- A Short History of Celebrity by Fred Inglis
In his opening line, Fred Inglis declares (or asserts) that “this is a history book.” It is hardly a typical one. In less than three hundred pages, Inglis covers the trans-Atlantic lineage of “this no more than 250-year-old phenomenon,” the celebrity. He does so primarily in the form of character studies—the author calls them “historical examples, of individual life stories which neither constitute a sample nor provide epitomes”—that hopscotch between Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States. These examples are mobilized to make the case “that the business of renown and celebrity has been in the making” for all this time, and that said business constitutes a pivotal historical phenomenon with important implications for modern society. Inglis finds celebrity constituted of dual components: culture and technology. The culture of capitalist society produced the entertainment industry, consumerism, and a press that fueled them both; industrialization also created an increasingly large, anonymous, and fragmented urban world. Technology helped to create the illusion of immediacy and intimacy amidst that fragmentation. The “powerful contradiction at the heart of our phenomenon” combined “knowability with distance” to produce the celebrity. Inglis explores these developments in three parts, each longer than the next. The closest he comes to a formal chronological treatment is Part II, which moves from London (1760–1820) to Paris throughout the nineteenth century, then to New York and Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.
This is an irreverent, candid treatment from a senior scholar—in laymen’s terms, it’s a “post-tenure book.” Inglis refers to “these neurotically offendable days” with the distaste of a man who nostalgically hearkens back to a time when political correctness had not yet been invented; he resentfully uses the term “sex object,” though he quickly labels it a “damned cliché”; and the “tens of thousands” who treated [End Page 405] Marilyn Monroe as said sex object are castigated as “helpless wankers” who kept Monroe’s magazine covers “handily to hand.” He wants to be equally irreverent about dates: invoking a somewhat commonplace distaste among historians for pinpointing the exact moment of creation or destruction of a given phenomenon, he insists upon prefacing most of his time periods with phrases such as “roughly”; “(until 1920 or so)”; “let us say, from 1935 to 1970”; or “sometime between” those years. Yet he seeks affirmation for many of his periodizations, which is derived at various points by figures such as C. Wright Mills, Walter Benjamin, or “in the company of social historians.”
Periodically, Inglis reflects upon the sprawling nature of his creation mid-stream; in Chapter 5, he spontaneously inserts a paragraph alerting the reader (now presumably 118 pages in) that “my history is neither a structural nor a narrative history. If anything, it is the social history of distinct stages and geographies in the growth of an industry.” He makes this departure from the narrative in order to justify the “explanatory place” of the “short biographies of key industrialists” that follow, just as he offers short sketches of artists, rulers, dictators-cum-celebrities, and selected stars of stage and screen. Yet the difficulty of such a catholic approach is soon revealed when the author proceeds to profile William Randolph Hearst and casually offers the explanation that father George derived his riches from the California Gold Rush of 1849 (he did not; it was the subsequent decade’s Comstock Lode in neighboring Nevada). The overall structure and content of the book recalls Leo Braudy’s 1986 classic, The Frenzy of Renown—surprisingly uncited in Inglis—but A Short History is anchored to an exegesis of modern celebrity that attempts in the first chapter (with only partial success) to distinguish that phenomenon from the older concept of renown.
The author attempts to excuse several references to artists, celebrities, journalists, and the “ideal sportsman” in the form of the male pronoun by inserting defensive parentheticals (e.g., “it was until the 1860s or so mostly ‘him’”) throughout the text. Yet these...