Fame Junkies

The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction

Jake Halpern

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780547527246
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

The author of Welcome to the New World and Bad Paper discusses America's obsession with celebrity in this 2007 investigation. Why do more people watch American Idol than the nightly news? What is it about Paris Hilton's dating life that lures us so? Why do teenage girls—when given the option of "pressing a magic button and becoming either stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful" —predominantly opt for fame? In this entertaining and enlightening book, Jake Halpern explores the fascinating and often dark implications of America's obsession with fame. He travels to a Hollywood home for aspiring child actors and enrolls in a program that trains celebrity assistants. He visits the offices of Us Weekly and a laboratory where monkeys give up food to stare at pictures of dominant members of their group. The book culminates in Halpern's encounter with Rod Stewart's biggest fan, a woman from Pittsburgh who nominated the singer for Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Fame Junkies reveals how psychology, technology, and even evolution conspire to make the world of red carpets and velvet ropes so enthralling to all of us on the outside looking in. Praise for Fame Junkies "An astute look at the mighty vortex of fame, which this author believes will only get more powerful." — Kirkus Reviews "Halpern displays an evocative, insiderish style reminiscent... of Tom Wolfe's when he peered into 1960s celebrity culture." — Wall Street Journal "A critical look at Americans' infatuation with fame and determines that fame is elusive, desirable—and also possibly addictive.... [An] engaging study." — Publishers Weekly

Part I

The World of Aspiring Child Celebrities

1

Going to Fame School

LOOKING FOR aspiring celebrities in America is a little like looking for dehydrated nomads at a desert encampment—they are everywhere, and their thirst is so intense it’s almost palpable. So when it came to finding places inhabited by fame seekers, I had plenty of options. I eventually decided to focus on young people—the kids and early teens of the “reality-TV generation,” who grew up in the 1990s watching The Real World and other shows that seem to offer everyone at least fifteen minutes of fame. I believed, rightly or wrongly, that kids were more likely to give me emotionally honest answers about why they wanted to become famous. And for some reason I felt a lot of sympathy for kids who yearned to become famous that frankly, hard as I tried, I simply couldn’t muster for adults who wanted the same thing. All this persuaded me that what I really needed was a school of sorts—an academy for aspiring celebrities—and as it so happens I found just such a place right in my own hometown.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was growing up, Buffalo’s doorway into the world of fame and glamour was on the same street as my elementary school. If I had only traveled a bit farther down Harlem Road, heading south toward the Mount Calvary Cemetery and a bleak stretch of strip malls that housed (and still house) an odd smattering of such businesses as the Buffalo Gun Center, Tony’s Pizza, and Stylin’ Tat-2, Tattoo & Body Piercing. In the midst of this drab suburban sprawl, I might have noticed a white house with conspicuous, bright-purple trim and a sign reading Personal Best.

This hub for would-be stars is run by Susan Makai, who in her heyday, in the mid-1970s, was the closest thing Buffalo had to an A-list celebrity. After winning the title of Miss Buffalo in the early stages of the 1974 Miss America Pageant, she became the region’s first female TV meteorologist and one of the first unmarried cheerleaders to join the ranks of the Buffalo Jills. In the twilight of her stardom Makai was known informally as the “Movie Lady,” because she introduced a new movie each night at eight o’clock on Channel 29. Makai took her job seriously and she spoke at length about how each film was conceived, cast, and shot—and she did so in an accessible, upbeat way, almost like a well-spoken neighbor who happens to be a film buff.

During her tenure as the Movie Lady, Makai began working for the local branch of John Robert Powers, or JRP. At its core, JRP is a cross between an acting school and a talent agency. It is a place where children and teenagers can learn to walk like fashion models, practice reading scripts, and perhaps meet a bona fide Hollywood or New York agent. From a strictly business perspective, JRP functions like McDonald’s: owners of a franchise use the company’s name and patented formula to open new branches and make money. The company has grown steadily over the past half century, and JRP now operates in at least thirty states and a number of countries around the globe, from England to Indonesia and Vietnam.

JRP is hardly the only business of its kind. Dozens of other modeling and acting schools across the country, including Barbizon and John Casablanca, have created a fast-growing and lucrative industry. Many of these schools have proved quite resourceful at recruitment. Representatives from Barbizon persuaded several public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, to let them give talks during class time about the ins and outs of the modeling industry. Students were asked to submit their contact information if they wanted to learn more about modeling or become eligible to win a college scholarship. Several days later parents around the county received telephone calls from Barbizon salespeople who explained that their children had expressed an interest in modeling and that they could purchase six weeks’ worth of lessons for just $1,800. Soon afterward Montgomery County banned Barbizon from its schools. Apparently, however, this hasn’t set much of a precedent elsewhere. According to Ed Beaky, who has owned and run the Barbizon school in Dallas, Texas, for decades, it is standard practice for his employees to visit public schools and recruit students during the school day.

Of all the modeling schools now in operation, JRP is certainly among the oldest and most reputable. It was conceived in 1923 by John Robert Powers, a failed actor turned businessman. He designed a curriculum and wrote several books that offered a comprehensive strategy on how to become a successful model. In his 1960 classic, How to Have Model Beauty, Poise, & Personality, the author’s biographical note reads, “John Robert Powers has advised, met, admired and observed more women than any other man in history. His practiced eye perceives the women who come to the John Robert Powers Modeling Agency not as they are, but as the beautiful, charming creatures they could—and should—be.”

Powers’s book is full of brief chapters with titles like “Tips on Training Your Eyes to Sparkle,” “9 Ways to Put Charm in Your Voice,” “How to Buy a Hat,” and “Teenage Skin Problems.” At its best, the advice Powers offers is commonsensical; at its worst, it’s asinine. In his section on “Teenage Skin Problems,” for example, he has this to say: “Protruding nose hair can be clipped occasionally with a scissors but must never be pulled. Death has actually resulted from tweezing this area.” The book’s overall theme is that women must always strive for beauty and glamour. “It is a woman’s birthright to be attractive and charming,” Powers writes. “In a sense, it is her duty as well . . . She is the bowl of flowers on the table of life.” The path to glamour, he asserts, is open to everyone—no matter who she is or what she looks like: “There are no problems which cannot be solved if they are simply treated as problems instead of unchangeable drawbacks. Some flaws can be corrected—others can be made to fade away in the light of other perfected charms. Girls with buck teeth have become movie stars. Grandmothers have become glamour girls. The least pretty girls have become the most popular.” As proof of how easily attainable beauty and charm can be, Powers offers the example of a girl he once met who had a debilitating stutter. He quickly diagnosed the root of the problem and offered a solution: ”One day I casually suggested a change in her hair style and gave her lipstick to experiment with. . . . Gradually as the days went along, I saw the metamorphis [sic] of this shy sensitive girl into a beautiful young lady. She saw the changes, too—and at the end of a few weeks she no longer stuttered!”

Powers took the concept of the traditional finishing school, added a healthy dollop of Dale Carnegie-style self-empowerment, and threw in some quick training on how to act and pose for the camera. After just a few classes his students could acquire manners, heightened confidence, and the know-how to become budding stars. In theory, a successful JRP student could—if she followed each prescribed step—completely reinvent herself, a la Jay Gatsby. “Modeling has changed the lives of thousands of Powers Girls,” wrote Powers. “Small town girls have become leaders of New York society. A cantor’s daughter from the lower East Side became the editor of a top fashion magazine. A barge captain’s daughter married into royalty. One girl married an ambassador. Another married the head of one of our largest corporations. Others have married Hollywood producers, Broadway directors, famous actors.”

His approach rapidly proved a success. According to the JRP Web site, Powers’s original school, in New York City, attracted droves of students, and the agency it spawned went on to represent such stars as Ava Gardner, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, and Henry Fonda in their early modeling careers. In subsequent years the JRP schools trained thousands of students around the country—Diana Ross, Raquel Welch, and Jacqueline Kennedy among them—and cemented a reputation as the definitive conduit for aspiring stars of all varieties.

The common denominator at the heart of JRP’s success, the golden carrot that keeps students coming, seems to be the promise of fame. Time and again during my research I met kids from all over the country who told me some version of the same story. They were driving with their parents, or sitting in their bedrooms, when they heard an ad on the radio asking if they wanted to be famous. The ads varied from state to state, but the basic pitch was always the same: “You could be the next big star!”

In fairness to these fame schools, their sales pitches are not outright scams. At some point JRP students generally do get a chance to meet talent agents from New York and Hollywood. But here’s the rub: this usually happens only when the students pay an additional fee of several thousand dollars to attend an independently operated pageant or “talent convention,” where thousands of participants compete against one another for the attention of several dozen agents and managers from New York and L.A. And technically, the only way to get invited to a talent convention like this is to attend a registered acting or modeling school like the ones operated by John Robert Powers.

Susan Makai started working for the JRP School in Buffalo in 1983. At the time, the school’s owner, a local businessman named Jim Satterfield, needed someone to run it, and Makai seemed the perfect candidate for the job. Her various stints as Miss Buffalo, the TV meteorologist, and Channel 29’s Movie Lady had given her the visibility and the experience to speak with authority about celebrityhood—albeit within the somewhat limited setting of the Rust Belt. Makai also had a master’s degree in education, which qualified her as a teacher. The only problem was the cost of tuition. A typical course at JRP has never been cheap. “Even back in the early 1980s they were charging twelve hundred dollars for a course that was just a few months long,” Makai told me. “And that’s a lot of money to ask from people in a market like Buffalo.” This was especially true in the early eighties, when the region was rapidly slipping into economic depression. Not surprisingly, within a few years the Buffalo branch of JRP closed its doors for good.

After the school closed, Makai immediately began receiving calls from former students who were still interested in taking classes. Several of them even volunteered to work for her for free in exchange for classes. Eventually Makai became convinced that she could open up her own low-budget, mom-and-pop version of the JRP School. She would offer similar training in fine manners and the basics of acting—and her students would still ultimately have a chance to attend a talent convention—but Makai would charge markedly less for her classes. One of the areas in which Makai cut costs was advertising. There would be no elaborate radio campaigns selling the dream of fame, which Makai had never felt comfortable with anyway. Instead she would do things the Buffalo way, which meant taking out a small ad in the phone book and then relying on word of mouth.

During the 1990s Makai slowly built a reputation in Buffalo as a fair businesswoman who genuinely cared about her students. But things didn’t really take off for her until 1998, when a fourteen-year-old African American girl named Jessica White walked through the door. White attended several classes at Personal Best and then traveled with Makai and a handful of other students to a talent convention in New York run by the International Modeling and Talent Association (IMTA). There, in mid-July of 1999, as White mingled with hundreds of other children and teenagers from all over the country, the improbable happened: she landed a contract with IMG Models.

From that moment on Jessica White’s rise was meteoric. She traveled to Milan, Paris, and back to New York, walking the runway for DKNY, Kenneth Cole, Chloe, and Sonia Rykiel. Jessica’s mother, Fanny White, could not get time off from work to go on many of these trips, so Susan Makai often served as her “mother agent”—a long-standing position in the industry to help models too young to travel and negotiate on their own. Typically, a big agency like IMG will take 20 percent of a model’s income in return for finding her work; then, a mother agent will collect an additional 5 to 10 percent. The experience was eye-opening for Makai. “I didn’t know what the world was like on that level,” she told me. ”I’d never even heard of Jean Paul Gaultier.”

White soon began appearing in countless magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen, Teen, Jane, Teen Vogue, Elle, and, perhaps most noticeably, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues of 2003, 2004, and 2005. Needless to say, this kind of press was far more valuable to Personal Best than any amount of advertising on a local radio station. Back in Buffalo word quickly spread through an informal yet vast network of hairdressers, church groups, and portrait photographers that the best path to stardom was not a reality-TV show but a local thoroughfare called Harlem Road, on which sat a small white two-story house with bright-purple trim.

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I paid my first visit to Personal Best on a cold Thursday evening, as a light waft of lake-effect snow shot skyward in spiraling eddies. The sides of Harlem Road were fortified with embankments of snow and ice as high as five feet in some places, the color of which had long since been blackened with the grime of the mud-splattered pavement. I parked my car on a lonely side street, where a long row of identical tan-brick ranch houses and skeletal trees stretched toward the horizon. In the distance dogs were barking as if to ward off the cold.

As I stepped through the front door of Personal Best, I came into a bright waiting room painted in flamboyant shades of pink and purple and furnished with a few chairs and three metal magazine racks: one for People magazine, one for Us Weekly, and one for Elle. No one was in sight, so I cleared my throat to announce myself, and suddenly Susan Makai popped her head through a doorway. She was older, and a little blonder than I remembered from her Movie Lady days, but the contours of her face and the bubbly energy of her voice were familiar.

Makai greeted me, tossed me a copy of the most recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and then excused herself to do some last-minute preparations for an upcoming meeting. This meeting, she told me, was intended for her more advanced students—those who had already completed an eight-week “personal development course” in which they learned how to look, talk, and carry themselves in public. The first class, for example, taught the basics of posture and poise. The second covered how to walk properly and project a positive attitude. The third focused on nail care, skin care, general health, and the use of makeup. The fourth offered tips on choosing a wardrobe, wearing the right colors, and how best to shop. Many of Makai’s advanced students had also taken Personal Best courses in the fundamentals of acting and public speaking.

Tonight Makai was offering an information session for those students interested in joining the school’s annual trip to the IMTA convention in New York City—the same convention where Jessica White had been discovered. Students who wanted to make the trip would have to devote the next six months to learning monologues, fine-tuning their posture, buying the right clothing, and raising an average of $3,000 for the cost of attending.

At around six o’clock thirteen of Makai’s students began arriving and heading to the back of the house, where a former living room had been converted into a performance space with two dozen or so folding chairs and a number of glaring overhead lights. The students were all female, ranging in age from eight to twenty, and without exception they wore chic outfits that included pearls, Guess scarves, and Ugg sheepskin boots. The parents who accompanied them were strikingly unhip by comparison, and rather unapologetic about it. Clearly hard-working, solidly middle-class Buffalonians, they included a retired police officer, a town clerk, an elementary school secretary, a toolmaker, a bus-parts salesman, a worker at a turbo-compressor plant, and the proprietor of a golf driving range and hot dog stand. None of them struck me as the sort of people who would lightly toss away $3,000.

Eventually Makai emerged from her office, called the meeting to order, and asked the students to introduce themselves. The first to do so was the oldest, Sarah Hornbrick, who said matter-of-factly, “My name is Sarah. I am twenty years old, I recently graduated from Buffalo State College, I now manage an apartment complex, and I want to be famous.” The other girls nodded politely, and Sarah sat down. Moments later a fourteen-year-old girl named Lucinda Wells rose to her feet and explained that she hoped to become a movie star. In her hands she was clutching a large three-ring binder emblazoned with the words I WANT TO BE FAMOUS.

Over the following days I interviewed Lucinda Wells and virtually every other girl in attendance that night, and our chats were generally dominated by talk of fame. Many of the girls plainly wanted celebrityhood, but when I asked why, they were often at a loss. “You can ask anyone in my family or any of my friends, and they will tell you that what I want more than anything is to become famous,” Lucinda told me. When I pressed her on the matter, she added emphatically, “It’s just what I want to do. It’s the one thing that makes me feel good about myself.”

The most obvious draw for many of the girls was the glamour that comes with fame—a point that one mother made quite vociferously. Her daughter had said, “For me, it is not even about the glitz and glamour. . . .” when her mother quickly interjected, “Yes, it is! She loves being pampered. She loves someone doing her nails. She loves someone rubbing lotion on her face and feet. And she likes the attention. She’s a brat!” The girl, who seemed somewhat shocked, confessed to me rather sheepishly, “I’m a princess. It’s not my fault. My mom always told me, ‘Always shine, never blend.’”

For a number of girls fame also meant a one-way ticket out of Buffalo. Sixteen-year-old Amy Lumber, an aspiring actress, told me that Personal Best—like a number of out-of-town colleges she was investigating—offered her an escape from her father, who could be verbally abusive. She didn’t need to be a movie star, she told me. “I could do commercials. Like this one for Listerine.” She then recited an entire Listerine commercial and shot me a hopeful glance.

Most of the girls at Personal Best appeared to be quite excited about the possibility of leaving Buffalo and moving out to Hollywood. For the most part, they seemed to have formed their impressions of Hollywood and the “realities” of being a celebrity by watching Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. Sarah Hornbrick and a few others acknowledged that these shows were probably not entirely accurate—but this made little difference to Sarah. “I realize that they cut out all the dry parts,” she told me. “But it still seems like a pretty good life.” Other girls had come to this conclusion simply by watching TV shows that were set in Los Angeles. “I hate Buffalo—it’s so cold,” Lucinda Wells told me. “I want to live in L.A. From what I’ve seen on MTV News, it just looks so exciting.”

It is worth noting that, according to our survey of middle school students in Rochester, teenagers who regularly watch certain celebrity-focused TV shows—Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and The Insider— are more likely than others to believe that they themselves will be famous someday. The same appears to be true for teenagers who read magazines like Us Weekly, Star, People, Teen People, YM, and J-14. There is also a strong correlation between how many hours of television teenagers watch and how badly they want to become famous. One of the survey questions was “If you could push a magic button that would change your life in one way, which of the following would you pick?” The options were “(a) Becoming smarter”...