James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) was a landmark work in lionizing the life of a public figure who lived as an accessory of public culture and whose writings had done much to reveal the vanities and foibles of both ascribed and achieved celebrity. Others had written of achieved celebrity before Boswell. But seldom had the biography of an achieved celebrity been used so singlemindedly to not merely ennoble the subject, but elevate the author as a public figure in his own right. Boswell’s Johnson was indubitably a figure formed through social contact, expanded by the opinions, obsessions and conduct of his time, and his cultural monumentality was achieved through his acquisition and rendition of wisdom concerning the affairs of men. The same is true of the image that
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Boswell wishes to project of himself, of the biographer as celebrity, perhaps the first such intervention since the days of Callisthenes. By chronicling the life of Johnson in exacting and, one might add, undeniably self-serving detail, Boswell both declared Johnson’s historic importance and valorized his own identification with the life. Boswell’s Life of Johnson signalled both the democratization of fame and the birth of modern fandom. For it concentrated on the performance and projection of achieved celebrity on society, and presented the biographer and audience as spectators who will benefit through emulation. The rise of achieved celebrity culture signifies the democratization of power in society. Achieved celebrities, drawn from the mass and form of the people, reflect the declining lustre and power of ascribed celebrity.
Staged celebrity refers to the calculated technologies and strategies of performance and self projection designed to achieve a status of monumen-tality in public culture. In cases where these technologies and strategies are successful, the achieved celebrity may acquire enduring iconic significance.
Because democracy assumes the formal equality of the electorate, it requires leaders to be larger than the common man, so as to achieve influence over public opinion. Political leaders, therefore, soon became adept in staging celebrity. The gruelling and pious insistence of American presidents to speak ‘for the American people’ may utilize spectacular skills of ventrilo-quism that disguise the voice of capital or sectarian political interests, but when it works it can create lasting figureheads. Lincoln’s journey from a log cabin to the White House and his subsequent martyrdom ‘for the Union’ is a case in point. When the novelist, sometime politician and media celebrity Gore Vidal wrote his novel Lincoln (1984), he complained that he was forced to resort to fiction in order to tell the real story because most biographical treatments of the President failed to rise above sugary hagiography. In effect, Vidal argued that it was necessary to rescue Lincoln from the imagi-nary public edifice raised over many decades by spin doctors and zealots.
Lincoln was, in fact, a master of staged celebrity. His plainsman
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oratory wooed voters, and was propounded with devastating political calculation and adroitness. His conduct of the Civil War was always directed with an eye to posterity. The Gettysburg Address was not merely a magnificent dirge for the Civil War dead, but a baptismal oration on the rebirth of the nation in Lincoln’s own image.
But Lincoln was not the first president to understand the importance of staged celebrity in achieving political power. Establishing iconic signifi-cance in a culture is a valuable political asset because it carries with it automatic recognition, presupposes cultural authority and radiates glam-our. Andrew Jackson was the first president to develop the technology and strategy of staged celebrity as a wholescale political weapon. In many ways Jackson was a typical nineteenth-century adventurer. He was a foot soldier in the American War of Independence. He was captured and imprisoned by the British. He fought a duel and shot dead Charles Dickinson, a Nashville socialite who had alleged improprieties over a horse-racing bet.
He was a white supremacist and compulsive land-grabber who waged war against the Creek nation, and whose presidency masterminded the forced eviction of Native Americans from their homelands. Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 turned him into a national hero. Arguably, the victory was decisive in the American state-formation process. Jackson was credited with restoring national pride and confi-dence. His presidential campaign utilized this reputation to present him as more fearless and resolute than rival candidates. He grasped the impor-tance of the media in self-presentation and projection in the formation of public opinion, and he fashioned The Globe newspaper as the central instrument in his propaganda machine. The Globe provided Jackson with a platform to establish complete control over the Democratic party and to present a public front of heroic popular unity to the country.
The basic social and political equipment that raised Lincoln as magical and immortal to the American people was planned and engineered under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. His was an administration that
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exploited and developed staged celebrity as a primary political tool. Since Jackson, nearly every presidential campaign has sought to use the press to enhance the celebrity value of the campaign hopeful.
The growth of celebrity culture presented new opportunities for celebrity endorsement. From the days of Warren Harding, who was President in 1921–3, presidents have sought to woo voters by courting movie entertainers. This climaxed under the presidency of John F.
Kennedy. He regularly used his movie actor brother-in-law Peter Lawford to bring Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr and Marilyn Monroe to the White House. Kennedy’s affair with Monroe symbolized the incestuous relation-ship between the political and movie strands of celebrity culture.
Richard Nixon, who grew up in California at a time when many Hollywood stars, such as Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, were openly on the Left, remained relatively indifferent to Hollywood endorsement. Nixon was the embodiment of the insecure little man who had been denied favour on account of his background and unglamorous appearance. During his tenure in office only a handful of movie celebrities, notably John Wayne, were welcomed in the White House. The situation changed radically when Ronald Reagan was in office.
Reagan was, of course, a former Hollywood actor himself, and appreciated the publicity value of celebrity culture. His 1981 inauguration was orga-nized as a two-and-a-half-hour Hollywood extravaganza. The cavalcade of stars was hosted by Efrem Zimbalist Jnr, with readings from great American literature by Charlton Heston. Commentary was supplied by Johnny Carson. The audience was serenaded by Donny Osmond’s free interpretation of a Chuck Berry classic, renamed ‘Go Ronnie Go’, Ethel Merman’s rendition of ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ and Sinatra himself, singing ‘Nancy With the Laughing Face’ to the new First Lady.
Bill Clinton was known as the first rock ‘n’ roll President, who used movie and Pop stars to enhance his image. The unsuccessful 2000 presi-dential campaign of Al Gore received financial backing and public support
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from Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfus, James Garner, Herbie Hancock, Oliver Stone, Rob Reiner, David Geffen, Michael Eisner, Stephen Spielberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sharon Stone, Jeanne Tipplehorn, Sheryl Crowe and Barbra Streisand.
In the UK, party leaders have been slow to emulate American-style presentational tactics. Harold Wilson’s attempts to bring glamour into Downing Street by authorizing awards for The Beatles and ’60s show-biz personalities now look clumsy, unheartfelt and embarrassing. The post-war election campaigns up to the mid-1980s were comparatively low key.
Margaret Thatcher was projected as an apocalyptic leader who broke the mould of the welfare state and revitalized British individualism. Arguably, this was a triumph of spin over substance, for under her leadership Britain was racked with widespread social unrest and an equivocal economic performance. None the less, it was unquestionably popular with the elec-torate, who returned Thatcher to power in three successive elections. Her use of celebrities to endorse her politics was relatively modest, although the disc jockey and comedian Kenny Everett did notoriously address a national Conservative campaign conference in 1983 with the imprecation to ‘bomb Russia’.
John Major’s prime ministership was a return to the low-key leader-ship of the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan era. But in the 1990s this was abandoned under New Labour. Tony Blair was projected as the focal point of the Labour campaign. Perhaps because Blair’s wife is the daughter of the actor Anthony Booth, Blair is not shy of consorting with celebrities in public. Noel and Liam Gallagher and other ‘Brit Pop’ brahmins have supped at Downing Street. Meetings with the public, campaign rallies and media interviews are conducted in the presidential style of self-projection and the cultivation of Christian righteous individualism that no doubt Samuel Smiles himself would have applauded.
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