October 7, 2016 Brushes with Greatness The Ballad of Justin Bobby By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Recently, an article I had read in an Israeli women’s magazine when I was maybe eleven popped into my mind. The piece was about fans: people who spent a lot of their time following their celebrity idols around, splitting the difference between adoration and what would now be probably called stalking. I recalled a detail about two sisters who were obsessed with, if memory serves, Kris Kristofferson. Somehow, they had ended up at one of his houses, where a housekeeper let them in and was kind—or unprofessional—enough to give them some mementos of their idol’s: a pair of old cutoff shorts he wore out of the shower and some cigarette butts that he’d smoked. Cigarette butts that he’d smoked! This struck me both then and now as kind of extreme. Imagine being so earnestly fixated on a stranger that touching something that carried only the faintest imprint of his or her body—even something fairly gross like an old cigarette—would be a thing you’d seek out! Decades have passed, and today very few celebrities still inspire that kind of all-out adulation, engendered by real distance between the famous and nonfamous. The kind of stars I’m thinking about—Beyoncé, maybe Rihanna—have a spectacular untouchability that gives rise to the traditional model of fandom: the type that wants to touch, that desires the laying on of the hands, or at the very least a whiff of the raiment. (Think, for instance, of Drake—a big star in his own right but also, too, a known superfan of Rihanna’s—who, in a song originally meant for her to sing, wrote the lines, “Let my perfume soak into your sweater.”) Read More
August 11, 2016 Brushes with Greatness Orlando Bloom in the Nude By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Frédéric Bazille, Fisherman with a Net, 1868. It’s a funny thing about celebrity nudity. You would think, in this day and age, that American adults are inured to the essential facts of the unclothed body, thanks not just to their own workaday experiences but to their broader sense of the world. All anyone ever talks about, after all, is how skin-centric popular culture has become—with its Victoria’s Secret campaigns, its premium-cable fuckfests, its red carpet nip slips. And so, it stands to reason, we should have only a limited interest in celebrities baring all, whether of their own initiative or not. A fascination, however, persists. And how! A big celebrity gossip story last week hinged on the public excitement generated by the actor Orlando Bloom’s uncircumcised penis, revealed in paparazzi shots taken during a Sardinian beach vacation he went on with his girlfriend, the singer Katy Perry. In one set of pictures, Bloom and Perry were seen paddleboarding, Bloom on his knees at the back of the board, fully naked save for a baseball cap and sunglasses, Perry cross-legged in a bikini and sunglasses at the front. In another set of pictures, Bloom was captured alone on dry land, still naked, still wearing only a baseball cap and sunglasses—not unlike one of those 1980s Playmates with nothing on but a man’s tie or fingerless lace gloves, drawing yet greater attention to their otherwise exposed body. Read More
July 21, 2016 Brushes with Greatness The Immutable Laws of Starfuckery By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Painting by Lucien Rudaux, ca. 1920–30. In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, Please Kill Me, the ’70s LA groupie Sable Starr recounts the excitement she felt the first time she slept with David Bowie: Upstairs at the Rainbow they have just like one table. Me and David were sitting there, with a couple of other people. And to have all your friends look up and see you—that was cool. That was really cool … Back in the hotel we were sitting around. I had to go to the bathroom, and David came in and he had a cigarette in his hand and a glass of wine. And he started kissing me—and I couldn’t believe it was happening to me, because there had been Roxy Music and J. Geils, but David Bowie was the first heavy. So we went to the bedroom and fucked for hours, and he was great … I became very famous and popular after that because it was established that I was cool. I had been accepted by a real rock star. I’ve always loved this description because its sexiness sits very comfortably alongside its bluntness toward power grubbing. It’s really the perfect teenage fantasy: you’re having what appears to be very enjoyable sex with an extremely attractive person while simultaneously rising in the eyes of your peers thanks to the immutable laws of starfuckery. An inextricable part of sleeping with famous people is the encounter’s visibility to others, and the higher the celebrity’s rank on the fame totem pole, the better. It’s only science. Read More
June 16, 2016 Brushes with Greatness In the Restroom at the Walter Reade Theater By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Sofia Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola. In 2014, the magazine In Touch broke what is still, to my mind, one of our era’s most quintessential gossip stories. The weekly claimed that Lindsay Lohan was holding court at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, in an apparent attempt to impress her retinue, wrote out the names of three dozen of her sexual conquests—most of them A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Justin Timberlake, Colin Farrell, and Zac Efron—then tossed the list aside. A mistake, obviously, since that was likely when one of the entourage pounced, retrieving the sheet and eventually getting it into the hands of an In Touch staffer. The magazine reproduced the list in Lohan’s all-caps, American-middle-school-girl handwriting. Read More