In 1967, soon after releasing his debut album, David Bowie typed a reply to his first ever American fan letter. He was so happy to have heard from this girl, Sandra, that he wrote back in some detail. “I’ve been waiting for some reaction to the album from American listeners,” he said. “There were reviews in Billboard and Cash Box, but they were by professional critics and they rarely reflect the opinions of the public. The critics were very flattering however. They even liked the single Love You Till Tuesday. I’ve got a copy of the American album and they’ve printed the picture a little yellow. I’m not really that blond. I think the picture on the back is more ‘me’. Hope you like those enclosed.” (Is it just me who is rendered a touch hysterical by the idea of a young Bowie, in the days before he went into character as a drugged alien in flaming leotards and zigzags painted across his head, yearning to look a bit more “me”?)
This lengthy epistle, reprinted in the forthcoming book More Letters Of Note, looks set to prove the first rule of stardom, which is just how much all famous people want to be famous at the start – even the ones who later decide to become invisible. Bowie might be a reclusive enigma now, but in 1967 he was asking his first overseas fan whether he should open an American fan club as well as his existing British one.
While Celebrity Big Brother rages across our screens, full of desperate, wretched (and often gripping) people who seem to lurch from one reality show to the next, it is good to remember that it isn’t just them, the Kardashians and the Beckhams who want to be famous. The mysterious, enigmatic, intellectual ones want it, too. The Bowies, the Tilda Swintons, the Zaha Hadids – they all, at one point, yearned to be so successful that they could no longer walk down the street without wearing massive sunglasses in November.
With some, it is more covert: Bowie probably wouldn’t have spoken publicly about worries that his hair was the wrong shade of yellow on the album sleeve, whereas a Kardashian would have got three episodes of a TV show, a press conference, and a magazine exclusive out of this revelation. But it is still there.
The second rule of stardom is that they all say they don’t read their reviews, and they all lie, as I have learned in the course of doing many interviews. They never, ever even look at the papers, they say – and then they ask you about a particular colleague of yours who wrote something so horrible that they contemplated hiring an assassin and having him killed, and why couldn’t they have been reviewed by that other writer who seems so much nicer? This is the point where you realise they are not lying: they really don’t read their reviews – they consume them with every inch of their body.
The third rule of fame is that sometimes you meet the nicest, friendliest sorts and find yourself wishing they were more like the recluses. Once, having recently moved to Los Angeles, I was dispatched by the NME to interview the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, commonly referred to as “the nicest man in rock”, at his house “in the hills”. It turned out these were not the Hollywood Hills, as I had wrongly assumed, but some other hills much farther away, making my taxi ride very expensive, which is why I jumped out of the cab the minute we reached his gates.
I pressed the intercom and a man who sounded strangely like Dave Grohl answered, explaining how to drive up to the house. Embarrassed that I had moved to LA without learning to drive, and realising I had sent the cab driver away too soon, I hastily agreed with the voice I decided must belong to a butler. It would all be fine, I reassured myself, as Dave would be buried inside his mansion somewhere with no idea that I didn’t have a car. Fifteen minutes later, I made it to the front door, where Grohl stood chortling at me, having watched me hike across his property, while trying to hide my sweat patches, on his CCTV.
Now Mr Grohl is a very charming man, but there are times when you yearn for an enigma like the latterday Bowie, who would surely have taken one look at my damp armpits and been too polite, too otherworldly to say a thing.
