The History of Fame

way that they should have been able to. You know, Serena is different. We've heard this so many times over the years. When Diane and Charles divorce, the monarchy was over. When Harry and Meghan gave the interview for OPRAH, people said, the monarchy is over. Welcome to One Day University talks with the world's most engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses, the ones that students line up to hear. The One Day University podcasts gives you a front row

seat to learn on your schedule. I'm Steven Schragis. Fifteen years ago I founded One Day University to present top performing professors on stages across the country. There's no homework, exams, or student loans. It's learning for the sake of learning. In each episode, I'll sit down with a different professor to talk about one of their highly rated lectures. No

matter your interests, We've got you've covered. Our conversations will include politics, history, science, music, arts, sports, and pop culture. Our first episode falls into the pop culture category. The ninety fifth Academy Awards were held last weekend, with Everything Everywhere, All at Once winning Best Picture and six other Oscars. Millions of people tuned in to see some famous faces,

including Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Steven Spielberg, and Rihanna. Fans of Tom Cruise may have been disappointed to learn that he was a no show, even though his film Top Gun Maverick was nominated for Best Picture. Professor Susan Douglas has studied our relationship with the rich and famous. She has a lecture for One Day University titled a History of Fame The Power of Celebrity. She teaches communication and Media at the University of Michigan, and she's written several

books on gender and mass media. With the Oscars behind us, I was curious if Susan believed that movie stars still even exist, or if they are a relic of the past. I think it was a very unusual Oscar season. But I do think we still have movie stars. But here's the hitch. A lot of them have gone to television, you know, in part because streaming has offered so many opportunities to a list actors, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Jane Fond,

what could go on and on. And this started with the entrepreneurial work of Netflix and Amazon, and then COVID hit and people stopped going to the movies. And so I do think there are still movie stars. There are more independent productions that are getting more attention, and maybe people whose names we didn't quite recognize this Oscar cycle, we'll become more recognizable in the future. But I don't believe that Tom Cruise and a few others are the

only movie stars left. Let's start at the beginning with the origins. Where did the word celebrity come from? Do you have any idea. I'm not sure where it came from, but it was certainly in use by the eighteen forties. By that time, there were theatrical stars in the United States, and so you began to get the emergence of the notion of celebrity by mid century. Then why was there this interest and need for celebrities and how responsible was

the media for this rise of celebrity culture. Then you had a symbiotic relationship between the rise of inexpensive newspapers meant for the general public, not expensive political papers, and they needed content, and you had the ever expanding entertainment industry. You know, first it was theaters, and then the circus, and then by the late nineteenth century you had vaudeville, and vaudeville wanted to promote its stars. Newspapers wanted content,

and so they worked together with each other. And of course the media played a major role in producing which stars were the best, you know, behind the scenes with the stars, all of that, and they were fed a lot of stuff by first vaudeville entrepreneurs and of course then later and most famously, you know, the producers of movie Okay, then let's talk about two types of stars. One, you mentioned sports stars and movie stars. Specifically, I'm thinking

of Babe Ruth and Mary Pickford. These two were really important, and in fact, movie studios were at first sort of reluctant to even let this all happen. You want to tell us about that, Yeah, sure, movie studios, you know, very early on, this is the Nickelodeon period, you know, from roughly nineteen oh five to round nineteen eleven, they didn't want to put the names of the players on the screen because they thought they would demand more money. But what they found out is that viewers began to

respond to specific actors like Mary Pickford. Everybody referred to her as the girl with the curls, and people wanted to see more of the girl with the curls, for example. So they began to realize by nineteen eleven it was good box office to put people's names out because those stars could then promote movies. So that's when the shift begins to happen. And Babe Ruth was he really the

first sort of gigantic sports celebrity. He was. Yes, you know, there were boxing stars, but boxing was very controversial at the beginning of the nineteenth century because of interracial clashes around who should be the world champion. But Babe Ruth, I mean, let's remember Babe Ruth when he was with Red Sox. He was a great pitcher, and a great hitter, like who can do that? And so he obviously had

enormous talent. And then when he went to the Yankees and you kept hitting homer after homer and helping them win World Series. By this time, baseball was not only being covered in newspapers. By the nineteen twenty, star is being covered by radio, and that enhanced his star them even more. Okay, Susan, you mentioned radio. One part of your talk, which I had found fascinating because I never really thought about it before, was your explanation about how

it was radio that created many African American stars. Yeah. So this really relates to the great migration that occurred during World War One. There was a great need for workers in cities and up north, and you had sixty thousand African Americans migrate into Chicago. And some of those migrants were jazz musicians who have been playing in the bordelos in New Orleans. But the bordellos were shut down as like a national security issue in New Orleans. So

people like Louis Armstrong ended up in Chicago. So you had something that's very important in Chicago. You had a market for black music and independent companies arose producing what was called race music, and they were mostly recording either blues Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, but they were also recording what was called hot jazz. And this music became hugely

popular and white listeners loved this music. And so even though radio was, like all the media, very segregated, very discriminatory against black performers, nonetheless, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, they all became stars on radio. And we have to remember radio is a medium that denies sight to its audience, and so it was easier for black stars to become stars on a medium like that. Let's move on to something very different. Walter Winchell and the rise of gossip.

Who was he and why was the gossip industry so important? So gossip columns had started in the nineteen twenties and they basically kind of fell on the heels of the rye of movie magazines. You know, movie magazines starred in lateeens, early twenties. So Winchell started out, you know, as a newspaper gossip columnist, and he moved to radio in the early nineteen thirties, and he had this rat tat style of delivery, and he mixed news with celebrity gossip and

celebrity dirt. And he had a way of inventing all kinds of language in terms to stand for divorce, romantic liaisons, etc. And so what Winchell did is he melded legit news with gossip, bringing gossip into broadcasting for the first time, and he became enormously influential because of that, he could

make or break careers. I mean, hardly anybody has heard of Walter Winchell now, but Walter Winchell from the nineteen thirties until the early nineteen fifties was a superstar and enormously, enormously influential, and you know, forty million people listened to him. So if he wanted to condemn your career, he could. It seems to me that People Magazine has been around forever, but as you point out, it hasn't. That's not true.

Why was People Magazine so important in this area of fame? Okay, So the story about People Magazine is that Time Magazine was doing focus groups, doing research on you know, people's engagement with Time magazine, and what they found was that whenever somebody got Time Magazine, the first section they went to was in the back of the book People, and

they said, Aha, let's start a whole magazine. This was in nineteen seventy four, and of course it became a smash hit, and the early People magazine had a mix of celebrities and everyday people that they wanted to profile. And during this period in the nineteen seventies, you begin to get the early metastasizing of celebrity culture because you get People, and then you get Us Weekly, the imitator. You get Barbara Walters specials in the mid nineteen seventies,

you know where she starts interviewing celebrities. By the early nineteen eighties, where you're getting Entertainment Tonight and then Lifestyles of the rich and famous. So you're beginning to get this kind of rolling building up of celebrity culture. Tell us a little bit more about what you called the blurring of the lines between news and entertainment. Why did

news expand its coverage of celebrities so much? Well, you know, as I noted earlier, this really started with Walter Rinchell bringing gossip into news, and for a while, when television news was establishing its credibility, we didn't have much coverage of celebrity in the nightly news. That began to change

in the nineteen eighties and beyond. One of the reasons is that the news divisions of the networks in the late nineteen eighties were spun off of the entertainment divisions, meaning that the entertainment divisions which were making all this money, were not carrying the news divisions anymore. Now the news divisions had to make it on their own, and they

had to have good ratings and all the rest. And so you began to see like Dan Rather on the nightly news covering the divorce of Mike Tyson and Robin Gibbons, and you're like, what is that? And then of course you have the proliferation of cable, first cable news and then cable shows, and so cable twenty four hour cable. There's a twenty four seven maw that needs to be filled, right, and there isn't that much politics all the time. And also foreign news bureaus were cut, so you fill that

with stories about Britney spears. Celebrity news is cheap, you can recycle it, people flock to it, and at the same time we start to get more and more politicians being treated like celebrities. And of course, the ultimate blurring moment is twenty sixteen when you have the star of a reality TV show transform that into becoming president of the United States. So, you know, we're at a really odd moment now where politics is as much or more

entertainment as it is public policy and politics. This has been a long process and here we are. After the break, we'll explore social media's impact on fame and the religious undertones of celebrity worship. You described three different types of celebrity ascribed, achieved, and attributed. So what's the difference between those three? So achieved is obvious, You've earned it, Lebron James, Meryl Street, the Rolling Stones. You know, people admired for

their obvious talent and achievements. Ascribed is you were born into it. And right now we have a very prominent ascribed celebrity, Prince Harry with the number one bestselling book Spare And so you're a child of a celebrity, You're born into the royal family. You had nothing to do with it. Some ascribed celebrities remain celebrities and others don't. And then attributed is it happens to you, usually through

US scandal or some kind of other event. Nobody knew who Monica Lewinsky was right until the scandal of her relationship with Bill Clinton comes out, and all of a sudden, she is famous. She is well known simply because she is caught in a scandal. Some other examples, if attributed can be one hit wonders, a lottery winner can be famous for a short period of time and it goes away. Often attributed celebrity is the one that most rapidly fades. The notion of what is and who is newsworthy has

changed dramatically. Seems like anyone can be a star. You want to talk a little bit about that. Yes, there's a term for this called the demotic turn, which comes from the word democracy. And this really began around the year two thousand. So there were stars of big hit shows, friends er. The shows were doing incredibly well. The stars kept demanding more money because they were making a lot of money for the networks at the time. And after a while, the networks were getting fed up with it

because they wanted to keep their profit margins high. And meanwhile, there had been this little show on MTV called The real World. He throw seven people together an apartment, see what happens. That started in nineteen ninety two. By the late nineties, it was doing very well for MTV. So then we get this show called Survivor. The first episode of Survivor was a smash hit, and that led to more and more reality TV. Now why was reality TV produced on MOSS It was so much cheaper to produce

than scripted shows. You could get people who would be on those shows for free because they wanted to be on television, and so you were cutting your costs way down, and boom you get the explosion of reality to V. And then, of course this intersects with the rise of social media, right and people beginning to think, you know,

maybe I can become a star on Instagram. And of course, more recently we now have TikTok stars and we have YouTube stars, people who have basically crafted themselves into personalities through social media. So when this term demotic turn was coined, it barely anticipated the rampant democratization of celebrity in our culture. Here's another phrase I learned from your lecture that sounded very scientific to me. Parasocial interaction. What's that all about? Yeah,

it's a complicated term for something we all do. So, Steve, have you ever sat in front of your television set and yelled at a newscaster as if he or she could hear you, or in a horror film, don't go in there, don't go in there. Parasocial relationships refer to us having imagined relationships with people as if we know them, as if they can hear us, when, of course it's

a very asymmetrical relationship. You know, we may know a ton about Jennifer Aniston, she has no idea who I am, right, and so parasocial relationships are the relationships that we form with stars, and so some people can have very strong parasocial relationships, you know, be very devoted fans. A parasocial relationship can also be negative, right, I could have a very strong negative parasocial hatred of somebody famous. So, but that's what it refers to, is that connection that every

day people have often powerful with as people. Can you comment on some of the privileges and power of celebrity and and some of the drawbacks for both celebrities and for the people who become so invested in their lives. So, look, celebrities have a wider voice in the world than we do. They go to the front of the line. I don't imagine Tom Cruise ever having to go to the Division of motor vehicles and waiting, you know, two hours to get as light as renewed. They go to the head

of the line. So you know, those are some of the privileges that they get downfall or you know, the anti privileges is really loss of privacy. Many celebrities really hate the loss of privacy. They are under scrutiny all the time. One slight mistake and especially now in the era of social media. Boy, you know, can you get banged up on on one slip of the tongue or one mistake. And I will say in particular really worrying about the privacy of your children, which has become a

big deal for a lot of celebrities. Those are some really quite serious downsides. There's what some people would would actually call a religious aspect to celebrity fascination, including pilgrimages to important sites like the one in Memphis, and you know what I'm talking about. So Grace Land is of course a complete monument to Elvis and his grave is there, and I went there with some colleagues on an off day,

and there were fans laying flowers on the grave. So in terms of religion, there is, you know, a hypothesis that celebrity worship is kind of a substitute for religion. And if you've been to any rock concerts recently, think about how the stars are beautifully lit on the stage, almost haload. They are above us, they are illuminated. We're below. Maybe we're holding candles, you know, to pay tribute to them. We sing along with them. They're above us. They're like gods.

The way that musical stars in particular are staged is very godlike, and people can become obsessed with what we call reliquaries, you know, a shock of somebody's hair, a piece of Michael Jackson's clothing, whatever. So some have argued that there is a religiosity to celebrity worship and celebrity culture. There were two Oscar nominated films that focused on past movie stars, Elvis and Blonde, which was about Marilyn Monroe. Why do you think they're still making movies about those

two and others so many decades later. There are certain stars, especially those who've died young, who've died tragically who are preserved forever in their use. And James Dean is another one. Right, we go back and revisit these stars in their youthful beauty, and what these stars kind of symbolize for us is a kind of immortality, because yes, Marilyn Monroe is long gone, Elvis is long gone, but we have posters of them, we have their music, their films, They live on in

all kinds of imagery and sound. It appeals to some notion of not really ever dying. That again ties in with our fantasies about and relationship with stars. Okay, Susan, one last question. Do you think the existence of celebrities has an overall positive or negative effect on society and culture? Well, Steven, I'd like to turn that question around a little bit and ask what do celebrities provide? What do they take away?

What do they justify? And so celebrities in if you want to go with a positive route, they provide everyday people with role models. They provide everyday people with aspirational stories about success. They provide everyday people with a kind of social glue. So you know, if I am sitting next to you on an airplane and we start talking, and there's been a political scandal and a celebrity scandal.

The last thing I'm going to do is talk to you about the political scan given the part as a nature or politics right now, but a celebrity scandal, you and I can be experts on that have a moral compass about it, and in our conversation we affirm our own morality about right and wrong. I think some of the damaging things about celebrity culture is they enact standards of beauty and slimness and youth that very few people kind of achieve, yet too many people seek to measure

themselves by. They justify hierarchies of race and class, They make hierarchies seem thrilling. They justify having way too much money. And I think there are some problems with celebrity culture, and they kind of legitimate a notion of who deserves what and who doesn't deserve certain things. Susan, thank you so much again for doing this. We really appreciate it. With such an interesting subject and an unusual subject, I

learned a lot. I hope our listeners did too. Thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me, it was great fun. Thanks for joining us here. At One Day University. Sign up at our website one dayu dot com to become a member and access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the world's finest professors. You could also download

our app. There you can learn more about today's episode and watch University of Michigan Professor Susan Douglas's lecture on fame and Celebrity, as well as her talks on the history of radio pagism and more. Join us next time when we talk about the Biden presidency. I would put his legislati accomplishments up against almost anyone's since Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson for the first two years of his presidency. One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and

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