What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial – and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word ‘fans’ has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators – though its provenance was far earlier, from the Latin ‘fanaticus’, meaning insanely but divinely inspired.
I thought of this on reading that the new Michael Jackson film has had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a biopic of all time. It’s fair to say that the fans will have made this happen: it’s not really the kind of flick someone casually picks after perusing the options. (‘Darling, do you fancy The Mummy, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or a slavish whitewashing of a man accused of the most gruesome sexual assaults on children?’) The accusations against Jackson – of which he was acquitted, though the pay-offs to the families of the children are believed to have run into the tens of millions of dollars – were so horrible that I doubt many people are on the fence. His fans, however, must be the most fanatical around, as was in evidence when three Michael Jackson fan clubs used the French defamation laws which make it an offence to sully the image of a dead person in order to sue two of his alleged victims after they appeared in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. The lawyer who acted for them, Emmanuel Ludot, previously sued Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, for the pain he had supposedly caused fans by giving Jackson the drugs that allegedly killed him.
Would any of today’s singing stars inspire the same beyond-death fanaticism? Two of them have recently made statements which appear to differ in their attitudes to the many-mawed monster that can either lick you all over or chew you up and spit you out. At the UK premiere of her new concert film, Billie Eilish burbled: ‘I just love everything that has to do with the fans… I feel like the connection that I have with the fans is what it’s all about for me, and the only reason I am interested in touring at all, and it’s what I enjoy so much about performing. They are as important as me in the movie, if not more so to me, so I feel really grateful.’
As important as her! One wonders how she’d react if those same fans asked for a cut of the film’s takings, or wandered into the grounds of her $3 million Los Angeles mansion. But she at least appears to appreciate that those people pay her wages, so it’s just good business to butter them up a bit.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift – whose relationship with her fans was so hands-on in 2014 that she had 89 of them round to her house and entertained them for a solid six hours by playing her new album, offering around ‘homemade’ cookies and parading her parents – has used the dread ‘w’ word of her adorers: weird. Speaking to the New York Times, she said: ‘There’s corners of my fan base who are going to take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that… You have to hold tight to your perception of your art, and your relationship with it. Then you just kind of have to be like, there it goes, I hope you like it. If you don’t… then I was doing it for me anyway.’ Having never particularly enjoyed any of Ms Swift’s platters myself, it has come as a great relief to learn that she never particularly wanted me to.
It’s a very different attitude from the cookie-proffering parties she employed on her way up, and it displays the tinge of contempt for the masses which often goes with great success in showbusiness. Demi Moore allegedly said to Tina Brown at a launch party, as onlookers peered across the velvet ropes into the VIP enclosure, ‘Can you imagine how you and I look to those people over there?’ To be fair, the famous see the worst side of people. If male, they will be inundated with offers of sex from women who only fancy them because they’re famous; if female, they will be bothered by men who will send them deranged mail and stalk them. It’s easy to overdramatise the threat from what Liz Hurley called ‘civilians’ and mistake the crazies for the masses. But all that attention from strangers was what they wanted. People who are famous have generally pursued fame ferociously.
Once someone is a fan, they’ll generally stay that way, even if the object of their affections does something outrageously offensive (see: Kanye West). Only a personal meeting with an idol who behaves badly will sever the bond: ‘Get away, dear – I don’t need you any more,’ a silent film star told a fan after she retired. One of the funniest aspects of fandom is when an artist has a hissy fit about having a fan they don’t want, as when in 2006 David Cameron said he liked The Smiths on Desert Island Discs. Four years later, Johnny Marr huffed on Twitter: ‘Stop saying that you like the Smiths, no you don’t – I forbid you to like it.’
All that attention from strangers was what they wanted. Famous people have generally pursued fame
It’s a funny old business, fandom – and getting funnier by the day. We return to OnlyFans, which started out as a pornography platform but has now attracted the famous, as they finally give their fans what they really, really want. So Lily Allen sells snaps of her feet, Kate Nash pictures of her bum and Kerry Katona a whole lot more. This is the purest distillation of the fan experience, which is why there’s so little dignity in it. It’s basically the digital equivalent of a tatty cardboard sign that says ‘50p a look’.
But whatever the offer, there will always be plenty of takers. As the heaving cinemas and Michael Jackson’s estate can confirm, this strange, sad, one-sided love affair is stronger even than death.
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