America's Own Cult of Personality

By Thomas Griffin

Newswatch/Thomas Griffin

The marketing of personality is changing from a cottage to a growth industry. Johnny, Merv, Mike, Dick and Kup go on forever, with their interchangeable guests. Barbara Walters gives up anchoring for the interviewing she's better at, PEOPLE magazine is a spectacular success.

The trend coincides with a current journalistic emphasis, even in the respectables, on what is interesting, against what is important. (The important may make a comeback in news interest but at the moment lacks either the urgency of danger or the stimulus of hope.) Recognizing this shift, politicians constantly conduct polls about their image and resist too much identity with substance. So watch Jerry Brown proving how zealous he is at implementing the Proposition 13 he fought. Note Jimmy Carter, falling in the ratings but still registering high for likability.

Everywhere the cult of personality prevails. Some stiff-necked resistance comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who argues for the public's right not to know, "not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk." His own American experience illustrates the difference between gossip and "personality" journalism: though an authentic personality, Solzhenitsyn is allowed his right to privacy. There is less of journalistic prying now, even though gossip and gossip columning are still around. Gossip flourishes particularly in Washington, where political hypocrisy still lends savor to misbehavior. More familiar nowadays are volunteered surrenders of privacy. Celebrityhood lives by publicity and must be ready to be "interesting" on cue.

In Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer described how, with success, he became "a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality, and status. Other people, meeting me, could now unconsciously measure their own status by sensing how I reacted to them . . . Success had been a lobotomy to my past."

Celebrityhood is full of lobotomy cases, skilled at not topping Johnny's lines and at flogging their book or plugging their Vegas engagement. "What a trial to be Norman Mailer, Billy Carter, Farrah Fawcett-Majors," John Leonard has written, "to have to grow a personality along the lines of one you invented, the one that sold; to have to compete with other fabricated personalities, inflations of cunning, blimps of ego." Celebrities also must cope with skeptical magazine profilers bent on finding the "real" person underneath.

A subspecies of celebrity is made up of those instant young show-biz successes who so often make the covers of the magazines at the check-out counters. The editors, aiming at young spenders, obviously know their market. But if punk-rock music doesn't interest you, a punk-rock star's life won't either--being totally occupied with self and titillating, if at all, only for the offhand candor about living arrangements and drug experiences. A historian, an architect, a playwright, a woman Cabinet member, a Nobel scientist--all of these have lived longer, reflected more, rubbed up against more experience and have more to say. An oddity of this kind of journalism (well known to the unyoung among its readers) is that the most interesting people aren't on the cover, but wait modestly to be discovered inside.

Fashions in public curiosity do change: once biographies were moral, meant to inspire emulation, as in the lives of saints or successful businessmen. Then came debunking journalism. Now, in a time of uncertain standards, the narrative style is neutral, deadpan: intending neither praise nor censure, but prepared to settle for provocative quotes and a plausible likeness. Readers too seem less judgmental, interested less in someone's character than in his or her "life-style." That mood could change, and if it did, so would the journalism. But an interest in people won't go away: it is as old as Plutarch, and apt to survive as long as humans do.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.