The Other Side of Fame

Behind the glitz and glamour—sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Celebrities suffer from drug abuse and addiction.

By Mary Loftus, published on May 01, 1995 - last reviewed on June 05, 2007

For some reason, perhaps because it's far removed from the L.A.-N.Y. continuum, celebrities' siblings are drawn to Central Florida. Not only that, but they feel compelled to become journalists here.

I've sat two desks over from Jennifer Beal's brother, Greg. Been at newspaper parties with Susan Sarandon's brother, Terry Tomalin, and shared journalistic turf with Gretchen Letterman, Dave's sis.

These relationships occasionally bring the mild-mannered reporters some fall-out fame. Terry, while on a backpacking trip with his sister and her pal Julia Roberts, noticed that Roberts was listening to Lyle Lovett cassettes on her Walkman, and set the two up for their first date. Gretchen made the newspapers when her brother dropped by for a visit in St. Petersburg and had a car accident.

But mostly, they're close-mouthed about their celebrity sibs.

"It's not just that you get tired of people asking about them," says Arthur McCune, a reporter whose stepbrother, Daniel Waters, wrote Heathers and Batman Returns. "It's also that, in comparison, you feel kind of like a failure. I mean, he comes home for Christmas and has been at some exotic locale for his new movie, or just had lunch with Winona Ryder, and then it's, 'So what's new with you?'"

Celebrity and success have become synonymous in a culture that judges by how rich, seductive, and riveting the image; where the name recognition of teenage waif models rivals that of Nobel Peace Prize recipients.

"Celebrity [is] the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves," Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. "It is evanescent... In our time, when success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing it."

Stars, then, have their own problems, not the least of which is contemplating their own half-lives. Some worries intrude from outside: rabid fans, gold diggers, paparazzi, critics, competition. Others gnaw from within: self-doubt, addiction, wanderlust.

Entertainers—whether actors, artists, evangelists, writers, musicians, politicians, or athletes—survive by peddling themselves and their talents to the masses. They're put on display, consumed, evaluated and achieve either dismissal or acclaim. Feedback is received through Gallop polls, Nielsen ratings, and box-office draw.

Like the tree-in-the-forest conundrum, this presents a philosophical puzzle: If a celebrity doesn't rivet the public's attention, does he exist?

Fame has always had a bad reputation among thinkers. Poets sung of its seductiveness, and its tendency to breed vanity and superficiality. But the worst you could say of the old kind of fame, the kind based on accomplishment, was that it clouded your vision. The new, less durable fame, the kind refracted through images, proves especially corrosive to the self.

"To be a celebrity means to have more than the usual assaults on one's ego," says Charles Figley, Ph.D., director of the Psychosocial Stress Research Program at Florida State University. "You're very vulnerable to the personal evaluations of other people. The public is ultimately in control of whether your career continues."

Figley, who is writing a book on the stresses peculiar to celebrities, conducted a survey in which 200 questionnaires were mailed out to names randomly selected from a list of the public's top-ranked celebrities. From 51 replies, he compiled a list of the primary sources of stress for celebrities and their families, as well as their reactions and solutions. Most of the questionnaires were completed by the celebrities, the rest by a spouse, friend, or adult child of the celebrity. The top 10 stressors, in order, were:

the celebrity press
critics
threatening letters/calls
the lack of privacy
the constant monitoring of their lives
worry about career plunges
stalkers
lack of security
curious fans
worries about their children's lives being disrupted

The celebrities' reactions to this stress were: depression, loss of sleep, crying over nothing, bad moods, acting out and misbehavior on the part of their children, lack of concentration, stomach problems, paranoia, over-spending, lack of trust, and self-hatred.

"There's a certain amount of insecurity," Figley says. "One of the respondents said that, at any time, he expected someone to come up and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Go back to being a waiter. What do you think you're doing here, anyway?' There's a constant need for reassurance that they deserve what they've received."

Stress-busting solutions celebrities mentioned included: talking to friends or therapists, beefing up security, having friends outside the business, protecting their kids, laughing as much as possible, finding faith and religion, getting out of L.A.

"A sense of humor was one thing that kept coming up when they were asked about coping," Figley says. "One family had fun with it, and made a game out of trying various disguises to not be recognized." But another respondent, a well-known celeb, said he vividly remembers a painful moment when his family was going out for pizza, and his youngest child asked his mother, "Does Dad have to come?"