cuadrilla, a squad of assistants who help him in the ring. But many go to restaurants afterwards, the torero boasting and declaiming, the cuachilla laughing, applauding and soaking. Such noisy outfits, seen in a Madrid bar, should be given a wide berth. Picasso, I recall, had his cuachilla of cronies and tame critics, and this is a sure sign of celebrity artists. Perhaps it has always been so. Painters, like bullfighters, need assistants — Guido Reni, the world's highest paid artist in his heyday, had 70 — and favoured ones went on pub crawls with the maitre. That is how Michelangelo, a man who needed the security of a train, got into a fight with the young sculptor Torrigiano, who did Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. He broke Michelangelo's nose and boasted, felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit under my knuckles.' (The Establishment got its revenge eventually, and Torrigiano starved to death in the cellars of the Inquisition.) I imagine the threats and rows in which Caravaggio was always involved reflected his troublesome train's behaviour. Ribera was another such case.
The Kennedys, being celebrities rather than serious politicians, had (and have) their trains, including indispensable lawyers who fix things when their bosses' behaviour leads to casualties. But, come to think of it, Winston Churchill liked to have his knights around him too: men such as Brendan Bracken, his chief publicist, Moran, his doctor. 'Prof.' Lindemann, his tame scientist, and of course Max Beaverbrook. The Beaver had his own train, which included one or two favoured writers such as George Malcolm Thomson, and a formidable red-haired man who ran the British Ford company. He and the Beaver did a regular cigar act when they were handed round, the red-haired man taking two and the Beaver struggling to get one of them back. But I do not object to such shows. The truly great are entitled to a court of admirers. No doubt Homer had one. Where the gorge heaves is at the spectacle of a bedizened nonentity, created by the media, existing by, with and from the media, whose very existence is doubtful once the media's contemptuous eye is removed, surrounded by a hired gang and playing Lear to the goggling young. 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' A celebrity, of course.'
Previous page
