In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy’s magisterial study of fame and its history, he identifies the principal allure of being a celebrity: ‘In the heart of the fan and the famous alike, fame is a quiet place where one is free to be what one really is, one’s true, unchanging essence.’ The belief that you can only become fully realised in the glare of the media spotlight is, of course, an illusion. In fact, the opposite is true. Far from enhancing the personality, fame corrodes it. Responsible adults are reduced to an infantile state in which the sole purpose of others is to satisfy their needs. As John Updike said, ‘Fame is a mask that eats into the face.’
Piers Morgan is better equipped than most to cope with this process: he started out as an egotistical monster. He is an interesting case study, too, in that he has enthusiastically embraced fame in spite of being aware of the risks. Before he became a household name, he was one of Britain’s leading critics of celebrity culture. As the editor of the Daily Mirror, he seemed to be on a messianic mission to expose the hypocrisy of the celebrity class and in television series like The Importance of Being Famous and Death of Celebrity he lovingly dwelt on the heavy price people like Angus Deaton pay for their celebrity status. Yet this did not stop him leaping over the velvet rope into the VIP enclosure at the first opportunity.
In God Bless America, Morgan’s third volume of memoirs, he charts his metamorphoses into a mega-star, not simply a journalist who crops up on television quite a lot, but a bona fide, A-list celebrity. This is largely thanks to Simon Cowell who invited him to be a judge on America’s Got Talent, one of the most popular shows in the States. It doesn’t take Morgan long to shed his old skin. At the beginning of the book, which covers the years 2006-8, Cowell bets him £100 he will have his first cosmetic procedure within five years. In less than six months he has his teeth whitened. Morgan’s strategy for dealing with any criticism of his changing attitude towards celebrity is to admit he got it wrong.
Apparently, being famous is all it is cracked up to be, judging from this book. Paris Hilton recognises him at a party at the Playboy Mansion. Tony Blair greets him at Lord Levy’s leaving party with, ‘Hello, Piers, how are you?’ This is echoed by Sylvester Stallone a few pages later: ‘Yo, Piers, how ya doing?’ He has been admitted to the club.
He is aware that this transformation is likely to attract a certain amount of hostility — particularly from people with their noses still pressed up against the glass. But he claims to be able to cope with this. ‘Britain’s Got Wankers,’ someone shouts out, as he drives past in his Maserati, having spent six weeks in Los Angeles. ‘God — and I really do mean this — it’s good to be home,’ he writes.
It is clear, though, that this non- chalance is an affectation and he really does care what people think. The book is an odd mixture of self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation: one minute he is bragging about how he helped Gordon Brown come up with one of his best put-downs of David Cameron, the next he is cheerfully repeating a joke that Stephen Fry is fond of making: ‘What’s the definition of countryside? The murder of Piers Morgan.’ These are two sides of the same coin, namely, an acute sensitivity about how he is perceived.
I suspect that beneath Morgan’s bluff exterior he is quite thin-skinned. He wants very much to be liked and it is a source of constant pain that he isn’t, at least not by everybody. Indeed, it is this personality defect that makes Piers such a good memoirist — like Alan Clark, he is constantly imagining slights where none exist — and God Bless America is as entertaining as his previous two diaries. From the first page it is clear that hiding behind the bombast and braggadocio there’s a vulnerable little boy, yearning for our approval. And fame probably isn’t the panacea he imagined.
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