Public Opinion and the Celebrity Image

During this tumultuous time of stock manipulation, world wars, and industrialized modernity, the American public became fascinated with, well, itself.  “In an early quest for self identification,” Amy Henderson writes in her work “Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture,” “Americans of the Revolutionary republic sought to derive a mythic national character by military heroes, romantic fictional characters, and prominent statesmen who embodied the ideals of virtue and self-reliance.  By the mid-twentieth century, the pedestal belonged not to politicians or generals, but to baseball players and movie stars” (49).  The departure from statesmen to thespian as the iconic American was in part attributed to the change over-time from a producing to a consuming economy (49).  Pastoral Protestantism gave way to the urban sprawl, and, like the towering skyscraper and corporate dissemination, the image of the celebrity sprouted, towered, and replicated itself throughout the nation.  In what Daniel Boorstein termed the “Graphic Revolution,” the reproducibility of art, the image, and the celebrity that resulted from the ease of mass distribution changed the notion, and face, of fame.

The Bowery section of New York City was the first to experience this urbane phenomenon:

“Publicity was crucial to theaters, and the increased competition spawned a flourishing poster and playbill business.  This in turn boosted the theatrical printing industry, which also turned out tickets, which were hawked by scalpers who wandered the Rialto crying, ‘I have seats in the front’!  Printers ran off new trade newspapers, which covered the drama industry, playscripts, in great demand out in the country, and sheet music, for sale to middle-class families with parlor pianos, likely purchased at Steinway’s Union Square showroom” (947)

Entertainment pulled itself out of the raucous and debauched gutter of the Lower East Side, and into America’s homes and heartland.  Actors and actresses, often used as the face of theater locally, now began to expand their celebrity out of Broadway and into the national sphere.  The immediacy of the dissemination of information, and the new expanse of celebrity across the nation, created a strain of demand larger, and temporally more constraining, than the star, thus the control of their image became just as, if not more, important than any of the talent they possessed.  Public opinion and public control would need to be manipulated in order to not only produce celebrity, but maintain its iconic status, and as such, celebrity influence and authorship became just as external as internal.  In a way, the star image is fabricated, and like other cultural projects, draw upon “other resources, institutions, and technologies.  Celebrity images are authored by studios, the mass media, public relations, agencies, fan clubs, gossip columnists, photographers, hairdressers, body-building coaches, athletic trainers, teachers, screenwriters, ghostwriters, directors, lawyers, and doctors” (Coombe 62).

The image of the celebrity, actually, may be more important than the celebrity themselves.  As Burrows notes, “Actors aiming for the big time, and stars who kept their image brightly burnished, both turned to stage photographers like Napoleon Sarony, who opened his famous Union Square studio in 1871.  Here actors posed in costume, with arresting props, before painted backgrounds, while the ‘father of artistic photography’ worked his flamboyant magic, deepening New Yorks’ capacity to manufacture ‘celebrities’ (947).

Margo Darling in The Big Money is defined by this ersatz subversion of the American ‘image’.  There is a scene where Dos Passos creates a Sarony-esque photographer, Sam Margolies, while Charley spectates, aloof in the beginning; but it isn’t until Margo undresses to nothing but a Spanish shawl that “Mr. A” turns his attention toward her with the purposefully placed adverb “intensely” (Dos Passos 265).  The viewer, and by extension the American public, is disinterested in Margo in her “streetclothes,” and it isn’t until Margo becomes sexualized “like on stage” that Charley, the reader, the viewer, et al., grant their attention.  As Clara Juncker examines in her work “Dos Passos’ Movie Star: Hollywood Success and American Failure”:

“Margo Dowling's climb to stardom is an ironic inversion of the American Success Myth. With the narrative cliches of a poor, but golden-haired orphan, a teenage rape and elopement, a dead child, pursuit by a millionaire's son, the period as an airplane magnate's mistress, modeling, and obscurity before discovery, Margo's story conforms to the paradigm of the American Dream. But, as Donald Pizer points out, Margo's Hollywood apotheosis "is achieved not by hard work and good luck but rather by the open exploitation of her sexuality and by her ability at every stage of her rise to achieve an effective level of phoniness.  By short-cutting the road to success through the prostitution of body and beliefs, the star devalues original American visions of opportunity and justice and takes her place among "your betrayers America" (BM 437)” (2)

Dos Passos even makes it a point to debase Margo to her image.  Near the end of The Big Money, a companion of Mary French points, during a chance meeting at a party with Margo, the rumor that, “if it’s true… [that] It seems she’s through; it seems that she’s no good for talkingpictures…voice sounds like the croaking of an old crow over the loudspeaker” (Dos Passos 442).  While Margo is more than capable to use her sexuality as currency with her numerous beaus, her voice would prove damaging to public opinion.  She has a face for the public sphere; the rest of her means nothing.  The public, like Charley, value Margo for nothing else but her image.

Public Opinion and the Celebrity Image