How to make a star

RECORD a quirky YouTube clip, hire a publicist, tip off paparazzi... how hard can it be to become an instant celebrity?

MY naked bathroom-mirror "selfies" are ready for distribution.

Three awkward phone snaps of a pasty journalist wannabe celebutante with a lower frame focal eyesore in mercifully low digital resolution. Max Markson shows early interest. "Well, I might be interested if someone famous was standing behind you," says the intrepid fame-maker and agent to the stars. He tells me I must be famous to take a selfie (a picture taken of ourselves) of value. He tells me how to be famous. "One, have your picture taken with a lot of famous people. Two, make a weird YouTube video. Three, create a web page."

Everybody's got an angle, he says. He would turn me into an online writing guru, famous for teaching people how to write. But I can't teach anyone to write. My sentence structures are too shambolic, riddled with random commas, exploding with unnecessary adjectives. Outrageous! But I'm grateful for the advice. I suggest Markson might like to purchase my nude selfies on the cheap, pre-fame, then watch them increase in value, post-fame - like a van Gogh, a Renoir or an authentic collection of limited-edition Elvis Presley pubic hairs. "Interesting," he says. Then he tells me a direct Tweet from Justin Bieber is now considered a collector's item. And Cole Porter sings in my ears: The world has gone mad today ...

I don't doubt The Bieb's tweets are valuable. Just like cellulite on Kim Kardashian's thighs has a dollar value. Just like a screen-shot of Miranda Kerr's airline flight details could be worth five grand. Just like the fact that right now there are photographers working out how to fly a $350 Parrot AR Drone (a remote-controlled quadricopter) over a Sydney celebrity's swimming pool. And when that soaring, high-definition camera hovers to its destination, the target celebrity will swallow her pride, put her best butt cheek forward and smile, because her publicist texted the photographers her address months ago.

A star is not born. A star is made, constructed from suburban dust, polished and hardened by platoons of publicists, armies of agents, held aloft by a public that doesn't half mind a bit of celebrity twinkle and sleaze. The fame monster is fed by celebrities tipping off publicists, publicists tipping off paps (paparazzi), paps paying off security guards, security guards selling out celebs, celebs selling souls, sold souls selling tickets, books, movies and celebrity songs about the perils of big hairy fame monsters. I don't have a hint of holier-than-thou about this. When Janet Jackson flashed her nipple, I looked. And now I will embrace the fame monster. Max, I'm ready for my close-up.

"You don't have to have talent," says Markson. Just go on Big Brother and hang around for a few months. Go on a weight-loss show and lose weight. "But you need to maximise the power of celebrity. I took a kid who had a party that went wrong Corey Worthington - and earned him a hundred grand in three months just maximising the power of celebrity. Someone who didn't have talent but had notoriety and he went global. He went on Big Brother. People from MTV wanted to do a TV series. A major telco in the UK wanted to use him. He did a record. The guys from MTV rang up and said, 'He's the poster boy for American youth!' You can maximise fame more than ever."

So I make a weird YouTube video. It's called "Dracula Dines in Food Court, Politely Asks to Bite Man's Neck". The video shows me walking around a Westfield food court dressed as Dracula, randomly asking people if I can taste their mortal foods. Then when they let me taste what's on their plate I politely ask if I can sink my fangs into their neck. It's my calculated attempt to appeal to the lucrative Twilight crowd. As far as YouTube videos go, I feel it's genuinely more interesting than the video featured on the site's "Most Popular" page today, "How to be a Salad", showing a young man who has taped rocket leaves to his face (2,493,887 views at the time of writing). It's not, however, half as interesting as "Hamster on a Piano (Eating Popcorn)" (501,644 views), but with 51 views and counting my clip is showing potential.

With little to do but wait for the video to explode, I fly to Sydney to get my picture taken with famous people. I spend an hour stalking Jimmy Barnes' daughter. "There's a celebrity every kilometre in Sydney," says paparazzi photographer Jamie Fawcett, swiping through his iPad in the front seat of his 4WD parked outside the apartment of Mahalia Barnes, a former contestant on The Voice. "They may not be the biggest name celebrities but they sell pictures for whatever reason. Mahalia Barnes was an ambassador for WeightWatchers and the last set of pictures I did of her was when she was in a bikini and she wasn't supposed to do a bikini reveal or a swimsuit reveal and we got these pictures without her knowing about them and we sold those pictures and, of course, she was forced to do a proper photoshoot.

"Because she's sold herself to WeightWatchers it's a fair thing for us to concentrate on them because they're taking money from the pool of celebrity endorsements to say she had lost weight. Well, has she lost weight? Maybe she has, maybe she hasn't. Has she put it back on? That's a story. You have to find the nuance within the context of the story."

In 2007, Nicole Kidman told a Supreme Court she was frightened and reduced to tears by Fawcett's paparazzi pursuits. He was accused of planting a bug outside Kidman's home. In November last year, former Spice Girl Mel B filed an interim apprehended violence order to keep Fawcett from loitering within 50m of her. The battleground was muddied when reports emerged that Mel B had established a side business in tipping off Fawcett's paparazzi rivals of her whereabouts and taking a cut in the exclusive shots later sold. The AVO was dismissed in March. "Celebrities dislike what they can't control and they can't control my pictures," Fawcett says.

He tells me to call his friend, Roxy Jacenko, a Sydney publicist currently being branded as the redeyed, devil-horned antagonist in Channel Nine's high-rating Celebrity Apprentice reality TV show. She always answers her phone. "Time is money," she says. Jacenko briefly represented Mel B before she stopped working with humans in favour of inanimate objects. "People talk back, T-shirts don't," she says. "My dad always asks me what I actually do. I say, 'You know when you're reading GQ and you see that man wearing that jacket. I do that. I make brands household names. It has all become one big thing now. Tip-offs from celebrities to have themselves photographed? Sure."

Fawcett's phone rattles on the car's dashboard. It's a tip-off. "Our tip-offs are tax deductible," he says. "You pay people for information about celebrities and their movements. While that suggestion implies that we're somehow asking people to break confidences or break the law or whatever else, truth is, a lot of information comes in from people who just want to help. People who are just as caught up in celebrity, in their inherent desire to gossip." People who embrace the beast.

His phone rattles again. It's a pap colleague. He has several men "on point" around Sydney. He has someone sitting outside model Jennifer Hawkins' house. There is another pap working a convoluted tip that Seal's former wife Heidi Klum's boyfriend is flying into Sydney with Seal's kids. Another pap has spotted Home and Away star Kate Ritchie doing yoga on a beach in Double Bay but he wants to ditch that gig in favour of surveillance on a celebrity chef who may be enjoying a secret lesbian tryst. Elsewhere, cricketer Brett Lee has gone "to the tip" and I can't tell if he's having an affair or driven to his local waste management station. (Turns out, it just means he's arrived at a location specified in a tip-off.)

"Today, the critical thing for us is to work out where Jen Hawkins is going for her wedding," Fawcett says. The wedding of Hawkins to Jake Wall is the celebrity event of the year. It sparked a bidding war between Woman's Day and New Idea magazines over exclusive coverage. Woman's Day was the victor with an offer reported to be upwards of $300,000. Now Fawcett's been asked, through his own agent, to provide spoiler shots for rival publications. "'No' is not an option," he says.

For the next six hours he hustles, charms, cajoles, pressures, double- and triple-deals his way to information on a time and location of the wedding. In his way stands Hawkins' manager, Sean Anderson, who, Fawcett says, is leaking red herrings and has hired SAS-trained bodyguards who will unceremoniously cavity-search any pap who threatens to spoil the deal. "I've been to more celebrity weddings than most celebrities," Fawcett says. "Never invited."

Between phone calls he drives to a list of Sydney celebrity addresses like a postie making his mail run. Here's a cafe in Paddington where actor Lisa McCune was shot kissing somebody who wasn't her husband. Here's where Fawcett shot Prince Harry smoking out of a window of the London Tavern. A shot like that will settle your mortgage. Here's Collette Dinnigan's house with the front door wide open.

He pulls up alongside legendary Sydney social photographer Bill Ranken, walking to an event, camera hanging from his neck.

"You catch Paper Giants?" Fawcett asks.

"Yeah," Ranken smiles. "The good ol' days."

This is where actors James Stewart and Jessica Marais from Packed to the Rafters share a place. Stewart enjoys a smoke on his balcony, dressed in a beanie and a surf T-shirt. "Hey Jamie," Stewart waves.

Fawcett: "Just showing a journo how it all works."

"You're with the best," Stewart says. "We're mates."

Fawcett stops at a news-stand, buys this week's glossies. He thumbs through each mag, tracking the usage of his own pap shots. A candid photo of a hugging celebrity couple. "Set up," he dismisses. Shots of fitness gurus and rumoured lovers Michelle Bridges and Steve "Commando" Willis. "That's ours," he says. "The penetration of that story knows no bounds."

Flip, flip. An Aussie celebrity sports star. "He sold the first year of his child's life for a million dollars, he can't complain about the attention."

Flip, flip, flip. People pushing prams, star kids playing on swings. Scandal sells but so does mundanity.

"People want to see celebrities struggling with supermarket trollies," he says. "Getting booked with parking tickets." He shakes his head. "These people don't lead their lives better than the average person. Fame is fleeting. It disappears as fast as it comes and for the most part it's not worth the trouble."

We settle on a shot of Kim Kardashian in a skirt caught in an updraft, a Monroe moment minus the glamour and style. "I went up to her house in LA the other day," Fawcett says. "There were 20 photographers outside. Ten cars waiting. That's her life. Every hour. Every day." He smiles. "Careful what you wish for."

Fawcett's phone rattles again. It's a Hawkins tip. She will be having her wedding in Bali. She has reportedly moved it forward a day to accommodate the urgent Woman's Day print run. Fawcett has 40 minutes to get to Sydney airport to catch the day's last flight to Bali. No is not an option.

He slams his foot on the accelerator and weaves through the weekday afternoon traffic, taking the kind of turn-or-die chances I should have expected from a man who dresses in tree-leaf camouflage for a living. He tosses me the keys to his car at the airport departures drop-off point and says a man named Skip will pick up the car from my hotel.

There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy and one of them is walking up the staircase of Sally Burleigh's PR agency in Surry Hills, Sydney. Prinnie Stevens radiates. She might actually be made of plasma compressed by gravity and an unwavering destiny to be on stage at the Grammy Awards like her hero Janet Jackson, the woman whose face and dance moves gave a shy Tongan girl nothing short of a reason to live. Stevens is a pulsating triple threat mum who looks like Cleopatra when her hair's pulled back hard. Her singing "battle" with her genuine best friend Mahalia Barnes on last year's The Voice was a perfectly orchestrated masterwork of televisual storytelling. "I'm not a singer, I'm a brand," she says, sitting in Burleigh's all-white office. "As a brand, I have to think I'm that brand, every day, all day. Walking, talking."

The long and treacherous road of reality television is littered with the bones of those who couldn't maximise their 15 minutes of fame; people who were chewed up and spat out by the monster. "You can't sit around and wait," Stevens says. "The only thing that changes after these TV shows is, if you sit around and talk about what everybody is doing you've now got millions of people watching you sit around doing nothing."

When the first series of The Voice wrapped up last year, Stevens - who'd been eliminated in the quarter finals - decided to pay Burleigh to be her personal publicist. Together with Stevens' manager, they developed a 12-month plan to keep Brand Prinnie in the spotlight. She launched a nail line. She released records, announced tours. Burleigh used her Channel Nine connections to land Stevens a spot on Celebrity Apprentice. She sang at The Great Gatsby opening bash. "Just staying out there," Stevens says. "Part of me being a celebrity and being considered a celebrity, Sally and the team definitely helped because my face was out there."

As a young girl, Burleigh was enchanted by the story her grandmother told about the time she attended the London premiere of her favourite film, Gone With the Wind. The gowns, the jewels, the glamour. Burleigh didn't want to attend the party with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. She wanted to organise that party. "It's an expensive investment to have a personal publicist," she says. "Australian singers don't earn much. If Beyonce sells an album, she makes $50 million. Australians make $50,000."

Tom Harris is the managing director at Australia's leading music business management company, White Sky. He says most former talent show contestants, and pop musicians in Australia generally, would be lucky to break even in any given year. Many are recording losses. "Prinnie invested in a PR agency that kept her profile up in the right way," Burleigh says. "We were able to keep her in the public eye."

Burleigh will also be on hand should Stevens ever find herself on the dark side of fame. "There are people protecting people," Burleigh says. "I do it myself. That's where crisis management comes in. Someone's busted for drugs. Someone's broken up their marriage. Someone's had an affair. Someone hasn't paid their taxes.

"Fame can seriously muck with people's heads. Look at the stars of The Voice. They weren't prepared for fame. They all went through major crises of confidence. No one knew The Voice was going to be as big as it was. They get to these dizzying heights and they don't know how to handle it afterwards."

In February, Woman's Day reported that last year's winner of The Voice, Karise Eden, had posted an open letter online explaining why she was deleting her Facebook account. "I'm a real person," she wrote. "I am a 20-year-old young woman from Wyoming [in NSW] who shot up overnight. I, as many, walked around confused, unsure and with no direction then BANG you won The Voice and all these people want you, all these people that shut you down before care about you. I give every fragment of me to you all when I open my mouth and sing and it can take its toll."

"You can lose your soul," says Burleigh. "And it's not anyone's fault. You become a celebrity, you get an agent, you get a publicist, you get a manager. They pay your bills, organise tour schedules. A car's waiting at the airport. Your tax gets paid, your accommodation is looked after, you have a hair and makeup artist, someone dressing you, feeding you, telling you where to eat and drink. They lose a sense of the everyday. Then they get used to it. Then they expect it. Then they demand it."

Stevens struts down to Burleigh's ground-floor showroom where the PR guru displays fashions and products of other clients that often find themselves cannily meshed with Brand Prinnie. She takes a Camilla Franks dress off a rack for an afternoon photo shoot. "Slammin'," the star beams.

I take a photo with her that I will be able to use to lift my standing in the world to something I am not. That's called leveraging.

Jodie,
Goodbye! I love you six trillion times. Don't you maybe like me just a little bit? (You must admit I am different). It would make all of this worthwhile. John Hinckley, of course.
- Letter to Jodie Foster from John Hinckley before his failed attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981

I call Paula Duncan to tell her she was my first celebrity crush, my first real encounter with the mystical power of the monster. Her smiling face, those deep, sensual stares on Cop Shop, those frenetic and hilarious Spray N' Wipe ads, were a touchstone of my early boyhood. She runs her own promotions company now. She has just hosted a charity event with writer Kathy Lette. She's flattered by the admission, warm and responsive, completely untouched by the beast.

I write a song for her. Richard Wilkins makes me do it. The great entertainment reporter has seen all sides of the monster. "The reality thing made people famous for being famous," he says. "But it's not a good career move to be famous for being famous, with a sex tape and a good publicist. Write a three-minute song that you just want to hear over and over again and is impossible to stop thinking about. Just get off your arse and do it." In a fevered and perfect storm of music and lyrics I chisel a guitar ballad that speaks of my unrequited love for Paula Duncan. It's called Spray N' Wipe Away My Tears.

You don't know me now
I hear ya
To you I'm invisible
Like bacteria
You don't have the time
For stubborn dirt and grime (like me)
But I could have been your Mr Sheen
I could have been your Mr Muscle
I could have been your Toilet Duck
But you don't give a flyin' ...
Fa la la la la, la la la la

I phone Australia's most enchanting classical guitarist, Karin Schaupp. She's on a break from a national concert tour with Katie Noonan. She's kind enough to lend her talents to a good cause: my shameless lunge for the spotlight. Turns out Karin's husband, Brisbane psychologist Giac Giacomantonio, is also a brilliant musician and he transfers the song to sheet music. They arrange an engineer to add piano and drums. Within two weeks we have created an epic Michael-Bolton-meets-Nickelback ode to an Australian soap opera icon. It's gonna go nuclear.

I start asking fellow musicians about the monster, about what I can expect when it inevitably lurches my way. "Loneliness, confusion, all sorts of personal experiences," says Kate DeAraugo, 2005's winner of Australian Idol. The very day after DeAraugo won Idol strangers gave her abuse and praise in equal measure. "It was all confronting," she says. "It's a competition and people take sides."

The intensity of the monster saw her undergo full-body liposuction surgery to reduce her weight, which has been, for her past eight years as a working singer-songwriter, "the elephant in the room".

"That's always been a big deal for everybody," she says. "It's one of the first things people want to know. 'How does Kate look? Has she put on weight?'"

"It is a monster," agrees Nikki Webster. "It can be on your side and other times it's looking right at you like a demon." On Saturday, September 16, 2000, the day after the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, Webster woke up as quite possibly the most famous 13-year-old in the world. "All the American reporters wanted me to leave Australia," she says. "They were like, 'Get out now, it's coming'. I was like, 'What do you mean? What's coming?' And they were like, 'Get out, it's coming'. Then it came.

"It was pretty quick. One day they were all on my side and the next day they weren't. Any publicity's good publicity. I get it now. I wish they waited until I was a bit older to give me that lesson. I was 15. I'm going through puberty. I'm going through peer pressure at school and I'm getting bullied with everybody at school saying the world hates me."

Webster was 17 and shooting Dancing With the Stars when she received her first death threat. "It came as a letter to my post box ... It was pretty awful and graphic, you know, what they were going to do and, you know, cut me, and pretty much kill me so I couldn't sing again and this kind of thing. It was pretty horrific."

Helen Reddy is deeply wise. But it's wisdom born of pain. "In 1973 I had my own show on NBC," says the queen of'70s pop. "I had three number one hits that year. Also that year, I lost both of my parents and the aunt who I was extremely close to. My parents' funerals were exactly 10 weeks apart. Nobody back in America knows. They all just slap you on the back and tell you how lucky you are."

She speaks of gigs done in wheelchairs after a bike accident that left her ankle hanging by its skin. She speaks of giving everything on stage, her heart, her soul, her blood, to the point where she would collapse backstage, and still they wanted more. "I used to do two shows a night, seven nights a week. One at eight o'clock and one at midnight and I'd fly back and forth between Las Vegas and LA after the second show so I could give the kids breakfast in the morning. I am serious. It's not a picnic."

In 2006 she published an autobiography, The Woman I Am, that stripped her life bare, gave it all to anyone who was interested. "The book had just come off the press and I got a letter from a fan saying, 'When's the next one come out?'"

I ask singer-songwriter Wendy Matthews about a hero of mine, James Freud, who she sang with in The Models. Freud took his own life in 2010 after a long battle with alcoholism. "Part of being creative is being sensitive," she says. "Being some sort of receptacle, and that can be overloading and that can be painful and I think most of the songwriters I know aren't very guarded people. They hurt easily, and we need those human beings of course. There is a cost and a price and sometimes it just breaks my heart."

Lastly, I catch up with Mahalia Barnes. I apologise to her for stalking her house. She laughs. "I find that so bizarre that people take shots of me," she says. "I took my family to Thailand on holiday and they [paps] followed me there. I told them it wasn't that interesting and I could send them an Instagram shot if they liked." She's built tough like her old man. He told her long ago that it's all a means to an end. That word she hates, "celebrity", the paps, the WeightWatchers gig, it all means food on the table for her three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and time in the studio doing the one thing she was born to do and, like her dad, does far better than most. "And I feel so lucky to do that," she says.

A text lands in my phone from Jamie Fawcett at Jennifer Hawkins' wedding in Bali. "Nailed the wedding video on Seven and pics are awesome," he writes. "Didn't spoil their wedding, left before the kiss." Paps are happy. Mags are happy. Bride's happy. Everybody wins in the Wedding of the Year.

My Dracula YouTube video has plateaued around 50 views. Empire-building takes dedication so I decide to exploit my children. I upload a cute YouTube video of my four-year-old daughter drawing a portrait of Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Seattle rock band Pearl Jam. I call it "Four-year Old Girl Draws Eddie Vedder".

Watching the video of my beloved daughter, whose trust I have so sickeningly betrayed, I am struck by something Nikki Webster said. In the swirling post-show madness of the Olympics Games opening ceremony, she found herself rushed into a press conference scrum surrounded by flashing cameras and the smiling faces of her heroes, Olivia Newton-John and John Farnham. "Then I was suddenly in this dressing room and there was Cathy Freeman and everything was electric," she said. "But I hadn't seen my mum. And all I wanted to do was ask my mum if she thought I did a good job."

Then I wonder from where on Earth the monster first sprang. Then I wonder what my granddad, a Rat of Tobruk, a man who would have been worth every second of the world's adoration, would make of all this. I feel close to something, some kind of insight into it all, something profound. But then I'm distracted by an internet gallery of celebrity skin irritations. Dear God, is that Britney's ankle?