Celebrities do more harm than good

BY ROSE HOARE

Madonna and Gucci on the United Nations' lawn. Backstreet Boys' Kevin Richardson and Elmo on Capitol Hill. Lionel Richie, Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone at the World Economic Forum. Some of the world's most troubled places and august institutions have welcomed some of the world's dumbest, most insufferable entertainers, and one English columnist is saying "stop the madness".

Marina Hyde writes weekly columns on sport, politics and celebrity for the Guardian. Before that she worked on the Sun's showbiz desk and before that studied English at Oxford. Although she writes about it, she says she avoids sites and magazines that carry anonymously sourced gossip or paparazzi shots. She manages to find enough material for her thrice-weekly columns from things celebrities have said on the record.

In her new book, Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy, she collects some of the most egregious examples of celebrity power-tripping. The cumulative effect is ugly.

On the phone from London, she says, "It's a slightly worrying indictment of how far we've let entertainers inveigle themselves into places they perhaps shouldn't be at all."

They fill gaps in conversations quite nicely, but who really cares what celebrities do or say? The United Nations and a few world governments. "Some celebrities say reasonable things," says Hyde, "but I think they should stick to their day job and be entertainers because I don't think they're expert in any other field.

"I should say that I love premieres and parties and scandals and all those funny things you read about that's fine, that's celebrities in their place.

"When they become very famous, I think a lot of people thought that they would be very satisfied by their career. But then they aren't satisfied and they suddenly decide they want to be public intellectuals as well. They want to be taken seriously, they want gravitas, they want people to see them as amazing in another field. They feel they're not taken seriously just for being an actress.

"Which is ridiculous to me because I take actresses very seriously. If they're good at their job, I think they're great. But the idea that you would then be standing up in Baghdad trying to solve the Iraqi refugee crisis is completely preposterous. It's a displacement of two million people and I just don't really think that you can sort that out in a job share with making $15 million a movie."

Hyde's chapter on celebrity activism is particularly good. Celebrities actors, musicians tend to react emotionally and inexpertly to complex political and economic problems, drawing attention to them, sure, but, in the process, oversimplifying them. "You know what `raising awareness' is?" Hyde footnotes sarcastically in her book. "Cheaper than `giving money'."

They can also edge out people more committed and more qualified for the job, while undermining the moral seriousness of their message by leading a hypocritically profligate lifestyle. Leonardo DiCaprio, who made an environmental documentary, flies in private jets. Bono, who sits on Ireland's Hunger Task Force which lobbies the government to devote more funds to aid, and who frequently appeals for donations from Ireland's taxpayers, is himself tax-exiled to the Netherlands.

Hyde points out that, according to the Giving USA Foundation's research, the 40-year average for charitable giving is 2.2% of a household's income after tax. This is a relatively stable figure it was 2.2% in 2005, 2.3% in 2006 and 2007. This shows that celebrity advocates don't raise more money for charities; they just raise the same sums in a different way.

Hyde contends that it's now difficult for charities to be noticed without a celebrity spokesperson and, since celebrities tend not to support unglamorous causes like skin diseases or mental illness (they prefer Aids and Africa), she writes, "it's difficult not to conclude that celebrities don't just skew the debate: they monopolise funding that in a less febrile atmosphere might have found its way to a needier cause."

For some reason, US actress Sharon Stone attended the World Economic Forum in 2005 and, after listening to the president of Tanzania talking about how insecticide-treated mosquito nets can guard against malaria, she found herself, out of the blue, eliciting pledges from the audience. "Just stand up!" she cried, "stand up and people will take your name!" Except only a quarter of the $1 million pledged was collected so Unicef had to kick in the shortfall.

And Stone hadn't done her research. In the Wall Street Journal, an economics professor revealed that some African governments distribute nets free through hospitals, which people sell on the black market so they can buy something they want more. A doctor sitting beside the economics professor at the forum had whispered that, although one million children die of malaria every year, two million die of diarrhoea, but he doubted that Sharon Stone would have found that so moving.

"Sharon Stone hails from a crazy Hollywood golden age where every time she opens her mouth something completely ridiculous pops out," Hyde says, with relish. And she's only one type of column-worthy crazy.

"In general, the ones that believe in these bizarre religions or that they are actually saving the world are quite helpful," she says, "because they tend to speak out a lot and have no sense of self-awareness and no sense of how ridiculous it is."

Giant celebrities like Madonna and Tom Cruise go in for recherche, bizarre religions like Kabbalah and Scientology because, Hyde says, they like the exclusivity. "Like having an amazing hair stylist my religion is quite niche and extraordinary.

"They're also religions of personal empowerment. Not necessarily if you're one of the rank and file believers, but if you're Madonna or Tom Cruise, it's about `you can do everything'. You're almost the godhead. Unlike other religions, which tend to emphasise your speck of dust nature in the face of the deity.

"And celebrities who are quite used to being worshipped really don't want to become worshippers. They would rather be personally inspired by a blend of hocus pocus and slightly odd pseudoscience."

So silly are some of the claims made about specially blessed Kabbalah water that it can cure Aids and cancer, that it can neutralise radioactivity from Chernobyl, that it cured Guy Ritchie's verrucas that Hyde advocates legal intervention.

"Celebrity endorsement is nothing more than advertising without regulation," she writes.

"Given that celebrities tend to come out with this stuff during interviews to promote personally enriching projects, perhaps one radical answer would be to treat such outbursts as commercials and subject them to the same censure and legal scrutiny."

There's something more sinister, potentially lethal, about Uma Thurman's praise of gem therapy or Gwyneth Paltrow's claim that "eating biological foods" can halt cancer people believe them.

Hyde points out that celebrities such as Michael J Fox or Lance Armstrong, who have actually battled illnesses, invariably refer people back to their doctors. Kylie Minogue was fastidious about correcting stories that claimed she had undergone "some fringe voodoo treatment" for her breast cancer, "because she realised, worryingly, how influential she was.

"The sad fact is that people do copy celebrities," Hyde says, "and they do also think that perhaps because celebrities are rich and have access to all the best doctors, if they are embracing some kooky treatment then it must be because it works."

Not content with damaging our health, celebrities are also assaulting our democratic rights. When Angelina Jolie-Pitt headed to Namibia to birth baby Shiloh Nouvel by scheduled caesarean, her bodyguard cordoned off roads, assaulted a restaurant owner and used pepper spray. House-to-house searches were conducted in case locals were hiding media. The Namibian government enforced a no-fly zone above the coast where Pitt and Jolie's five-star hotel was, and the Namibian embassy in Pretoria told journalists they needed permission in writing from Pitt and Jolie to get an entry visa. Journalists were deported, their equipment confiscated and one was arrested.

Jolie, one of the "goodwill ambassadors" for the UN, who has "Know your rights" tattooed on the back of her neck, had effectively seized control of Namibia's borders and airspace and, as Phil ya Nangoloh, director of Namibia's National Society for Human Rights observed, brought its democratic status into serious question.

After the birth, Jolie told CNN that Namibians, who obtained independence in 1990, have "just recently learned to govern themselves" and "we need to be there to really support them at that time, to help them to understand better how to govern".

A Namibian farmer told the New Statesman, "The restricting of local and international press, and this pseudo-royal attitude, are the exact opposite of what Namibia needs. People who, for years, tried to build a democratic society can only shake their heads at this."

Hyde is also critical of the other side of the coin. If celebrities are hypocritical and false, so are gossip magazines. If celebrities are morally bankrupt or grossly insecure, so are editors and readers.

She also deplores the ghastly tone of fake concern that's commonly rung, which she describes as "that of a well-meaning friend who recently read The Dummies Guide to Tough Love, and is now mainlining truth serum".

Hyde gives an example of the sort of quotes that result: "Britney feels she has nothing to live for and she doesn't care how repulsively fat she gets or what a shadow of her former self she becomes. It's so sad."

Poor Britney. The internet's most popular search term for the past four years, worth an estimated $120 million a year to the American economy. Last year she was photographed exiting a car with her hemline caught up in her jacket, revealing stained knickers. She was photographed sitting barefoot on a kerb, crying and clutching a lapdog, after an argument with gorgon manager Sam Lutfi. She was photographed being carried from her house on a gurney, hospital-bound, after an argument with ex-husband Kevin Federline.

"Anyone who publishes those pictures should know that they're basically complicit in the mental torture of someone who's mentally ill," says Hyde, who thinks the paparazzi's predation has worsened since the death of Princess Diana.

"They wouldn't have hounded Ronald Reagan when he had Alzheimer's at the end of his life, but they're perfectly happy to do it to her."

Readers of celebrity gossip magazines primarily women seem to cycle through excitable idealisation of celebrity lives, which leads to self-loathing, which leads to resentment, which leads to an ugly thirst for stories about celebrity suffering.

Hyde suspects this is partly because actresses lie about what fantastic, happy mothers they are. "You always hear people like Catherine Zeta Jones saying `I get up in the night when the baby cries and I make all the food myself and I love ironing their clothes'. It's just not true. It's physically impossible to do all that and make two major motion pictures every year. Most people find it hard enough to hold down any sort of normal job.

"And they always make out that they look glamorous all the time and I think it's actually really unsisterly. I'd be tempted to say `God, it's a bloody nightmare! No, the nanny does everything', but they need to be someone who brings in $10 million a movie, someone who's an earth mother, someone who adores the simple things in live these extraordinary confections.

"It's a shame people aren't more honest, but perhaps they feel guilty about the way they live their lives and they don't see their kids as much as they'd like I don't know but it certainly makes ordinary people feel slightly hopeless about themselves."

They need, Hyde suggests, to grow up and get some perspective. "No one minds a bit of scandal and gossip but just to devour all these magazines and speak about these people as though they were your friends and have really serious views on the dress they wore to something and their weight gain I find that an indication of a vast emptiness."

Celebrity, by Marina Hyde, available from June 5; Harvill Secker, distributed by Random House; $37.99.

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