The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press, £24)
There is nothing more reassuring than learning that there is nothing new under the sun. So it is oddly warming when Sharon Marcus, towards the end of her quite brilliant treatise on celebrity, discusses a populist US politician known for his ignorance, vanity, mendacity, racism and crudity, but above all, for his celebrity, his fame for being famous.
That politician, Marcus points out playfully, is Davy Crockett, the 19th-century frontiersman and soldier, popularly known as the King of the Wild Frontier, who was briefly elected as a Tennessee Congressman. He was mostly distinguished from the current occupant of the Oval Office by having shown some bravery as a soldier and being arguably of slightly higher moral fibre.
Sharon Marcus is a Columbia University literature professor, but her book, The Drama of Celebrity, is far from being densely academic. Her writing is sparky, feisty and compelling. Yet is it also a scholarly work, and a reasonably compact one; she channels the nuts and bolts of her scholarship into the 72 pages of footnotes, which might perhaps have been better kept online.
Marcus’s theory is that the 1960s’ notion that celebrities are mostly manufactured by the media is wrong. Starting out with the example of a beautiful young Canadian actress who came to nothing despite making the cover of LIFE magazine in 1966, she argues that the elevation of a person to celebrity status requires a combination of input from the media, a celebrity-hungry public and, crucially, the celebrity and his or her management.
The book’s structural standpoint, which may sound overly quirky but works, is to base her study on the 19th-century French Jewish actress, Sarah Bernhardt, a major star across the world from the 1870s to her death in 1923.
There was nothing Bernhardt would not do to become even more famous for being famous, from controversial statements about anything and everything, to scrapping publicly with France’s national theatre, the Théâtre Français, to launching herself across Paris in a hot-air balloon.
Yet she was far from a France-only celeb. Marcus notes that the British press wrote twice as much about her as they did about Charles Dickens, the nearest Britain had to a superstar. The Americans, equally, couldn’t get enough of Bernhardt, even if much of the coverage was not that favourable.
Of particular note, was her relationship with her Jewish heritage, which was not something everyone in the public eye would emphasise, in the 19th century — or now.
Bernhardt changed her first name from Rosine to Sarah to sound more Jewish. She rode the age of the Dreyfus affair at home, and rampant, casual antisemitism — not to forget sexism — globally, with seeming equanimity, appearing to take the view that, so long as they spell your name correctly, coverage is for measuring, not reading.
Like Bernhardt herself, Sharon Marcus’s book is tour de force and the author a total star.
Jonathan Margolis is a Financial Times columnist
