Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Rise of Celebrity Culture

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Any of us who have happened to see a celebrity in the wild can admit to the strange thrill you get. It doesn’t matter if it’s C, D, or Z-list celebrities, even, they all count! But why are we as a society so obsessed with celebrities? From Ancient Greek Gods to Kim Kardashian, our obsession has endured. And what does it say about us, when most young people just want to be famous when they grow up? Without a thought for what they might be famous for. Kate is joined by Landon Jones, former managing editor of People Magazine and author of Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved Into A Culture Of Fans And Followers. He’s here to take us back through history to where it all began, speculate what the future of celebrity may hold, and share tales of his own, such as why Princess Diana refused to dance with him.Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer Charlotte Long. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello for Twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, everybody. This is a podcast about adulty things, spoken to adults by other adults in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects,

and you should be an adult too. We are known for straying into some pretty spicy territory. So if you are not interested in swearing and naughty content and discussions around sex and murder and drugs and rock and roll and all kinds of things, then just give this one a miss. Just leave now. Go and put something more wholesome on. And if you stay and if you get upset with what you're about to hear,

then you can't even get angry with us. Because fair do's, we did warn you. Ah, yes, I will have the steak, please, medium rare. Well, I won't actually, because I'm a vegetarian. I will have the mushroom, medium rare. And a bottle of a chateau. after pap civil play. Thank you for joining me in this very swanky restaurant, betwixters.

Please do have a seat. People are starting to stare. I have it on good authority that this is a celeb hangout. Oh yeah. And who amongst us can resist the thrill of spotting a celebrity for real in the wild? There's nothing quite like it, is there? But why do we have this obsession with celebrities? What is that all about?

We once worshipped gods, pantheons of gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, Byzantine gods. We still worship gods. But now we also worship celebrities. And a half-decent sex tape can propel you to stardom. Speaking of which, here they come. Oh my God, it's St Christopher. Wow, he's looking even better in the flesh than he did in his sex tape. Don't stare, the Twixters.

Instead, let's delve betwixt the sheets to explore the phenomenon of celebrity culture, to trace the evolution of it from its ancient ways up until what in recent times has become an increasingly mad obsession. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dance. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry.

And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Pop quiz Betwixters. Who was the first celebrity? Hmm, hmm-hmm, hmm. Who do you think? Marilyn Monroe? Nope, you have to go earlier than that? Lord Byron, maybe. It's not a bad guess, that one. It's not a bad guess, but it is even earlier than that. According to today's guests, the one and only Alexander the Great can lay claim to that accolade. And to be honest, that's only because we've got sources to tell us that he was regarded as a celebrity.

There'll have been celebrities before him. Our adoration of public figures is nothing new. It really isn't. But there has been a definite transition, which has seen the demise of gods and heroes, and the rise of us worshipping something more fleeting in the cult of celebrity. Today we are joined by Landon Jones, author of Celebrity Nation, How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers, and Landon's the former managing editor of People magazine,

which launched in 1974, when the term celebrity really wasn't being used in the way it is today, or at least not as widely. So, what does our love of celebrity say about us as a society? Why do we do it? What do we get out of it? What do the celebrities get out of it? Why is the culture of celebrity a dangerous thing? And more importantly, why was Landon stopped from dancing with Princess Diana? Cameras at the ready, kids. Let's find that.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Landon Jones. How are you? I'm doing fine. How are you, kill? I am so excited to talk to you today because you, You have published a book on the phenomenon of celebrity, the history of celebrity, and if anyone knows anything about celebrity, it has to be you, right? You were the managing editor of People magazine. Have I got that right? That's right. I was the editor and I was there when we started the magazine. Wow. And that was back in 1974. But we didn't at that time even use the word celebrity. It was not a word we used. We referred to movie stars and politicians and athletes as if they were different species.

And now suddenly, celebrities seem to have taken over all of them. You didn't use the word celebrity in People magazine when it started? Not at first. We eventually caught on. Certainly when television stars emerged and became personalities in their own right. And suddenly we're learning they weren't just a role that had been. written for them. They were real people with real houses and real dogs and parents. And so we treated them as human beings. And that's when the whole thing sort of took off and the celebrities just became

another creature. But those were in the old days. It's much more violent with us everywhere now. It's everywhere, isn't it? It's tempting to think of celebrity as being modern, as being new, as being something that we're obsessed with today. But it's not a new phenomenon, is it? No, fame has been around, and celebrity themselves has been around. And people use the word sort of as an adjective. I've become celebrated, or this is a celebrated person. So it was more of an adjective.

Only later, more recently, has it become a noun. And I sort of divided into two phases. When I look back on movie stars, I think of them as Celebrity Ancien. You know, the previous regime. And the celebrities now with social media and social influencers, the Internet, so all of that, has become much more pervasive. And so now, if anyone is having a public event and wants attention, you have to invite celebrities.

It's required. You know, we saw that in the coronation. We see it everywhere. That is so true. Thinking about history, fame and the pursuit of fame has always been with us. And something that you do in your book a lot, which I think is really interesting, is you talk about the concept of celebrity and the concept of a hero together, and that they're interchangeable.

And I'm thinking about the really ancient Greek myths and the ancient world where they did hero worship, didn't they? Yeah. I keep an eye on heroes because people have trouble identifying heroes now because celebrities have taken up all the bandwidth. And they've taken up all the oxygen in the room. And they have the loudest voice in the room. And so people are not good at identifying heroes.

The one reason I wrote my book when we used to have focus groups and talk to readers of People magazine, and the focus group would always warm up the group with an easy question. And the question was, who are you heroes? And so she would ask them. But then I noticed she had stopped asking that question. And I said, how come you don't ask the question about heroes anymore? And she said, well, they can't think of anything. And I thought, aha, that was a eureka moment.

And there's a theme here that I wanted to explore. So the book I was going to write about celebrity was just not going to be gossip and funny stories and trivial things. It was going to have a more serious point. And one of them, what that got me into it was the demise of heroes. What to you is the difference between a hero and a celebrity? What is the difference is that a hero is known for his or her accomplishment. and they've done it for other people, and it's not rehearsed. They do it spontaneously, and they do it virtuously.

The accomplishments of a hero live forever, we hope. Accomplacements of a celebrity effervescent, they can die overnight. Yeah. If we're thinking about the ancient Greek myths, like Achilles and Hercules and the Greek gods, they were celebrities and heroes. There's an interesting thing. the Greek gods, people tweeted them with reverence, but they were dead. The first human being who was living to be treated like that was Alexander the Great.

And he had his face put on a coin. And so suddenly his image was on a coin and everyone had it. And he was still alive. But what happened was that the reverence that people had towards the Greek gods got transferred to a human being. And in a way, we're still seeing that with the use of the image, And it's the image of people, you know, their faces and their names that has carried on ever since Alexander. So we see it on the age of revolution with people like Napoleon or whoever. And it continues with Samuel Johnson, whose name and face were in books.

And Samuel Johnson used to complain I'm not being rewarded as much as my celebrity makes me think I should be. Then it goes on into the U.S. and people use photography. and they had Buffalo Bill and Wild West show, which traveled all over the world. And someone is implausible as Wild Bill Cody became one of the most famous people in the world. He was greeted by the British royalty. Why?

Because his name and face were everywhere, and he knew how to exploit them. The first modern celebrity, and maybe this is wrong, but it's often said to be Lord Byron when he wrote Child Harold's pilgrimage in the very early 19th century. I think there's one line from him where he said, I woke up and found myself famous, or words to that effect.

I'll talk about that. That was one of the first times someone became aware of their own celebrityhood. And it didn't make them comfortable. I mean, he was uncomfortable by that. In France, John Jacques Rousseau, you know, the philosopher and writer, he became famous because of his books and confessions or whatever. But then he went out to play chess in the Tulleries, and people besieged him. You know, they wanted to talk to him, meet him, get his autograph, and he hated this.

So he did not have celebrity long before someone like Greta Garbo did. It's one thing to be well-known. And I think there's a great quote from your book. You're quoting someone else that celebrity is known for your knownness. I like that. Celebrity is someone known for being well-known. That's the one. There's a difference between somebody that everybody knows,

but the reaction that celebrity can produce in just normal plebs like me, that kind of reaction of like, oh, my God, oh my God. Like, you know, Russo being swamped and people losing their minds almost around somebody who is famous. That's so weird, isn't it? Very weird. We've all been in a restaurant. When someone very famous walks into the restaurant,

all the forks freeze in the air. Right. And people stop talking. The forks were frozen. And they look over at the celebrity and just take it in. I mean, this goes all the way back to Alexander and the Greek gods and the sense of reverence. You know, a god is walked into the room, even though it may be somebody completely insignificant who hasn't really had any accomplishments.

It could be a social media influencer. That's so true. It could be somebody on a reality television show. If a Greek god walked into the restaurant, I can understand the reaction of people that stunned and mouths open and really excited. But like you said, it can be anyone with any level of fame. Even somebody that is not very famous, just seeing them, will provoke a reaction from people like, oh my God, it's them. Is there a sense in your book of what that is, why we do it? Is it worship?

Have celebrities become the new gods? I don't think it's worth it because of the celebrity worshippers. The people who worship celebrities are modeling their lives on them. There was a survey of British children, age 10 and 11. And they asked them, what do you want to be when you grow up? And they said, I want to be famous. And I want to be a celebrity. And that was the first choice.

And the second choice was, I want to work for a celebrity. That has nothing to do with accomplishment. No. And so that's a sad thing. And it turns out that when they grow up, they take that with them, their celebrity worship. The more that someone worship celebrities, this has been studied too, the less likely they are to participate in the community to be active politically, even to vote. And so all of those things disappear with the arrival of celebrity worship.

You do get your super fans, don't you? You get your people that camp out to even get a glimpse of their heroes. But I think when you get to the people like the A-listers, the really big celebrities, they provoke a reaction from everybody that they encounter. It must be such a strange way to live your life. Like, you can't just go to the shop anymore and get milk. You can't just get on the bus anymore

without people losing their shit around you completely. I know. It's sort of sad. I mean, I talk in my book about the many celebrities I interviewed, and these include Princess Diana, and these include Elizabeth Taylor to name people. See, I'm excited hearing that. That's what celebrity does. I'm talking to somebody.

who has spoken to Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor, and I'm excited about that. That's weird. It's very weird. Another one in America was Malcolm X, the Revolutioner. And that's how I interviewed all of these people. And the first thing you discover is that you think you know them and you don't know them. So it's an illusion of intimacy that somehow the media have given you.

And all of them, Princess Diana, you know, I was odd. I wonder, am I supposed to court see when I meet him? And she was girlish and fun. And it was just like meeting a college student who was delightful. And so she was really without pretense and without ears. And this was true of Elizabeth Taylor. I met her somewhat late in her career after she'd had, you know, seven marriages to six husbands. And her Richard Burton face.

At this time, she was a rather mature woman, but she was devoting herself to good causes. And the cause she devoted herself to was HIV. and AIDS. And she got inspired by her friend Rock Hudson, the movie star. But when I met her, I went to her house in Los Angeles. And I thought some servant would open the door.

But she opened the door. And I was so shocked to see her that I dropped my tape recorder and I dropped my bouquet of flowers all on the floor. And so I did not make a good impression. And so this is when you realize that the visual shock of the celebrity.

That said, she was smart, she was humorous, she was idealistic. She had a house full of art from her art dealer father in London. So it was an interesting encounter. Oh, and then Malcolm X, the revolutionary, he had no control over his image. And so someone said to me, can you interview Malcolm X? And I was about 20 years old. I'm afraid to interview him.

He's going to hate me. You know, I'm everything he hates. But nonetheless, I did interview him. he was the complete opposite of an angry person filled with hate. He was kind, he was intellectual, he was a professor, and he was trying to teach me to understand his point of view. And it was a strong point of view. He did have that. He did not compromise.

But he was completely different than the image. And one of my points in the book is that so much of this is determined by the media and the marketers. Malcolm had no control at that time over the media that covered him. Now, after, gosh, what, 60 years after he died, there are movies about him with Denzel Washington and Spike Lee. And the movies are rather engaging. But this is a completely different personality than the media image he had to live with when he was alive.

I don't know where to start with this. I'll start with Princess Diana, because we've just had the royal coronation. I think that most people would have that heart-stopping reaction to meeting her. But you said that she was really nice, natural and like a college student. But was your encounter with her staged in any way? Like you're saying that Malcolm X, he couldn't control his media image, but people have learned how to over the years.

You danced with Princess Tiana, didn't you? Yeah. You know, when I met her, I said to her, why are you doing this? Why are you talking to it? And the idea was we, People Magazine, wanted to sponsor a charitable event with her that she would come to in Chicago. She said, well, I'm trying to improve my image with the media. She was very frank about it. And she said, I just had coffee with Mr. Murdoch, as she called him.

Rupert Murdoch was part of her plan to improve her image. I'm not sure of her son Harry thinks that now. And so was I. You danced with her. What was the event that you were dancing with, Diane? Well, that was our benefit that we had at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago. And so we invited 500 people at least paid a lot of money to buy tables and sit with her. There was a band and Tony Bennett came inside. And I had said, well, who's going to dance with her? The first dance.

I said, I want to dance with her. I'm the host. I was sitting next to her then. Her office said, well, there's some conditions. I said, oh, what are their conditions? And they said, well, you have to be married. And I said, well, I'm married. And they said, yes, you have to be happily married. And I said, I'm happily married. That's such a weird criteria. I know. And then they said, well, you also have to be a good dancer. And I said, I'm a very good dancer. At least in my mind. Yeah. And then they said, finally, you have to be six feet tall. And that's where I flocked. And so I never did dance with her. Oh, no. Even though I paid a lot. of money. People over six feet got to dance with her. Wow. Was that about controlling her image?

Why were those rules in place? Did they think that she was just going to run off with someone who was over six foot tall and unhappily married? They were trying to avoid gossip and headlines. And they were trying to keep her image squeaky clean. Of course. In those days, it wasn't always so squeaky clean. And so they were trying to combat that. So when you're interviewing people like Elizabeth Taylor and like Markham X, are you aware of as a journalist of what they're trying to portray. Because as someone who's writing for the media, and you said that their images are controlled by the media,

do you feel a conflict between what they would like you to write about them and what the magazine would like you to write about them? Yes, certainly then and probably still now a very strong conflict. I mean, the celebrities are very aware when they deal with the media, they want as much control as they can get. they used to require, we want to approve the interviewer. We want to approve the photographer. We want to approve the scene that's going to be.

So they were smart about that. And people refused to agree to these things. And so it was a real tension, a heads butter, because we would say, no, you're stuck with Landon Jones. He's going to be the interviewer. And you're stuck with Harry Benson. He's going to be the photographer. And so they had to decide, well, how much was it worth for them?

to be publicized on the cover of People magazine. And that was worth a lot of money, certainly in those days, for sure. I'll be back with Landon Jones after this short break. From biblical fame to its fabled great walls, Babylon was home to kings, conquerors, and wonders of the ancient world. But what do we actually know about this legendary city? And how much is still shrouded in mystery? Join me, Tristan Hughes, every Sunday thrift.

May on the ancients as we delve into the story of Babylon. We'll be covering topics varying from the King Nebuchadnezzar the Second and how he forged a massive Babylonian empire. We'll be exploring the mystery of the hanging gardens of Babylon, looking at world-renowned objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder, and also looking at Babylon in the aftermath of one of the most well-known conquerors in the whole of history. Babylon, after Alexander the Great. That's all to come this May on the ancients every Sunday. Take Elizabeth Taylor, for example, her celebrity is huge. It's cult-like. She's Elizabeth Taylor, but you met her as a real woman, you just went to her house and she opened the door to you. When you're talking and working with these people, do you get a real sense of the

disconnect between Elizabeth Taylor, the celebrity and the actual real person that you're talking to. When I think of her, I think of their dripping with diamonds and she's got like, you know, the fabulous glitz and glamour. She was one of the first influencers, by the way, because she put out a perfume line. And one of them was called Passion perfume, Elizabeth Taylor's passion. And she did that to make money. It was her product. That's still going on. Of course, it's a spanned at a thousandfold with the social influencers who are the brands. So it's all about branding. And the celebrity are just an adjunct or an accomplice

to spread in the news about a brand. But I'm getting a little off your question. Which was a good question about the discrepancy between the image you may have. I think this is almost always true. And celebrities know that, but they don't let their hair down too often around the media. No, because they're working, I suppose, aren't they?

A celebrity's encounter with you to write an article is them at work. So it's very carefully choreographed. Yes. I think one of the really interesting things in your book is you're also exploring celebrity now and what the future of celebrity will be. When we're talking about Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, this is before social media. So controlling images is slightly easier than it is now? That was an earlier generation.

The generation now is a somewhat devaluing. the celebrity of the hour. Yes. And that's certainly true. The celebrities are a dime a dozen now, but they're there. And people are getting the news and information more often from celebrities than they are from journalists. But it's always coming from these social influencers who have no expertise in this area.

And so we hear a lot about misinformation. And when it come right down to it, a lot of the misinformation, misinformation, originates with celebrities. And you hear a lot these days about artificial intelligence. There are false celebrities images that are now available on social media platforms that are completely robotic and they're made up by a computer. But people don't even know that. I write about one name, Lil Michaela.

He was a young woman who looks like a sometime model. She's in L.A. She looks completely realistic. She sounds realistic. interacts with her fans and you believe her, but she's not real. She's a fraud. And she has something like 20, 30 million followers. Wow. That's a very strange point that we've entered into, isn't it? That a computer simulation can be a celebrity now. Yeah, it's a simulation of a celebrity. Sooner later, they're going to be a dime a dozen. Wow. If there's one theme in my book,

it says celebrity can hurt us. And it hurts celebrities themselves. who become narcissistic, you know, and have a very high death rate that they die young. And this is proven and documented how often they die. And then it also hurts celebrity worshippers who lose their self-esteem, who spend money beyond their means to imitate a celebrity. And so there's that thing. And they hurt the community because people who become celebrity worshippers are less involved in the community, the celebrities themselves become politicians,

run for office and become the source of misinformation that damages the community. So those are all things that concern me. Absolutely. I think that that is something to be concerned about. I'm interested in what you said there about that celebrity hurts people. Just thinking a little bit about how it hurts the celebrities themselves. Because speaking of Greek myths, it feels like a Greek myth, doesn't it? That everybody wishes that they were famous. Everybody wishes for success. and then as soon as you've got it, I know. There's so many people, like once they're on the other side of it,

once they've achieved fame, realized that it's a real poison chalice. It really is. I mean, two of the examples I give in my book were more or less at the same time. There were Charles Lindberg, the aviator, you know, who flew across the Atlanta at the first solo. He became the most famous person in the world

because this happened when newsreels and radio were first starting. So people heard about him. And they saw him. And there's his handsome bun boyish. And what it led to was a ruin of his life and the kidnapping and murder of his son. And so terrible things happened to him. Wow. At the same time was the arrival of Albert Einstein.

He came overnight, very, very famous. And he was ambivalent about it. He was smart enough to know this wasn't a good thing. And he went to London and gave an interview. One of his very first in 1919, when he first became wild. totally famous. And he talked about how American husbands were ridiculous and so on. And they got printed. And then he realized, oh, my gosh, people are going to find out everything I said. And so he just shut down completely and lived their life rather anonymously as much as he could, given that he was

Albert Einstein. And he was friends with Charlie Chaplin. And so he was ambivalent about stars themselves. And he was a good man. He tried to help people, African-American opera singer, And Marianne Anderson wanted to give a concert in Princeton. The local hotel would not let her stay there. And so Einstein let her stay in his house. And so he had that human touch and that empathy for other human beings that they make, to me, sort of heroic. And so I admire Einstein for that. I mean, that kind of goes back to what you're saying earlier about being famous for doing something

and then being famous for being famous, doesn't it? Yeah. It's such a strange thing because we all, at least most of us, that we would like to be famous. I think maybe it's about being successful as well, but I look at people who was crazy famous. Like my grandmother, who wasn't famous, but she once saw Marilyn Monroe. She lived in America. She saw her in a car as she was waving to people, and she told that story for her entire life, that she had glimpsed Marilyn Monroe in a street. And that was pretty much it. I mean, what must it be like to live your life, knowing that if

people just see you in the street. They will be telling that story until their dying day. I agree. It's completely bizarre for someone like Monroe, a classic example of someone who was hurt by the apparalysis. And she never really completely recovered. My friend Joyce Carroll Oswald, a long historical novel called Blonde about Marilyn Monroe. It's pretty devastating about what happened. Because she was exploited by people and she was used by everyone.

And so you become an object of ill use. It's really unfortunate. The really famous people that you've met, and I was going to say the A-listers, but I've often wondered, is there a B list or a C-list? Or is that just something that we say, A-listers? Are there lists anywhere? That's a good question.

If you're not on the A-list, you hang around people who are. So this is why at the coronation, the American singer-Lyinor-Ly is there, Katie Perry is there. At the big insurable events in New York City, the Metropolitan Gala, where used to be for fashion, it's a gala for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It used to be all about fashion.

Now it's about celebrity dresses. It really is. And if some of them, I'm Kim Kardashian girls who, people don't even know why she's famous. There's an event in Washington called the White House Correspondents dinner that when other correspondents used to invite their politicians and rub elbows with them. And it used to be called the nerd prom because they were so unglamorous. But People Magazine and others started inviting celebrities to the nerd prom because we knew they would gain attention and publicity and photography.

And that indeed did happen. And so now it's dominated by celebrities. It's lost its original purpose. You know, there's a famous saying attributed to Andy Warhol, the artist, which I don't think he ever really said, which he said in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. And so that says something about the ever essence of celebrity. It doesn't last. Wow.

One thing that you do touch on a little bit in your book is the idea of aliases, stage names. Is it just to sound cooler or does it do something else? This was pointed out to me by a writer who was talking about George Bernard Shaw. Okay. And Shaw was famous. But everything he wrote in the newspapers and columns, he used his initials, GBS. And so he became somebody else, GBS. This happens again and again.

In America, you have Samuel Clemens, a shopkeeper's son from the Midwest, who becomes Mark Twain. And Twain, he is safe to be Twain because people can make fun of him because he can be a celebrity. But then he can retreat and become Samuel Clemens. And then we had the guy in Hibbon, Minnesota, named Robert Zimmerman, who would play in good, and then later on he became Bob Dylan. I didn't know that was his real name. Yeah, Zimmerman. He is still, in his own mind,

I think he's still pretty much Bob Zimmerman. But Bob Dylan is the guy he goes on stage and sings songs. When did the word celebrity start being used? If you weren't using it to describe people in People magazine in the 70s a lot, when did it start to become used all the time? because it's everywhere now. That's a fascinating question. It grew slowly, but then with the arrival of the smartphones and social media,

and this is around 2006 and the first social media, and then suddenly everyone was overwhelmed by people who were inexplicably well-known for being well-known. So I think that's when it really started, and we're still trying to get our arms around it. And I don't think we have. I don't think we fully understand why and where it goes or where it stops. It seems very, very mysterious in that regard. If we're thinking about somebody like the Kardashians,

who they seem to me to be the epitome of the modern celebrity, because everything I know about them, I've learned against my will. I've never sought them out, but I know a lot about these people, and especially about their bottoms, which is a weird thing to know about people. It's such a weird thing. to like, no, but there we go. I think if you go back through history,

you can find examples of women being famous for being beautiful and sort of not much else, like celebrities, aristocrats or famous mistresses. Is that the space that the Kardashians are in at the moment? Is they're just sort of famous for the way they look, basically? I mean, I think that her fame began with a pornographic film. Oh, my God, it did. I'd forgotten about that. Yes, and so did.

I think she was then working as a hair. dresser for Paris Hilton, another quasi-sized celebrity who also had a pornographic film. Yes. And pornographic films are interesting because so many new technologies depend on pornography, but also because it talks about defiance. And if someone is defiant and defies convention, and certainly, the Kardashians have done that. Yeah.

Certainly Donald Trump has done that in America. He simply defies convention. And that goes way back. A good example is the British actress Sarah Bernhardt, who became wildly famous all over the world as a singer. But she was defiant. She posed in dresses, the women, sexy dresses, the women had not worn.

She took a picture in a casket just for the shock value. And that was shock value then, because no one does it. But when you look at the future and you're trying to say, well, who's going to become famous? are they defiant? And that's a hint that they might be. Wow. What do you think the future of celebrity is? I've seen things like TikTok have changed what we think of as a celebrity, Twitter. You can now be Twitter famous or TikTok famous or YouTube famous, which means you're famous in a very sort of small area, but still really famous.

There's a certain sort of fragmentation that's taking place now because there's so many different social media outlets. And it's hard for someone to dominate or, be in all of them. Yes. But what helps to go back to my point about being defiant, if you're defiant and you bring in eyeballs and you bring in customers and the brands want you and so they pay you. And so you can rise out of a niche medium and suddenly reach many more people.

Both things are happening. It's fragmented and a few people are escaping it. Do you think, have we had enough of celebrity yet? Is it starting to wane or is this? just something that's going to keep going. It's just with us now. I don't know. I see some clues that people are wising up to the flaws of celebrity. And there's certain people like Greta Thunberg, you know, the young activist on the climate and Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel Prize for her human rights work in the Philippines. So people like that. And you see some well-known stars

quietly doing good works. I think a Roger Federer. who gives a lot of money to schools in South Africa, which I didn't know. I didn't know that, no. Because why? Because he doesn't brag about it. He doesn't talk about it a lot. But he doesn't.

I think there has been a slight shift around narrative, especially with people like the Kardashians. I'm seeing more and more young people, students that I teach and people on TikTok are starting to look at them more and just go, what is this? Yeah, let's hope that they continue to wise up and say, what is this?

Oh, Lanny, you have been, amazing to talk to. And my one final question to you is, even though you're the editor of People Magazine and you deal with celebrities day and day out, was there anyone that you were really starstruck by? Was there anyone that even you were just like, oh, but it's them? It comes back to the person whose face was on the cover more than anybody else was Princess Diana. And so she sort of remains, at least for me, in that sort of pantheon, regardless of like, even even though she seemed normal and charming in person. But everyone had that reaction to her.

And she remains the best-selling cover on People Magazine, the most frequently photographed and put on the cover of People Magazine. So she's sort of the A-plus list in that category. A-plus list. I like that. Lanny, you've been wonderful. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find my website, Lanny Jones. That's my nickname.com.

and you can talk to Beacon Press, my publisher in America, which is the publisher of the book, which is called Celebrity Nation, how America evolved into a culture of fans and followers. And by the way, I think it's happening in Britain too. Oh, God, yes. Without a shadow of a doubt, we love a celebrity over here as well. Oh, Lanny, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thank you, Kate. It's been really enjoyable. Thank you for listening. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really does help us out a lot if you do that actually. And if you want us to explore a subject or perhaps if you've just had a couple of jars and you want to say hello, you can now email us and you can get us at betwixt at history hit.com. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast features music from Epidemic Sound.