Fame. Justine Bateman
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old, then don’t bother. Just die and someone will write a biography about you. You will have been that interesting a person.
No, I hate memoirs. I’m going out on a limb here, telling you this, because I have a few close friends who have written memoirs. Good, talented people. I hope they don’t take offense. There are other people who have written memoirs; people whom I don’t know but whom I respect. They may take offense and now never want to meet me because I said I hate memoirs. My friend Marcus mentioned some memoirs he’s read that were good; real literary gems. I haven’t read them. There are a lot of books I haven’t read. So, sure, probably hundreds of these gems exist, memoirs that will blow your mind. I’m sure someone will tell the world all about them, when they leave their critical review for this book online later: “Justine Bateman opens her book with an ignorant rant about the memoir genre.” Something like that. That’s OK.
I talked with a fair amount of book agents before finding the right one to represent me. Almost all of them wanted me to write a memoir, and not the book about Fame. Hey, maybe they thought I had lived a fascinating enough life for that, or maybe they just felt it was an easy sell. The book agent I finally really connected with never mentioned the word “memoir.” He just loved my writing, the subject matter of Fame, and said, “Let’s go.” He’s also Noam Chomsky’s agent. The American intellect and national treasure, Noam Chomsky. If Noam Chomsky’s book agent isn’t interested in this being a memoir, then no one else should be.
Even one of the publishers I met with, a big publisher, who I assumed was fascinated by the Fame subject matter because they had been anxious to set up a meeting, eventually hit me with, “Wouldn’t you rather write a memoir?”
Me, in their office, having just talked about Fame, the sociological theories, my theories, my experience, the experiences of other famous people I’d interviewed. Me, then announcing, “Just so you know, I’m not interested in writing any kind of memoir.” They looked at me, eyebrows raised in that maybe-you-didn’t-mean-that-aren’t-we-still-having-a-good-meeting kind of way. They half blurted out, “Well, don’t look around this room!”
It was only then that I actually did look around the office, and noticed that the shelves were lined with memoirs. You name the person, this company has published their memoir.
“Wouldn’t you rather write a memoir?”
Aw, you too?
What I did get out of that meeting, though, was a completely new direction for the book. Still about Fame (and not a goddamn memoir), but instead of the academic version I had already half-completed, rather a cut-to-the-bone, emotional-river-of-Fame book. (One that my current publisher loves, natch.)
Sheath
There’s this moment I keep flashing on. This scene. I’m on a couch, in a room. Closed French doors in front of me. I’m in Miami. At a friend’s place? A hotel? I don’t know. It’s in the early ’90s, I think. ’92, say. I’m sitting there. I’m alone. And I feel utterly lost as to how to handle people coming up to me, recognizing me. I had been solidly famous for a while. I was very famous. Can’t-go-anywhere-without-people-reacting famous. So, I’d had people coming up to me for a while. For a while. What was the fucking problem? Hadn’t I had enough practice? Hadn’t all those years of people coming up to me done it? Where was my resulting proficiency? Why wasn’t I a pro at this now? I still, STILL did not have some reliable way to deal with the public. I so badly wanted some dependable blanket-manner to lean on when people came up. It just never came. I was on edge, on guard, on. Antennae up, all senses pumping, looking, watching, waiting, primed, tense. How’s it going to come at me? It’s going to come at me. At what moment? What person, I mean what kind of person? A man. A dad? Wants an autograph for his daughter. So that’s it, but then a curveball: he tries to flirt with me when I hand the paper back. Me, shift gears, pull back the smile, cut that shit off. He’s pushed into the aren’t-we-having-a-nice-moment-thinking-about-your-daughter and “What’s her name?” Me, writing, Cheryl, All the best, Justine Bateman, and handing it to him. He slips into that door that’s wide open now, no suspicion necessary. The door’s not just ajar or half-open with a foot wedged behind the back of it to limit it, but wide open. The daughter, right? Writing something for the daughter.
Then, “I read that you don’t wear underwear.”
Yeah. Yeah. Y.E.A.H. Yeah, I remember that Playboy magazine interview. I said that. I said that. Oh shit, should I have said that? Surprised at seeing my interview verbatim, a fucking relief that I was finally seeing my words verbatim after years and pages and issues and interview after interview of having my words twisted or made up and shoved in my mouth so I sit there in print with the writer’s ripped and bloody assessment of me or “angle,” or whatever the fuck, spilling out of my mouth as if I had ever said any of that fucking shit or in that stupid way. Yeah, I remember that interview. Panty lines. Pantyhose under jeans on camera so there’d be no panty lines. That’s what I said. THAT’S WHAT I SAID, YOU FUCK.
So, yeah. Here’s the autograph for your daughter. The one who’s, how old is she? Eight, maybe? Nine? Here’s that autograph. And you read Playboy and you want me? Or you just wanted to say that, or you just wanted me to know you read my interviews? Which is it?
You go. You move on and I don’t know how the next person is going to come up to me. Soon. Soon, someone else will come up to me and I don’t know how. I don’t know what they are going to bring to the plate. I don’t know.
* * *
I started this book because I was thinking about how Fame is a mercurial, ephemeral energy, this thing, this smoke, this cloud. This thing that will make everyone in a restaurant stop being themselves, sit differently in their chairs for the whole time the celebrity stays in the room there. Talk differently now to their friend or business associate across the table.
“I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT THE FACT THAT SO-AND-SO IS SITTING RIGHT OVER THERE. SO CLOSE. RIGHT over there.”
“I remember when I saw that film they were in / that song they wrote / that home run they hit.”
“Oh fuck! People are going to freak when I tell them who I had dinner with. I mean, I could have touched them. That close. I brushed past them on my way to the bathroom!”
“I’ll just make it look like I’m checking my e-mail. Just hold my phone up a bit. Got the shot. Shit, kind of blurry. Do it again. If I hold it up a little higher, I can get my face in it too. Oh, that’s too good! Yeah, get my face in there too, hold the phone up just a little higher. Jesus, I got it. Hold on. Just a minute. I just gotta post this. Oh shit. Gotta post this to my Facebook. Holy shit. OK. OK. What were you saying . . . ? Sorry, you know, when will I ever get the chance, you know? They’re sitting right the fuck THERE!”
So, I was thinking about this, how it’s not even a real thing. Fame. Just this thing that society wants to have. For what? I wanted to cut it open and spread it out, grab a fork and get in it. Get the wisdom. Understand society’s need, the public’s need. So, I started. No big deal. Started writing. Really good academic stuff. But, I had a shipping container full of FEELINGS about it all. Fuck Fuck. FUCK. This was just supposed to be an exploration of the Phenomenon of Fame. Easy. Work, but easy. Not emotional, not some exploration of my own fucking feelings about me, about my Fame, about my current lack of it, relatively speaking. Fuck. But, no going back. Couldn’t pull out. Process them. Press those feelings through the colander. So, OK. My experiences, yeah. I’ll tell you what that was like: The Lifecycle of Fame. The Beginning, the Love, the Hate, the Equilibrium, the Slide, the Descent, the Without.
Fame. This thing that came upon me. I didn’t have it and then it was on me. I was without it, nowhere near it, not cultivating it, not looking for it, knew no one who had it, just unfamiliar with it, and then it was on me, enveloping me, encasing me in a sheath that I could look out of and see the world as I knew it before the Fame happened, but a sheath that now obscured anyone’s vision of me. Can you see me? You see the Fame. Can you ever not see that? Can you ever go back to seeing me without the sheath?
You know