The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Of course, there must be advantages in living with a saint, and spouses must get something out of it for themselves, but Pamela Stephenson so effectively Pelzer-ises Billy Connolly that you begin to wonder what it is about the lives of talented people that lends itself so readily to a thoroughly banal account of themselves. Stephenson gives us a Billy Connolly whose rage is no longer enjoyable; he is no longer the working-class guy who was a careful listener and a wry observer of shite and toil, but a thoroughly broken adult who is constantly running into the limelight as a way of escaping the emotional starvations and sexual abuses of his childhood. He is not really at home in Glasgow or Los Angeles; the stage is his only home, and it is not any joyful platform either, but a place where demons are routinely confronted, where voices from the past are finally (but repeatedly) given their answer, and for Stephenson, as for all these writers, the whole of show business is something larger than itself: it is not a job, but a display of courage; it is not to do with a developed gift, but a grievous vocation; it is not a wonderful effort to be good and special, but a fleeing from badness and a fight to be normal. If John Bayley made the world an unsafe place in which to be a spouse, then Pamela Stephenson goes one step further: she takes a person famous for his character and gives him the psychological boil-wash of his life, leaving him damp, colourless, wrung out, and softened; dragged into a basket waiting at the base of her hungry machine.

  Like many sentimental narrative-makers, Stephenson is addicted to flashbacks that begin to kick in from a position of apparent glory: Billy is standing on a stage surrounded by applause; he is in attendance at a flash Hollywood party; he is negotiating the corridors of his vast castle, the centre of a world he has made for himself; and yet, as his biographer has it, the terrors of the past are always ready to encroach on his achievements, making them sickly and hysterical. Childhood has everything to do with the problem of fame, of course, but more subtly than this, and often in ways that offer permission to the talent rather than force depletion on the character. If fame is a kind of freedom for some people – a kind of release, and a revenge – it needn’t mean that every interesting element of that person is a form of falsification, a deranged refusal of everything that was handed down. Stephenson turns Connolly into the sum of his abuses, a product of darkness alone, and she helps us to lose sight of his native defences and imaginative leaps, his power of communication, his handy way with blasphemy, his light-conducting naturalism in the face of some pretty bad odds. Connolly is funny, and his funniness is not merely some sensational consequence of his sadness. He has more versions of himself than his biographer can live with: his ability to inflect society and inflect himself derives from a culture much larger than the culture of drunk fathers who like to put their hands down their children’s pyjamas.

  But in the mind of celebrity survivalism, nothing could ever be so interesting as that:

  It’s hard to know exactly why William molested his own son. He had the experience of being extremely religious and, since the Catholic Church was very strict about the sanctity of marriage, he saw no possibility of divorce from Mamie or remarriage at any point: however, that doesn’t really explain why he chose this particular form of sexual expression. It wouldn’t be the first time extreme sexual repression in an ostensibly religious person led to ‘unspeakable’ acts. As Carl Jung explained, denial of our shadow side will often cause it to rise up against us. Perhaps William himself had been sexually abused in childhood, as is so often the case with perpetrators. In fact, historical accounts of that culture and time would suggest that, in those overcrowded conditions, incest was extremely common.

  And when Stephenson first meets Connolly, ‘it felt as if we were joined at the wound’. The comedian is now surrounded by people who are hungry for his seriousness, and who have detained themselves with enough Jung to render all good comedy an illness. In a performer, rawness is not necessarily the enemy of polish, but Connolly’s loved ones clearly want him to smarten up his ideas about himself, as if he was negligent before, as if solving the past in conventional ways requires much more of him than his genius. As psychic rescues go, Billy is the perfect modern celebrity’s kind of thing; it might not be evident – not in the following paragraph anyhow – that low-fat self-regard is no less poisonous than self-doubt.

  It is August 2000 and the heavy green dining-room curtains at Candacraig, our Scottish home, have been drawn to hide the bright evening sunshine of a northern summer night. A few close friends, some of them known to the world as very funny people, have just seated themselves with us around the dinner table. The conversation gravitates to an uncomfortable discussion of the impetus for comedy, in reply to a question from one of the non-comedians at the table.

  ‘For me,’ interjects Billy at one point, ‘it’s about the desire to win. My audience becomes a crowd of wild animals and I have to be the lion-tamer or be eaten …’

  ‘Oh, is that so?’ Steve Martin challenges him. ‘You don’t think it’s about a little hurt from Daddy?’

  When you want everything, and get everything, maybe the fantasy of having nothing becomes your luxury. In show business, that kind of thinking has always, at the same time, been part of the reality and the campness of the industry. ‘Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a million dollars for a kiss and ten cents for your soul,’ said Marilyn Monroe, someone for whom adult fame could seem like a poor betrayal of the richness of girlhood dreams.

  These people’s books always tell you what they’ve got – the cars, the attention, the castle, the hotels – but this is really just a kind of throat-clearing for the main announcement: I Have None of the Things that Normal People Have. As vanities go, this one is pretty hot, but it’s now widespread enough to have become a pop cultural commonplace. Sentimental as a lollipop, no doubt, but at one stroke it turns the audience’s envy into pity, the star’s excesses into privations, and makes the generally bloated star feel like someone who lives at the very centre of the world’s suffering. There’s a price to be paid for fame, you see, and only the famous would understand. It’s a Judy Garland-style balance sheet of profit and loss, now scripted into the deepest self-dramatisations of our celebrity culture; when you have everything you are insufferably lonely in your view of things on our small planet; and slowly, photogenically, you become a victim hounded by ‘demons’ and ‘parasites’.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, in the earlier days of British light entertainment and pop music and television, this was a hidden, unknown process, where worlds of dissociation and distraction engulfed young people before they knew what was happening to them, and the journey through famousness for someone like the singer Lena Zavaroni seems to me an entirely different order of drama, a properly personal disaster that involved a notion of community and a post-war idea of domestic life, leisure and the good society. She was the last gasp of the entertainment world that existed before global corporate sponsorship and MTV. But the meaning of publicity has changed everything: there is a new sort of narcissism in the dramas promulgated by the famous, an explicit revelling in fame for its own sake, in the branding of personality, and it is a development the world finds compelling.

  ‘This book is dedicated to the walking wounded,’ Geri Halliwell writes. (Halliwell too can now be found acting as a judge on one of the Saturday-night talent shows that have changed young Britons’ notions of what it means to be alive.) And yet, despite the millions, the gear, the house in Hollywood, her story happens not to be an account of all the luck and the fun she is having.

  It would take a whole book on its own to really explain the recovery process I have been through. All I can do is try to convey how profoundly it affected my life … I can honestly say it has been the most painful thing I have ever done, and the most rewarding. I didn’t know it at the time but the moment I picked up the phone and asked for help, I took my first step on the road to recovery. That simple step marked the end of years and years of denial because I was confessing that I was powerless over food
and that my life was out of control as a result.

  I began to realise how dishonest I had been to myself and to my friends and family for so long, I was living a double life, giving the impression that everything was fine and that my eating problems were over when I knew that I had been controlling and bingeing. Now I just wanted to be honest. The first person I had to be honest with was myself. I had accepted I was powerless over food but now I had to look for the reasons. And when I did, I realised that my addiction was not the disease, but the symptom. Insane as it sounds, I even found a reason to be grateful for my problem.

  Well, not as insane as all that. We have to assume that Geri is part of the generation that likes to think success is the answer to the principal questions of a young life, and that, after success, the only answer is failure, which serves to deepen the notion of success. She wants normality but also wants to say normality is a curse:

  I came from a poor family and a broken home and had always felt like I was the odd one out, the token working-class girl in Watford Grammar School. But these things alone can’t really explain my eating disorder. They do help to explain why I was so hungry for fame from an early age – after all, they are the classic conditions needed to produce a wannabe. I think the real explanation has its roots in the death of my father in November 1993 and the fact that six months later – still reeling from my loss – I walked into a London rehearsal studio and auditioned for the group that would become the Spice Girls.

  Every one of these books should be called Still Reeling from My Loss. Waterstone’s ought to have a wall for them: ‘Still Reeling after All These Years’. The problem, you might imagine, is less to do with the ordinary to and fro of free school dinners and Dad being partial to the odd snifter, and more to do with the modes of behaviour common to a tribe of people who take more interest in the media’s interest in them than they take in themselves or the people around them. Most of these celebrities spent too much time staring lovingly (then hatefully) into the media pond: if it’s not the mirror it’s the Mirror, and modern celebrities are covered in vanity, low-mindedness and deceit when it comes to the tabloid press, to say nothing of the press’s own behaviour.

  Geri Halliwell’s old chum from the Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham, has a thing or two to say about the push-me-pull-you mechanics of the British press, but, first off, she’s in a class of her own when it comes to dedications. She feels sorry for herself too, but she manages quite deftly, in dedicating the book to her family, to remind us all how effectively her sense of self has obliterated their reality:

  Mummy, Daddy, Louise and Christian. Over the last six years I have turned your lives upside down. And I don’t just mean having to live behind security gates. As difficult as it has been for me, it has been even more difficult for you – not just coping with my personality, with its ups and downs, but your whole lives have been changed. While I have fame and the money that comes with it, all you have, apart from being proud, is the upheaval.

  That’s all I’m having to do with Victoria Beckham, except to say that she and her husband, David, in their relationship with the press, have taken the notion of abuse, the abuse of one set of human beings by another, to levels that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by the press, but feeling hunted by the press is an aspect of self-hunting too: their famousness is an occasion for grief, and their grief is a constituent part of their fame.

  *

  The newspapers love abuse stories and they love the mixture of celebrity and populism that marries so easily in the culture now. People can vote these celebrities into being, they can read about their horrific lives in the papers, they can buy the books that give more details and which speak of the terrors of the press, they can move quickly onto the next serving of success and pain, voting new people on and new people off, and to Tony Blair and culture-surfers everywhere, it can seem like a nice way of having a democracy. Tony Blair asked for a meeting with one of the judges on Pop Idol, Pete Waterman, and sought his advice on how to harness the five-minute convictions of that generation. Not long ago, the winners of its predecessor Popstars, the group Hear’Say, broke up in a welter of tears and recriminations, speaking of horrific media manipulation, destroyed personal lives and abuse on the street.

  Celebrity means nothing now without the notion of suffering. Fresh off the block, aged only eighteen, Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates is here with his autobiography, already hooked up with a ghost-writer of his former self, already reeling from the difficulties of being a success. These books know their market: again, this is not a youthquaking story of hard work, sheer pleasure, tradition and talent, but a tale of how Gareth struggled to make it with a speech impediment:

  I had a stammer from the moment I tried to put sentences together, which my parents recognised because my dad had a stammer up until he was 18, which he grew out of (my sister Charlotte has one too; sometimes it’s hereditary). My stammer got worse over the years and at five I was referred to a speech therapist, but this didn’t really help me. My stammer would make me completely unable to say a sentence properly, but I didn’t want this ever to get in the way of what I wanted to do.

  You would think talent was enough, but talent nowadays is not enough: it must answer a grievance, it must canonise its bearer. At the most visible end of tabloid fame, no talent at all will be fine, so long as the body itself is lovely, and makes itself available for whipping and anointing and self-explaining. Here’s the facts. Ulrika Jonsson used to be the weathergirl on TV-am. She had an affair with the England football manager. Over the last year she has had more newspaper and magazine articles written about her than were devoted to the war in Sudan, the elections in Brazil and the future of the Common Agriculture Policy combined. But Ulrika is familiar with her own agony and she is ready to share. (Dedication: ‘To Cameron and Bo. Remember, if the worst comes to the worst, being screwed up can sometimes make you more interesting.’) And so the past comes reeling back. The book is called Honest:

  I have been married, divorced, faithful and unfaithful. I have battled with depression and enjoyed moments of bliss. I have had an abortion, I have been raped and I have stripteased. I have loved myself and loathed myself. Throughout my life, my exterior and interior have done battle – not just on account of being born one nationality and living quite another, or indeed of having parents at opposing ends of the personality spectrum, but also on account of having lived my life very publicly for some fourteen years. At the age of 32 what had surfaced was a crisis of persona.

  And that’s where the story ends: you don’t have to be good at anything, and you don’t have to have done anything, except to have somehow been a celebrity and known what that costs. Readers will forgive you anything except your uncomplicated success.

  On Lad Magazines

  JUNE 2004

  A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday-night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift.

  ‘It was like an alcoholic bullet flying through the night,’ a former guard says, poetically. ‘You just couldn’t cope with those guys on their stag nights. That’s what did it. The buffet car was a cesspool. They were climbing into the berths with Christ knows who. It was madness. They’d pull the emergency cord. They’d fling the bog roll down the aisles. They’d vomit. Break guitars over each other’s heads. You can’t be having that on a nice train.’ You’ll find the same sentiment echoing around the hostelries of Dublin’s Temple Bar, where stag nights have been banned, proprietors believing that the Ryanair generation has made a mockery of the art of running amok. Over on cheap flights from Prestwick and Stansted, these boys were often to be found floating trouserless in the Liffey at dawn, or staggering up Grafton Stre
et, their T-shirts clinging to them with alcopops and spilled sambuca.

  Britain’s news-stands are heaving with magazines devoted to the rough magic of being a bloke. On first sight you think they are what my friends used to call scud mags; the girls who adorn the covers – legs wide, breasts atumble, nipples fit for pegging a couple of wet duffle coats on – tend to be among the nearly famous, a tribe of models admired by laddish editors for their friendly shagability and the hunger in their eyes. The market for male ‘general interest’ magazines has grown massively in the UK, as if young men suddenly needed to be celebrated and serviced in a new way, as if there were a new demand among them for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of soft-core irony and hard-core sentiment. But apart from reassurance and a sort of avenging pride, what are these magazines selling to their readers? With their grisly combinations of sensitivity and debasement – ‘How to Bathe Your New Baby’ v. ‘Win the Chance to Pole-Dance with Pamela!’ – it may be time to consider whether these men’s magazines aren’t just the latest enlargement on the old fantasy of men having everything they want to have and finding a way to call it their destiny.

  Stag & Groom Magazine is edited by a woman who has no end of tolerance for the male love of male company. She has the modern Lifestyle writer’s addiction to life as it might be lived in a pink paperback, and that means her men are allowed to be very bad and also to know that their badness is quite lovable. But maybe she’s just having a monumental laugh. ‘Stags!’ she writes in the editorial of the second issue: