CELEBRITY  | Daily Mail Online

DEAD FAMOUS 

by Greg Jenner (Weidenfeld £18.99, 400 pp)  

Dr Johnson, in 1751, defined a celebrity as a person ‘much talked about’ in taverns and coffeehouses; images of actress Sarah Siddons and Bill Richmond (a bare-knuckle boxer) would be reproduced in oil paintings and waxworks.

It is much the same today, nearly three centuries later, with social media ensuring the stratospheric renown of, say, David Bowie, David Beckham, Meryl Streep and Beyoncé, people who have ‘achieved greatness in their fields, breaking records and influencing culture as they’ve gone’.

Were there any justice in this world, however, celebrity, fame, glory — call it what you will — would be applied only to people who have made great strides: Picasso or Crick and Watson, the discoverers of DNA. Author Greg Jenner makes the case for Florence Nightingale, who insisted on hygiene in the hospital wards of the Crimea, eradicated post-operative disease and put a stop to the ‘amputated limbs hacked from screaming soldiers’ being ‘simply fed to nearby dogs’.

Another instance of genuine achievement would be Grace Darling who, in 1838, rowed out into a storm and saved passengers from a sinking ship.

But as Jenner argues in this rollicking book, true attainment has always been of less importance than glamour and charisma when it comes to celebrity status. Indeed, ‘talent might be utterly irrelevant’ — as what counts, above all else, is sex appeal.

Jenner says that if Lord Byron’s poetry flew off the shelves, it was because he was ‘a blend of devilish sin and natural genius’.

When silent-movie heart-throb Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, women killed themselves in despair.

The famous are not like the rest of us. They attract ‘barrowloads of cash, parties, and private jets’. They totter along red carpets. They go in for detoxes, plastic surgery, personal trainers and ‘extreme yoga sessions’.

Yet we, the avid punters, also want to know everything about their ‘romantic flailing’, their struggles, their battles with drink and drugs. For the terrible Faustian pact about celebrity is that it is the fans who are in charge, giving or withholding worship. The adored can swiftly become the vilified.

Over in Hollywood, by the end of the Twenties the studios were receiving 32 million items of fan-mail annually. The likes of Greta Garbo, Chaplin, and later Marilyn Monroe and Elvis became marketable commodities whose images appeared on plates, lamps, cereal packets, pyjamas, you name it.

‘Celebrity and consumerism became the closest of bedfellows’, says Jenner. Even cricketer W.G. Grace found himself promoting Colman’s Mustard; Gorbachev, of all people, advertised Pizza Hut. Box office heavyweights and public figures are ‘guarantors of commercial success’, and if Barcelona paid £198 million for a footballer, they expect a return on their investment.

Jenner is like an irrepressible junior school teacher, anxious to keep pupils’ attention. ‘Blimey! We ended up in a dark place there, didn’t we?’ he gushes. His prose style is seemingly aimed at children.

But I am not a child and it makes me very cross. See me after class.