Bradley Wiggins is sick of fame – but I bet he’d miss it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/24/bradley-wiggins-fame-celebrities

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You’d have thought that winning the Tour de France and an Olympic gold could only change a cyclist’s life for the better, so Bradley Wiggins’ claim that there are times he regrets it strike one as a bit peculiar, if not perverse.

After all, one enters competition – takes up sport, even – for the possibility that it will bring fame and glory. So to complain about it seems ungrateful to say the least. “It’s quite hard that level of fame, when you just want to do normal stuff with the children,” Wiggins told BBC Sport. You can imagine the scene around the bouncy castle: the furtive glances, the whispering, the discreet snaps, then the proffered pens and autograph requests. Surely a small price to pay for all that money and adulation?

Wiggins is hardly the first headline-grabber to reconstruct fame and celebrity as essentially irksome. “God! Why don’t people leave one alone?” complained Kenneth Williams, hardly a shrinking violet, in his diary. Charlie Chaplin, mobbed wherever he went in the days of silent film, claimed in his autobiography that the experience left him “with a depressing sense of loneliness”. More recently, Rihanna, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence have all voiced similar sentiments, describing their experience as “lonely”, and the attention of the public as a “headache” and a “drag”.

So why do they do it in the first place? While it is easy to dismiss the prima donna-ish utterances of Hollywood stars as mere whingeing, one feels a certain degree of sympathy for a cyclist who, until his big break, had only the attention of sleep-deprived lorry drivers to worry about.

Suddenly, his face was everywhere, reflected in the front pages on the newspaper rack as he queued at the supermarket. The pointing had begun. “Normal life” takes a back seat at such moments. For the really famous it reaches the stage where you accept you can no longer do “normal”. Pay somebody to go to the shops for you. Buy a big, isolated home and drive everywhere door-to-door. Stop talking to everyone apart from fellow celebrities, who understand what you’re going through (even friends and relatives will be wanting their share of your limelight). At some stage you really do have to decide whether it’s worth it.

The biggest problem is when celebrities become unable to separate the trappings of fame from what they are being paid to do; especially when they attribute that fame, rightly or wrongly, to their superior ability. Russell Crowe says “I’m famous for making movies. Celebrity just happens to be an unfortunate byproduct of what I do,” which seems a strange comment for a film star, as if all his career goals would have been fulfilled making amateur videos with his mates and posting them on YouTube had not the pesky media come along and spoiled it by making him famous.

Several years ago, the former CNN reporter Donna Rockwell and I published a study in which we found that all celebrities go through a love/hate phase in relation to the experience of fame during the period that they (and their families) are getting used to the non-stop attention. One common coping strategy is to cultivate a dual personality, as footballer Michael Owen has described, but this requires you to accept your life as a performance for different audiences. It also helps if you do not get up to anything off-camera that could interest anybody other than your mother.

For this reason, rock stars are especially vulnerable. Kurt Cobain, godfather of early 90s grunge, was completely unable to juggle the personal and the professional. Obsessed by the need to be authentic, he died leaving a suicide note that read, “I can’t fool you, any one of you … the worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it.”

Most celebrities in our study ended up reaching some kind of compromise, even those who felt hard done by by fame. Not one of our interviewees would, after all, consider trading back the experience.

Even Wiggins, hustling his kids out of the soft play area as a trail of well-wishers forms behind, concludes “I think you learn to deal with it.” One day he may find himself standing in that supermarket queue, nobody will point, nobody will whisper, and he may well feel a little tinge of regret.