Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  The odd condition of being well known called celebrity has become a key element in contemporary American social life, one that cuts across and often transcends wealth, culture, and class. Somewhat different from fame—which goes back to ancient civilizations: in Rome it was known as fama and was closely connected to civic virtue and later to personal achievement—celebrity is usually more detached from pure achievement. I, for example, believe I have modest fame but no celebrity whatsoever. “You’re slightly famous, aren’t you, Grandpa?” my then seven-year-old granddaughter once said to me. “I am slightly famous, Annabelle,” I answered. “It’s just that nobody knows who I am.”

  The celebrity, in Daniel Boorstin’s formulation, is “a person who is well known for his well-knownness.” The old categories for fame were rigid and quite clear: one could become famous as a prophet, martyr, monarch, poet, artist, scientist, or warrior, and, much later, banker or merchant. The first famous man was Alexander the Great, the first famous woman Joan of Arc. How different from today, when one can acquire celebrity for committing murder, winning money on a quiz show, or performing the act of fellatio on a (admittedly high-level) public servant!

  In the contemporary world, the snob’s interest in celebrity is, first, in acquiring it; and if that is not possible, second, getting close enough to it to have some of its magic rub off and adhere to him. Where once the snob wanted to get into Society—no easy thing—today he can consider himself having arrived if he finds he is among the well known. Not that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Already in the eighteenth century, G. C. Lichtenberg wrote, “The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can’t hear yourself speak.” In late-nineteenth-century Paris, the Abbé Arthur Mugnier, a man known for his sweet nature who shows up in the memoirs of Edith Wharton and other people of literary interests, wrote in his journal: “What I like in society is the setting, the names, the beautiful homes, the reunion of fine minds, the contact with celebrities.” The snob likes the same things, but if need be, he can make do without the fine minds.

  Contact with celebrities does lots of things, and not only for snobs. Lord Reith, the founding director general of the BBC, noted in his journal: “I do not enjoy parties unless there are people bigger than myself present.” Being with people the world reckons as notable gives one the feeling that one is living a little closer to the center of the universe. “We are all in the gutter,” Oscar Wilde has a character in Lady Windermere’s Fan say, “but some of us are looking at the stars.”

  The stars, from the standpoint of celebrity, aren’t what they used to be. They come increasingly from show business, but of an order of magnitude much lower than that of Fred Astaire and Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong. Stars in our day are television news readers, quiz-show hosts, talk-show Johnnies and Janes. In America at this time, perhaps no greater celebrities exist than Oprah; the three major network anchormen (Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings); Regis Philbin, a quiz-show man; and maybe Donald Trump, who builds gaudy hotels, marries slightly gaudier women, and manages to stay on the covers of the grocery (or gutter) press. The best-known American singer must be Madonna, though I am unaware of any songs she has sung, and because her hair and makeup change so frequently, most Americans, having glimpsed a best-selling book of photographs of her naked, perhaps have a clearer mental picture of her bottom than of her face. No business, it is truly said, like show business.

  Celebrity consists mainly of having oneself talked about and mentioned frequently in public places. As for how one knows one has achieved the condition of celebrityhood, this is not always so easily divined. In the ancient world, having one’s face on a coin was firm evidence of renown. Today I suppose that finding one’s name as a clue in a crossword puzzle might be one indication, though having a crazy person imagine he is you would be a stronger one. Celebrity has its own hierarchy. In his diary, Alan Bennett notes that, in the audience at his play one evening, the singer Barry Manilow is disconcerted to find the press and paparazzi desert him when Prince Charles and his great good friend Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles enter the theater.

  Being recognized by strangers is another measure of celebrity. Perhaps this paragraph belongs in my name-dropping chapter, but during the few years that I went out fairly frequently with Saul Bellow, I felt he used to check the room in restaurants and other public places to see if anyone recognized him, and was faintly disappointed when (too often) no one did. He was also, poor fellow, sometimes confused in good old philistine Chicago with a powerful defense attorney around town named Charley Bellows. On the other hand, I was taken to dinner by George Will, at the Cape Cod Room of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, and everyone seemed to recognize him: the maitre d’, the waiters, lots of fellow diners, two of whom sent up (by way of the waiter) slips of paper asking for an autograph. As we left the restaurant, two couples entered the hotel, and one of the women actually screamed, “My God, it’s George Will.”

  The difference between the celebrity of Saul Bellow and George Will here is that the latter regularly appears on television, and, with the exception of major scandal on the Monica Lewinsky level, television and the movies are perhaps the only ways to acquire serious celebrity in America. I once gave a talk at California State University at Los Angeles that was televised on C-Span, which I thought no big deal. The reaction to that was wider—I do not say better—than to any piece of writing I’ve ever published. Thirty or so acquaintances, channel surfing, reported catching my talk. A number of letters and notes came in, and more than a hundred e-mails. One day three or four months afterward, I was crossing a street in Baltimore when a man in a red Mazda Miata, about to make a right turn, stopped midturn, lowered his window on the passenger side, pointed a finger at me, couldn’t bring up my name, and finally exclaimed, “C-Span, right?” Only television confers this kind of goofy renown.

  People’s propensity for excitement when around celebrities is apparently never to be underestimated. I have a friend who had the misfortune to have a minor stroke in Los Angeles. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he was told, with something like civic pride, that he was being put in the same room in which Sammy Davis, Jr., died. The next morning, on the way to take neurological tests, he was asked by the attendant pushing his gurney if he’d like to go the long way down to neurology because doing so they might see Olivia Newton-John, who was reported to be in the main waiting room.

  The snobbery connected with celebrity runs at least two ways. First, and more obvious, is that in which upward-looking snobs seek to attach themselves to celebrities, in the hope of improving their own (presumably) shaky status. Second is that in which the celebrated themselves suffer their own status anxieties about slippage in their celebrity. Neither tends to bring out the best in people.

  For the celebrity who enjoys his fame, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about critically, and that is not being talked about at all. This is especially true for celebrities who sense their own notability on the slide, if not altogether dissipated. I was once introduced to Marshall Goldberg, the (1937–38) Ail-American football player from the University of Pittsburgh (and, later, with the Chicago Cardinals), who, it was impossible not to see, was delighted that I knew who he was—or should I make that who he had been. A nice man, Marshall Goldberg, but clearly a man of deeply diminished celebrity, in the sense that few people under sixty were likely to know what he had done.

  Celebrity may seem terribly superficial, yet it is not without its pleasures. Leo Braudy, in The Frenzy of Renown, remarks that “the spiritual glow conveyed by being recognized means finally not having to say who you are.” How much more comfortable a room seems when there are people in it who have some notion of your proximate worth. Even historical figures have felt the allure of fame and celebrity. “Why, upon the very books in which they bid us scorn ambition philosophers
inscribe their names,” wrote Cicero, who was an impressive self-promoter in this line. Montaigne, a great realist, thought it hopeless to expect people not to seek every recognition for themselves.

  Yet something different, and more than merely wanting one’s quality recognized, is going on in the desire to be celebrated. It is one thing to wish to be distinguished from the ordinary. But people who worry a good deal about celebrity—about not having it, or about not having enough of it, or about losing it—are contending with essentially snobbish emotions. They wish to be above the ruck, the sweaty riffraff struggling down below. Intent on finding a way to arrive at this elevated position, they must themselves sometimes be shocked at the lengths to which they will go to achieve this simulacrum of achievement.

  The job is the more difficult for people who have nothing to offer other than the desire itself. I think here not only of the people who hang around the celebrated but who eagerly put themselves out for them in the hope of somehow sharing in their celebrity. One hears endless stories about women falling, quite literally, before athletic stars: the toughest thing about playing in the National Basketball Association, it has been said, is not smiling while kissing your wife goodbye when your team is going on a road trip.

  Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio shows the phenomenon of the celebrity hanger-on in extreme form. DiMaggio was the greatest all-round player in the history of the game of baseball, but off the field his intrinsic charms were not, to put it gently, immediately or universally evident. Yet, owing to his celebrity, a long list of people were always ready to put themselves at Joe DiMaggio’s service: to run interference, to serve as gofers, to arrange his financial, sexual, and quotidian needs. Not a few left their families to keep Joe company at odd hours. Some had their own motives—among them, wanting to use him to make money off his name—but most found it thrilling enough just to be around Joe.

  What they got out of it is complicated, I’m sure, but part of it had to do with the right it conferred of telling others of one’s connection to a man who, in his own way, was a historical figure. Whether I should be ashamed of saying so I’m not certain, but I should have liked to meet Joe DiMaggio. And if I had done so, I would certainly have told a number of people about it—because I think it would interest them, of course, but also to establish that I was living at what the world reckons ethereal heights. “If you had told me in 1938 [when he was ten years old] that I would be Secretary of State and friends with Joe DiMaggio,” Henry Kissinger has said, “I would have thought that the second was less likely than the first.” Is Henry Kissinger being a snob here? I don’t believe so, even though DiMaggio’s celebrity, if not his seriousness, outranks Kissinger’s, which is far from slight. Instead Kissinger nicely illustrates Andy Warhol’s remark that the best thing about being famous was that one got the chance to meet so many other famous people.

  Although very great wealth brings its own celebrity—we all know who Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Milken are—the normally wealthy are usually ready to offer obeisance to the celebrated by paying high prices to attend one or another kind of celebrity dinner. At the University of Chicago I once attended a dinner in honor of Walter Cronkite, a high platitudinarian and a man with a face only a nation can love, at which I noted the spectacle of a gossip columnist named Irv Kupcinet and a television news reader named Walter Jacobson shake hands warmly while each looked over the other’s shoulder in the hope of discovering more important people than they in the room.

  Such has been the mania in America over celebrity that, as Tyler Cowen writes in What Price Fame?, “it is estimated that 20 percent of all television commercials include a famous person.” An economist with an interest in popular culture, Cowen describes ours as “an economy of fame.” (Soon, doubtless, there will be an academic specialty called Celebrity Studies.) By this Cowen means that fame, which he uses synonymously with celebrity, is central not only in the sale of products but in the promotion of culture. The repercussions from this often cause the division between celebrity and quality to be all but unbreachable; certainly it has made the line separating the high, middle, and low in culture more blurry than it has ever been before.

  I was once at a party, in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, at which were present a number of powerful political personages. Among them were George Shultz, then secretary of state; Jeane Kirkpatrick, then ambassador to the United Nations; Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then senator from New York; and Henry Kissinger. Lots of security men in the room, many walkie-talkies. I was seated at a table with a number of artists and critics. At the table with me was a dear friend, now dead, who was, though he would not be pleased to have it said about him, a power snob. Looking around the room, he leaned in and whispered to me, “I see that we have been put at the children’s table.”

  The snob, recognizing where the action is, goes weak in the knees at the prospect of meeting or actually spending time with celebrities. The celebrity, he recognizes if his social radar is in good repair, is the new American aristocrat. But, as in a reverse limbo dance, the bar of celebrity rises higher and higher, allowing more and more people to pass under it.

  “Reputation may be the major American art form,” wrote Harold Brodkey (for reputation here read: celebrity). Brodkey himself had achieved considerable celebrity, at least in the small literary world of Manhattan, based on a long unpublished novel, said to have been a masterwork in the making. Once the novel was published and proved, alas, far from a masterpiece, Brodkey, who had something akin to genius in garnering celebrity, shifted into confessional mode, and re-counted, in the pages of The New Yorker, his own forthcoming death resulting from AIDS. Poor man, right up to the end he kept his celebrity, which then expired with him.

  “Can a nation remain healthy, can all nations draw together,” Winston Churchill asked in an essay of 1930, “in a world whose brightest stars are film stars?” But of course things have gone much lower than film stars. Along with designers, chefs and models nowadays ring the celebrity register. Fame has long been separating itself from real achievement, but for the celebrity snob achievement hasn’t much to do with anything. The celebrity’s most serious achievement is in keeping his or her name before the public; and perhaps the greatest achievement of all, as the public understands it, is a talent for celebrity itself.

  I have not till now called for sympathy for the snob, but life over the past fifty years cannot have been easy for him. His social radar would have been almost constantly atwitter as one hierarchy after another in American life has broken down and been replaced by new ones, ever more blurry and more ephemeral. The chief problem of how to gain and maintain a place from which to look down on all but a handful of his countrymen has shifted on him almost continuously. Piolets, at the ready for the great social climb, the snob has the challenge of discovering a peak that keeps changing and disappearing. American social life must have come to seem to him so many illusory tips and no iceberg whatsoever.

  21

  Anglo-, Franco-, and Other Odd philias

  I HAD A FRIEND, now deceased, named Peter Jacobsohn, who attracted many people in a way that for a long while I couldn’t comprehend. Peter was born in Germany, was Jewish, came to this country as an adult not long after World War Two. He was small, bald, cared about clothes, and had a nice sense of whimsy. He had a cosmopolitan accent, part British, a touch Teutonic, free of all American idiom. His father, Siegfried Jacobsohn, was a distinguished drama critic and editor of Die Weltbuhne, an important intellectual magazine in Weimar Germany. But Peter’s early life—with the advent of the Nazis, his and his mother’s forced exile to England, his subsequent internment by the English in Australia during the war—had robbed him of all ambition and left him with only two goals: survival and the enjoyment of everyday life in America on a modest scale.

  Married, with a son born when he was in his fifties, Peter achieved both these goals, but at the high cost of anxiety about whether he h
ad a real understanding of his adopted country arid was doing, if not the right, at least the approved thing. Although he would live in America for more than half a century, he never, one sensed, really got the hang of it. He was a man who asked for lots of advice, had many consultants, of whom for a long period I was one. (He called me, amusingly, “Colonel.”) History had rendered Peter a permanent guest, not a host; a supplicant for, not a dispenser of, favors; a receiver much more than a giver.

  What was interesting, and what for a while I couldn’t fathom, was why so many people, of a great range of ages and types, were always pleased to help Peter. Part of the explanation is that he was a gentle, charming man with no edge to him whatsoever, a genuinely sweet character. Yet I finally concluded that something else, something deeper, was going on. All these people wanted Peter to like them—not that he could do anything for them, or that they longed for a deep friendship with him—because if they were liked by Peter, they seemed to have passed an unspoken test. If Peter liked you, it felt as if Europe approved of you. Peter’s friendship had a way of deprovincializing us, or those among us who prefer to think of ourselves as more than mere Americans.

  Most Americans of any educational pretension, as I have remarked earlier, have long felt a cultural inferiority toward Europeans. In the nineteenth century, no one felt this more strongly them the best-educated Americans. Bostonians of the Brahmin caste regularly ventured to Europe, many of them settling in Florence, Rome, London, and Paris, and having a wider European than American circle of friends. The lure was a denser, richer culture. Henry James, in his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, puts best what this class sensed was missing from an America that was then less than a hundred years old. Here is what one might nowadays call James’s wish list: