Rethinking My Implacable Yearning for Fame

Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants, if not the balls? You (which is to say I) yearn implacably for attention, and for a restoration of the fame of decades long past. Butwhen you get just a little taste of it, you find it discombobulating.

Which, again, is to say I. Aye, aye, cap’n!

In the past fortnight, I’ve done three, well, events to promote my little book about my three nights of sin with David Bowie on his first visit to Murka in 1971, and have been one of the co-stars (with a fellow who devised a map showing pretty much everywhere in London that David has so much as paused to light a cigarette). I’ve been applauded (oh, how very sweet the sound!). I’ve been asked for my autograph, and been approached by smiling perfect strangers hoping for a wee conversation.

And I’ve remembered how discomfiting being the center of attention can be.

In these, the late autumn of my years, my bladder has become a spoiled child, forever demanding evacuation. The first night, at a posh members-only club in the glamorous West End, it was even more shrill than usual as the Q&A portion of the evening ended. But the moment I came off stage, I was intercepted so warmly en route to the gents’ by a succession of members of the audience that I’d have hated myself for not stopping to chat with them. At which point: another problem. When I’m chatting with one person, who’s charming and wonderful and a little insistent, and I see someone behind her, who’s been waiting at length for his turn, shrug and walk away in disappointment, I feel I’ve let the latter down. And, sadistic narcissist though I’ve been called (and called and called) lately, I hate letting someone down.

Walking back to the team’s locker room, an NBA star high-fives a dozen fans. How do the two dozen whose hands went untouched feel? How does the little boy who’d die of joy if his favorite baseball player signed an autograph for him when said shortstop autographs scribbles on half a dozen kids’ mitts, and then lopes off to shag flies, leaving the little boy’s unsigned?

(Shag flies. My British readers don’t know what just hit ‘em.)

A former friend of mine remained 12 well into her fifties, in the sense that she beseeched celebrities for their autographs without a trace of embarrassment. In her view, Rick Nelson, a Monkee or two, and both Hall and Oates were perfectly wonderful people because she had their autographs, and former Supreme Court justice Diana Ross was an unspeakable bitch. Coming out of the studio in which she’d been taping a video, you understand, Ross had ignored her pleas for a moment’s attention.

“How do you know,” I asked my friend, “that 90 seconds before emerging from the studio, she hadn’t received a text message saying her grandmother had died?” No sale. In my former friend’s view, it is the celebrity’s sacred duty to be accommodating to fans 24/7/365.

Obscurity, I take it all back — or at least a lot of it. (Which is no way to suggest, please note, that I don’t want you to subscribe, and to persuade everyone you’ve ever met to follow suit.)