After 25 years of hanging out with celebrities, Caitlin Moran finally works out what it means to be famous
SHE’S visited a sex club with Lady Gaga, had tea with Paul McCartney and turned down dinner with David Bowie – Now Caitlin Moran has finally worked out what it means to be famous.
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THE first time I saw someone famous, I was 10 years old. There was a summer fayre at Wolverhampton Girls’ High School, so we’d gone to find second-hand shoes and “knickyknacky-noos” – the council estate phrase for objets d’art – at its stalls.
The summer fayre had a star attraction: Helen Cresswell, author of children’s series The Bagthorpe Saga, doing a book-signing. I’d both read the books and seen the BBC adaptation (my review, in my diary: “FUNNEEEE”) – and queued up to have my books signed. The queue was long. More people joined it by the second. I listened in on their conversations.
“Who is she?”
“Don’t know. But she’s ... famous.”
Over the afternoon, the majority of that room coalesced into a long, oddly adrenalised line to meet a pleasant, middle-aged author, who patiently signed proffered pieces of paper and autograph books, and chatted. Both she and the people she met were slightly confused by the whole process – obviously, she didn’t know who they were, but they didn’t know who she was either – and yet it went on for two long hours. Pretty much everyone in that room left with Helen Cresswell’s autograph. Pretty much everyone did not know why.
All these people did know was that other people knew who she was, and that having someone famous in Wolverhampton was a rare thing. An unusual thing. A thing that must not be wasted – the chance to spend a few minutes with that most mysterious of things: someone with fame. To meet someone famous is a lucky thing. Like shaking a chimneysweep’s hand. You might as well. Just in case.
Of the hundred or so autographs Helen Cresswell signed that day, the majority, I’m sure, were not kept more than a week or two before being thrown away – the magic of famousness fading from the paper the longer it was away from her. A month later, the autograph-hunters must have been bemused as to why they had it. What do you do with a piece of paper signed with a name you barely remember? It had seemed so important to get it at the time. Important enough to queue for.
But now? Something to be tucked in a box file, never again opened, or else put in the bin.
Twenty years later, I’m at Glastonbury with the actor John Simm. Our kids go to the same school; we like the same music. We’ve spent the weekend having quiet pints, chats and wild enthusiasms about New Order.
His fame, at this point, is full-bore and ridiculous – he’s in Life On Mars and playing the Master in Doctor Who. He is very cautious about leaving the backstage area – “It’s not worth the hassle” – but I, in my blithe ignorance, keep telling him not to be such a precious thespian flower, and come for a wander in the further fields.
Eventually, reluctantly, we leave the backstage bar. We have stepped no more than three paces from the exit when a man who is “having a good weekend” runs up to John, points at him – finger quivering – and cycles through a series of facial emotions, each more extreme than the last. In the end, he takes a deep breath, and bellows simply, “FAMOUS! FAMOUS! FAMOUS! FAMOUS!”
John pauses for a second, politely, to see if the man has anything he wants to say.
“FAMOUS!” the man shouts again. This is what he wants to say.
“Sorry,” I say, as we return to the backstage bar, John’s hat pulled low over his face.
Three years on, I am interviewing Sir Paul McCartney. It’s 3pm – hours before showtime – but, outside the stadium, in Italy, more than 1000 people stand with banners, flags, posters. They wail, they sing – Beatles songs, Wings songs – that have become modern hymns.
I have been a journalist for more than two decades now. A fairly regular part of my job is being around famous people. I interview them; I watch them work; I socialise with them. I’m friends with some of them. I’ve ended up in the toilets of a sex club in Berlin with Lady Gaga, watching her pee. I’ve pulled on Keith Richards’ hair, as he tries to prove to me that, whatever Noddy Holder from Slade might accuse him of, he does not wear a wig.
I enter Paul McCartney’s dressing room. He’s a man, the same age as my dad, who looks up from some papers with a smile. He seems completely normal. And I am here to work.
“Cup of tea?” he says – just like my dad would. To my horror, I find that I am crying.
It’s Paul McCartney. I quickly palm the tears off my face, while fussing over my iPhone, and start the interview.
Paul McCartney hands me a cup of tea.
It’s Paul McCartney tea.
I start crying again.
He looks at me as if he has seen this many, many times.
FAME is a curious thing, for which, I think, we have not yet fastened on the correct lexicon. We talk about someone “being famous” – but the fame is not inside the famous person. Fame is not something you actually do. Neither Helen Cresswell, nor John Simm, nor Paul McCartney were doing famous in those incidents above. They were not manifesting any powers or behaviours outside the absolutely normal. They weren’t making lightning come out of their arses, or flying, or lifting heavy objects with their minds. They were just people chatting, drinking lager and making cups of tea, in a totally normal way. The fame wasn’t in them. If they were alone in a room, they wouldn’t be “being famous” at all. Even the most famous person in the world isn’t “famous” for more than an hour or so a day – when they get recognised by a cab driver, say, or when someone in the street runs up to them and says, “I love what you do! Can I get a picture?”
The rest of the day – making breakfast, watching telly, unblocking the toilet, chatting to mates, doing some work – there is no fame at all, because you can’t be famous on your own.
Instead, “fame” is something that happens to the people observing you. Fame’s main attribute is that it affects other people – the Fame Maths is that the more famous you are, the more people you affect. In that way, fame is not so much a palpable quality or skill in the famous person, but more like a meme, or a spore, that infects the brains of others. It’s oddly like particles and waves in quantum mechanics – it only manifests its attributes when measured or observed.
The magic of fame, then, is not in the famous person – but in the audience it alters.
The photoshoot accompanying this piece is a case in point. “How do we depict fame?” my editor fretted when we discussed it. In the end, we simply googled “famous women”, and then recreated their most famous shots. I had a lot of make-up put on and six hairdryers pointed up my frock to be Marilyn, and sat in the rain being Faye Dunaway the night after the Oscars.
I can tell you right now, from experience, Faye would not have looked as relaxed and supreme as she does in Terry O’Neill’s shot if she’d been not in Los Angeles, as she was in the original, but at a rooftop pool in east London at 7am, with sideways freezing rain flattening her hairdo.
But fame isn’t a facial expression, or an action, or an outfit. In all these pictures, it’s the paparazzi, the Oscar, the newspapers on the floor, that tell you I’m famous. Without them, I would just look like someone having a bad day flashing their knickers; someone with a hangover, someone in a nice dress, someone with a nice car. All of which I have in my day-to-day life – hey, the Ford Galaxy is a brilliantly utilitarian vehicle for family life – but which don’t, on their own, say “fame”.
You can’t show fame in a person, because that’s not where the fame is. It’s in the outside world. Not you.
I did not want to be famous as a child. I had much bigger fish to fry.
“When I was pregnant with you, I had very strong hallucinations that you were Ganesha, the elephant god,” my mother told me when I was 12.
As I was a very fat child, I received this information with a certain amount of fatalism. Ah. This was why I was so pudgy, and had quite a large nose. I was Ganesha, the elephant god.
“You’re here to bring luck to the world,” she continued, still folding sheets, and putting them away in the airing cupboard. “That is Ganesha’s role on Earth. Also, this is probably your last incarnation – so make it count.”
As my parents were pretty far-out hippies, this conversation didn’t seem that unusual. I filed away the information – that I was here to bring luck to the world, as the incarnation of a Hindu elephant god, and that this was probably my last incarnation – in the same way I filed away other pieces of information they had given me, such as the best way to help a car stuck in sand (put a piece of carpet under the rear wheels, and don’t over-rev), and how best to end a conversation. (“Talk about jazz. Mingus. Coltrane. It confuses people.”)
When I wrote a novel at 15, I continued to not want to be famous. I went out of my way not to be. When the book was published, my PR (I had a PR!) told me they might have secured me a slot on Wogan, to be interviewed. I sent them a very polite letter explaining why I did not want to be on television: “I don’t want people to know who I am. I just want them to know my writing,” I wrote, in a childish scrawl on pink notepaper.
They sent a stern reply back, explaining the only way for people to know about an author’s writing was to take the goddamn amazing piece of publicity and go on f...ing Wogan (I paraphrase here). I still declined.
The book sold 1800 copies.
I did not regret not going on Wogan. I was here to bring luck to the world! Not to be famous.
NOW I am 43, and I am, in some ways, in some places, famous. I’m in The Times every week, for a start – but then, so is, almost invariably, a recipe for pork belly; it’s good to keep these things in perspective – and the book I wrote in 2011, How to Be a Woman, has sold one million copies. My last novel, How to Build a Girl, is being made into a film, and I’ll occasionally pop up on TV talking about a new book, or in a news article wanging on about some petition or charity.
Here are some of the most amusing places I’ve been recognised.
While buying Canesten in a chemist.
Trying to bag an untypically runny dog poo on someone’s driveway.
Crying on the Tube listening to Prince.
By a policeman who rang on my doorbell to tell me that my children, excited by the first day of the summer holidays, were dangling their naked bums out of my upstairs window, shouting, “FREEDOM!”
In the changing rooms at Topshop, on the phone to a friend, saying, “These culottes are giving me massive camel-toe.”
Naked in a thermal pool in Japan.
But the fame I have is very specific. For starters, very few men ever recognise me. If you write a book called How to Be a Woman, men tend not to read it – too much hassle on the train. So to 48 per cent of the population, I’m not famous in the slightest. Similarly, as a columnist in The Times, I don’t get recognised in places where people’s main newspaper is The Sun. Walking around, say, Cheltenham, I’ll get, “Are you...?” two or three times. In Chigwell – not a sausage. And even in a hotspot area, it’s a certain kind of woman who will recognise me: girls with hair dyed rainbow colours; girls wearing lots of eyeliner; girls wearing Doc Martens boots; girls who dress in charity-shop clothes; girls who go on marches; girls who love libraries. I am, then, roughly, all things added up, 17 per cent famous. I will get priority treatment while trying to choose a vegan muffin in an independent cafe; not so much when trying to haggle a discount in LK Bennett.
And this is, I have to say, exactly how I like it. I’ve seen what people are like around famous people – I’ve been that person around famous people – and I don’t want to be in the business of making people shake, or cry, or shout, or lose their words, or suddenly start babbling, or be deferential, or else, conversely, feel they suddenly have to explain to you why everything you do is shit.
Famous people change the room they’re in – my God, the sudden energy shift that occurs when Bono or Lady Gaga steps through a door! – and that’s useless for a writer. Writing is about observing things, not being observed.
I don’t want to be famous, because I know what a giblet I’ve been around famous people, and I don’t want to provoke that kind of ergot madness in the minds of others. In 30 years of being around famous people, I’ve still not learnt how to handle these encounters.
In the beginning – as a teenage journalist – I thought the best thing to do was talk incessantly about myself: tell my victim a series of amusing anecdotes and factlets at parties or, often, during interviews, in order that they might realise how amazing I was, become my friend, which would lead to them giving me £1 million and taking me everywhere on their jet. These are the things you tend to think when you start meeting very famous, very rich people. That they could give give you £1 million. That they’ve got so much money, and they might think you are so awesome, if you keep talking about yourself, that that might happen.
A friend of mine recently became friends with one of the most famous pop stars in the world, and the second question another friend asked him – after “Is he nice?” – was, “Have you asked him for £1 million yet?” These thoughts linger way into your forties.
That this tactic signally failed to work is information I probably don’t need to mention – no one wants someone they’ve never met before to start telling them stories about their lives (“And so I thought my belly button was leaking – but it was only sweat!”), whether they are the man reading the gas meter or Iggy Pop. And no one will ever just give you £1 million. Ever. That will never happen.
However, I didn’t know that it was the simple human impulse to not have randoms forcing information on you that was causing Operation Celebrity Befriendment to fail, so I ramped up my game to a higher level: I started having sex with celebrities instead. No one superfamous – just “comedians, and people in bands from the Nineties” – but all gentlemen were selected because I loved their work, thought they were geniuses, and thought I would somehow commune with their art on a higher level if we went to bed together. That I would somehow get their genius inside me. That I would be transformed.
IT took me just a few disappointing experiences to realise another vital truth about art and fame: neither of these things are in a man’s penis. That’s not where it is. There is no such thing as penius.
When I met my husband, I stopped having sex with famous people – it seemed the polite thing to do – and went on to my third tactic around famous people: “giving them their space”.
“Everyone who meets a famous person wants a bit of their time and their attention,” I thought, wisely. “The best way I can show my respect to them, then, is to give them their space. Demand nothing of them. Leave them be. That is how you show love to the famous.”
By this logic, when I ended up doing a radio show with John Peel – a massive hero of mine; a man whose show had changed my life – I did everything in my power to ignore him.
“Going anywhere nice on holiday?” he asked me, during a break in recording. “Got any plans for the summer?”
“No,” I said briskly, turning my back.
“What you been listening to, then?” he continued. He really was most avuncular.
“This and that,” I said, casually, lighting a fag, and pretending to read a newspaper.
“He will be grateful for my lack of clinginess – and, next time we meet, it will put us on an equal footing, which will lead to true friendship,” I thought, still keeping my back to Peel. “I’m playing the long game here. How clever I have become!”
Peel died from a sudden, unexpected heart attack two months later. I never got the chance to play my long game.
I was similarly stupid with David Bowie.
“One day, I’ll take you for dinner with Bowie,” a friend of Bowie’s promised. Bowie had, apparently, read my stuff and liked it.
“Oh, I would have nothing to say to him! I’d bore him! Never do this! NEVER! I FORBID IT!” I said.
Then Bowie died, too. If it were possible to die of regret for not accepting a dinner invitation, I, too, would have died on the day his death was announced.
I met Bono recently. During the last U2 tour, while the band played Ultraviolet – one of my favourite ever songs, ever – they flashed up pictures of feminist heroes on the massive screens behind them. One of the faces was mine. This was, obviously, amazing.
Before the gig, Bono requested a meeting. I was escorted into a room containing Elvis Costello, Bob Geldof and some supermodels. Bono came over – utterly charming. We chatted for a few minutes. He was delightful.
“Hey – we should go for lunch sometime!” he said at the end.
“Well, Love Island’s on at the moment, and it’s kind of eating into my schedule,” I replied – still trying to be superbreezy around heroes.
Understandably, I’ve not heard from Bono since.
All these things, then, were the impetus to write How to Be Famous. It’s not a guide for how to become famous – I am, still, only 17 per cent famous, and want to keep it that way – but how we react around fame. How those with real, true fame have to deal with a situation where almost everyone they meet is affected by a kind of ergot poisoning of the mind, where they behave like fools, divs, wallies, idiots, mad fornicators, those on the cadge, bores or else simply deranged. How they deal with the screaming, the bad reviews, suddenly checking your bank balance and it reading £1,364,847.44. How some of them become better people because of it – and some of them become much, much worse.
I’m hoping the good fortune I bring to the world is to take the discussion of fame away from Heat, Hello!, OK! and TMZ, and into pubs and playgrounds, so that when future generations meet Bono, they won’t get all flustered and turn down a lunch – but sensibly say, “I have series-linked Love Island, and so am entirely free to take you up on that offer, thank you.”
So that we can finally be inoculated against the odd, amazing magic of fame. ●
© The Times, London
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