Even so, to universal tabloid rejoicing, the Sussexes are moving back to Britain. Though maybe only for a bit. And Chuck wasn’t told till the last minute. And Harry is still on non-speakers with Wills. And maybe it’s just for Meghan’s work. Except why are they even doing this when they said they’d never? What about the millions Harry owes the Mail? And so on.

The dichotomy that stands out, amid all the rubbernecking and rumor-mongering, is “public” and “private”. Megxit was all about Harry and Megs being private individuals, so well-known for appearing in public to tell us how desperately they needed their privacy they even got a South Park segment about their Privacy World Tour. 

But despite being so private, Harry is still angling for the British public to pay for his security. But this doesn’t really make sense. Why would he be entitled to a state-funded heavy with an earpiece, if he’s just a private individual? Aren’t famous rich people expected to pay for their own bodyguards? 

Harry’s difficulty is trying to reconcile two mutually exclusive kinds of fame: the kind that comes with high-profile public service, and the kind that comes with individual celebrity. In this sense, the nearest parallel — both in terms of divisiveness, and in terms of ambiguity — isn’t Britain’s panoply of still-living ex-PMs, but a man currently angling to join their number. The only Brit, in fact, clickbait-friendly enough to out-clickbait Prince Harry, and who functions even more powerfully as a human Rorschach test: Nigel Farage. 

Farage, too, has been in the news lately in connection with arguments over his security and the nature of his public profile. To Farage’s admirers, he’s a hero and public servant: Britain’s last chance of escaping the Uniparty and restoring something more like the status quo ante Blair. To his many haters, meanwhile, he’s the odious imp responsible for the calamity of Brexit, whose comeback was oiled by almost winning I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here! and whose conduct in public life has always indecorously blurred the lines between lucrative media and celebrity appearances, and purportedly selfless public service. 

Amid this ambiguous maelstrom, Farage argues that the divisiveness of his public role has placed him at such grave risk of public attack that the Home Office should offer him greater state-funded protection than has hitherto been available. He has further asserted that the £5m donation at the center of the current parliamentary standards investigation was intended to help him with security costs the government refuses to cover. The whole debate became still grimmer following the murder of Reform migration spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe at her home. 

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So is Farage a celebrity or a political figure? Greedy grifter or vulnerable public servant whose safety is in the national interest? Harry, meanwhile, hasn’t (to my knowledge at least) received any undeclared donations from crypto bros of any kind. But — albeit perhaps for different reasons — he too acts as a kind of human Rorschach test, variously perceived (including perhaps by himself) as “public” as in high-profile public service, and “public” as in lucratively famous. 

In Harry’s case this isn’t down to a role in parliamentary politics. It is instead the result of the unique nature of the “working royals” as public figures methodically insulated from the faintest whiff of commercial grabbiness. 

Being “royal”, as far as royalty has operated in Britain since the last absolute monarch was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is largely symbolic. The human individuals born royal are employed as symbolic placeholders for absolutism within a parliamentary democracy. It’s a weird job, one that comes with certain privileges, but also makes demands as well, especially when it comes to monetizing your public profile. 

In a way that has some parallels with the restrictions on politicians, there is a profound taboo on monetizing living royals. Royalty works, inasmuch as it does work, by making the royals generic and representative. Celebrity is the exact opposite; it assembles an individual personal brand and privatizes any profits. Kate and Wills understand this dynamic and play along with a mix of dutiful reserve and understated wokeness that is (if you’ve spent any time around Britain’s upper castes) impeccably small-c conservative. 

Harry, though, was always the wild one. It was Harry who went to a fancy-dress party dressed as a Nazi; who saw combat and then blabbed about slotting jihadis; who Went Too Far by getting therapy and reinventing himself as the Royal Lolcow with that awful memoir. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he clearly never had a sufficiently bland personality to be wholly comfortable with a role as silent figurehead. 

And it was also Harry who inherited his mother’s morbid fascination with the other kind of public life: the individual celebrity personal brand. Despite (so he recounts in That Memoir) an abiding fear of loved ones being hounded to death by the press, he somehow still married an actress and couldn’t stop reappearing in the public eye to demand privacy. And Meghan, meanwhile, clearly never understood the difference between royalty and celebrity. 

This is perhaps understandable: America is a republican, entrepreneurial culture, and from that perspective it’s easy to see how royalty might be conflated with personal brand. Or perhaps it was just her. In any case, the result was wall-to-wall cringe, made even worse whenever Harry joined in. 

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Among the deeply bonkers, predominantly American “Sussex Squad” royal fandom, which seized on Megxit as a re-run of 1776, the settled narrative is that Markle was expelled from the Firm for being “too Black”. But the reality is the opposite: it was clear when they married that the British establishment and much of the public were over the moon at the prospect of a Diverse Royal. It was the deeply un-royal grabbiness and oversharing, not Meghan’s epidermis, that turned the British public against them. For lovers of royalty-as-represention, the idea of monetizing that aura prompts the kind of revulsion reserved for people who fundraise “for good causes” then (cough — Captain Tom — cough) trouser the proceeds.

Meghan had no such qualms. When the Sussexes announced their decision to step back as working royals, they simultaneously applied to trademark “Sussex Royal” and turn their HRH status into a lifestyle brand. Correctly sensing the imminent disaster of “HRH”-branded scatter cushions in Target, the Palace briskly put a stop to these maneuvers, spiking the brand application and drawing sharp lines to delineate the Sussexes’ activities from anything that might resemble “working royal” duties. The couple were only allowed to retain their “HRH” titles provided these were never employed in any public or commercial capacity. 

Various tell-all cringefests have followed, to media fascination and cold Palace fury. And after all that, who can blame the Firm for wanting to ensure that their exit was unambiguous and their status simply that of private individuals, as they said they wanted? Accordingly Ravec, the committee that manages security for British public figures, has also treated them thus, ruling not only that Harry’s security should not be publicly funded, but that he would not be allowed to access government protection even if he reimbursed the taxpayer. Wealthy private individuals, even those closely related to the King, don’t get to rent armed protection from the British government. 

But Harry seems not to want what he says he wants — nor perhaps to understand that you can’t be both a working royal and a regular celeb. Or, less charitably, perhaps he’s just realized he is rubbish at being a celebrity but can’t quite bring himself to go full Prodigal Son. All the Sussexes’ American ventures bombed, and there are still no HRH scatter cushions. Meanwhile Harry’s Invictus Games project is in Britain, and now Guy Ritchie has reportedly offered Megs a job. It turns out the only things they were ever good at were the two jobs they tried to leave behind, and then, disastrously, to merge: being a regular TV actress, and a working royal. 

Now they seem to want it both ways again. He’s clearly angling for a kind of Premium Economy sort-of-royal status. Between this and his charitable gyrations it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he longs to be a public representative again, like his nan. But his wife is just as clearly yearning to return to that other, mutually exclusive kind of fame. And if there’s one thing Harry could glean from the ongoing Farage farrago, it’s that the way to make yourself maximally vulnerable to press harassment is by trying to combine celebrity with public service. 

So, assuming Harry was telling the truth about not enjoying such harassment, the Sussexes face a straight choice between symbolic representation and the celebrity kind. In other words, between Harry’s vocation and Meghan’s. Assuming he wants to stay married, in Harry’s shoes I’d be beginning to wonder what secret third thing would allow me to be famous, and politically powerful, and symbolically representative. 

Under what circumstances could he enjoy both kinds of public aura? The answer is: it could, in theory, be done. But to achieve this, Harry would need to reach much further back than his grandma’s reign, to the monarchy as it was before his branch of the family got anywhere near it. That is, to royalty as it was understood in the British Isles before 1688. And with the exception of the other, even more bonkers, fringe of royal fandom, no one is quite ready for that — least of all Harry, or Meghan, or indeed Nigel Farage.  

In the first scene, Price is looking at magazine covers from her glamour model heyday in the late Nineties and early 2000s: Loaded, Maxim, Front. Back then, she went by the pseudonym Jordan, and doesn’t like what she sees. “Ugly. Absolute ugly,” she says. The only time she softens is when she picks up some photos of herself at five and seven. “Ah, she’s quite a pretty little girl. Gentle eyes. Innocent. No idea what was coming ahead of me.”

Her words are slurred and nasal, because her teeth — glaring white and fitted in Turkey, in exchange for an Instagram post — are too big for her mouth. (She’s said that she doesn’t recommend anybody have fake teeth: “I can’t eat a chocolate eclair now in case I pull one out.”) After innumerable tweakments, her face today looks alien, like a Bratz doll’s. She recently had surgery to remove scar tissue from migrated filler. Her breasts, of course, are enormous, absurd. They almost distract from how tiny the rest of her body is: take away the implants, and she would likely be underweight.

All of this, Price insists, is how she wants to be. Back when she was a Page 3 girl with unaugmented breasts, The Sun ran a poll asking its readers whether she should have a surgery. (Headline: “MY BOOBS ARE IN YOUR HANDS”.) 80% voted against. Price ignored them. She also ignored the fact that implants were banned from Page 3, meaning that getting them was potentially career-ending — especially the ostentatiously fake, “stuck-on” ones she wanted.

In one sense, Price made the right decision. Her new body coincided exactly with the needs of the booming lad-mag market. “My pictures,” she says in the series, “were pornographic without being pornographic.” The artificial extremity of her figure turned her softcore poses into obscenities, and the precocious innocence of her Bardot-ish face (the face she now considers ugly) layered on the perversity. Every title wanted her as a cover girl because, simply, she shifted copies. Something about her mix of innocence and artifice made her into a provocation: men want to pick her up and possess her.

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From when she was a teenager, she says in the documentary, she understood how to incite male attention, and she loved it. None of this sounds like it’s about sex for her: the pleasure was all in the power she had to make men look at her, without giving them what they wanted. She explains that liked to be looked at — and she knew her sexuality could guarantee that — but not to be touched. She traces this impulse back to an incident that occurred when she was seven years old, when a strange man molested her in the park near her home.

Maybe as traumatizing as the abuse was the invasive way the police treated her when they investigated, taking away her underwear. “There’s habitual abuse of men against me. Taking advantage of me from a young age for their own self-benefit,” Price says. (In her adult life, she’s revealed that she’s been raped twice, once by a celebrity and once during a carjacking in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, she has PTSD.) There seems to be a direct line between the powerless victimhood she experienced as a child, and the deforming insistence on absolute bodily autonomy that has shaped Price into what she is today.

In 2000, against the backdrop of Price’s vertiginous rise to fame and her cultural dominance, Michel Faber published the novel Under the Skin. It’s about an alien called Isserley who has been sent to Earth. In order to pass as human, her entire body has been surgically reconstituted, causing her constant pain: under daylight, she looks obviously freakish, but in the dark it’s enough (or anyway her gigantic bosom is enough) to captivate men. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though,” thinks one of the hitchhikers Isserley picks up. “Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows — no wonder her top was long-sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that…”

Isserley’s reconstruction means she can’t have sex (“The tangle of knotted flesh between her legs she didn’t touch or examine; it was a lost cause”), making her the epitome of the woman who can be lusted for but not possessed. That doesn’t matter, because she isn’t seducing these men for intercourse: she’s bait, luring humans so they can be processed for the meat market on her home planet. Whatever debased things these men think about her as they sit in her car, Isserley is the one abusing them, not the other way around. Her modified body grants her supreme power.

Whether Faber was directly inspired by Price or not, her image was predatory too. That perception was solidified by the fact that she had a relationship with Pop Idol contestant Gareth Gates when he was 17 and she was 24. His agent told him to deny they were together — Price, they said, was career death to a teen idol like him. She sold the kiss-and-tell story of taking his virginity while she was pregnant with her first baby, conceived with the footballer Dwight Yorke.

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In the documentary, both she and Gates talk about their time together with tenderness and respect: he doesn’t seem scarred by his fling with an older woman, but it’s clear from the way he talks about the coverage that her scorched-earth strategy hurt him personally. Meanwhile, it gave her profile a boost. The more outrageous Price could be, the more the press ate her up. She was a Noughties succubus: a female demon who could be portrayed as seducing men to their destruction.

And in the same way that Isserley’s unnatural cleavage distracts men from everything that should be disturbing about the rest of her, Price’s ever-expanding chest seemed to distract from the fact that there was something not quite right about her. Only occasionally did anyone seem to notice that she might not be OK. Nothing to Hide includes striking archive footage of the comedian Frank Skinner interviewing her in 2001, after she revealed her pregnancy, and — with kindness that belied his new lad image — telling her that she seemed vulnerable.

She was: a year before she had attempted suicide following a break-up. But there was no room for weakness in her public image. When her baby, Harvey, was born, she commodified him as she’d commodified herself, selling photos of them together. In the documentary, she explains her thinking. The level of press interest in her meant that someone was going to make money from pictures of them, so why shouldn’t she be the person to profit?

Similarly, the documentary explains how she cut a deal with a favored paparazzi. She would tip him off so he always got the killer shot of her falling out of a nightclub (now even more disgraceful since she was a new mom), and he allegedly kicked back a share of his fee to her. Price was exploiting the system that sought to exploit her. Later, she would use reality TV to monetize every aspect of her life, including her marriages and her children.

It was clever, and it seemed to give her the thing she’d always wanted: attention and control combined. But her power was illusory. Price was being publicly broken down for mass consumption, and drawing some profit from that process could not stop it from harming her. As the series follows her career, her disintegration escalates — physically (Price has dealt with multiple complications from surgery), emotionally (her private life, lived in public, is painfully chaotic) and financially (she has been declared bankrupt twice).

Price wanted to be desired, and when men desired her, she was hated for it. The tabloids cheerfully had their cake and ate it, first running the salacious details of the Gates affair from Price’s account, and then using his denials to paint her as a liar. In the documentary, there’s footage of her being booed at an awards show when she makes a jibe about the situation. Her actions were calculated to provoke, but the backlash to her provocations still wounded her — especially when it touched on her capacity as a mother. Maybe the nadir of Price-hating came in 2010, when the comedian Frankie Boyle made a joke in his Channel 4 series Tramadol Nights about Price being raped by her son, who was eight at the time.

Price’s fortunes fell with the old-media structures. The lad mags are gone, the tabloids weakened. But her approach to fame was prescient. Total self-commodification is now the rule of social media. The porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips have followed Price’s path of seeking maximum outrage (for example, through their viral gangbang stunts) in exchange for maximum attention. Blue even, horrifyingly, found a way to market her pregnancy, by arranging a “baby shower” where she invited men to urinate on her belly.

Blue and Philips make the same arguments as Price: their bodies, their choice, and they choose to extract maximum profit from themselves. But as Price shows, when you make yourself hard, you make yourself brittle too. Perhaps her successors will be spared the damage that Price has gone through. Perhaps they will be better at protecting themselves, even while they are selling themselves off piece by piece. Perhaps they are able to inoculate themselves against the hatred they inspire in others, in a way that Price was never able to — there is an argument that having access to social media, rather than needing to rely on an often-hostile press, gives this generation of self-exploiters an unprecedented level of control.

I think this is a false hope. However rapacious the media was before the arrival of the mass internet, social-media audiences are even more hungry for drama and liberal with their viciousness. The incentives to flog yourself are as strong as they ever were, and now there are no intervening editorial layers between you and your audience to act as a moderating force. The impulse to extremity goes unchecked, and competition for attention pushes everyone to go further. After all, you could hardly say that social media has been good for Price: just think about her teeth.

For a while, it looked like Price truly had found a way to turn her objectification into a successful cottage industry: her degradation was the means of production, and she seized it with alacrity. Price was the perfect creature for the sexual culture of the Noughties: an effigy of femininity, who existed to be hated. Price has been made to pay and pay for wanting to be wanted.

With all the mystery around Ozempic in pop culture, old-school anorexia seems strangely simple. Perhaps this explains the internet’s fixation with both Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid, the singer and model who have become the unintended public faces of pernicious (alleged) eating disorders in recent years. Grande has become noticeably less grande since the pandemic; she shocked observers with her rail-thin frame during the promotional junket for the film Wicked, and in the past few weeks has appeared on stage, incredibly thin, during live shows. “She literally looks emaciated,” said one fan on X; others accused her of having “choreographed sitting” into her dance routine, presumably to avoid lightheadedness.

Hadid, for her part, has been posting again about her Lyme disease diagnosis. The supermodel was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 16, along with her mother and brother. Intermittently since then, she has shared pictures of herself stripped to the waist in a hospital bed, covered in electrodes or on a drip. One fan says it’s really because she “doesn’t eat”. Others scour the contents of her fridge, finding only “juice, yogurt and berries”. “It’s heartbreaking to see her battling with an ED [eating disorder] and Yolanda is all to blame,” reads one comment, with reference to Hadid’s former-model mother who is known for encouraging her other daughter Gigi only to “have a couple of almonds” when the then-teenager complained of feeling faint and hungry. Bella Hadid may well be debilitated by Lyme disease, but her physical frailty is hard to ignore. As with Grande, her disappearing body is viral catnip.

Why is skinny “back” in celebrity culture? We must not forget the specific glamour of anorexia, glamour which is most intoxicating to teen girls. The literary critic Elaine Showalter memorably described melancholia in the Romantic period as a “prestigious disorder of upper-class and intellectual men”. You can see why it was thought of in this way: plumbing one’s own misery required both depth and leisure. Happiness is for oiks. Of course, this perception had no bearing on real incidence, save for the crazy-making nature of idleness which may have brought the black dog unto a few sad squires. Sighing was probably just as common in the scullery as in the library. Nevertheless many illnesses have their mythologies, and if male depression was conferred an elite status in the past then the female cognate today is without doubt anorexia and bulimia.

The virtuous connotations of female eating disorders are that sufferers are meticulous, intelligent, disciplined and detached — coolly incorporeal, pensive and stylishly sad. The prototype of the chic contemporary anorexic is Marya Hornbacher, whose 1997 memoir Wasted, published when she was just 23, detailed her teen years in recovery wards, culminating in a brush with death when she weighed just 52 pounds. In the book, Hornbacher describes her illness with borderline cinematic sumptuousness: “I brought a stack of books and a notebook, packs of cigarettes, and sat coiled in a chair in the corner, rubbing my eyes… swallowing coffee… reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill and Marx.”

Here is this sophisticated teenager, swapping food (lame) for philosophy (rad!) while going through coffee and cigs like a Parisian poseur. Are we meant to interpret her starvation as cool or awful? The ambiguity is deliberate. While Wasted won huge acclaim and became the archetypal anorexia memoir, Hornbacher’s barely restrained sense of her own emaciated glamor compromised its function as a “warning” for sufferers and their families. Instead, it spurned imitation. Another eating-disorder memoirist, Nicole Johns, author of bulimia tome Purge, says fellow patients would try to “smuggle” copies of Wasted into treatment facilities, treating it as a manual. Hornbacher’s tendency to brag, and her undisguised nostalgia for the allure of her illness — as well as the instructional nature of the account, much of which is in the second person (“you will lift the toilet seat, carefully slide your fingers inside your mouth and down your throat, and puke until you see orange”) — made it premium reading material for the aspiring anorexic.

Today, this mechanism has become part of the very wiring of social media. Since the early days of blogging sites — Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram — eating-disorder pages have been as depressingly constant as pornography. “Pro-ana” (anorexia) posters compete with one another for the lowest BMIs; TikTok content creators get around guardrails by pretending that the calorie-counts which accompany images of their meals are “prices”. Bloggers share “thinspo” (thin inspiration) — pictures of themselves or celebrities; they “body check”, meaning that they show off hollow stomachs or wrist-thin thighs for other girls to use as motivation. Because they are famished, they also post obsessively about food. In this they resemble the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the Forties, in which healthy men were put on extreme diets. Over 24 weeks, the men were found to hoard and obsessively read cookbooks. Had these men been given access to Instagram, they too would surely have gorged on images of food.

Celebrities are also part of the eating-disorder internet. Many super-thin stars, most notably Ariana Grande, have asked people not to comment on their bodies — Grande called speculation about the looks and health of others “dangerous”. But asking fans — the source of your income — to pay attention to only the “comfortable” facets of your persona breaks the contract of fame: celebrity means sacrificing privacy, and exposure is part of the bargain. Commenters diagnosing stars from a distance — or even “concern trolling” (posting skeletal pictures of women they’re “worried about”) — may be distasteful, but it is inevitable. These celebrities are, after all, the ultimate beneficiaries of the attention economy and stand to gain even when this attention is negative; Grande’s secrecy around her alleged condition has in fact only increased the intrigue and therefore the coverage.

I have little doubt that Grande’s thinness is, to some vulnerable fans, aspirational. And there is no denying that pictures of these celebrities are being used as “thinspo”. Grande posting body-checking pictures of herself fitting inside a guitar case means an X user called “Skinny B4 Death” will inevitably add her to their starvation moodboard. Hadid, for her part, has often posed in a way which emphasizes a starved ribcage; this could well lead to users glamorizing emaciation, in a grisly echo of Nineties “heroin chic”. To those quick to dismiss this as a feminist fuss over nothing, use your imagination: you may not give a sod about seeing one too many jutting bones, but then you may not be a teenage girl. For them, such images can alter the course of a life.

The public spectacle of Grande’s and Hadid’s emaciation is functioning, in the age of the internet, like a virtual eating-disorder ward: hypercompetitive and dishonest, bragging and furtive. Particularly since their fans are primarily those most vulnerable to eating-disorder content: namely, girls. The result of all this blog-worthy boniness is that the troubled years of these stick-thin celebrities may end up just like copies of Wasted: tucked under inpatients’ pillows, bookmarked at the bad bits, treasured as a guide for how to disappear.

Northie, the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, is Gen Alpha’s Adrian Mole. Her debut album — N0rth4evr, released on Friday — is a catalog of the grandiose woes of phase-stricken tweens, recognizable to all former miniature diarists. Powered by the sounds and styles of metal and K-pop, North sings about the ennui of her mega-famous upbringing. In case you didn’t know, it can get lonely “in the back of the Lamb”; in fact, “all this money turn my heart into a black hole”. She rises to these challenges with her father’s hustler braggadocio: “I ain’t steppin’ out unless somebody pay me.” Presumably this pocket money is going towards indulgences more extravagant than Claire’s clip-on earrings and fruity Maybelline lipgloss, but ultimately North is still, if you needed reminding, only 12.

Mademoiselle West’s charmed childhood has been an internet obsession since she was delivered to the strains of Bohemian Rhapsody in West Hollywood in 2013 (Kanye was doing some delivery-room DJing, perhaps the most compelling incident in a crowded field for which he deserved punching). North was described as the world’s most famous baby, a crown shared with our very own Prince George; like a true royal, she was baptized in a cathedral during a tour of Jerusalem. From there, the marketing ramped up: who can forget her musical debut at the age of six at Paris Fashion Week, during which the puffa-coated rap progeny yelled into a mic at a heroically straight-faced row of models: “What are those? These are clothes. What are those? These are clothes.” Ye grinned on stage at his mini-me; Kim wept in the front row. Since then she has starred in The Lion King, collaborated with FKA Twigs and performed two songs at the 70,000-seater SoFi stadium during Kanye’s comeback show in LA last month. And, of course, she’s now released an album.

All the while, like every boundary-prodding preteen, North has been shocking curtain-twitchers with her “too grown-up” look. Black grills on her teeth, long blue wigs, finger piercings, full-beat makeup. Like Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter, 14-year-old Blue Ivy, North has been the focus of much hand-wringing and finger-wagging about the provocative styling of child celebrities. West, never one to pass up an opportunity to swipe at his ex-wife, is thought to have accused Kim of crossing “the line” in allowing North’s at-times eyebrow-raising outfits; a source said he thought his daughter was “way too young to be parading around like this” (on that occasion, in a corset), with threats of “rais[ing] hell with the lawyers”. This, supposedly, from a man who appears to encourage his wife Bianca Censori to go to events in the nude.

But observers who fret about North’s breakneck-speed entry into adulthood, littering comment sections with refrains such as “how about go be a kid” and “this is just sad”, are missing the point. North is precocious in the way only nepo babies can be; opportunities to dance on stage in Rick Owens boots are not forthcoming to most anonymous preteens. Her polished public image and drastic overexposure is the result of inconceivable fame — with its attendant stylists and agents and fixers. But she is also in many ways typical of her age group: her ultra-public childhood has millions of analogs the world over. Online pre-adolescence today is by definition grotesquely stage-managed, publicized, even monetized — and mostly by children themselves. Even those from more conventional homes than North West are fashioning their own digital cults of personalities, with their own curated TikTok shopfronts, their own sullen lip-syncing clips and their own fake-eyelash experiments beamed to strangers across the globe. 

The fact is that childhood as a category was too fragile to withstand the totalizing force of social media. In-built features like the gatekeeping and chastisement of parents, the creativity of boredom, the privacy of loneliness, were traded in for intoxicating external moral codes, constant stimulation and the paranoia of exposure as soon as social media companies established Instagram, YouTube and TikTok as essential presences in young lives. The difficult tween years are periods of excruciating fashion experimentation (in my case, those undocumented crimes involved lace-fringed leggings) and rolling identity crisis: phase after phase, bad outfit after criminally bad outfit. The braces, swoopy side fringes and crippling self-consciousness of those years are formative; to develop personality and resilience, you need privacy. And yet, privacy is no longer an option. Kim Kardashian said of North’s occasional faux pas: “Unfortunately, we made that mistake in front of the whole world.” But really, today, who doesn’t?

North West, Aged 12 and ¾, is treating official album releases like most of us used cringe diary entries that should never see the light of day — but then so are all Gen Alphas, who use TikToks to broadcast to their albeit smaller followings their own middle-school malaise. All this expression jeopardizes the authenticity of feelings and opinions: for many online children today, all private thoughts are subconsciously optioned for public posts, which must result in a strange new self-fashioning. Always mindful of an imagined audience, children’s emotional lives mirror the viral feelings of others. Just as North West sings of “every scar, all the blood”, her “shady” entourage or the loneliness of that Lambo in imitation of her goth faves and her grimmo father, preteens the world over simulate the views and feelings of others. Like North, they perform angst without the required depth of introspection or experience; it’s just cool to do. 

As a great imitator, Miss Westie is a herald for Gen Alpha’s ascent to the public sphere. When her generation becomes the culture-shaping twentysomethings, we should brace for a wave of hollow authenticity: these children are relentlessly expressive mimics trained from infancy to perfect public image. A cohort of copycats. 

North represents the near-universal condition of modern youth: she is what childhood looks like when buffers against the adult world disappear; when that separate sphere of shielded development dissolves. Personally, I like her. The choices she makes — her odd fashion sense, her musical homages to passing obsessions — remind me very much of being her age. She is bizarre and fascinating, and living the girlhood dream. But if you think she is overexposed, thin on talent and fatally overconfident then brace yourself — a whole generation of Norths is ready to rush the stage.

But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (“We belong together”) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: “It’s best you know what you don’t/ The aperture lets the light in.”

It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn’t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one. 

And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There’s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. “One of them had my ear and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can’t have that, it’s mine.” Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss. 

One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” Not long after Payne’s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. “You are a commodity, and not a human,” Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. “People crack, but I’m surprised more people don’t crack.”

Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of “car crash” status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don’t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently — desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you — must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up. 

One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he’s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne’s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. “Full transparency, it’s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,” he said. “I really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.” Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.

It’s something that Styles went through, albeit in a smaller way, back in 2014 when his breakup from Taylor Swift was widely understood to be the inspiration for her album 1989, though some of the references were relatively subtle. Styles gave his own musical account of the Swift break-up on his self-titled debut album, in the song “Two Ghosts”. But that’s an exception in his discography. Styles’s songs are, in general, intimate but impersonal: they very rarely map onto the tabloid version of his life in the way Swift’s songs do. What they often share, though, is a powerful sense of loneliness — a kind of loneliness that chimes, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fortuitously, with his listeners’ lives.

His second album, Fine Line, was released in 2019, but the wistful longing for contact that underpins it felt authored for the lockdown years. “I don’t want to be alone,” he sighs on the opener, “Golden”. When “Watermelon Sugar” was released as a single in 2020, it made perfect sense that the video opened with the message: “This video is dedicated to touching.” It was already a song about skin hunger, which many of us were experiencing that year. The 2022 follow-up, Harry’s House, was directly shaped by those weird years: Styles has said in interviews that “As It Was” in particular was written about the seeming impossibility of returning to normal after the pandemic. 

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Even in his acting roles, Styles seems drawn towards characters with a deeply melancholy failure to connect. His two leading movie roles (in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling) attracted little praise for his dramatic skills, and it’s true that Styles has never yet managed to be truly convincing when delivering dialog, but both films should be recognized as brave, interesting choices which cut against the heartthrob expectations he carried with him: in the former he played a closeted policeman in Fifties Britain, and in the latter he played a red-pilled nightmare who turns out to have kidnapped his wife and forced her consciousness into a simulation of midcentury American white-picket bliss. 

But what makes Styles such a great artist of loneliness isn’t just that he understands its pangs. It’s also that he finds something seductive in that idea of being alone. The pain is a good pain — the sharpening, purifying kind. It’s notable that the hobby he has to unwind from being a popstar is long-distance running, which is one of the most solitary things you can do. In a conversation with the author Haruki Murakami (also a runner) for the magazine Runner’s World, Styles describes the joy of running like this: “you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.”

There’s something else quite telling in that dialogue. Styles tells Murakami: “I think my favorite thing about you is that I know nothing really about you, other than the work you’ve given to people. So I’m as deeply grateful for the amount that you’ve chosen to keep to yourself as for what you’ve chosen to share with us.” It’s a comment that echoes Styles’s own apparent strategy for surviving fame: extreme, meticulous reserve. It’s a method that echoes the careful distance David Bowie kept between himself and his audience, often using characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) as a screen. Styles’s fashion icon status and arty performances are clearly indebted to Bowie, but this unapologetic self-protection might be the most significant influence that Styles has taken.

One way to describe fame is that it’s the condition of being loved too much — loved more than any one person can bear. For someone like Styles, who has had to survive an entire adulthood of that love, solitude must be the most fascinating thing. For most people, isolation is one of the painful conditions of our age: too much time hunkered down in solitary laptop labor, too many friendships that exist only on screens, too little touch. Styles’s extreme celebrity enforces isolation (when a trip to the shops provokes a riot, all you can do is stay at home), but it also turns being left alone into a luxury. That means that he can find beauty in a condition that, for so many people, is an ugly inevitability. Styles is our perfect pop star because he has found the romance in loneliness.

This jejune tic is a recurring motif in Gwyneth, the hotly anticipated, unauthorized, and extremely hefty new biography of the actress and wellness empire founder by journalist Amy Odell. And somewhere between the second and third time that Gwyneth was pretending to puke with loathing, I started to think about why biographies like this are written, about who is considered worthy of one — and about the difference between having had an interesting life, and being an interesting person.

A skilled biographer, which Odell is, can craft a narrative compelling enough that it almost elides this distinction — and Gwyneth is, indeed, a piece of expertly woven and compulsively readable storytelling. But eventually, over the course of 448 pages, it’s hard not to think at least a bit about the question above and to notice that Paltrow is very much the former thing, and extremely not the latter.

The buzz surrounding Gwyneth suggested that it would make a meal for audiences dying for revelation, desperate for dirt, and aching for a glimpse of the real, human woman behind the $600 exfoliating peptide with foaming seaweed extract sheet mask. Certainly the press dutifully hyped it up, publishing sneak peeks and buzzy lists with titles like “The top ten most shocking revelations from the unauthorized Gwyneth Paltrow biography.” This, despite the fact that the contents of these lists were either not revelations at all — Gwyneth declined to participate in the biography, and so the quotes from here included therein are culled from the thousands of interviews she’s sat for over the years — or, if they are, not the slightest bit shocking. She’s grossed out by fat people, yeah, we know. She was popular in high school, obviously. She allegedly enjoyed being teabagged by Ben Affleck, who she described in a recent podcast appearance as a “technically proficient” lover… This seems far-fetched, but if true, it’s silly. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the book is that after she once had a falling out with fellow celeb and frenemy Winona Ryder she nicknamed her “Vagina Ryder”, and this only because you’d expect someone of Gwyneth’s pedigree to be a little more inventive in her cruelty.

But this, too, goes back to the fact that being born into rarefied circumstances does not necessarily a rarefied person make.

Much of the book traces Gwyneth’s trajectory from privileged childhood to Hollywood breakout. Born to actress Blythe Danner and powerhouse producer Bruce Paltrow in 1972, Gwyneth was a darling of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival as a child and, as a teenager, attended the famous Spence School in New York City. She was both popular and rebellious, and rarely suffered consequences for the latter — partly because she could charm her way out of trouble, partly because she simply didn’t care if she got into it. She was an underachieving student — for lack of intelligence or trying, unclear — and made it into college only after her dad pulled a string or two. She also didn’t stay there long: it was shortly after matriculating at the University of California, Santa Barbara that her acting career took off. She dropped out, got famous, and never looked back.

Insofar as the book contains anything juicy, it’s in these early pages. The time Gwyneth got suspended for doodling an erect penis on a wall in the library; the time she lashed out at a friend after learning she’d been rejected from Vassar. Insofar as it reveals anything crucial about its subject, that’s here, too — not because this information was unknown, or unknowable, but because it’s the first time it’s all been assembled in one place, and into a narrative through which one can clearly discern both the contours of Gwyneth’s character and the eventual shape of her future.

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Partly the chapters about her childhood allow the reader to understand just how long Gwyneth has been doing what she does — how for her, acting and celebrity was less a dream to be chased than a birthright to be claimed. But it’s also possible in these pages to pattern match the vaguely entitled teenager Gwyneth was to the billionaire empress of celebrity wellness she is now, to see how inevitable this all was. Gwyneth is not untalented, but her talent is secondary to her success, which has been almost entirely a function of her proximity to the right people. Before she was ever a household name, she was the child of famous parents, and then the girlfriend of various famous men. Her acting career flowed directly from her having figured out how to work these things to her advantage, and from an intuitive understanding passed down from her parents that all the world’s a stage. There’s an especially vivid anecdote on this front from her Spence years: on the first day of school, Gwyneth realized that her outfit — a Breton striped shirt and loafers — wasn’t attracting the right kind of attention from the most popular girls in her class. She went home, changed clothes, came back — and found herself immediately welcomed in. It was an early lesson in the importance of a well-timed costume change, of the importance of looking the part. In some ways, one could argue, it was the first successful audition of her life.

To give Gwyneth credit, this is a skill, no less impressive for the fact that she was evidently born with it. Acting at its best is not just a pantomime of feeling; it’s the ability to show people what they want to see, to persuade whoever is watching that you are this other person, that the character you’re playing is real. But as an origin story, it is hardly the sordid unauthorized bombshell the culture was clearly and dearly hoping for. The best celebrity biographies stir our emotions, revealing previously hidden depths beneath the famous faces we know so well. But there is no secret trauma or childhood tragedy here, no behind-the-scenes breakdown that reveals Gwyneth to be better, more complicated, more human, than she appears on TV — and nor does she come off as a scheming, magnificent villain, more evil than you could possibly imagine. Instead, Gwyneth’s life has turned out exactly as one might expect for a girl born to privilege, godfathered by Hollywood royalty, and savvy enough to turn these things to her advantage.

And if her personality has developed to be somewhat less stellar than her career, this, too, is also more or less what you’d expect from a woman whose ability to relate to other people never evolved beyond the confines of a high school cafeteria. If the distasteful aspects of this are obvious enough (Vagina Ryder, anyone?), it’s also been undeniably to her benefit. More than once, I found myself wondering how much Gwyneth’s uncanny ability to cultivate attention, to emerge unscathed from everything from a scandalous breakup to a box-office bomb to a social media firestorm over jade vagina eggs, is owed to social strategies developed in the fishbowl that is the social scene at an elite New York City high school.

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But if this is the ironic source of Gwyneth Paltrow’s success, it’s also a little bit tragic in that what allows a person to flourish in the celebrity world tends to stunt their growth in every other milieu. It’s not just her, of course: fame has always created perverse incentives, and Hollywood, the original attention economy, is not exactly known for encouraging the kind of personal growth that makes for emotionally mature adults with a healthy sense of perspective.

Still, to see Gwyneth’s life laid out like this, it’s striking how much the woman herself hasn’t changed even as she’s moved from moviemaking to motherhood to managing the GOOP empire. The obsession with thinness — oh, excuse me, wellness — remains potent as ever. She continues to hold people at arms’ length, or freeze them out like a cool queen bee if they cease to be useful to her. And certainly, it casts some moments from her more recent years, like the one in which she famously paused on her way out of the courtroom where she’d just won a civil suit against a man who sued her after they collided while skiing, in a somewhat stark light. What she said that day, as she leaned in to speak to him, was, “I wish you well.”

But one suspects that what she really wanted to do — and perhaps did do, later, out of sight of the cameras and the crowds — was wait until his back was turned, and then stick a finger down her throat to mime throwing up.

But offstage, all is not well. For this Beckham-Peltz alliance, between a footballer’s scion and a billionaire American heiress, has come at the cost of disharmony in the Beckham bloodline. The lore runs deep: what began with a spat between Queen Victoria and her future daughter-in-law over who would design her wedding dress (Nicola opted for custom Valentino over Posh’s own label) has deteriorated into a transatlantic battle of wills, with the eldest Beckham son shunning his father’s 50th birthday celebrations in London for the comforts of LA, a dynastic death blow which has kept the red tops going for weeks. And just before it was announced that David had at last snagged a knighthood, the final flourish in a decades-long hustle to accrue national-treasure status, it emerged that Brooklyn and Nicola had engaged the services of Jenny Afia to stop their PR going into tailspin. That’s Meghan and Harry’s lawyer, if you didn’t know. It seems errant celebrity sons and their Lady Macbeth wives are keeping the bright minds of Lincoln’s Inn in the finest horsehair.

What marks out nearly every player in this psychodrama is a distinctive deficit of flair; David’s brilliance at football is the only spark of talent in that entire extended family — the rest is luck and marketing. Victoria could not sing (roadies would turn her mic off during Spice Girls performances); Brooklyn cannot play football, model, photograph or cook. His younger brothers, Romeo and Cruz, dabble in fashion and music like all the other bottom-set nepo nippers. Nicola Peltz, the daughter of a billionaire, wrote and starred in a film about poverty last year. It was not well received. This clan’s rise to knightly success is purely the work of publicists — and it is this which makes the parable of the prodigal Beckham son in many ways the most telling story of our time.

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For in the Beckhams, we see the revival of the celebrity dynasty, the family as a brand. Like the Medicis before them, they have risen to aristocratic respectability though cynical spin: weddings double as brand mergers (OK! splashed out a record-breaking $1 million to cover Posh and Becks’ wedding), and children are bequeathed dukedoms in the form of little brands and film cameos. Thus the Beckhams reveal the true cost of nepotism: the desecration of skill and value in public life, the disappearance of a celebrity meritocracy where you were expected to be able to sing, dance or otherwise earn your adoration. They are little better than A-list Machiavels like the Kardashians or Molly-Mae Hague, who are simply “famous for being famous”. In such a world, the eldest Beckham child is cursed with an empty empire; he has been given the stand — riches, attention, business backers — but he has absolutely nothing to say.

The new royal court in which Brooklyn wages war is as ritualistic and rotten as any before it: there is confession (Brooklyn is rumored to be concocting a tell-all memoir of his eventless 26 years so far, in the style of Prince Harry’s Spare), portraiture (carefully choreographed dynastic lineups with out-of-favor members pointedly absent), assassination (deadly press briefings), succession (the careful delegation of nepo gigs), and exile (Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, away from his family’s newly settled kingdom — the Cotswolds).

Brooklyn’s conduct towards his parents, much like Prince Harry’s, reveals a vacuum of character which exposes the unfairness of undeserved fame: all the set-dressing and charitable works in the world cannot distract from the fact that we have allowed the wrong people to become famous. The parallel with the prince doesn’t stop there: the Peltz-Beckhams and the Sussexes are said to have held an exiled-son summit in Montecito. What outrages us about these two hit dogs, Brooklyn and Harry, is that despite all the privilege imaginable they dared to complain, driven by horridly un-American concerns like “boundaries” and “their truth”. The last resort of the overtherapized offspring, going “no contact” with one’s family, has reportedly now been taken by Brooklyn — a telling echo of “Megxit” apparently steered by Nicola, another slightly older American bride viewed with suspicion by the British public.

Yet the British public isn’t exactly team Becks either: part of our contempt for Brooklyn derives from disdain for his parents, and their own meteoric rise. Many still see them as arriviste; it was not long ago that Victoria had a spiky bob and bulletproof breast implants, and David has at great pains shaken off his once-mocked Chingford accent. This couple has undeniably made it — David is guest-editing none other than Country Life in October, with flat caps, tweeds and spaniels guaranteed to erase any memory of his bleached Nineties curtains; they have also made it easy for their children to follow suit.

But Brooklyn has so far floundered, going through something of a career identity crisis in the process. The footballer-cum-model-cum-photographer-cum-chef’s latest venture, a hot-sauce brand called Cloud 23, has been beset by trademark disputes — but his bigger problem is the mishandling of his personal brand, the ultimate selling point for anyone in the food aisle frowning over a celebrity product. Whereas David somehow cobbled together an aura of sophistication convincing enough to flog Haig Club whisky, it would be difficult to swallow a glob of Cloud 23 without imagining Brooklyn smirking in an apron.

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In the absence of talent or wit, Brooklyn must self-publicize relentlessly to retain his birthright. This is about vanity, yes — but also money. For the Beckham clan is also the Beckham conglomerate, in which children are spin-offs, subsidiaries, each expected to perform value for the business empire. In Brand Beckham, Victoria is the creative director; David is the legacy label. Brooklyn is the floundering prototype, launched too early. Romeo and Cruz are R&D projects, constantly retooled until the right note is hit. Harper, just 13, is a publicist’s dream: the only girl, she is primed for singing or modeling or, later down the line, a marriage alliance.

David and Victoria, for whom playing nice isn’t showing results, need only wait for their mutinous son’s bid for independence to fall on its face. Any attempt at freedom is cursed; this family has produced chicks with wings already clipped. Brand Beckham is too big to fail, and will crush any struggling subsidiaries.

Whether he realizes it or not, Brooklyn is doomed to lose the Battle of the Beckhams. He is destined to be a leisure prince, but through some misguided sense of his own value has instead been larping purpose which, owing to his privilege, he has never needed and is now too old to acquire. But this troubled son must soon accept that his inheritance is simply equity in his parents’ brand: his fame is not a reward for excellence. Get off the motorbike, get on a plane, and tell your mom and dad you’re sorry, Brooklyn. After all, who on earth would you be without them?

Censori’s outfits have been growing increasingly in need of censorship for some time. In 2023 she was photographed in Florence, trailing after West, clad only in a sheer bodystocking and clutching a purple pillow like a child’s teddy. Then there was the claustrophobic Maison Margiela shroud, all sheer full-face covering and a tire-like collar.

West, meanwhile, stalked next to her in shoulder pads and tights, like a Judge Dredd terrorist with a hooded hostage ready for necklacing. He seems to relish displaying Censori’s beauty, vulnerability, and pliancy, as a foil to his own vaguely paramilitary-tinged and always fully clothed aesthetic — often in dark glasses, and often masked, too, like a bodyguard or executioner. We’re to treat it as high fashion; but her huge eyes, blank face and awkward, near-naked discomfort cry out that something is off.

Creative passion or abuse? Opinion is divided. Early in their romance, West wrote a febrile song called “Censori Overload”, lamenting “no more sex till marriage, and no more drip till Paris”. She has been described by some as West’s “muse”: an inspiration and living artwork. Others find the outfits degrading, and worry that the relationship is abusive.

Perhaps the most liberal interpretation is that it’s just kinky, with West as the “dom” and Censori in the “sub” role and the whole dynamic subject to an unusual degree of public exposure. Certainly West has form for enjoying power and control in relationships: often dictating the wardrobe choices of women he dates, even clearing out ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe on camera. He reportedly employs a whole “secret team” to create Censori’s outlandish outfits, as though she’s a living doll, and announced early last year that she would wear “no pants this year”. He gropes her publicly — and, it appears, sometimes demands still more intimate public sexual favors: a 2023 incident in a water taxi in Venice saw West photographed seemingly with his trousers at half-mast and Censori’s head in his lap — prompting local police investigations. At the Grammys over the weekend, West reportedly ordered her to drop the coat with the three words “Make a scene”.

This is all still, more or less, at least arguably within the scope of “lifestyle BDSM”, which is to say a form of long-term couple relationship that never breaks out of “dominant” and “submissive” roles. But advocates of BDSM emphasize that while participants in a “kinky” partnership may agree to a “power exchange” even 24/7, the dynamic itself should be consensual, pre-negotiated and based on mutual trust and communication — with “safe words” giving the submissive party an escape route if it all gets too much. That doesn’t sound like it’s happening here: West reportedly screens her social media, controls what she eats, and even tells her when to go to bed.

So are West and Censori just kinky, or kinky and playing without safe words? And if so, what’s the difference between that and coercive control? But when we set BDSM itself into context, it becomes clearer that its safe, sensible rules for rational perversion can’t be made to apply in this case. Rather, they serve to distract from what’s actually off about this scenario.

As a cultural phenomenon, BDSM only only emerged alongside liberalism itself. As the writer Andrew Klavan has noted, one of the great early innovators in the relativist philosophies that underpin modern liberalism was the Marquis de Sade: also a notorious sexual degenerate and origin of the “S” in BDSM. Downstream of (among other liberal thinkers) his trailblazing, amoral, often sadistic (they named it for him!) advocacy of radical sexual libertinism, a liberal worldview has steadily emerged in which sexual and social norms may be discarded in favor of individual freedom and will.

Especially since the Sixties, we have leaned into that Sadean social picture: one that decries moral absolutes and rejects baked-in asymmetries and social givens, asserting, instead, the freedom of every individual to do what he or she wishes. Among less amoral liberals than de Sade, this tends to come with a side-order of egalitarianism and strictures on harming others. In other words: we should be able to do what we want, provided everyone consents, and we’re all working meanwhile to abolish real-world asymmetries of power.

This is the context in which BDSM makes sense. For it’s a good rule of thumb that whatever is most forbidden will seem especially enticing. It’s thus most committed to egalitarianism — broadly, liberals — who are also most likely to fantasize about domination and submission. The practice of “BDSM” within its usual “safe, sane, and consensual” boundaries, complete with safe-words, creates a space to enjoy the frisson of power asymmetry for liberals otherwise committed to the flattening and disavowal of all such differences.

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And what’s so icky about West’s decision to sculpt his personal life into a de Sadean tableau is that he’s taking full advantage of the now-widespread culture of liberal sexual permissiveness that views BDSM as so perfectly fine it has a UK Ministry of Justice advocacy group. In this culture, Bianca Censori’s treatment can be read as merely “kinky” — and yet West’s treatment of her exploits the fact that social hierarchies never really flattened. Or, rather, that flattening has gone into reverse. Kanye West stands among an emergent post-liberal phenomenon of lords and princes: billionaire titans of a new Gilded Age, who live out, very literally, the internet assertion that you really can “just do things”.

In this context, what’s off about West and Censori isn’t the sexually explicit outfits, or even waterborne BJs. It’s not even West’s evident relish for exposing and exhibiting his obedient consort. It’s the fact that he has selected someone to serve as his counterpart who is unable to play at his power level.

The bestselling soft-porn fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey thrilled countless normie housewives with its romantic-yet-kinky account of the love-affair between dominant billionaire Christian Grey, and loving, submissive Ana. In that book it all ends happily, and Christian Grey falls deeply in love with Ana and doesn’t make her wear a see-through bodystocking in public. But the reality of real wealth disparity in the postmodern age is that, like the aristocrats of the pre-liberal age, the super-rich are “equals” only with others of their own kind. Relative to normies, the idea of “equality”, or even “consent”, is largely an abstraction. They really can just do things, and we can’t. In terms of what this looks like in practice, for socially asymmetric romance, a better mythic model than Christian Grey is the (from a modern perspective, rather rapey) Greek mythology of Olympian gods seducing mortal women: a grab ‘em by the pussy world of simply taking what you want, all horny swans and abduction by bull.

West appears to have come upon Censori somewhat like an Olympian seducing a nymph. Not long after they met, he “married” her, in a private, possibly-not-legally-binding ceremony — a scant few months after finalizing his divorce from fellow-Olympian Kim Kardashian. And the contrast between the two women says it all. Conservatives may curl a lip at the flashy, new-money excess of the celebrity super-rich class, preferring the understated grandeur of old European money; but in the weird world of “high net worth individuals”, Kardashian — who is also a billionaire — is indisputably in the same league of aristocracy as West: postmodern influencer royalty.

By contrast, Censori has neither obviously abundant family money, nor particularly extensive business interests of her own beyond serving as architect-turned-model-turned-living-doll. She is, figuratively as well as literally, all fur coat and no panties. Combined with the ambivalently binding “marriage”, this relative poverty makes her acutely vulnerable: a situation in which domination and submission is less a fun game to play at weekends, than an all-enveloping reality. In theory, she could surely walk away any time; but as the journalist Tina Brown observed recently, there is nothing more corrupting than private jets. So unlike for Queen Kim, it’s easy to see how the costs to Censori of walking away from her controlling prince and his creepy fashion thing could lead her to tolerate more, or indeed wear less, than she would really prefer.

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In this new age of yawning wealth disparities, West’s remodeling of Censori from employee to chattel-wife takes objectification to new levels — all while presenting Censori as wife, controlling her as if she were still an employee, and smuggling the whole queasy cocktail under the cover of possibly-“kinky” sexual liberalism.

In old-money aristocratic terms, then, we might compare West’s choice of Bianca Censori as his project to a duke seducing a maid, then parading her half-naked in public — simply because he can. The new-money volume of objectification and media spectacle makes it something still worse. If we lack the language today to express our disgust at the obvious misuse of power this all entails, it’s because the liberal world has forgotten how to think about real, substantive class hierarchy. With a post-liberal one now fully upon us, in the Second Trumpian Epoch, it might be time to remember.

Roan has described, how a stalker turned up at both her hotel room, and her parents’ house in Missouri. In another incident, a group of fans figured out her flight information and met her when she landed in Seattle, where one man was so enraged by her refusal to sign an autograph, airport police had to intervene. Another time, while out at a bar celebrating a friend’s birthday, she was grabbed and kissed by a fan.

If Roan weren’t famous, all these things would be obvious instances of harassment or assault. But she is famous, so — to the people who do them, at least — such actions exist in a grey area. She has sought her celebrity, and this is what celebrity consists of, so therefore she consented to this attention when she started releasing music.

She was discovered on YouTube at 17, signed to the label Atlantic, and then dropped in 2020 when lockdown stifled was should have been her big breakthrough. She spent two years rebuilding herself to where she is now: tickets for her British tour started at £20 when they were released in March; if you want to go to her London concert this weekend, it will now cost more than £600 on the resale market.

Those prices tell you something about the determination of Roan fans to get close to their icon. It’s a passion that, when it turns sour, tips into disturbing intrusion and harassment. This becomes even more disturbing when you realise that what she’s undergone is pretty normal for famous people. In April this year, for example, a woman was sentenced to prison and placed under a 10-year restraining order for stalking the singer Harry Styles, after sending him 8,000 cards in a one-month period.

More often, though, it’s a woman being harassed by a male obsessive. The “public woman” is, historically, a euphemism for prostitute: by making herself visible, the crude logic goes, she precludes herself from refusing any attention at all. That is witnessed by the list of female artists who have offered support to Roan, including Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX. The singer Mitski sent an email: “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members.”

As well as finding private support, Roan has made a public effort to set boundaries. In August, she issued a statement on Instagram urging fans to leave her alone when she was “not in work mode”: “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out — just because they’re expressing admiration.” She reiterated on TikTok.

One notable thing is that Roan’s pushback has, so far, been near-universally well-received. Yes, some individual fans have called her entitled or selfish for refusing to cater to them, but in the press, the reaction has been largely celebratory and supportive. That’s a shift from a generation ago, when fan intrusion was largely treated as a fair tax on the pursuit of public attention.

In 1999, a psychiatrist writing in the Guardian claimed that having a stalker was “the ultimate fashion accessory”. Three years earlier, the New York Times had chided Madonna for seeking special treatment after she asked to be excused from testifying in the presence of the man charged with stalking her: the headline read “Even You, Madonna”. (He was ultimately convicted, despite the defence’s efforts to claim Madonna was acting in the courtroom as she acted on screen.)

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In the 2000s, that attitude was enthusiastically embraced by a voracious celebrity gossip culture. Gawker — the now-defunct New York gossip blog — was even shameless enough to have a feature called “Gawker Stalker”, reporting live sightings of celebrities around the city. After the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel attacked the website over this, Gawker went on the offensive in a luridly self-righteous post.

“Stalker-style treatment is a description of public people’s lives in public, and is also treatment that anyone with any kind of media or online presence […] is now subject to,” it read. “The only difference is that celebrities are protected somewhat from these verbal attacks by ‘piles of money.’” In other words, celebrities are only being treated the same as everyone else, and even if they aren’t, their celebrity status itself precludes them from sympathy.

Any journalist suggesting in the same way today that Roan is somehow asking for it or too privileged to be affected by the behaviour would have a hard time, largely because social media has given artists a direct line to their own fandoms — and those fandoms a direct line to anyone who criticises their heroes. And Roan’s connection to her fans is unusually tight, even in these intensely parasocial times. When she returned to Missouri to rebuild herself, it wasn’t her songs she put the most effort into: it was building her presence on TikTok.

With no label to push her, she had to build her own following; and because her songs and her act focus on ideas of sexuality, self-discovery and release from repression, that following has bonded to her tightly. For many fans, her work has helped them to uncover and express the most intimate truths about themselves. She told the Face: “I can’t read my DMs anymore, because I cry so much. But when people are like, ​‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ — I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment.”

This is emotionally powerful. But it’s also the intractable paradox of fame in a social media era. You become successful by cultivating closeness with your audience; from that closeness, some people are going to extrapolate a relationship that extends further than is healthy. Roan’s fans believe that, through her work, they have found the truest version of themselves.

From there, it is only a short step to imagining that they also know the truest version of her, and that if they could only attract her attention, she’d recognise the bond they share.

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It’s telling that one of the fan behaviours she’s announced she will no longer tolerate is people trying to attract her attention by shouting her birth name (Chappell Roan is a stage name): another manifestation of the fantasy that they know her secret self. The irony is that her act draws heavily on drag, an art form that is all about concealment in plain sight. For Roan, her elaborate costumes and mask-like makeup act as a division between her public and private selves. For the extreme and obsessive fans, this simply represents a challenge to be overcome: an act of coquetry inspiring them to up their pursuit.

Clearly, it is untenable for anyone to live with the demands placed on Roan by her most obsessive fans. But it is also impossible to see how her reasonable need for privacy can be balanced with being the kind of celebrity to whom fans send highly personal messages about their own coming out story. At the moment, Roan’s best defence against the cadre of over-proprietorial fans is a cadre of slightly less proprietorial fans who are at least responsive to her requests about boundaries. It is a choice between two different ways of being treated as a possession, one slightly less destructive than the other.

Fame is not power — or at least, it is not only power. Fame is the experience of being owned by millions of different people, each of whom is certain that their small, splintered version of you is more true than the version of you anyone else could have; each of whom believes that their love entitles them to be loved in return. The only way to survive is to bury the “real you” out of reach and let people pour their devotion into a person who doesn’t really exist. Otherwise, everyone ends up like Orpheus: annihilated by those who claim to care the most.

But as well as identifying several genuine perpetrators, the Yewtree overreached. In 2014, the police raided Cliff Richard’s home and the BBC was on hand to film it; no charges were brought and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Richard’s part. In 2018, the High Court ruled that the BBC coverage had infringed Richard’s privacy in a “serious” and “sensationalist” way.

Both Richard and Paul Gambaccini, another innocent who was arrested during Yewtree and released without charge, have argued that those accused of sexual offences should have anonymity to protect them from the stigma of the “sex offender” label. And in practice, the media has grown increasingly cautious about publishing suspects’ names, particularly famous ones.

Over the past few days, it has become obvious that this approach is as likely to inflame speculation as protect reputations. On Friday, The Sun reported that an unnamed “top BBC star” had been suspended over allegations that he had paid an unnamed 20-year-old “more than £35,000 since they were 17 in return for sordid images”, according to the unnamed 20-year-old’s unnamed mother.

The whole country became engaged in a high-stakes game of “Guess Who?”. There were so many candidates. Within 24 hours, one had been settled on in media gossip circles. Online, though, the guesses ran wild, with the words “nonce” and “paedo” freely dispensed. This was potentially career-ruining stuff: Rylan Clark, Gary Lineker and Nicky Campbell all issued statements denying being the presenter in question.

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But if you knew, the name still seemed so unlikely. Huw Edwards. Beneath the stentorian furrowed brow that has carried the nation through election night and the Queen’s death, the naked absurdity of male lust.

And there were still twists. On Monday, the young person involved made a statement calling The Sun’s report “rubbish” (and saying that The Sun had been informed of this before publication). The BBC opened an investigation, then suspended it at the police’s request. On Tuesday, another person told the BBC they had received “abusive and menacing messages” from the accused, after they met on a dating app. A detail that attracted less attention was that the abuse happened after the alleged victim had hinted on social media that they would out the presenter.

Then the police concluded that there had been no criminal offence. And finally, on Wednesday, Edwards’s wife issued a statement confirming that it was him, and that “Huw is suffering from serious mental health issues”. “The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters,” she said. “He has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.”

The mood deflated at this point. It felt a bit like having stayed at a gathering too long, queasily sobering up among the cold canapes and dregs of booze. The Sun has announced it had no plans to publish further allegations. The BBC will continue its investigation.

There is no nice way to be accused of being a predator. But the toxic mix of celebrity and anonymity seems to have made this exceptionally messy: the scurrilous chatter about Edwards expanded to fill the void of information. By the time he was officially named, the shaming had grown so extreme that he began to look like the victim — and yet we still don’t know what, if anything, he’s culpable of.

In one sense, the Edwards story is a very old-school tabloid expose. It’s in the lineage of sports anchor Frank Bough, who was brought down by the News of the World in 1988 with the headline “I TOOK DRUGS WITH CALL GIRLS”; or Jamie Theakston, who was reported by the Sunday People in 2002 to have visited a “vice club”. A good old-fashioned British sex scandal.

But although the British public loves those stories, it also harbours a conflicting instinct that celebs deserve some privacy — especially if it’s about sex. If Edwards was active on apps (he has yet to respond to the allegations), it says something that no one he communicated with went to the press until The Sun broke its story. Being a bit sleazy, on its own, isn’t deemed disgraceful behaviour.

But that doesn’t mean the British public has no taboos. There was much focus on the youth of the individual Edwards is alleged to have received pictures from. Age gap relationships, even legal ones, are broadly disapproved of. The Sun quoted the mother referring to “my child”, even though the individual is well into sexual majority — a technique to foil identification by not disclosing gender, maybe, but one that introduced an unsavoury implication.

The reports about Edwards also referred to his “power” as a celebrity. His greater fame, like his greater age, was assumed to confer a seniority he was able to exploit. This is true of some kinds of celebrity: the YouTuber who grooms his fans, the popstar who chews through groupies. But it’s also a logic that, at the peak of #MeToo, saw cases such as a bad date with the comic Aziz Ansari rounded up to practically assault.

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It feels doubtful that presenting the 10 O’Clock News casts that kind of irresistible spell over young dating app users. Outside of the newsroom, it’s hard to imagine what power Edwards had to exercise. Conversely, anyone with compromising chats from an august national treasure has a one-click means of undoing them. The allegations against Edwards so far amount to unwise, but not illegal. There are certain things that are incompatible with broadcast gravitas, and it seems being incontinently thirsty online is one of them.

Edwards has suffered a humiliation that would be unsurvivable for many, personally as well as professionally. What he is accused of would appear to be a deep betrayal of his family; the way in which the accusations have been made has set him against his BBC colleagues, who at a minimum have seen their workplace brought into disrepute, and at worst have been dragged into the scandal on social media. And he has suffered in isolation, walled inside a formal namelessness that didn’t stop everyone from knowing it was him.

It is a strange fact that there are, out there in the world, actual paedophiles — men convicted of viewing the worst child sex abuse imagery — serving non-custodial sentences and living their lives. Meanwhile Edwards appears to have been comprehensively ruined by an allegation that so far amounts, at worst, to looking at pictures of someone he could have legally had sex with. This is not to say that his actions are beyond moral reproach. It’s possible to wrong other people without breaking the law.

It’s also possible to be both sinned against and sinning. But there is no proportionality in public shaming, and there is no privacy on the internet. Edwards was the perfect public figure for this scandal because everything about his image suggested perfectly controlled professionalism. How incongruous for the solemn man behind the desk to have appetites.

Those already committed to the “abuser” narrative will continue to believe the worst about Edwards; others will recalibrate him into a pure victim. The truth is probably messier. Whatever it is, it would have to be exceptionally bad to merit the destruction already inflicted. The problem is one of justice. Despite what Richard and Gambaccini believe, this is unlikely to be achieved in secret, any more than it is likely to be achieved by the febrile processes of social media.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

When my performance was over, my professor asked: “Would you have done that if you were painting your nails in your room alone?”

“Yes,” I said.

But the truth was, I wasn’t sure — and 20 years later, I still think of this moment every time the brush slips when I’m painting my toenails and I say “god damn it”. I wonder: am I authentically a person who swears when she messes up her pedicure? Or have I become one because, all those years ago, I said I was?

I thought of that moment, too, while reading Emily Bootle’s new book, This Is Not Who I Am, an examination of authenticity in the digital age, which attempts to suss the “realness” of everything from politics to personal brands. One early definition of authenticity, offered in the book’s introduction, is drawn from Rousseau: that you must not only be who you are but be seen to be who you are. But surely being seen, especially if you’re trying to be, influences your behaviour? If you dance (or paint your toenails) like no one is watching but in full awareness that an audience does, in fact, exist, where does authenticity end and performance begin?

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This was a difficult enough question to answer back when authenticity was synonymous with the mundane — when those “They’re Just Like Us!” photo spreads of celebrities running errands or exiting the gym wearing sweatpants were the realest thing out there. It’s even more difficult in an era when authenticity is increasingly synonymous with tragedy, when being real requires nothing less than eviscerating your own trauma in public so that everyone can see the suffering. That well-known meme, “pics or it didn’t happen”, implies a constant burden of proof, a sort of Turing test whereby you prove your humanity by posting. The irony: there remain circumstances when whipping out a camera to post the moment is decidedly inhuman.

One of the most disturbing things I saw amid the posting-mad days of the pandemic, now gratefully deleted, was a selfie from a woman standing in a hospital room, the camera angled so that the patient, her father, was clearly visible in the bed over her shoulder. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and not only was it unclear whether he was merely dying or already dead, it is hard to say which of these things would have been worse. “Overexposure to this type of image diminishes their power to induce revery,” Bootle writes in the chapter titled “Celebrity”. She’s talking about Beyonce’s pregnancy photo shoot, but she could just as easily be talking about this. This is the content we’re most rewarded for sharing: the Botticelli-style pregnancy photo shoot or the deathbed selfie (but not much in between).

Having become synonymous with the ugliest moments of life, the notion of authenticity intersects with another term, relatability, which is equally hard to pin down. Bootle notes that it is “overwhelmingly used to describe a generic self-sabotaging personality that leans towards extremes”:

“It is relatable to lie in bed all day; it is also relatable to try to cram too much into the day. It is relatable to run out of money… it is relatable to spend a lot of money on something frivolous but not on something sensible. It is relatable to have a panic attack. It is relatable to eat burgers; it is relatable to forget to eat. It is not relatable to resist sleeping with your ex, and it is not relatable to have a gym membership… It is not relatable to get married. Relatability, in short, suggests mess.”

The question, then, is what happens when we start thinking of our mess as something to be posted about instead of something we need to clean up.

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For every person who quietly recoiled from the sight of that hospital room selfie, from the gaping mouth of the dying man looming like a black hole over the picture-taker’s shoulder, another punched the retweet button and praised her bravery, her realness, in sharing that moment. This is perhaps unsurprising — it’s widely known by now that negative post receive more engagement online because they make people feel good — but less studied is the peculiar alchemy whereby positive posts can get the same sort of traction if they make people feel bad

Last month, a woman who posted about the pleasure of spending mornings drinking coffee in her garden with her husband became Twitter’s main character of the day. Her authentic expression of joy accrued outraged demands that she check her privilege. When a person is seen to be who they are, but who they are is a happy and well-adjusted adult, we don’t quite know what to do with it. We don’t like it. We don’t trust it. And if you won’t show us the mess lurking under the surface of your seemingly-happy life, we’ll just have to make one for you.

This toxic breed of engagement isn’t unique to Twitter, but it does seem to find its purest expression on that platform. Recently, on a friend’s podcast, I listened while he spoke ruefully about the behaviour that Twitter incentivises, comparing the site to a drug from which he wished some external force would cut him off. But I wondered how much we can get away with blaming the platforms for the behaviour of the people on them — and said as much. My friend, a sweet and mild-mannered guy in real life, has an entirely different persona on Twitter: pompous, caustic, bullying, openly antagonistic. Surely this is at least partly a choice, I said.

My friend conceded that Twitter does not bring out the best in him. Then he told me that personal responsibility is a Right-wing talking point — which is, ironically, exactly the kind of argument that would play maximally well on Twitter. Does this manifestation of extremely-online silliness in a non-online dialogue just go to show the lengths to which Twitter has rewired our brains, just as that acting class might, I sometimes think, have rewired mine? Or is it simply revealing what was already, authentically there?

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Bootle asks questions like this without ultimately offering answers. She concludes: “If any self we put out into the world is subject to the same analysis and questioning, to the same rules of performance, is being authentic materially different from being inauthentic?” As a means of understanding who we are and how we live in the present, then, her book is inscrutable — but I don’t think that’s the book’s fault. Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn about authenticity is that it’s become a useless term.

But the emptying-out of how we gauge “realness” has very real consequences. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he announced his intent to upend the old system that delineated verified versus unverified accounts. Overnight, the site’s blue check was transformed from a sort of “trusted source” badge into a commodity anyone could buy — and within hours, Twitter was overrun with accounts touting “inauthentic” blue ticks tweeting all manner of nonsense and wreaking all manner of havoc. When you consider that this is where some people get their news, where some influential people form their opinions, where political movements have been known to begin: authenticity is more than a question of what your average social media user feels able to share with a small circle of friends online.

But as for the average social media user’s search for authenticity, it seems fundamentally self-defeating. The most recent great hope was the app BeReal, which encourages the sharing of in-the-moment mundanity during an arbitrary two-minute window each day. This is understood to be the nearest thing available to a spontaneous and honest glimpse of a person’s life, yet is achieved only through the most rigid of constructs, the strictest rules — which, of course, self-conscious and digitally-savvy users are already figuring out how to manipulate (and sometimes using to go viral on other, more performative platforms). BeReal might be the app on which posts share the closest relationship with the truth, but it is not the truth — any more than brushing your teeth or painting your fingernails in an acting class, for an audience, is precisely the same as the real thing.

And even if you manage to draw back the curtain on your real life so that the internet can see everything, the act of drawing it back is inherently, well, unreal. Erasing the barrier between our inner and public-facing selves doesn’t reveal our authentic selves; it creates a third self, something uncanny, like those mirror-image photos that show what you would look like if both halves of your face were perfectly symmetrical.

Obviously, we all contain multitudes; obviously, we all make context-dependent choices to display some aspects of our inner selves while withholding others. Obviously, it is fully possible for a person to be a terror on Twitter, a doting cat dad on Instagram, a glib interlocutor in political debate, and an absolute peach to have a beer with. But which of these personas is real, or most real? All of them? Or none?

Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive. And I wonder if Madly, Deeply is supposed to perform the same spell for a different woman: the resurrection of a loved one. This book is not a finished piece of art. Its publication feels personal: it is a fragment of a man, a fragment of the cult of the actor, and vanity by proxy. Obliviously, this book investigates that cult of the actor.

People will say that they like the diaries because they like Rickman the actor, and they want more of him: but you don’t get that from the diaries. He was clearly likeable, and generous: he mocked himself in Galaxy Quest, playing a Shakespearian actor slumming it in a Star Trek rip-off for money, and he felt that tension between artistic and commercial imperatives. (An entry written during a Harry Potter film says bleakly: “More Great Hall. More turkey. More Hogwarts song”.) But the diaries aren’t good. Rickman is a subtle actor, but he is not a writer, and I think he knows it. He agonises over the entries. He hints that he lied to them, fretting that he cannot remember the “coded details and the sharp thoughts hidden between the safer lines”. A good diarist will betray his friends and, above all, himself, as consciously and willingly as an actor will put “the chicken” on his head for the part. But Rickman is more oblique: his confessions are accidental.

You yearn for him to tell more — to inhabit himself consciously. But the most he manages is to call women he dislikes “Ms”, beadily; suggest that famous actresses are controlling, and write “[He] has a wonderfully pitched reading. I wish he would find different mouth-shapes,” about Simon Russell Beale. He is fragile. He struggles. He watches Yes To The Dress.

Rickman knows that fame is self-hating: the phenomenon of wanting to engage with fantasy people not real ones, that is, not engaging at all. I suspect his battles with the media are a proxy for his battles with himself: art versus commerce. He notes the terrible questions journalists ask on press junkets: “Alan, what are the smells of Barcelona?”

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He notes the offensive diary items. He suspects a female masseur is taking sexual pleasure from touching him in a professional capacity. Did she confuse him with Hans Gruber, or the Vicomte de Valmont? Many actors excel at playing who they are not — it’s the ecstasy of transgression. He is nothing like a villain, or a satyrmaniac: he was in a relationship with the same woman for almost 50 years.

I think a large part of Rickman was repelled by his fame — he mocks actors who care who is playing what and for how much — but it addled him anyway. Fame corrupted and exposed him, and we know that because in the diaries he accidentally exposes himself. He and his partner are distraught to discover that there are no Leftists at the luxury hotel in the West Indies they visit over Christmas: why would there be? He frets that the (presumably First Class) airport lounge he finds himself in has no space for “Eccentrics and Weirdos” like himself. So why not step outside?

His serious politics — and I am willing to believe they are serious in intent — are made absurd by the publication of these diaries. If you place serious things next to trivial ones — and the lifestyle of a famous actor can only be trivial — they become trivial too.

This is Rickman at an anti-austerity march in 2011. It reads like parody. “Straight to EAT for coffee and a sandwich before wandering down to Trafalgar Square and long wait for the Equity banner. At Park Lane the sight of the Dorchester proved too much.” “Ms [Mia] Farrow talked long and expertly about Darfur,” he writes in another entry. “Salma Hayek talks of her time in India as a volunteer for Mother Teresa — this utterly beautiful woman talking of wiping up shit and worms and keeping the flies off a dying woman’s face.”

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It often reads like parody, Adrian Mole grown up: “On the way home, a visit — forced — to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.” Or: “St James’s Christmas Mass. The sermon evoked Stalin as a reason for the need for God. Mostly I was looking at the congregation and wondering why we don’t have a local Waitrose.” Or: “Tonight the tree frogs were silent. What do they know?”

He should have written a book about acting. He is, of course, a superb critic: “Emma [Thompson] needs to work with someone who will ask her to dig rather than skim”; “Ms [Georgina] Cates [in An Awfully Big Adventure] suffers from only functioning from her sense of the story. She listens to nothing, responds to nothing. She’s a butterfly inside her own glass case, watching herself bat around.” “Every line,” in a Henry Goodman performance of Shylock, “is a thought contained in a body which has a life.”

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But mostly it is Rickman in an unfinished play: what would he think? It is a fair metaphor for our treatment of the acting class: deification is objectification, and destruction; the end of Perfume, in which the desired man is torn apart. It is fragments from a nervous man who hated gossip, and now will be read for it: “Bumped into P. Mandelson & Reinaldo [his partner] in Westbourne Grove. He was eating a choc-ice and trying to rent a video. Tea with Mussolini.”

So it is a tragedy, then: with the publication of this book, perhaps commerce won. A question from the Sweeney Todd press junket is cruel, but it displays his predicament neatly: Alan, if you were a pie which flavour would you be?

But everyone else in Britain must have. He’s now sold five million copies of them, and at moments has enjoyed an almost Beatles-esque literary ubiquity, topping the hardback and paperback bestseller charts simultaneously. And like the early Beatles’ albums, he’s cranked them out at a prolific (and commercially auspicious) rate. The first of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries came out in September 2020, and the second almost a year later to the day. Right on cue, the third, The Bullet that Missed is out this week. And like its predecessors, it is set to be one of the bestselling books in British history.

The famous novelist who is famous for being something else — a newscaster, cook, or dress-designer — is no great novelty. And though he’s clear that he didn’t want to be seen as having “dashed out a celebrity novel”, Osman is clearly not in the writing game for the garret and the overdraft: his first two books went for a seven-figure advance. But while Graham Norton, Jeremy Vine and Richard Coles bashed it out, took the cheque, and returned to the loftier heights of their primary career, Osman has refused to stop writing.

If you’ve been entertained in Britain over the last 25 years, you’ll be familiar with Osman, whether you realise it or not. If, in the Noughties, you saw a deal-broking, sombre-talking Noel Edmonds conjuring numbers out of red boxes — Osman was behind the camera, as a producer. Or, if you only caught the aquatic soft-play of Total Wipeout or the “anarchic” nastiness of 8 Out of 10 Cats, go back and check the credits. Executive producer: Richard Osman.

But this was all mere preludial before Osman’s imperial, front-of-house period. First, still behind a desk if not behind the scenes, as Pointless’s toothy sage of arcane trivia, before spinning off solo with Richard Osman’s House of Games. And in the past few years, the written word has also become an integrated province of Greater Osmania. If you can clamber past the cardboard Osman display set in the Waterstones window, the life-size Osman cut-out in the doorway, you’ll find only pyramids of Osman hardbacks, themselves overshadowed by the broader Teotihuacans of shiny Osman paperbacks.

He was already on television every single day. The face and the name, every night of the week just around teatime — flick on the old crystal bucket and there he is, in the slot of warm, cuddly, wisecracking nerd. Like Stephen Fry, a camera-loving Cantab whose intelligence is attractive rather than intimidating — indeed, Osman is seriously fanciable according to various samples of “which celebrity d’you wanna shag” psephology.

Heat magazine’s weirdest crush (2011) has also been aided by a campaign of epic salesmanship. First the Tube posters, the chat show slots, the free books given away to NHS workers, and the personal “brand manager” appointed to Osman by his publisher. And then the blurbing splurge and the endorsements from Britain’s popular intelligentsia which gush across the covers of Osman’s books. Adam Kay (“achingly British”), Marian Keyes (“VERY funny”) and this slightly scary recommendation from Philippa Perry: “I didn’t ever want to finish this book!” It would be too easy to envy such a spectacle, and several reviewers have given into the temptation. But Osman’s success has rippled overseas (number two in Japan). He can’t be written off as some self-inflating industry balloon.

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So what of the books? Like the rest of Osman’s oeuvre, they’re very entertaining, and make smart use of the winning ingredients of British popular fiction. The setting, Osman’s Hogwarts or Malory Towers, is one of Britain’s few remaining growth industries: an old-age home in Kent called Coopers Chase. Living there are Osman’s Famous Five — Ron, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ibrahim — who set up the Thursday Murder Club, an extra-curricular group dedicated to solving cold murder cases. They have help from local bobbies Chris and Donna, and shadowy figures from their own pasts. The result is something like a cross between The Archers and Spooks, with Elizabeth, a kind of female James Bond in retirement, lending proceedings a touch of Cold War, gun-in-the-handbag glamour.

Osman isn’t a multifaceted or complex writer. His villains stalk the night-terrors of the middle-class imagination: a drug baroness, teenage hoodlums, tax-avoiders and, most horrifying of all, a gauche property developer. And in the background lurk the clichés of broader thrillerdom: Colombian drug smugglers, the New York mafia, dodgy Albanians. This is all smoothed under a tone of relentless comic bathos, raising the stakes of a murder before dropping you back down to quaint, twee, pensioner earth. So, meet this fearsome former Russian spy, sometime head of the Leningrad KGB, who is on the phone to a call centre trying to get Virgin Media to show this week’s Bake Off. Or: on the road, racing after our perp — but can’t we please stop for the loo, my bladder’s really not what it used to be.

These deflationary gags, honed on the panel show, are good for a half-hour, not for 400 pages. It has been labelled “cosy crime”, godless and largely un-romantic. When sex rears its head, it keeps its hat on (all of Osman’s oldsters are rather horny, but only in the manner of a wistful dotage). Even his criminals hardly swear. In place of such grandiosity or indelicacy are jokes, daytime telly references, warmth, and a steady, mellow banality.

You can’t attain such heights of popularity without trouble. And while Osman would always face aesthetic attack (most crime novelists do), some suppose his popularity comes with political responsibilities. One notable attack from the Left accused him of a kind of bourgeois sentimentality, projecting a too-tranquil provincial England where the police aren’t corrupt or violent enough and which neglects the “cruel and authoritarian” truth of Conservative rule.

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Whether or not the Kent police really need defunding, the Thursday Murder Club series is certainly not politically radical. From Agatha Christie onwards, as the historian Alison Light has argued, English crime has always contained a strand of deep conservatism, suspending a cyclical, domestic space of puzzles and resolutions at a safe remove from the anxieties of modernity. With Osman, this can be even more robustly applied. His pensioner-vigilantes are literally bubbled away from the threats of the contemporary world, even more so than Christie’s middle-class assassins. His goal is entertainment, not critique or attack. The “whip-smart” millennial novelist can angrily deconstruct online sexual politics as much as they like; in Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, one of the inconsequential running gags is Joyce’s new Instagram account, @GreatJoy69, and the slew of unsolicited messages and pictures it attracts.

The truth is that Osman’s characters, readers and viewers are the same constituency: Britain’s comfortable gerontocrats. Everything that I associate with being and feeling modern — atomisation, digital culture, urban space, irony — is absent from these books. They’re not for me; they’re for the shrinking number of people who still reliably get their laughs and news from television. And Osman knows this is his gift. “My whole career is formats, really,” he told the Guardian, from Deal or No Deal to The Bullet that Missed.

The scale of his success tells us some things we know already: we’re getting older, we’re retelling the same stories, rehashing the same jokes. But it’s also a reminder that for the vast swell of people, a good time looks a bit like an endless panel show: inconsequential, cringey and hopelessly trite; but good-natured, and conscious of a collective national mesh of humour and sympathies which we are sometimes of in danger of forgetting.

That’s no reason to head out to mourn Western civilisation. The great hope for Osman’s books may be the news that broke soon after his first started breaking records: Steven Spielberg is to adapt it for the screen (producer: Richard Osman). In the hands of Spielberg — a technical master of his medium in a way that Osman will unfortunately never be — the true role of stories like this will become plain. Not to sermonise or uncover the economic basis of society, but to move and thrill the common heart.

Filmmakers had made massive bombs before Heaven’s Gate and they have made massive bombs since. Three or four were released last year, including Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which is by far the best film Del Toro has created. Both of these films are nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year and have probably lost far more money for their studios than Heaven’s Gate. How is it that Cimino became so famous and was able to create two towering works of art in the space of three years? And then become a pariah?

*** 

Cimino lived for 77 years, having had so much plastic surgery by the end of his life that it was rumoured he transgendered. In the end, he looked like the cliché of a middle-aged lesbian. When he was barely 40, at the height of his career, he was briefly the world’s most famous youngish director, after winning the Oscar for directing The Deer Hunter, a new Hollywood masterpiece that spoke powerfully to Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation about the cost of war. It was a huge, serious R-rated movie for adults that was also a big popular hit, a work of movie art that resonated with filmgoers everywhere. (Well, that was 1979 for you.) But the following year, when his follow-up Heaven’s Gate bombed, Cimino instantly became the most disgraced director in Hollywood history and his career was mostly over. What happened? A big part of it had to do with the perils of obsession and perhaps not being as talented as your only great film implies.

Cimino was born in 1939, a third-generation Italian American who grew up on Long Island. His father was a music publisher, and his mother was a costume designer, and Michael was considered a prodigy from a very early age at the private schools he attended. But Cimino resented what was expected of him and he began to rebel in high school. He started hanging out with juvenile delinquents and getting into fights and coming home drunk. His parents couldn’t believe this was happening to their well-behaved little boy and they couldn’t stand his new friends. But these new friends lived with a passion and an intensity that Cimino, as a rich kid, just never found among his peers. They were the outsiders and the individuals that Cimino would be attracted to for the rest of his life; men with their own code — all of his seven movies are about criminals, soldiers, policeman, mob bosses, murderers.

Cimino found it strange that his father, not so much his mother, disapproved of his delinquency because his father was, according to Cimino, the life of the party. He travelled a lot, he was an intense womanizer, he loved martinis and chain-smoked and died young.

Cimino graduated high school in 1956 and then enrolled in Michigan State in East Lansing, where he majored in graphic arts and was a member of the weightlifting club. He was a popular student and in the 1959 yearbook he was described as someone who “loved blondes, Thelonious Monk, and drinking, preferably vodka”. After studying at Yale, Cimino moved to New York City and worked in advertising on Madison Avenue, where he directed commercials for everything from Kodak to United Airlines to Pepsi to cigarettes. The added incentive, Cimino said, was to meet beautiful girls.

Clients were soon clamouring to work with Cimino, but he had one drawback: because of how meticulous his work was he almost always went overtime, and yet most thought the results were worth it, even if Cimino went overschedule and over budget. Through advertising he met a woman named Joann Carelli, who was an agent for commercial directors, and they began what would become a 30 year on-off relationship and she would be the only credited producer on the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate. She is also the only woman Cimino has been quasi-romantically linked with; he never married, he never had children.

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As the Seventies began, Cimino decided to move to Los Angeles, where he began his career as a screenwriter. It was Carelli who encouraged this, even though Cimino had never written a script before. But by 1978 he had written about a dozen and was making a decent living. Cimino would have rather directed, but he didn’t have any money to option properties or buy books or pay someone to write a script and the only chance he had to direct something was if he owned the screenplay that a movie star wanted to make. And that’s exactly what happened with a screenplay Cimino wrote called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which was shown to Clint Eastwood who bought it for his production company.

Eastwood had planned on making the movie himself but allowed Cimino a chance to direct it, his first feature, after being impressed with his rewrites on the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. Cimino had been hired in to revise a second version of the script, and the film turned out to be a massive hit — the sixth-highest grossing movie of 1973, a much bigger hit than the original Dirty Harry. Cimino has said that if it weren’t for Clint Eastwood, he would never have had a career in film, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was the 17^th highest grossing film of that year and Jeff Bridges was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Cimino was 35.

Because of the success of the movie Cimino was deluged with offers, but he didn’t like any of them and decided that he would only get involved with a project that he wanted to do. This was the Seventies. This was the era of the filmmaker as auteur. This was the decade of freedom and studios were willing to take big risks.

So Cimino kept rejecting offer after offer until he decided to pitch a big ambitious Vietnam movie to a few EMI executives who had approached him in November 1976 about another script called The Man Who Came To Play, whose central conceit was about people going to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. But the script needed to be heavily rewritten and revised: EMI loved the premise but it wasn’t a movie yet.

Cimino had read the script and told EMI he was confident that he could elevate the script into an actual movie, but it was unclear who these people in Vegas playing Russian roulette were, why they were there, and what had happened to them. Cimino was intrigued and decided to hire Deric Washburn, who had worked with him on a previous script, on the revision. Washburn went ahead and wrote a first draft and when Cimino read it he thought it was so bad that Washburn must be mentally deranged. Cimino and Washburn supposedly had a confrontation at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood where Washburn said he couldn’t take the pressure of working on the script with Cimino’s attitude and gave up. So Cimino fired him and threw everything out and wrote the first draft completely alone. The Deer Hunter was born.

Now, Washburn has said that this is all a lie. He claimed that the two of them spent three days together at the Sunset Marquis and hammered out the new plot and agreed that Washburn would do the bulk of the writing. Washburn claimed he had been given a time limit of a month — the clock was ticking — and he had spent the entire time writing and rewriting the script. When he was finished, according to Washburn, Cimino and Carelli took him to a cheap restaurant somewhere on the Sunset Strip where Carelli told Washburn: “Well, it’s fuck-off time.” And Washburn was fired.

Washburn saw this as a classic Hollywood situation: you get a dummy to write the goddamn thing, then tell the dummy to go fuck himself, then put your own name on the dummy’s script, and make sure the dummy never comes back. Washburn admits he was so tired that he didn’t really care if he was fired. He’d been working 20-hour days for a month and was completely burnt out. He left LA the next day, got on a plane and flew back to Manhattan.

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EMI was surprised by the new The Deer Hunter script and how it turned one man into three — and how these men now worked in a steel town in Pennsylvania and were all drafted into Vietnam. In the original script it is Mike, played by Robert De Niro, who stays in Vietnam and Christopher Walken’s Nick who comes back to the steel town and returns to Linda (Meryl Streep). It is Mike who meets his tragic fate at the Russian roulette table and not Nick. Cimino revised all this, but the Writer’s Guild of America in their arbitration process awarded Washburn sole screenplay by credit and the original authors of the script The Man Who Came To Play were given story credit along with Michael Cimino. Cimino was pissed. But he had a movie to make.

The Deer Hunter started shooting in June of 1977, and it took six months to complete at double its original budget. The cast, along with De Niro and Walken, was made up of John Savage, John Cazale and Cazale’s girlfriend at the time, Meryl Streep, who De Niro recommended to Cimino after seeing her in a play. Streep didn’t really respond to the role of Linda — she saw her as a vague, stick girlfriend — but Cazale was dying of lung cancer and she took the role so she could be near him on set.

There was an arduous year of post-production — the film editor Peter Zinner, who won an Oscar for his work, was handed about 110 miles of printed film to edit. This was a monumental task in 1978. How did so much film get shot, one wonders. How did the already large budget double? The answer is Cimino had become obsessed. He was now a film artist who wanted to create a masterpiece, something that could be compared to The Godfather and The Godfather Part II — movies that are looked at as the pinnacle achievements of the New Hollywood.

The wedding sequence that opens The Deer Hunter was supposed to be about 20 minutes long but in the finished film it’s over 50 minutes and it’s grand and ominous. Visconti would be proud. Cimino’s instincts were so right: to give us this much time to spend with these characters until the horror of Vietnam interrupts everything and destroys their lives. The moviemaking in the wedding sequence and then in Vietnam is monumental. An artist has painted this movie and seems to know exactly what he’s doing with every brush stroke, every camera pan, every edit.

The first cut of The Deer Hunter was three and a half hours. EMI and Cimino were pleased with it but executives at Universal, the studio which had bought the film before production and were releasing it in the United States, were not so enthusiastic. According to an exec at EMI, the Universal contingent were shocked and thought the use of God Bless America in the final scene was anti-American. They really did not like it and they really didn’t like it any more when it was cut down by 30 minutes to just over three hours. Michael Deeley, the EMI executive who had overseen the film’s production, said that he realised too late that Universal was the wrong home for The Deer Hunter.

The head of Universal at that time was Thom Mount, who has described the post-production process on The Deer Hunter as a continuing nightmare from the moment Cimino finished it to the day it was released. Cimino was wedded to every single frame he shot. He was an artist obsessed with his own creation.

When The Deer Hunter was released in December 1978, it was given just a one-week run in two theaters in North America: one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The one in Los Angeles was The National in Westwood, which, along with the Village, was the grandest of all the theaters in LA. It was always a thrill, no matter what was playing, to go see a movie at The National: even if we had no interest in a particular movie and it was playing at The National, we’d still go.

My movie-mad friend and I — we were 14 — bought advanced tickets for the Saturday matinee. Four of us went with his parents, who had to take us because The Deer Hunter was R-rated. We sat in the last row and the movie began, no trailers, in 70mm. It remains one of the most powerful and overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had. The Russian roulette sequence was so suspenseful, so violent — no one had ever seen anything like this — that I was terrified, wiped-out.

Of course the literal-minded press complained that there weren’t any recorded cases of Russian roulette in the Vietnam War, but Cimino said The Deer Hunter was a personal and an autobiographical film. This is the kind of film an artist makes. The Deer Hunter for Cimino was not political, polemical or supposed to be historically accurate. This is what an artist says. And Cimino sometimes teasingly defended these scenes by saying he had news clippings from Singapore stating that Russian roulette was used during the war though  never showed these clippings to anyone. Cimino was a prankster and liked to make fun of the press and toy with them. This is what an artist does. I’ve done it before. Often you can’t help yourself. You think: they need to be tricked. They need to learn a lesson and get fucked with a bit. You think: why do we even have to talk to them?

In some factions — and this is so tiresome — The Deer Hunter was called a racist movie because of its depictions of the Vietnamese soldiers who torture the Americans. The whole film was apparently a racist rewriting of that tragic war. But Christopher Walken has said that while making the movie no one ever mentioned Vietnam — it was simply a war film and Russian roulette was its metaphor. Michael Deeley, that EMI exec, also said that The Deer Hunter wasn’t really about Vietnam but about how individuals respond to pressure in an unworthy war and how they face the horrible choices presented to them.

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The Deer Hunter is a parable and many Vietnam veterans who responded favourably to the film thought the Russian roulette sequences were a valid allegory. Maybe not the liberal entertainment press who, despite admiring the film, kept pushing the racist angle. But this is what an artist is often up against: a wilful misreading of your intentions in order to satisfy someone’s own ideological outlook. This is so boring and it was happening in 1978 just as it happens now. Some things don’t change.

That the movie was originally released in just two theatres in December — in order to qualify for Oscar nominations — was the brainchild of a flamboyantly gay Grease producer called Allan Carr. He had become a fan of the movie at early screenings and devised a PR campaign that would ensure the movie would be talked about and then rereleased nationwide at the end of February, when we saw it again at The Village Theater and where it played even more powerfully.

My friends and I were in awe of this movie. And most critics were too, with many of them writing that The Deer Hunter was the best American epic since The Godfather. Roger Ebert called it one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made and David Thomson has called it one of the great American films of all time. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won five: Picture, Director, supporting actor for Walken, editing and sound. De Niro, Streep and John Savage were also nominated for their performances — as was Vilmos Zsigmond’s extraordinary cinematography.

And this sweep at the Oscars happened despite a pushback campaign against the film once the nominations were announced. It was spearheaded by Warren Beatty, a famously liberal Hollywood insider, whose comedy Heaven Can Wait was also up for nine Oscars and was competing with The Deer Hunter in many of the same categories. Jane Fonda, the star of Coming Home, another Vietnam War film that was The Deer Hunter’s main competition at the Oscars that year, also criticised the film for its racism in public, even though she had never seen it. There were demonstrators outside the auditorium where the awards were given out. Robert De Niro was so anxious over the controversy that he decided not to go and stayed in New York, but then Jon Voight was the heavy favourite to win for Coming Home that night, which he did. A week after that Oscar ceremony, Cimino, newly minted as New Hollywood’s latest boy wonder, flew to Montana to begin shooting his follow-up to The Deer Hunter — a movie called Heaven’s Gate.

***

Heaven’s Gate was a script Cimino had written in 1971 called The Johnson County War, a western set in 1892 about cattle barons versus immigrants that didn’t get any traction because no stars wanted to sign on. It was shelved, but in the days leading up to the 1979 Academy Awards, when it seemed certain Cimino would triumph and The Deer Hunter would win him both a Best Picture and a Best Directing Oscar, United Artists was convinced to resurrect what was now called Heaven’s Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges and John Hurt.

United Artists approved a budget of $11.6 million and offered Cimino complete artistic freedom. The studio was coming off a heady run: it had won the Best Picture Oscar three years in a row, with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall, and it was considered the go-to studio in a town for filmmakers who didn’t want to be constrained by the politics and bureaucracy and interference of some of the other bigger studios. This was the headiest time in Cimino’s career: he was offered the most freedom as an artist, and he took full advantage of it. He was going to paint the screen with not only the most amazing western ever made but one of the grandest achievements of the New Hollywood. It would be the ultimate auteur movie, aiming not only for a stunning work of visual art but also a violent and popular movie that would connect with a mass audience.

Cimino was drunk on the possibilities and when a filmmaker becomes this obsessed with a movie, the first thing to go out the window is judgment. There was only one thing that United Artists asked of Cimino, and that was to have his film ready to premiere in December — to make sure it was eligible for a truckload of Oscar nominations and also have it play during the lucrative Christmas season.

But by the sixth day of filming, Heaven’s Gate was already five days behind schedule. Cimino had become an artist whose fanatical attention to detail led to an entire street being built to his precise specifications, and then being torn down because it just didn’t look right. The artist’s mania was settling in. An entire tree that Cimino approved of was cut down and moved in pieces and rebuilt in a courtyard in Oxford, England, where the opening Harvard graduation scene takes place. An entire irrigation system was built under the land where the climactic battlefield scene would unfold so that it would remain vividly green.

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But why not? This was the era where Francis Ford Coppola shot a million feet of footage for Apocalypse Now. Kubrick had shot almost as much footage for The Shining. Spielberg had lavishly overspent on 1941. Even Martin Scorsese had spent $20 million on Raging Bull. What was United Artists supposed to do except trust the artist they hired to make the movie they agreed upon?

But Heaven’s Gate was soon haemorrhaging money, and by the time Cimino was finished with principal photography he had shot more than 220 hours of footage. The movie was costing around $200,000 a day to produce at one point. But Cimino was in the grip of something: he wanted to make his perfect movie and soon he was demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes. Cimino had become the kind of director who delayed filming for the day until a cloud that he liked rolled into frame. Actors and musicians who had been brought to Montana where most of the movie was shot would wait around and end up stranded, endlessly waiting to be called to shoot their scenes that never materialised. John Hurt, who plays Kristofferson’s best friend, temporarily left the set to shoot David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and claimed no one noticed that he’d been gone.

Heaven’s Gate didn’t finish shooting until March 1980, and ended up costing $44 million dollars, four times the agreed budget. Cimino then locked himself away with his editor — William Reynolds, who had edited The Godfather and The Sound of Music — and worked obsessively on putting the movie together for its new release date: Thanksgiving weekend, 1980 — a year after the original release date.

After I watched it for a third time during lockdown, I think Michael Cimino had convinced himself that he’d created a masterpiece, and that all the expense and hard work and time spent had been worth it. And though there are dozens of images in Heaven’s Gate that are as stunning as any ever shot and there is undeniable genius in it, the movie does not work.

In late June 1980, Cimino previewed a rough cut for the execs at United Artists that ran to 5 hours and 25 minutes, with Cimino promising to cut about fifteen minutes. UA flatly refused to release the film at that length and conspired to fire Cimino. Cimino finally relented and said that he could re-edit the film to about 3 hours and 40 minutes, but no less. In the end, he cut it down to 3 hours and 39 minutes.The premiere took place on November 19 at a theater on the Upper East Side in New York, packed with celebrities including the stars of the movie. During the intermission, Cimino noticed no one was talking excitedly to him or drinking the complimentary champagne. He went up to his publicist and asked why everyone was so glum and subdued and the publicist reportedly told him: “Because they hate the movie, Michael.”

The critical reception the following day was an avalanche of negativity. The New York Times called it “something quite rare in movies these days: an unqualified disaster”. Instead of reviewing Heaven’s Gate as a flawed ambitious epic — with some of the most gorgeous cinematography ever seen in an American movie — it was reviewed mostly as a business story, with everyone blinded by the cost rather than what was in the movie itself. When he realised what was happening — that his movie was being cancelled! — Cimino complained that it wasn’t finished yet and that he had been pressured to cut the movie for a Thanksgiving release. After a one-week run in New York, Cimino and UA pulled the movie.

Cimino recut it down to 2 hours and 29 minutes and it was released in late April 1981. It might have been shorter, but it was far worse than the original version — which, despite being a mess, has a feeling and coherency that is lacking in the truncated version. Roger Ebert proclaimed it was still one of the most scandalous cinematic wastes he had ever seen in a consensus reappraisal. The film closed in two weeks having only grossed $3.5 million.

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In the years since, there has been a major reassessment of Heaven’s Gate and what Cimino was trying to do. This began in the mid-Eighties, with European critics such as Robin Woods calling Heaven’s Gate one of the supreme achievements in Hollywood cinema. David Thomson called Heaven’s Gate “a wounded monster” that demands re-exploration. Martin Scorsese has said that it has many overlooked virtues. And it must be said that it does have a few overlooked virtues and that it does play better today that it did 40 years ago — its grandeur has become more powerful as the notions of movies are dying. But the damage to its reputation and to Cimino had already been completed in the early Eighties. The New Hollywood that thrived in the Seventies, where directors were often given free reign, had a stake driven into its heart. The New Hollywood was officially over. A decade of high-concept movies followed, negotiated by agents and lawyers as well as a return to studio control.

Heaven’s Gate damaged Cimino’s career considerably, but he still worked throughout the Eighties. It wasn’t until 1996, after a series of flops, that Cimino made his final film, Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson, with a budget of $31 million and only grossing $21,000. This was when Cimino supposedly snapped: reports of him arriving to set late, seemingly under the influence of drugs. The editor on Sunchaser said that Cimino emanated an eerie, freaky vibe and that he had his face covered during the editing process with a handkerchief. Over the years, I always wondered what happened to Cimino. He very rarely opened up or gave interviews after Heaven’s Gate. And yet colleagues and financiers and executives and producers continued to talk about him: vain, self-indulgent, egotistical and megalomaniacal. How can one make a movie like The Deer Hunter and then nothing else that remotely rivals it? The rest of Cimino’s movies are mostly bad; in fact, all of them are bad to one degree or another. How did Cimino get so lucky that one time out?

He seemed to be an incredibly intelligent man: his tastes were wide-ranging and he had real moviemaking fever. But something went wrong. Something got fucked up. And I think part of it was that he was working in the wrong business and believed that the sheer force of his talent was going to keep the lights on — that no matter what, his talent was going to let him thrive in the jungles of Hollywood. In the end he became a recluse of sorts, hiding in his Beverly Hills mansion on Coldwater, looking, on the few occasions he was spotted, as if he were transitioning into a woman. He died in 2016 but no one knows how or from what — the cause of death was never revealed.

He once said: “When I’m kidding, I’m serious, and when I’m serious, I’m kidding. I am not who I am and I am who I am not.” To me, this sounds like an artist.

Listen to The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast here.

On one of the last nights before the festival kicked off, I insisted on going to Film Forum to see Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground. I was excited: it was the first film I’d see in weeks, as my life had gone from one of watching films to one of begging filmmakers to sign contracts — and the documentary had been praised far and wide as “exhilarating… experimental” (AV Club), “rapturous” (Slate), and “as radical, daring, and brilliant, as the band itself” (Rolling Stone).

And it’s true: I was exhilarated. I was sold when the first notes of Venus in Furs began to play, thumping almost painfully loudly in the butter-scented dark of the theatre. I was sold when Lou Reed’s beautiful young face appeared in Chelsea Girls-style split-screen, flickering with the slight human movements that Warhol couldn’t stamp out even with his commands not to move. I was sold on the hypnagogic, Brakhage-inspired collages splicing together 16mm film at that dizzying pace where impression exceeds memory. It made me think about how beautiful time is, how beautiful existence is, how beautiful youth is. As K. Austin Collins wrote in Rolling Stone, “[t]he movie makes you wish you were there”.

But I’m not sure it’s true that, as Collins continues, with the “lights darkened, [and the] dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are”. When the lights lifted, I was there in a chair in a city overrun by private equity and a sense of impending collapse, waiting for people in their fifties to collect their bags and exit to the restrooms.

All the reviews talk about how the film isn’t a traditional narrative documentary, telling you the story of the band. Instead, it makes you “experience… feel… in your gut”. The film, then, is nothing more than a vibe. The only real impression it leaves you with is that The Velvet Underground was cool. And it was cool. They look cool, even today, in those videos with the polka dots projected on them, the hot people dancing in all the leather. Lou Reed and John Cale still look beautiful, young and sombre under Warhol’s camera. Unlike, say, The Pixies, they’re not lame at all.

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And yet this isn’t quite as radical a documentary as reviews would have it. As one reviewer put it, there are interviews that “offer commentary and insight, alternating between taking a detached ‘long view’ of things and plunging us into the middle of it all”. In other words, there are normal talking-head interviews, even though they’re in square aspect ratio and even though they’re projected in split-screen and even though they’re filmed by Ed Lachman.

And you know what? It’s not fun to see members of the Factory as 65 year olds. Cultural documentary, I’m starting to think, is always fundamentally sad. It’s always a memento mori. Music is about youth and beauty, but this film can’t escape a stultifying sense of impending death, even in a “fun” version that seems mostly to prove that Todd Haynes is familiar with structuralist film. The problem with documentary is that everyone hates documentary: that’s why all the truly original ones are affronts to the genre; they are anti-recreative and experimental (Shoah, The Killing Fields, etc.). Even usually brilliant and original directors fall flat when they turn to documentary, churning out depressingly normal, depressingly obvious work (see Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger, an Iggy Pop documentary complete with titles in Creeper font).

The problem of documentary, its vampire problem, is worse with music. Music is about people between the ages of 15 and 30 being incredibly cool — and Sixties cool, especially, is about youth and freshness and limits. That’s why Haynes doesn’t continue past the break-up of the band: because it’s not cool that they didn’t die, because it was lame when Green Day came out with American Idiot in 2004, because no one wanted to see Billie Joel Armstrong wearing eyeliner in his thirties.

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As the film discusses, Warhol would project his work at 16 frames per second, a third slower than life. The people here seem ghostly, slowed down, plugged into a museum-like circuit, one where the individual is transformed from flesh to symbol, from transient to uncontainable. The same change makes a person cool. Coolness, celebrity, is all about some area halfway between presence and absence.

One of the highlights of the film is seeing Jonathan Richman meet the band as a 15 year old, and hearing the 2019 Richman exclaim that he thought “These people would understand me!” That’s how you always feel about your idols; like there’s someone a little far away, a few years old, a little bit skinnier, who knows.

So you don’t want to see them grow up. You don’t want them to get married and have kids and buy a house. You don’t want them to survive. You don’t want them to get normal.

At one point in the movie, Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian filmmaker, talks about the zeitgeist of the Sixties, the movie houses of Midtown, and the New York Film Festival, all bristling with avant-garde experiment and energy. It’s hard to imagine a time when the New York Film Festival was interesting. Today, an exciting NYFF film is The Velvet Underground, a film by an old person about old people for old people. And what’s left for us? For days after watching the film, I listened to ‘Heroin’ over and over again, struck again by the pain of it, by the screechiness and hurt.

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In comparison, all young people have today are Instagram memes and videos and a sense of irony so deep that until that film festival I was working on actually happened, most people thought it was all a joke. It was beautiful and triumphant, and two days after it ended, our creative director, a “meme lord”, an innocent child who had been working in an ice cream shop in Florida and living with his mom until he got scouted and brought to New York in July, overdosed, and I found out he was dead from seeing his dead body on my Instagram feed. His ex-boyfriend has posted the photo, announcing his death and asking if anyone knew how to contact his family.

Again, almost everyone thought it was a joke, and no one had his family’s address. No one knew if he had siblings. No one even knew how old he was; I could vaguely remember a conversation where he’d told me he was either one or two years older than he said he was, because even being 25 was terrifyingly old. Because to be cool, you have to die, you have to disappear. The heroin has to actually kill you.

This month marks 30 years since the first publication of the Modern Review, the magazine which I co-founded with Toby Young, my then soulmate, and Cosmo Landesman, my then husband. Toby was a teenager when I met him in 1984, his academic family living next door to Cosmo’s in Islington. When I abandoned my first marriage and small son at the age of 24 to elope with Cosmo, I promptly annexed Toby as my amigo-in-chief. (We were such a close threesome that my son, Jack, was blessed with the middle name Tobias.)

It all started on a sunny spring day in 1990; as we queued for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, Cosmo and Toby were talking about Intellectual Stuff while Jack and I — both video game addicts — chattered away about Mario. When Toby joined our conversation, I remember marvelling at his ability to one minute bang on about the Frankfurt School and some bird called Theodora Dorno, and the next do an impression of Bart Simpson. It occurred to me that he was a new type of person — as much concerned with Baywatch as Beowulf — who needed a new type of magazine. And so we started to plot: “I’ll be boss because I’m the rich one and Toby, you’ll be the editor because you’re the clever one.”

It certainly helped that I was loaded. Sometime in the Eighties, in my late 20s, I was earning more than the Prime Minister and the Chancellor combined, simply by writing for newspapers and magazines. Then I pocketed an advance of £100,000 to write a smutty novel about a girl reporter on the make, called Ambition. But there’s only so much cocaine a person can take — and even after I gave away a not insignificant proportion of my earnings to charity every month, there was still quite a bit left, so I started us off with a few thousand.

A saintly patron since my impoverished teenage days, Peter York, declared his willingness to invest — and John le Carré sent us a cheque too. But it was tireless Toby who did the legwork; after a year of begging letters he amassed £16,666.50 — just £1,983,333.50 short of his £2 million target.

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Toby used to say that he had “negative charisma”; he’d walk into a room and everyone would loathe him. Cosmo told me that he’d given Toby the classic anti-hero novel What Makes Sammy Run — and Toby read it as a users’ manual rather than a cautionary tale. But I never saw that: I adored him. He was full of life — more exuberant than anyone I’d ever met. So I wasn’t surprised when he gathered around him a coterie of very clever youngsters who got it completely.

LOW CULTURE FOR HIGHBROWS was our strap-line; inside our first issue of Autumn 1991 our two-page mission statement was accompanied by images of Bart Simpson and Roland Barthes. “Imagine if FR Leavis was editing Smash Hits!” I said at the time.

The run-up was very dramatic — as Toby put it a decade ago: “We couldn’t afford a laser printer, so the literary editor, who also happened to be the assistant arts editor of the European, sneaked us into Robert Maxwell’s newspaper emporium and showed us how to use the equipment. When Maxwell found out he applied for an injunction against the magazine and, when that failed, pursued us through the courts for damages.” On the eve of the court case, which would have without doubt bankrupted us, Maxwell went for a midnight swim — and we were off.

I didn’t keep anything from those days, but Cosmo still has a collection of old copies, including an ironic “home-shopping catalogue” supplement that features a Julie Burchill doll, basically a Barbie dressed in black with dark hair: “Pull the string and she tells you how much she earns.”

The covers and headlines were funny and forthright – “KEANU REEVES – YOUNG, DUMB AND FULL OF COME”; “WHY PRINCE CHARLES MAKES ME SICK” (Guess who by?); DI HARD: WHY DIANA IS OUR POP PRINCESS; (Me again!) POSH SPICE – IS SHE FUCK!; WAZZA MAZZA WIZ GAZZA? (David Runciman — now a distinguished academic.)

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Our writers were brilliant and diverse. Nick Hornby before he was famous. The eternal enigma that is Ian Penman, who I chased down and snogged into submission. A review by one of the Velvet Underground — Sterling Morrison — of a book about the Velvet Underground. A very amusing ongoing column by Cheers writer Rob Long of conversations with his agent. A young Louise Doughty, now a famous novelist, visited D.M. Thomas for writing tips and found a dirty old man. Mark Steyn took down the untouchable Dennis Potter; Richard Littlejohn took a hatchet to the hypocrisy of the broadsheet newspapers and their parasitical relationship with the tabloids.

There was an ongoing column — so pertinent now — called If I Ran The BBC, written variously by Garry Bushell, Mariella Frostrup and Quentin Crisp. See what I mean by diverse? Today, when the word is deployed by the likes of the BBC, it just means people of various hues and sexualities all saying the same thing on everything from the importance of breakfast to the horridness of Brexit.

As for me, when I wasn’t drooling over pop stars half my age, I was getting into massive squabbles with academics. The best one, with Professor Camille Paglia, ending with me elegantly advising her to “Fuck off, you crazy old dyke”, became such a classic spat that it remains plastered over the internet — sadly, unlike the rest of our wonderful publication.

From a starting circulation of 5,000, we were soon up to 30,000 — not a lot, but imagine if there’d been Google back then! When one of our journalistic heroes, the brilliant James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, came to London to write a profile of us, we couldn’t believe our luck. But a few years down the line (or lines, considering the amount of coke I was keeping my young Stakhanovites going with) all was not tickety-boo between Toby and myself.

Perhaps we had just been too close not to combust, like a passionate love affair. The New Lad fad had arrived, and as someone who’d been a feminist since the age of 12, when I shoplifted The Female Eunuch, I didn’t want us associated with it — we were too good for that.

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Take Elizabeth Hurley. I thought she was a smasher, and was delighted when she agreed to read excerpts from Ambition as a free giveaway with the magazine. But I was starting to feel I knew her nipples better than my own. She obviously felt the same and upon hearing that Toby was planning to publish some revealing photographs of her, hired a scary law firm to dissuade him. Quite right too. “We’re not bloody Loaded!” I snarled at him.

But it was to be another vamp who put an end to our phenomenal fun. Toby mentioned that he had met — and slept with — a girl called Charlotte Raven and was employing her as an editorial assistant. Her name alone thrilled me, and when I heard that her dad was rich, and discovered that we had a pleasant time in bed — mostly at Blakes Hotel — I decided on a whim that I wanted her to be editor instead.

Toby, understandably, closed the magazine down in the summer of 1995. Charlotte compared him to Hitler, which is when I started to go off her. Our relationship was never going to last; I had my eye on her younger brother within three months, whom I’m still married to after a quarter of a century.

But I think the Modern Review would have folded within the year anyway. We were victims of our own success; all the broadsheets started to poach our writers. As John Harris of the Guardian put it: “Out of all proportion to its meagre resources, it soon comprehensively redrew the cultural map, forever wiping the high-cultural smirk from the face of Britain’s critics.”

What happened to this silly lot of self-important kids? I’m still looking for trouble — and finding it — at the age of 62. Cosmo wrote an excellent book called Starstruck in 2009. Charlotte has a terminal illness; her book Patient 1 is published in November. Toby did the best of all of us; now founder and director of the Free Speech Union.

Could the Modern Review happen today, in this weak world of echo chambers, cry-bullies and cancel culture? I suspect not. We no longer live in a time when two people can be rude to each other without running to the authorities. I feel sorry for the brightest kids of today, desperately wanting to be journalists but terrified that one unconventional thought might find them finished before they’re started.

As for me and Toby and Cosmo and my bright little boy Jack, whose beautiful mind was eaten alive by madness and who took his own life six years ago, we’ve all lost a lot along the way in the 30 years since we queued up, waiting for thrills. But we’ll always have that rollercoaster.

According to his friend, film producer Damon Bryant, one of the first on the scene, the flat was pristine: “He put flowers in every vase. He was as sober as a judge. There were no drugs. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

His funeral about a month later was spectacular, even by Soho’s flamboyant standards. A horse-drawn cortege inched its way around the tight grid of streets. Thousands of mourners followed; among them Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost, Alfie Allen, Noel Fielding, Robert Elms and Jaime Winstone. All of them knew the little man who was lying there, silent, and alone.

Bernie Katz was the man they called the Prince of Soho. For 27 years, he had worked as front-of-house manager of the Groucho Club, the long-established and exclusive private members’ club in Soho where, in the 90s, Princess Diana went to lunch and Bill Clinton once played saxophone: a dizzily decadent playground for the rich, the famous and the not-so-famous.

The term “Prince of Soho” was marked out in flowers on the horse-drawn hearse; his title was coined by the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who was closer to Bernie than most.

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Bernie’s funeral made the BBC News at 6pm; he would have been thrilled, everyone said. As TV and radio presenter Robert Elms put it: “He was the essence of this place. He was preposterous, he was gorgeous, he was five foot nothing and had a heart bigger than this square… Bernie knew everybody. If you were touched by Bernie — and it probably meant he touched your bottom — you stayed touched.” Noel Fielding described him as “always in a leopard-skin jacket, whirling around like a windmill. He was a character. I don’t think those people exist anymore.”

Yes, he was a character — but what kind of character? As a member of the Groucho, I knew him a bit, but not well. One person told me that Bernie was the sort of person who was your friend for 60 seconds — and would then disappear. The circumstances of his death — and the strange events that led to his demise, from the moment he left the Groucho in unexplained circumstances a few months before — are explored in my podcast series, Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho?.

Bernie’s death was a shock to many. But it was also a motif — an acknowledgment of another death; that of old Soho itself.

Nowadays, Soho’s spirit has been sold to the highest bidder; the developers have got their way. Independent restaurants are few and far between — on Broadwick Street, there is now a branch of the Ivy, unthinkable 20 years ago. Berwick Street market, for years an impeccable source of all manner of questionable items has been gentrified. The fruit vendors have made way for stalls selling flat whites and falafels.

These streets were once Bernie’s manor: he had worked in the West End pretty much from the moment he left school. Born in 1967 to a Jewish family in south London, as a teenager he witnessed the murder of his father, a gangster called Brian “Little Legs” Clifford. Bernie would later write of his “gangster father” whose life ended with a bullet in the head: “So used was I to a life of drive-by shootings, I thought nothing of the sound of that gunshot, except that it intruded upon my viewing of the Price Is Right.”

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That murder has never been solved. And neither was Bernie’s own demise. Indeed, the latter, as I discovered, was never properly investigated.

Bernie had joined the Groucho as barman in 1990, just before Cool Britannia when the club was at its drug-fuelled zenith: even though the management had — and still has — a strict zero-tolerance policy of drugs.

The Groucho is the kind of place that is guaranteed to divide opinion; there are those, like me, who are long-standing members, and won’t have a word said against it. Others are less enamoured, dismissing it as pretentious and elitist. (To which members reply: isn’t that the point of a club?)

Founded in 1985, the Groucho began as a club for the media and publishing worlds. By the 90s, it had become an infamous celebrity haunt. Inevitably, some members did drugs; the upstairs snooker room was occasionally known as the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. In 1996, the room was the scene of a furious showdown between actress Patsy Kensit and her then-boyfriend, Liam Gallagher. Glasses and snooker balls were thrown, and Gallagher ended up trashing not just the table but the room itself.

Other moments, too, became Groucho legend: Melvyn Bragg chatting to U2; Friends star Matt LeBlanc propping up the bar alone one Saturday night; Dancer Wayne Sleep once took Princess Diana there for lunch — and handed her the bill. On one memorable night in 1995, Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the downstairs bar.

And throughout it all, Bernie was there. He would sashay from table to table, clad in leopard skin and Cuban heels, soothing the pampered members, dealing with their tantrums, dropping in a witty or caustic remark. The Bernie stories, like the man himself, were outrageous, lurid and always true. He proved his chutzpah by once ejecting Madonna for being rude.

Stephen Fry, a founder member of the Groucho, was closer to Bernie than most. “My first impressions were of a huge, vibrant and outgoing personality,” he told me. “All hugs, grins, extravagant language and wild attire.” But, he went on: “There probably was something sad about Bernie …  It may seem glamorous… but in fact there was a lot of work, very little money and too many temptations into addiction and late nights.”

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I talked to dozens of Bernie’s friends, family members and Groucho regulars: all spoke warmly of him, though some were curiously reluctant to go into detail about the last weeks of his life. Others were deeply puzzled. Actress Alison Steadman told me: “Bernie was fun and kind. When he walked in, the room lit up. I have never been able to establish exactly what happened and why… but whatever it was, it was so wrong.”

So what did happen to Bernie? Bernie’s tragedy, his surviving family and friends told me, was that after he left the Groucho, with no regular job, he had begun to succumb to the addictions that had dogged him through his life.

The precise reasons for his departure were never properly explained, though many believe his self-indulgent figure ran counter to Soho’s sanitised new world. Whatever the truth, without that job he lost his own sense of worth. He soon found himself short of money, and ended up taking small loans from friends.

And then, his close friends told me, things quickly escalated. Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the wrong type of people — specifically, it was whispered, Albanian gangsters and their constant demands for repayment over drug debts. As one friend said: “He had a lot of debt, and that debt was related to buying cocaine, which there were rumours it was an Eastern European gang. That was being spoken about a lot… thirty grand to the Albanians, or whatever it was.”

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The drug trade in Soho, for most of Bernie’s life, was dominated by Italians and Maltese gangsters. But sometime in the last decade, the Albanians squeezed them out. They were frighteningly ruthless, violent and brooked no dissent. Bernard Clifford Katz — camp, easy-going and sweet-natured — would not have stood a chance.

Certainly by the time of his death, the Albanians had cemented their control in London. Even now, four years after Bernie’s death, they are still at the forefront of the cocaine trade in this country which is worth billions.

Perhaps if the Albanians had stayed out of Soho, just at the time Bernie was working there, he might never have fallen out with gangsters. If he hadn’t been such a gregarious soul, he might have kept his job. And if he’d have kept his nose clean — in every sense of the phrase — he might still be welcoming guests into reception and charging across the room in his Cuban heels.

But that wasn’t to be. For Bernie, Soho was a timeless neighbourhood of decadence and debauchery. Until it wasn’t.

After his death, the Groucho renamed its downstairs restaurant “Bernie’s” in his honour. On one wall sits a beautiful portrait of him; he looks strangely relaxed and at peace — a memory to a golden era of Soho that has since decayed.

Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho is available at now.

Except, if you knew about the #FreeBritney campaign, this felt like something else. Not a tech-flavoured parable about the commoditising effects of the pop industry, but a straight-up retelling of a story about Britney Spears, who for the past 12 years has had no legal control over her life while her family has made every decision for her. In 2008, Britney — who by then had been shockingly famous for a decade, since the release of “… Baby One More Time” — had a very public breakdown. She shaved her head. She attacked the paparazzi. She lost custody of her children for a time. She was taken into hospital strapped to a gurney, and all this was harrowingly documented by the eager press.

Around this time, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the World Service, caught the latest update on the Britney situation, and semi-consciously decided that the first thing I would do the next morning would be to write Britney a letter inviting her to stay with me. She just needed someone to look out for her for a bit, and boy am I good at looking out for Britney, who I’ve loved since the first time I saw the “Baby” video. I put a poster of Britney in her teenage bedroom in my own teenage bedroom and had to, excruciatingly, un-out myself when this led everyone to assume I was mostly into girls.

No pop star has ever arrived with such a perfect statement of what they are, and what they mean. Here’s the former Disney Mousketeer, now 16, surrounded by a pounding Max Martin production, big-eyed in school uniform and moaning out every word, absolutely desperate with desire — with love, because Britney’s S&M-skirting invitation to hit her (figuratively!) one more time is all directed at one baby. And of course, we all knew she was a virgin. That was part of the sell. She had to be in on it, didn’t she?

Maybe my 17-year-old self was making some generous assumptions about how far Britney was directing this, but don’t teenage girls always make generous assumptions about their command over the world? Anyway, the Britney template was established: half unstoppable purpose (hit me!), half hopeless supplication (when I’m not with you I lose my mind!). On top of this, by her second album, the irresistible phoniness of this confection was being acknowledged in songs like “Lucky”, a ballad about a “Hollywood girl” who’s “lost in an image, in a dream.” She had to be in on it. Didn’t she?

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The best of Britney’s fame songs is probably “Piece of Me”, which was released in November 2007. In it, Britney — by then well into her “hot mess” era, with two broken marriages and one abortive rehab stint — goes in on her tabloid image. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17… Mrs She’s Too Big, Now She’s Too Thin,” she chants. The refrain is classic Britney, part come-on and part threat: “You wanna piece of me?” It sounded like someone throwing her own coverage back in the media’s face and taking charge.

A few months later, she was strapped to that gurney and in charge of nothing. From that point, amid rumours of mental illness and substance abuse, she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father control over essentially her entire life — her finances, as well as her physical and mental health. In the public account of the Britney story, this is where the show got back on the road. Head shaving: out. In: mammothly profitable Las Vegas residencies. I saw the touring version in Scarborough, in 2018, and God she was good when she was performing.

When she wasn’t in motion, though, she seemed a little vacant, and I’m not fully sure she knew she was in Scarborough (the best we got was a “Hello UK!”). This is where a second version of the Britney story cuts in, the one that’s been assembled by supposition and guesswork. This is the version the #FreeBritney campaign is working to. For them, Britney, like fictional Ashley O in Black Mirror, has been wholly co-opted by the people around her — her family — who they believe are exploiting her for maximum financial gain. The ACLU has even offered to support her in challenging the conservatorship arrangement. Her latest attempt to remove her father from her affairs was just deferred by a court till 2021.

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By louise perry

What’s actually going on with Britney is difficult to say, because the hearings on her conservatorship are all closed, and her family deny any charge of acting against Britney’s best interests. Fans have been left picking over her social media for clues, which is, it’s fair to say, opaque. But even the most generous guess at what’s happening leaves a bad taste. If this is a woman who really is incompetent to run her own life, and has to be overseen in every particular by her guardians, why was I squealing away in the stands watching her do hot Thatcherite self-determination anthem “Work Bitch”?

Being a hypocrite, I guess. Being a fan. Getting my piece of her. Other artists play off their persona and their private lives in their music: Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — in fact, all the most exciting pop stars since Britney have followed her in making their music primarily a record of their relationship to fame. But with Britney, it seems as though the image long ago outran the woman underneath it, and even the supporters who want to free her still want her to be their Britney.

The most heartbreakingly implausible bit of that Black Mirror is that the pop star character gets her liberation, because it’s hard to see Britney’s way out. If she succeeds in cutting her father from the conservatorship — even if she’s eventually deemed too competent to be released from it entirely — what does freedom look like for someone whose entire adult life has been spent being famous for being Britney Spears? The most constricting part of celebrity isn’t the people who hate you: it’s the people who think they love you, and who think that love means they own you.

A day later in Paris, Jean Vanier died. He was no celebrity and held no high public office, yet the tributes paid since his death give a flavour of how highly he was regarded. A “spiritual giant” and a “living saint” were some of the more restrained epithets.

Vanier was the son of a Canadian diplomat raised in Canada, France and the UK, who had served in the British and Canadian Navy. Uneasy with the bravado and competitive atmosphere of the military, he moved into academia, teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto. In the early 1960s, he started visiting a home for people with mental illness near Paris. Shocked by the conditions in which they lived, he began forming a revolutionary idea shaped by his Christian faith.

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Vanier bought a run-down house in the village of Trosly-Breuil north of Paris, where he invited two men with learning difficulties, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, to build with him a small community. Others soon joined, and by the time Vanier died on 7 May this year, the community had grown into a movement known today as l’Arche (the Ark), comprising more than 140 different communities in 35 countries around the world, 10 of them in the UK.

The concept behind l’Arche is simple. Rather than placing people with additional needs into what used to be called mental institutions, or even ‘independent living’, it brought different people together to live in the same communal space. The able-bodied lived alongside the disabled, those with learning difficulties alongside those without.

l’Arche was not a charitable movement based on the strong helping the weak. At its heart lay the conviction that mental or physical abilities bear no relation to the value and beauty of an individual human being. Those with learning difficulties, rather than recipients of help, come ready with much to teach those of us without learning difficulties.

Time and time again, members of the community say being part of l’Arche has led them to form deep friendships with people they might never have encountered otherwise, and that wisdom in these friendships flows in exactly the opposite way we might expect.

Messy, complex and often trying, Vanier’s radical idea is, nonetheless, that if you place the beautiful, the famous and the talented at the centre of a community, everyone inevitably feels inferior. Placing the weak and forgotten at the centre, by contrast, automatically includes everyone. By spending time with the weak and vulnerable, we learn to confront our own vulnerabilities – the very thing we spend most of our time trying to hide.

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As Vanier once said: “I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.” He is also recorded as saying: “Those I have lived with have helped me to recognise and accept my own weaknesses and vulnerability. I no longer have to pretend I am strong or clever or better than others. I am like everybody else, with my fragilities and my gifts.”

Our celebrity-obsessed world, epitomised by the Met Gala, is one whose currency is influence, fame and the power that comes with it. The result is a society in which people feel the need to prove themselves more beautiful, clever or influential than everyone else. The kind of people Vanier spent his life with are, according to Vanier “not seeking power, they are seeking friendship”. These are the kind of people who have the ability to remind us which matters more.

St Paul once wrote: “Power is made perfect in weakness. So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

It is an idea few understand, but one which Jean Vanier and those he lived with fortunately did. And for that, his story offers us a radical choice about the way in which we choose to live today.

The perfect power of weakness

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Religion, that is.

There’s been huge excitement about Bieber’s involvement with the Australian-founded charismatic Hillsong Church – the church even had to issue a denial to clarify that they hadn’t pressured him to cancel recent tour dates. The Sun reports:

“Justin Bieber takes his girlfriends there to get the Pastor’s approval – including Paola Paulin. His ex-girlfriend’s Selena Gomez and Hailey Baldin have also attended services, while stars such High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens, Hailee Steinfeld, Nick Jonas.”

At the same time that the Canadian pop star has been recommitting himself to the faith of his upbringing there’s been a significant lawyering up from the Scientologists after Leah Remini (of the US comedy series, King of Queens) didn’t just exit the church after 30 years of membership but put together audience-rousing documentaries explaining why she had departed. The Church has even set up a series of websites to undermine the credentials of other former Scientologists featured in Remini’s “Scientology and the Aftermath”.

It’s no secret that a celebrity endorsement helps promote a brand and religious groups can be as excitable about the stardust as anyone else. And quite understandably. Taking just one possible measure of their ability to spread religious (or other) messages, look at Twitter. Justin Bieber has 102 million followers. That’s 62 million more than Donald Trump and 88 million more than the Pope! Quite useful if you believe that your mission is to “go everywhere in the world and tell the Good News to everyone”.

Almost no-one is in the same social media league as the 23 year-old singer and songwriter but as someone who worked in corporate communications for Christian charities for nine years, I well remember the reaction every time someone off the telly outed themselves as a Christian. In one corner a colleague would call for urgency “before the charity down the road snaps them up”. Wiser sages would urge caution – in case, for example, anything came to light about the public figure’s background that might complicate the reputation of any charity willing to be associated with them. And – at an extreme – a cause (fairly or unfairly) risks the “Remini treatment” if celebrities feel used in any way. Even if the charity-celebrity relationship is healthy, the spotlight generated by an association is not a comfortable place for some religious leaders. Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, for example, asks difficult questions about Justin Bieber’s pastor at Hillsong and his approach to confidentiality, to gay people and to celebration of ‘hot wives’.

Famous believers

Religion and fame is often a strange combination in the West, and we don’t always know what to do with a disclosure of belief, especially when a celebrity converts. A fundamental lack of religious literacy means many journalists write about religious groups as though they’re some sort of sideshow. Facing such reporting, Madonna used a Harper’s Bazaar interview to counter some of the claims made about her practice of Kabbalah – claiming that her efforts to become a better person “made people nervous”.

Some of the most thoughtful analysis about a high profile person’s belief often comes from commentators who aren’t afraid to write themselves and their own religious background into the story, and who spend some time getting to know people involved in the faith community. Check out the poignant account of Hillsong by Jewish NYC mum Taffy Brodessa-Akner and atheist Michael Marsden’s experience of the Alpha course, following Sam Fox and Geri Halliwell’s participation in what is an introduction to the Christian faith that occurs during ten weekly sessions.

Raising the issues

Because celebrities have access to platforms that the rest of us don’t have, they can be formidable educators about religion. British comic and actor Stephen Fry, for example, provoked public debate about blasphemy laws when he criticised the notion of a loving God. Sadly, despite this being the 21st century with greater levels of education than ever before, we need to be reassured by Sir Mo Farah and others that not all Muslims are out to kill us. And Sir Mo spoke out against the US President’s executive order on immigration earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Mayim Bialik (of Blossom and Big Bang Theory) describes herself as “socially conservative” and uses her YouTube channel to discuss modesty and women’s empowerment: