The Origins of Celebrity Culture

Modern celebrity culture began not with Hollywood, nor with the Internet, but in the 18th century, when the modern meanings of the words “celebrity” and “star” first became widespread. Famous people have existed for millennia, but the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome sought eternal renown, while medieval saints attained their canonical status only after death. Celebrities are people known during their lifetimes to more people than could possibly know one another. For many centuries, rulers and conquerors were the primary celebrities.

Only in the 18th century did publics begin to take a strong interest in a large number of living authors, artists, performers, scientists, and politicians. In 1782, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published an autobiography in which he confessed to spanking fantasies, then complained that everyone was gossiping about him. After basing an 1812 poem on his own life, Lord Byron woke up to find himself famous. By the 18th century, a host of performers and authors had stalkers and groupies; by the 19th, many received hundreds of letters yearly requesting autographs. 19th-century celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, a French cook based in London, sold his own brand of bottled sauces and put pictures of himself wearing his trademark red beret on the labels. A century before the rise of radio and television commercials, celebrities endorsed wigs, face creams, powders, pianos, and bottled water. Well in advance of charity telethons and stadium concerts such as Live Aid, celebrities held benefits for victims of res, earthquakes, and yellow fever.

Why did modern celebrity culture emerge when it did? As literacy expanded dramatically among all classes in North America and Europe, so too did the number of those able to read about celebrities. As leisure time increased, more people had more time to visit the theaters, opera houses, and lecture halls where they saw celebrities in person. Even more fundamentally, democratic movements in England, France, and the United States gave rise to a new emphasis on individuality. The Romantic cult of genius that ushered in the 19th century led to the fin de siècle worship of personality exemplified by Oscar Wilde. In 1911, a theater producer explicitly speculated that the star system loomed so large in the United States because Americans were what he called “an individual-loving people.” New visual media catered to that affection. In the 1860s, affordable, compact photographs of celebrities became widely available in shops and via mail order. In the 1890s, heavily illustrated niche magazines devoted to stage stars began to flourish, anticipating the movie magazines that became popular in the 1910s.

Most importantly, democratization made people eager to track current events that they saw themselves as shaping. Celebrity culture would not have taken off without newspapers, but far from imposing curiosity about famous individuals on the public, newspapers used an already existing fascination with celebrities to attract more readers. Until the 1830s, newspapers in England, France, and the United States were costly publications, sponsored by wealthy patrons and read by a small, select group of subscribers who received their papers by mail. In the 1830s, the news became more commercial. To increase circulation, publishers began to charge readers only a penny instead of the traditional six cents, and began to rely on advertisements, subscriptions, and daily sales, including street sales, to turn a profit. Instead of targeting a select group of insiders willing to pay handsomely for exclusive, specialized information, the new penny press appealed to general interests in an effort to reach the largest number of readers possible.

Newspapers were so identified with celebrities that in 1841, when one of the most successful new penny papers purchased its own steamship in order to deliver news from across the Atlantic at record speeds, the publisher named it the Fanny Elssler, after a world-famous Austrian ballet dancer who had just toured the United States. Steamships and newspapers helped celebrities to expand their fame; in turn, celebrities helped to attract publics to those novel forms of transport and communication.

As the number of commercial papers grew and competition for readers increased, newspapers found that they could not limit themselves to influencing readers; they also needed to please them. Articles about celebrities, especially when illustrated with lithographs and engravings, were a reliable way to boost circulation. An 1862 issue of the Illustrated London News covering the Prince of Wales’s marriage sold 930,000 copies, more than three times the magazine’s usual circulation rate. Addressing journalism students in 1912, a US newspaperman explained, “In publishing a newspaper you endeavor to print what the people want to read.” The people wanted to read about celebrities. In turn, celebrities themselves became aware of the power of the press, even arguing with editors about their coverage. In 1829, for example, two popular actors sent a letter to a London newspaper, addressed “To the Publick,” in which they accused the publication of misrepresenting them. The editor published their letter to demonstrate his fairness and to avoid a libel suit, but he also published it because the actors were leading figures in London’s theater scene, and celebrity sells.

At the very moment that newspapers first came to depend on publics for their success, technological changes in paper production and printing were making those publics larger than ever before. In the 18th century, the most successful newspapers had circulations in the low thousands and information still took weeks to travel between capital cities and the provinces. By 1825, a top-selling Parisian newspaper was reaching 16,000 subscribers; by 1880, the leading Paris daily had more than 500,000 readers. Steamships and railways began to deliver newspapers to readers around the world with unprecedented speed. By the 1860s, transoceanic telegraph cables enabled news to travel around many parts of the world almost instantaneously. By the 1880s, a famous actress could get married in London and have the news published in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Chattanooga within a week.

The steamships and railways that delivered the news also delivered celebrities themselves. Many performers, authors, and reformers took advantage of the new mode of travel, crossing the Atlantic to conduct readings and deliver lectures that were 19th-century versions of 21st-century TED talks. Best-selling British novelist Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842; in 1845, abolitionist Frederick Douglass traveled to England. Three decades later, extensive railway networks enabled celebrities to easily visit both a nation’s major cities and its more obscure nooks and crannies. In the 1880s, star actors Edwin Booth (1833–1893) and Helena Modjeska (1840–1909) could perform in world theater capitals such as Paris, London, Berlin, Warsaw, and New York and in small towns ranging from Davenport, Iowa, to Zanesville, Ohio. Performers spent so much time traveling that actor Maude Adams (1872–1953) had sliding scenery installed on her customized train car so that she and her troupe could rehearse between stops.

Cheap postage rates, photography, the penny press, telegraphic news agencies, and steam and train travel all provided channels through which celebrities, publics, journalists, and photographers could interact with one another. They did so long before the rise of the Hollywood studio system. Far from creating modern celebrity culture, movie studios simply adapted one that the theater had invented decades earlier. “Star” was a 19th-century term coined in English, along with “étoile” and “vedette” in French, to designate a theatrical troupe’s most compelling lead actors. In 1855, a young middle-class woman living in Glasgow announced, “Unless there is some Star in the theatre we do not go.” In the 21st century, live theater has become a niche form of entertainment, albeit one still able to generate blockbusters such as Hamilton.

But before the advent of film, millions of people regularly attended the theater each year. In 1865, London shows attracted almost twelve million viewers a year; in 1905, New York City alone had eighteen million theatergoers, with Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago all competing to host equally vibrant theater scenes. In 1886, the United States had almost 300 touring theater companies. By 1900, Paris and London each had over a hundred playhouses, many seating around 3,000 people. Theatrical networks were global: a hit play might open in London, then travel through the United States; make the rounds of the British Empire; or start out in Paris, then be adapted for performance in Berlin, Stockholm, and New York.

Not surprisingly, given the depth and breadth of the theatrical celebrity system, early film producers used stage stars to lure people to the new medium of cinema. The famous 1896 Thomas Edison film now known as “The Kiss” was originally billed “The May Irwin Kiss,” because it featured famous theater performer May Irwin in a popular scene from her hit play The Widow Jones. The very term “movie star” existed precisely because stars were presumed to belong to the theater. Many of the most famous early lm producers, directors, and performers, including Lillian Gish, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Barbara Stanwyck, started on the stage, and some shuttled between Hollywood and Broadway for years.

Though Hollywood did not invent stardom, it did briefly change celebrity culture in one important way. 19th-century theatrical celebrities exercised significant autonomy. They had the power to choose their roles, control their schedules, select supporting casts, design costumes and sets, lease and manage theaters, and craft their public personae. From the 1930s through the 1950s, at the height of the studio system, a few freelance film stars, such as Carole Lombard and James Stewart, retained some of the independence enjoyed by their theatrical predecessors. But most lm moguls effectively used restrictive contracts, well-oiled publicity departments, and their influence over the press to control what movie stars could do and what the public could learn about them. During the decades when notoriously dictatorial studio heads Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers, and Harry Cohn reigned supreme, many stars received orders about what roles to play, whom to date, and how to dress. In exchange, they received the support of a powerful, integrated entertainment industry. Stars who balked, such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, often found themselves subject to retaliation, lawsuits, smear campaigns, and periods of unemployment.

The critics who produced the first serious analyses of celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s had two reference points: the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the fascist, propaganda-driven personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Not surprisingly, given those contexts, those who first theorized celebrity culture had little good to say about it. In 1944, Leo Lowenthal built on Adorno’s writings to suggest that 19th-century “heroes of production” renowned for their great deeds had devolved into 20th-century “idols of consumption” best known for the cars they drove and the soaps they bought. Lowenthal got his history wrong—celebrity culture had always included heroes of production and idols of consumption—but his audience right. Intellectuals have been decrying the ills of celebrity culture ever since. Although towering figures such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall argued for popular culture’s utopian, redemptive potential, few have applied those more optimistic frameworks to celebrity culture. In 1977, when Richard Dyer established celebrity studies as an academic field, he took the studio system as paradigmatic of the many other forms of celebrity that preceded, followed, and coexisted alongside it.

Taking 1940s Hollywood as the norm has distorted our understanding of how celebrity culture works by making it seem inevitable that a concentrated power exploits and manipulates both celebrities and publics alike. Not only did Hollywood not invent celebrity, its version of celebrity culture was an aberration. The decline of the lm studios in the 1960s, the breakdown of broadcast television that began in the 1980s, and the rise of the Internet since the 1990s have returned celebrity culture to its more anarchic 19th-century roots. Today, the fact that no single medium or industry controls stars or stardom has made more visible how strongly publics and celebrities have always influenced the course of celebrity culture and how their moves have been crucial to keeping it alive.

  

Excerpted from The Drama of Celebrity.

On the 18th-Century Origins of Celebrity Worship. By  Sharon Marcus.  LitHub , June 10, 2019.

PrincetonUniversity Press

Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Just as each generation believes it invented sex, so each thinks it created celebrity. Ask someone born in the 21st century what defines celebrity culture, and they will likely single out the digital media that allow anyone with a cell phone to ‘like’, retweet and comment on a Kim Kardashian post in seconds.

The mid-century cultural critics Theodor Adorno and Daniel Boorstin had a more paranoid view: they believed that the media imposed stars on a mindless public. Then in the 1980s and ’90s, the scholars Jackie Stacey and Henry Jenkins saw the public as in charge, making or breaking stars. In prosperous times, celebrity biographies tend to attribute stardom to talent, luck and hard work. In precarious times, we hear more about icons who self-destruct.

All these views assign power to one and only one element in the equation: the media, the public or the stars. All of them are wrong – because all of them are right. No single group has the power to make or break a star. Three equally powerful groups collude and compete to define celebrities: media producers, members of the public and celebrities themselves. None has decisive power, and none is powerless.

The three-way effort to create, define and undo celebrities is tireless. To become famous, the American rapper Cardi B had to do more than record catchy tunes. She had to promote them effectively to people who liked them. She had to be outrageous and self-revealing enough to garner a huge following on Instagram. She had to collaborate with a celebrity band, Maroon 5, and feud with the already established star rapper Nicki Minaj. (Don’t know who these people are? Many 12-year old girls will be happy to enlighten you.)

In January 2019, Cardi B won an online battle with Donald Trump when she posted an Instagram video calling his government shutdown ‘crazy’. The Twitter-mad president signalled his defeat with an uncharacteristic response: silence. A month later, Instagram trolls attacked Cardi B for not deserving her Grammy. She left the platform, only to return two days later. The story continues.

Social media amplifies and speeds up interactions between audiences, media and stars, but YouTube and Twitter did not invent modern celebrity culture. That happened more than 150 years ago, thanks to the popular press, commercial photography, railways and steamships, and national postal systems.

Consider Edwin Booth (1833-93), one of the most famous American actors of the 19th century. Remembered today, if at all, as a brother of the man who assassinated president Abraham Lincoln, Booth became known in his time for playing Hamlet, Richard III and Brutus in Julius Caesar. His acting yielded enough money for him to buy several theatres and a Gramercy Park mansion in New York City that he turned into an all-male club, the Players, where actors could rub shoulders with elites. He lived on the building’s top floor, surrounded by books, theatrical memorabilia and the hundreds of letters he received between the 1860s and ’90s and chose to save.

Booth’s fanmail attests to the many links connecting 19th-century audiences, media and stars. Thanks to steamships, he had performed in Europe and received letters from England and Germany. Thanks to railways, his US audiences included major cities and smaller locales from Akron to Zanesville.

Some of the letters that Booth preserved were ‘mash notes’ soliciting assignations. Others begged for money, jobs or free acting lessons. Some plied him with quack medical remedies or tried to convert him. Dozens sent the actor long poems combining all of the above.

Many letters lavished Booth with praise but quite a few offered unsparing criticism worthy of any Twitter troll. One correspondent in 1866 advised Booth how to be a better Richard III. ‘Your appearance was not sufficiently stern and sombre,’ the writer complained. ‘You might … have a larger hump on the back & a more infirm gait as you move on the stage.’ Other critiques were less polite. ‘Shakespear No 2’ offered pungent advice in a scrawl that grew larger with each line: ‘Mr Booth Your Hamlet is overdone. Your constant contortions render your part monotonous. Some parts are well done but in others where you should act like a rational man you act more like a maniac.’

One correspondent ranked Booth’s critics. A journalist who had reviewed Booth’s Charleston appearances sent clippings for the actor’s perusal. A woman who requested an edition of Booth’s most frequently performed plays used a colour code to distinguish the six different occasions she had seen him as Hamlet.

The French opera singer Pauline Viardot received and kept a similar set of letters, as did the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To be sure, 19th-century print publics were less visible to one another than digital publics are today. But the continuities between celebrity cultures past and present are real, and offer a telling clue to what really intrigues people about celebrity culture.

All of us, even those who ignore celebrities, are part of a story whose outcome we can influence but never fully predict. Celebrities are neither pawns nor gods. Every time Cardi B releases a new song, poses for a magazine cover or posts on social media, she can gain or lose status. Members of the public are neither passive consumers nor omnipotent creators. They argue among themselves, and each individual’s decision to engage or ignore celebrities helps to make or break stars. Journalists use celebrity coverage to get the public’s attention. Some criticise celebrities; others cater to them.

The resulting pandemonium is celebrity culture – a drama that many help to script but that no-one fully controls. If we knew for certain how the story ended, we might lose interest. If we had no role to play in the outcome, we might be less intrigued. The moral of this tale: celebrity culture is neither all good nor all bad. But if you don’t like celebrity culture, don’t blame the internet. Blame everyone.

The pandemonium of modern celebrity began in 19th-century theatre. By  Sharon Marcus.

Aeon , June 11, 2019.

As part of the 2017–2018 Fellows' Presentation Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Sharon Marcus RI '18 shares material from her soon-to-be-completed book, in which she addresses such questions as "What is a celebrity?" "Have they always existed?" "And why do so many people care about them?"

Marcus teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century British and French culture. She is the 2017–2018 Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Video of a lecture, April 12, 2018. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. 

The legendary actress, international superstar and shrewd self-promoter Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was the “godmother of modern celebrity culture,” and is the central figure of this inventive, stimulating book by the Columbia professor Sharon Marcus. Bernhardt used the media to publicize her sexual daring and make even her flaws iconic. When she was caricatured as “skeleton Sara,” she flaunted her fashionable thinness and extravagant costumes. Her nasal voice, sinuous movements and angular poses made her recognizable and electrifying even to audiences who did not know French. Reporters were fascinated with rumors of her exotic menagerie, the satin-lined coffin in her bedroom, her ride in a hot-air balloon, her adventurous world tours. Henry James called her “the muse of the newspaper.” Even amputation added to her allure. After her leg was removed in 1915, Bernhardt kept on performing, “prone, on a litter”; the Shubert press office suggested a “Post-Amputation Tour” and it sold out across the country. The Divine Sarah was the most famous amputee since Captain Ahab.

By highlighting Bernhardt’s agency and stamina, Marcus aims to overturn the elite intellectual position that the media is largely responsible for creating celebrities who are mere commodities; she wants to challenge the perception that 21st-century celebrity is “synonymous with an empty renown that has no basis in merit or achievement.” Gender plays a role in this disdain; in the mid-19th century, when most celebrities were male, the term was “strongly associated with merit.” Now that female stardom is accepted, bias is displaced to the gender of the fans: “The more feminized the fan base, the less seriously the press takes the star.” Nonetheless, she argues, “celebrity culture is a drama involving three equally powerful groups: media producers, members of the public and celebrities themselves.”

Moreover, fans, as she richly documents, have always set out their own standards and judgments. Marcus looks at scrapbooks, playbills, diaries recording dramatic performances, and fan mail that combines “adoration with assessment.” Long before cinema, fans compared and rated the performances of touring stars. Great actors had signature roles, such as Phèdre and Camille for Bernhardt, which enabled the evaluation of technique. A Bernhardt could be compared to historical figures, like Rachel Félix; stars sometimes alternated leading roles in a well-known play.

It seems indisputable that Bernhardt anticipated many of the strategies of celebrity self-promotion, and Marcus is a brilliant theorist and analyst of theater history. But equating celebrity with the stage actor, and generalizing about public influence from the memorabilia of 19th-century devotees, can’t account for the contemporary cultural situation. The drama of celebrity goes far beyond the dwindling niche market of theater.

Marcus maintains that the internet has not significantly changed the triangular balance of celebrity culture. Yet she also shows the historical importance of the fan. In the past, fans were more likely to curate than create, to celebrate than compete. Today online fan fiction has changed that dynamic, and both stars and media compete with the bloggers, vloggers, podcast makers and tweeters of celebrity 2.0. Fans now have the power to punish and destroy celebrities, as Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr discovered. While 15 minutes of fame may not be possible for everyone, reality TV, talent shows and social media influencers have greatly expanded the pool of celebrity candidates. A celebrity today is as likely to be Stormy Daniels or Sarah Sanders as Sarah Bernhardt.

A Star Is Born? Try Manufactured, a New Book Argues. By  By Elaine Showalter. The New York Times , May 31 , 2019.