must collude in a performance, like the wait staff in a restaurant who seek to make you feel welcome and important. In the dining room they must be solicitous, friendly, helpful, and agreeable; “I’m Jan and I’ll be taking care of you today.” But in the kitchen, the façade can come down, especially if they find a customer to be overly demanding or entitled. So teams decide how they will treat the audience to its face, but behind the audience’s back can derogate and even mock them. They just can’t get caught doing so. Thus, teams, as well as individuals, must also work to avoid embarrassment. When such back-stage derision of the audience is exposed it can be very damaging. That’s why when a waiter surreptitiously recorded Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser during the 2012 campaign saying that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government, believe they are victims … [and] pay no income tax,” so Romney’s job “is not to worry about those people,” it collided with his front-stage image as running for president of everyone and did significant damage to his candidacy.
Goffman’s schema helps us unpack and appreciate a successful or unsuccessful celebrity performance and what the celebrity must do to convey sincerity. Celebrities who, in interviews, seem too scripted, evade questions, or give obviously clichéd or pandering answers come across as phony or as hiding something. Those who are overeager with the interviewer or don’t govern their behaviors—as when Tom Cruise in 2005 famously jumped up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes—can seem not in control of their performances and even unhinged. (And the thought that Cruise actually might have planned such a stunt was an equally troubling view into his back region.) That episode seriously damaged Cruise’s public image. When back-stage episodes become public, like Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant in 2006 against a police officer who stopped him for drunk driving, they can ruin a star’s career, as this episode did for Gibson, because it suggested that his true, unscripted self was a hate-filled bigot. But celebrities are members of teams, too, who work to maintain their successful performances. An allegedly happily married celebrity couple, for example, should not be seen fighting in a restaurant or bar. If one of them says in an interview how happy they are, the other one better say so too. And when a celebrity grants an interview, he or she will work hard to enlist the journalist as a team member as well, striving to have the interviewer convey the best possible image of the star.
Most celebrities, of course, seek to protect their back stages, to maintain some privacy, and not to have back-stage comments or behaviors cross the boundary into the front region. But at the same time, many celebrities understand that their fans want access to the back stage, and this has become more true and more possible with the explosive increase in the number of paparazzi in the early twenty-first century and the rise of social media. So increasingly stars, or more usually someone on their staff, use Facebook and especially Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter to present a managed view of what seems to be the back stage. In addition, social media have provided easy-to-access technological platforms that allow initially nonfamous people to create a marketable persona—a self to present to a broader, unknown public—that has led to a rise of various social-media-based celebrities.
Celebrities and the Emergence of the Mass Audience
While there have been, for millennia, people who rose to fame, the production and proliferation of celebrities in the United States really takes off in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of several intertwined phenomena: the increased democratization of society, the evolution of the United States into a much larger and more impersonal society, the rapid growth of national markets and cultures, the rise of an emerging middle class and urban, white-collar workers, the spread of popular entertainments, and the gradual rise of bureaucracies to manage businesses and the government. Increased urbanization, fueled in part by rising immigration, meant there were growing and concentrated audiences for popular culture fare. The success of the “penny press” in the 1830s and beyond, geared to everyday people and not just elites, provided venues for advertising concerts, performances, and other events. A new kind of public sphere was emerging as well, one that was more participatory and less governed primarily by white, property-owning men.
It was in the nineteenth century that the term “celebrity” emerged.10 Unlike the top-down fame of kings, queens, or prominent religious leaders, celebrities and their creators and managers needed fans. And the rapid growth of the population and profound changes in the way people lived created them. In 1790, 95 percent of Americans lived in rural areas; only 5 percent lived in cities, and only a few, like New York and Boston, had more than 15,000 people. By 1890, industrialization and the rise of the factory system had led to a major growth in the number and size of cities, with now 35 percent of Americans living in urban areas. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans living in cities grew from ten million to fifty-four million. And immigrants and their children were the major source of this growth. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million people migrated to the United States, most of them moving to cities. By the 1920s, more people lived in cities than in the country, a major shift in American life.11 The increase in the number of jobs, improvements in transportation, and, of course, the lure of public entertainments all made the city magnetic.
The rise in leisure time was also crucial to growth in public entertainments and the stars featured in them. Some estimate that in the early to mid-1800s, many people worked seventy hours or more a week. In manufacturing jobs in the 1870s and 1880s, a sixty-hour workweek was typical, and workers began organizing in the 1870s for an eight-hour workday.12 By the turn of the century, various industries had gone to an eight-hour day, freeing many people up to attend vaudeville shows and go to the movies and amusement parks. By the 1840s, cities like New York, despite religious and moral opposition among the educated elite to the potential corruptions of theatergoing, had a robust theater culture with known actors. Thousands of new theaters, especially in cities, were built between 1850 and 1900.13 By the 1880s, vaudeville was the most popular form of commercial entertainment, featuring anywhere between twenty and thirty acts, each performing for about fifteen minutes; an estimated 15 percent of all city dwellers attended a show at least once a week.14
During this approximately eighty-year period, between 1840 and 1920, the phenomenon of the celebrity begins to take hold. And, since then, the role and impact has only increased. Why? Of course there was simply the increased ability to produce them, through the building of “museums” and theaters in cities and towns, and the development of promotional apparatuses through newspapers, broadsides, and later magazines. An increase in economic wealth in the United States, and the gradual expansion of leisure time, fought for primarily by unions, helped enlarge an audience for entertainment and its stars, as did rapid technological change—the invention of the camera, phonograph, motion pictures, and then radio.
One obvious reason for the rise of celebrities during this era comes from the production side: as owners and producers of urban-based entertainments like the theater and vaudeville sought to maximize profits, they used the expanding press and techniques of modern advertising to create known name performers—stars—to attract an audience. But other explanations for the rise of celebrities come from the consumer side of the phenomenon. Of course people wanted diversion, escape, and entertainment, but there was, and is, more to it.
Celebrity Culture as a Response to the Rise of Bureaucracies
This period saw the rise of bureaucracies, especially in the post–Civil War period, to manage large-scale organizations like governments or businesses. These were characterized by their hierarchical structures, impersonal rules, emphasis on rational principles of organization, and the specific allocation of duties to specific job descriptions, which typically involved delimited tasks and spheres of influence in the workplace. As the sociologist Max Weber noted, while bureaucracies were in many ways an excellent and highly functional form of administration, they depersonalized both those who worked in them and those they served. Individual cases or exceptions that don’t conform to the rules, individual ideas or initiatives not in your job description, just can’t be accommodated. Just think of how we feel waiting for our number to be called at the Division of Motor Vehicles or trying to reach an actual human via a voicemail menu. Those waiting in lines
