Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (19 page)

More than motor control, they lose control of syntax. It’s very common for someone to come up to a famous person and say, “You’re my biggest fan.” This has happened not just a few times to
me,
but many times to every well-known person I’ve asked about it. “You’re my biggest fan,” they say.

I wondered what the psychiatrists would make of this.

What does this mean? They’re starting to say, “You’re my favorite…” and midway confusing it with “I’m your fan.” There seems to be a confusion of identity. I am you and you are me. It sounds a little like what Freud said in
Civilization and Its Discontents:
“At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one….”

Why these exact words, over and over again? “You’re my biggest fan.” Is there an unconscious desire to resist the power they feel the famous person has over them? You’re
my
fan. You don’t have power over me, I have power over
you.
Or maybe not. Maybe in this case a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes, although rarely, there is actual hostility. I was scouting locations for
Sweet Liberty,
a movie I was going to direct on Long Island. It had been a long fourteen-hour day when I stopped to fill up at a gas station late at night. A short, wiry man came over to the car and leaned in the window. He asked for an autograph. I said I was sorry, I didn’t give autographs, but I’d be glad to shake his hand. He said, “I don’t want to shake your hand! You know something? You’re not that great an actor. You just play the same part over and over.” He was giving me a critical review at midnight next to a gas pump. Then he got more specific. He called to a friend: “Let’s beat this guy up.” His fantasy disappointed and his rage aroused, he was no longer the pleasant Dr. Jekyll I had offered to shake hands with. I pulled my face back from the open window and drove off on an empty tank.

But it usually isn’t hostility that surfaces. People’s emotions are stirred in a way I don’t fully understand. I was having dinner in a restaurant once, and a few tables away a woman in her thirties put down her fork and stared at me with a vulnerable, confused expression. It was early in my career, and I didn’t know how to react. Should I nod? Should I say something? I decided to do nothing and went on eating. A few seconds later, there were tears coming down her face. I didn’t know what to do. I froze. We sat there, staring at each other. And then she started sobbing. Big, heaving sobs. She got up from the table, her dinner half-eaten, and left the restaurant.

Why are we so disoriented by the sight of a famous person? We’ve seen these famous people on a screen in a darkened room, which is a dreamlike state. Is that why, when that person steps magically out of our dreams and into reality, we become disoriented?

Sometimes we think that objects touched by the famous have some special importance. My family and I were having breakfast in a pancake house once, and as we were leaving, the family at the next table asked my wife, “Is he finished with his napkin?” It was sticky from syrup and egg stains, but they took it as a souvenir. To some extent,
most
of us can behave this way. I certainly have. I bought an original Rembrandt etching once because it was beautiful—and also, when I think about it, because Rembrandt had touched it. Later, I was afraid I might have bought a fake, but I never quite found out for sure. (This way, he
might
have touched it.)

Fame is an aphrodisiac. It bestows sex appeal on you. When Bill Clinton was running for president, he appeared on MTV and a young woman in the audience asked him if he wore boxers or briefs. Soon after I started on
M*A*S*H,
I was asked the same question by two young women who came over to me in a bar. They said they couldn’t get over having laughed at all the funny things I said on television. Hoping to defuse their interest, I introduced them to the two good-looking young writers from the show I was there with. These were the people who had actually
written
the funny things I said. But they weren’t famous, and the women had no interest in them
or
in their underwear.

We tend to think that
rich
and
famous
go together, but fame takes more getting used to than being rich does. The difficult part of celebrity is when you’re recognized not for what you do, but simply for being famous. It can be moving when someone tells you that your work has affected them in some way. But when you’re only a facade, as recognizable as the Empire State Building and about as emotionally moving, the feeling is different. I had known, of course, that signing on for a television show would involve getting better known, and I thought I could handle it—but now, people were pulling at me, yanking at my clothing, grabbing me.

I felt I was being hunted. For months, I had night terrors in which I saw a shadowy figure in my bedroom in the middle of the night, glaring at me, and I would wake up screaming. After a while, I would wake up while he was strangling me. This was a little harder to take than the checks that were accumulating in the dresser drawer.

After the shadowy figure stopped dropping in every night, I got a visit on the set one day from the FBI. Two agents came to tell me a young woman had escaped from a mental hospital in Florida. She had a gun and was headed for California, where she was going to get revenge on Alan Alda and Clint Eastwood. It seems Clint and I had abducted her in Los Angeles a couple of years earlier, and she was coming after me with a handgun. I thanked the agents, and we put a guard on the door at Stage Nine for a while.

More difficult, though, than the way people react to who they
think
you are is that you can’t be who you really are. Albert Camus felt that the public man can’t be private in public or he destroys the public image.

Something like this happened to the soccer player Zinedine Zidane (known affectionately in France as Zizou) in 2006 during the World Cup. He was thrown out of the game when he head-butted another player. Zidane, who later said that his mother and sister had been insulted repeatedly by the player, acted in a moment of rashness, not as a famous athlete with constraints, but as the private person he was underneath. A lot of articles were published about this, with some writers picking up on the Camus idea, suggesting that Zidane, consciously or unconsciously, was lashing out not only at the player who had insulted him, but also, as one said, at “the unlivable role he had been slotted into by the French.” He had to play the part of Zizou, an idealized national hero—a role that was impossible to live up to. In this way, the public image can be a cage. It can inhibit growth or change of any kind. Popular artists have trouble deepening the work they got popular for, and politicians have trouble simply changing their minds.

As your public persona grows, it becomes based, in part, on some aspect of you, but to a large extent on descriptions of you by people who don’t actually know you. The image flies around like the goddess of rumor and builds until it may be seriously at odds with who you really are. In any case, it’s not a three-dimensional picture. If you have any desire at all to be human, you want to have at least one more dimension beyond the two that are allotted to a cartoon character. But it’s hard to escape the public character you become. Mine was “Mr. Nice Guy.” It became my nickname. It started early in the run of
M*A*S*H
with a
Newsweek
headline: “Nice Guy Finishes First.” The headline hooked into a cliché and turned it around slightly, lodging in the minds of other writers, who repeated it, amplifying the effect. I didn’t mind it at first, but when I began to see it was becoming my identity, I bristled. Especially when I started being told I was
“too
nice.” It became harder to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and legal equality when people could dismiss my arguments as the sentimental oozings of a weakling. But once the phrase caught on, it was unstoppable. Ten years later, the writer of the article introduced himself to me. “Hi,” he said apologetically, “I’m the one who started it.” But to be admired and derided at the same time was probably going to happen anyway, and according to Samuel Johnson, I should have welcomed it. He said, “It is advantageous to an author, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.” But that sounds to me more like a description of why fame isn’t worth it.

I was able to wait it out, and eventually it pretty much went away. Camus, who died young, never really had the time to wait it out. In an interview he gave when he was forty-five, the year before he died, a reporter asked him: “Do you find yourself at ease in your personality as a writer?” He said, “Very much at ease in my private relationships. But the public aspect of my calling, which I have never liked, is becoming unbearable.”

But none of us is immune; people keep coming along who are sure that fame will solve their problems. Instead, I’ve seen them become despondent. It turned out they had the same problems as before, but magnified, and now they even had a few more. We suppose that the attention we’ll get will feel like we’re being adored. It never occurs to us that it might feel, instead, like being hunted. Sometimes it’s both.

As loved as she was, Princess Diana was also hunted. Her public persona was loved by a whole nation who never knew her. They loved her so much that after she died and Elizabeth didn’t quickly make a public display of grieving, they began to reconsider their love for a queen they had loved and whom they had also never known.

I met Diana a few years before she died. I met her because I was famous and she was famous. I was acting in a play in the West End of London, and one day, for some reason I can’t remember, all the theater people in town were invited to lunch. I went and was surprised to see that I was seated next to Princess Diana. I knew by now that the only way to speak to a famous person was as a person, not as someone famous; to talk about their job, their interests, something simple and human. When famous people meet, they often go out of their way to speak simply, idiomatically, sometimes even using slang and coarse language to deflect any sense of trying to appear special to the other person. When I see photographs of world figures with their heads thrown back in abandoned laughter, I think one of them has probably just said something startlingly ordinary to break the ice.

I tried to be direct with Diana, but it came out a little forced.

“It must be hard, having to go out day after day and make these public appearances. Probably at a lot of places where you don’t even really want to go.” If I was awkward, she was gracious and answered me simply and with a certain amount of force.

“It was
very
hard in the beginning. And they didn’t give me any help at all—the family. They just shoved me out there and let me figure it out for myself.”

She was angry, and I was surprised at her candor, because she was still a member of the British royal family at that point. We chatted some more, and the lunch was over, but I remembered her vulnerability.

Then six years later, pursued by paparazzi in a Paris tunnel, her car crashed and a few hours later she died. People around the world were sorrowful. And I found myself angry at the photographers who I felt had hounded her to her death. Three days later, I had to fly to California, and as I got off the plane, there was a photographer waiting in the terminal. I hadn’t been on prime-time television for years. I wasn’t hot. There was no reason to be lying in wait for me. But these guys would bribe people working for the airlines for a look at the manifest list and then take pictures of anyone well known, in the hope they might do something inappropriate, or be with someone they shouldn’t, or stagger off the plane drunk. I ignored him, but then he began that ritualistic backward walk: always facing me, snapping the shutter, and flashing his strobe in my face; leading me in a compliant dance of self-betrayal. Hiding my face from him would be as good a picture as posing and smiling; even better. I had a flash of anger. I turned on him and put my face in his. He took a step back toward the wall.

“How dare you?” I said. “How dare you do this, three days after what just happened?” I felt she had been hunted, as I had been when fame first hit me. But I had had the time and the luck to adjust. For me, the discontents of celebrity had leveled off, but hers had only deepened.

The photographer didn’t know what I was talking about. I was blaming him for being a member of the tribe that had killed her, and he looked at me as if I were a little out of my head. And to some extent, I was. A touch more testosterone and I might have turned into Zidane. But my anger didn’t change anything. It contributed nothing to my contentedness.

For this discontent to go away, or at least diminish, I think the trick is to somehow be able to live both a public life and a private life at the same time, without one threatening or destroying the value of the other.

I looked at my watch.

I see we’re coming to the end of the hour—and it’s time for the cure. If you don’t mind, I’ll go ahead and administer it myself.

I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, the antidote to the discontents of the public face is to be as authentic as possible—to be simply who I am, both in my public face and in my private one.

So what we’ll do is, we’ll take this boy—born into a life of illusion, bred by a mother who had hallucinations, trained in the art of being someone else, and who found himself known for someone he only partly resembled—and we’ll give him a new identity.

After a life of trying many others, this one may work best. The identity we’ll give him is himself.

I felt pretty good about the talk. I had tried to be honest with them, and putting my tangled feelings into words had unraveled a few knots in them. Their questions were generous and supportive. I’d spoken in a place where I didn’t really belong, and I seemed to have got away with it again.