watching TV that night. Family Ties had a 32.7 rating at its height, meaning 32.7 percent of all Americans who owned a TV set (practically every household owned one) had the show on every week during that period. Maybe there’s one person in front of each TV, maybe there are four. The population in the US then was about 242 million, so that’s about 62 million people watching. Every week. That’s getting close to modern-day Super Bowl numbers, you see? Look, I don’t want to saddle you with a lot of math, I just want to show you how concentrated the TV audience was back then. The top shows now: Modern Family, say, or The Big Bang Theory, are pulling in a 2.3 rating or a 3.4 rating. You got a population here now of 324 million, so that’s 7.4 million or 11 million people watching those shows each week, respectively. These are the top-rated shows. Low numbers. Millions more people watched one night of a TV show in the ’80s than watch an entire season of some 2017 shows. That’s because the audience now is fractured, all over the place. 500 cable channels, more TV channels, TV series still being made on the Big 4 (there are four now), but now also on HBO, Showtime, A&E, AMC, FX, etc., etc. Movies still in the theaters, but video games in the home. Lots of choices. You can’t get those big TV ratings numbers anymore unless you are the Super Bowl.
Love
So here I am, I’m in it. 16, I’m 16 when it starts, and I’m in it, in the Fame. Didn’t see it coming, just in it. People smiling at me. Happy to see me. SO HAPPY to see me. Like a baby or a toddler. Me. Being looked at as if I am the long-awaited child of a couple who thought they couldn’t conceive. Looked at as if I can do no wrong. Everything I do, looked at by others with big, glassy eyes, smiles that cannot be drawn down with any of my actions. Applauded for basic tasks, even. Like a toddler dressing herself, feeding herself, walking, running, scribbling shit on a piece of paper with a crayon and up on the refrigerator with PRIDE. Everybody loving you. You, celebrity. You, newly famous person. Everybody loves you. Is proud to throw their arms round you and call you “pal.” People who would make a show of snubbing you are now claiming your friendship, hat in hand. Or unconsciously so, like an old coat-check ticket to retrieve a long-ignored coat in the back of the closet there by the maître d’.
“YES, that one. The one I refused when you mentioned it to me weeks ago. NOW, I’ll take it. And I’ll wear it now, because it’s CHANGED.”
Yeah, you get those. You get those. You get it all. It will get worse. When you’re in a bar and some guy, drunk, wants you, wants to be with you, takes the “control” road and tries to rip you a new one for smoking. Your regular habit, the one you’ve had since you were 17 in high school, trying it out, getting used to it. Anyway, now, for years, a regular thing, not a change from who you were. But this guy, this guy is on the “control” road of getting at you and says, “Ew, I didn’t know Mallory smoked.” Trying to be controlling. Like you’ve disgusted him; he had such high hopes for you, thought so well of you. You had that! You had this guy thinking so highly of you! There it was and there it goes. You just fucked up. You disappointed him, drove him away, this approval, affection that was so freely yours. You blew it.
Yeah. It will get worse, but for now, oh man, the attention is kind of weird, kind of exciting, kind of feels like an accomplishment, acknowledgment for your work. That’s what it is, right? OK. Maybe there’s some formula here, a correlation. Success = Fame = accomplishment. Just correlation or causation? Whatever, correlation, they’re related. You learn this. You’re 16. Seems right. They keep rising, your ratings and your Fame. They keep going up, both of them, together.
Anything
There was this photo shoot. Me and actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Me, 18 or 19, Sarah, the same. Photo shoot for Tiger Beat. Teen fan magazine. Harmless. Photo shoot with some clothes we had in our closet. That’s all.
“What are we doing today?”
“Let’s do a photo shoot.” Grab some crap in our closets—T-shirts, jeans, NOTHING. Belts, hats, and crap we had bought at army surplus stores. Whatever.
“We want to do a photo shoot.” Of course for publication. No question. Never a question/doubt. Wide-open doors. Somehow a photo studio, somehow a photographer, somehow immediately printed in the magazine. No question. Here. Here, for you. Whatever you want. Two teenagers with whatever out of their closets; shit you couldn’t get rid of at a garage sale. No questions asked, photo shoot and publication provided. Open doors, open smiles, open, open.
* * *
Concerts, backstage passes, cops letting you go when pulled over for a ticket (not always, but half the time), Super Bowl game. Super Bowl XXI, maybe XXII, I don’t know. Hosting MTV’s halftime show. Limo pickup, always a limo pickup, then in a helicopter. A helicopter because of the traffic. Skip the traffic, fly over the traffic. Let down anywhere. On the grass right there, in front of the stadium. It’s the Super Bowl, we have celebrities in the helicopter, we land wherever we want. Usher you in. Here are your free tickets, your free impossible-to-get, only-for-sponsoring-entities, 50-yard-line, you-made-not-one-effort-to-get-these-tickets Super Bowl tickets. Sure, you’ll host the halftime show later in a room where you cannot hear yourself talk into the mic because of the screaming, the cheering, the volume. But man, you don’t give a shit. THIS IS AWESOME. Like sitting in in an effortless, delicious orange custard cloud of favor all the fucking time. All the time. Everyone wants you, to be with you, be near you, give you things, do you favors, LISTENING INTENTLY TO EVERYTHING YOU ARE SAYING.
Yeah, that was a big one. Everyone was listening intently to what I was saying. A circle of people. Around me. Adults. Me, a teenager, or early 20s. Done nothing, really. Traveled, OK. Was a good student, OK. Showed up to work on time, OK. Worthy? Worthy of being listened to as if a river of holy wisdom is pouring through my mouth? No. NO. But, the feeling. Oh, it felt good. At that age, to be heard, to be taken seriously. Shut up. OK. Listen to the Fame. The way these people, or why these people, were listening to me so closely. So careful not to bring up anything about themselves and risk ripping my interest from this circle of people. Keep me from wandering off. Keep me there. We love to hear ourselves talk. Best way to keep someone engaged is to ask them about themselves. Keep a celebrity there, let them talk, hear them, REALLY hear them, show you hear them. Nod your head somberly when they make an “interesting” point, laugh quickly and heartily when they say anything amusing. KEEP. THEM. THERE. OK. So, here we had it, I had it, in spades. Spades. Everyone would stop and listen.
* * *
You see? You see what happens? The celebrity, the famous person, gets used to this. They get used to it and come to expect it. They have to because it happens all the time, every day. OK, so you expect it and you then stop asking anyone else about themselves. You just forget. It’s not part of the exchange anymore. You talk and talk. You pontificate. It seems to be what people want. They want to keep you there, and you, the famous, what are you doing? Why do you keep talking? What are you doing? You are delivering. They need something, this group, this circle of people, and you are reading the group and making an assumption. You’re right, your guess is right, and you perform, deliver. You want to make sure you aren’t trashing all this goodwill being handed to you. You don’t want to be like Justine Bateman when that guy in that bar was so disappointed in her smoking a cigarette. She trashed all that goodwill, all the adulation he was just handing her. You don’t want to be like that, right? So you give it, you deliver. And you get used to this performance to such an extent that you forget to behave any other way. So there’s that.
Circle
I’m going to tell you about something that happened the other day. I mean now, you know, present day. I was meeting some new friends, people in the business, and there was this one woman, actress. Well-known, yes, but not overly so. Where am I, on the Fame scale there? I don’t know.
