Books

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FAME AND THE FAIRY TALE

I have been preoccupied for many years with the subject of fame. My father became famous when I was thirteen, and his celebrity has since affected virtually every aspect of my life. Dad was never well known in the way that movie or television personalities become publicly recognizable. He was a psychoanalyst whose ideas and style of writing ap-pealed to many people outside his own field—to scholars in a wide range of disciplines and to the lay public—making him one of the most widely read and influential psychoanalysts in the world.

At the peak of his renown in the United States, Dad was thought of as a cultural icon, and his face appeared from time to time in the pages of the New York Times or on the cover of Newsweek or other widely read magazines. Because of this media exposure, he would occasionally be recognized in a restaurant, for example, where people at nearby tables would whisper to each other as he was seated, or a flustered waitress, perhaps having read his best-known book, Childhood and Society, in her college psychology course, would ask for his autograph. Such celebrity sightings could be erroneous, however. Dad was so distinguished looking, with his blue eyes and shock of long white hair, that he elicited attention in public places from people who weren’t really sure who he was but were sure he must be somebody. (Sometimes they guessed that he was Arthur Fiedler, whom he slightly resembled, for many years the popular conductor of the Boston Pops.)

It was not the breadth of my father’s reputation—the sheer number of people who knew his work—that affected me the most profoundly: it was the intensity of the reaction to his writing, to him as a person, or even to the mention of his name whenever my connection with him was revealed. He was a brilliant man who also wrote and lectured about psychological issues in a way that affected people very deeply. He was perceived as a powerful father figure: compassionate, kind, and possessed of unique wisdom about some of the most difficult challenges of being human. He was revered by his readers as well as by those who interacted with him on a more direct professional or personal basis.

Dad’s public aura overwhelmed and bewildered me. Was he really something of a god, imbued with the magical powers his admirers ascribed to him? Or was he the complex person whose human vulnerabilities had always been so apparent to me? My more intimate image of him was difficult to reconcile with the public persona.

And to the extent that he was perceived by the public as being larger than life, his idealized image posed a threat to my own sense of self-worth as a life-sized and less charismatic human being, destined to make much less of an impact on the world. Living in the shadow of his fame, I was confronted with the challenge of having to search for a meaningful nonheroic way to be, turning to sources of gratification and self-affirmation quite different from those on which he relied.

It has gradually occurred to me that the task of creating a purposeful and satisfying life in the shadow of my father’s renown is not a problem unique to me or even to those who have grown up in proximity to someone famous. It is faced by nearly everyone growing up in a culture obsessed by celebrity in which so many people are affected by the godlike images of public figures that daily loom over our lives.

We have become convinced that fame is the ultimate in human achievement—that there is no more absolute measure of a person’s worth than the attainment of celebrity. We imagine that the famous not only have achieved a unique social status, but actually have triumphed over the exigencies of the human condition. The gods have smiled upon them, granting them special gifts—extraordinary beauty, talent, intelligence, wisdom—which we assume have set them free from the relentless self-doubts and desperate strivings that afflict the rest of us. They have arrived at a special state of grace.

Human beings have always needed to believe in heroes who appear to have triumphed over the hardships of life. Our current fascination with the real-life heroes whose images are transmitted to us through the modern media serves much the same psychological function as the more traditional fascination with fairy-tale heroes, whose images dominated human cultural life through the simpler medium of storytelling for thousands of years. But unlike the media-generated idols of today, fairy-tale heroes were not real human beings living in the real world. They were symbolic figures—sometimes in nonhuman form—living in an enchanted land quite different in character from the world we actually inhabit. Their heroic exploits were symbolic representations of man’s struggle to overcome the obstacles to happiness in the real world.

The scholar Max Luthi suggests that “the fairy tale is a universe in miniature,” which portrays man in confrontation with the world. The fairy-tale hero confronts terrifying dangers and solves impossible problems in a journey toward the attainment of the ultimate rewards of life: “marriage with the prince or princess, . . . kingship or gold and jewels.” Such tales of personal triumph, told by generation after generation, inspired much the same sense of awe and enchantment in the members of traditional cultures that our preoccupation with the famous brings to our lives today. They were tales about “people who were as beautiful, wise and fortunate as human beings could be” and who “moved towards and gained an absolute worth in life.”

It strikes me that media-generated stories about the famous play a remarkably similar role in our lives today. We, like our ancestors, are fascinated with news about “people who are as beautiful, wise and fortunate as human beings could be,” and who appear to have arrived at the pinnacle of success. In the traditional fairy tale, it is ascendancy to the throne that signifies the greatest imaginable triumph of the human soul. In the real world of today, it is fame that has become the symbol of ultimate success and self-realization. And images of the famous convey to us what the fairy tale once promised: “that we [too] can become kings and queens, or lords of our own destinies . . . that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.”

But the eminent psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim reminds us of a profound difference between fairy-tale heroes and our real-life contemporary idols. As symbolic representations of man, fairy-tale heroes are, by nature, one-dimensional figures who lack the complexity that characterizes real human beings. In fairy tales the difference between good and bad characters is oversimplified, making it easier for the listener to identify with the good and reject the bad. Writing about fairy tales as a time-honored medium for the entertainment and instruction of children, Bettelheim points out that “presenting . . . polarities of character permits the child to comprehend easily the difference between [good and bad fairy-tale characters], which he could not do as readily were the figures drawn more true to life . . .”

Because of my father’s celebrity, I have had an unusual opportunity to observe the way in which modern-day fairy tales are constructed around real-life people who have achieved fame. An idealized and oversimplified image is generated by the media—with the help of the celebrity and the eagerly receptive public—an image with which people can easily identify and from which they can draw vicarious strength and inspiration. But such images are not realistic representations of human beings. On the contrary, they conceal the real complexity of the people around whom they are constructed.

It is hard for us to accept that our most beloved celebrities are as complicated and difficult to really know as the rest of us, that their personalities contain as many contradictions as our own. It is difficult to believe that those who appear dazzlingly self-confident in public or in the demonstration of their extraordinary talents can also feel frightened, vulnerable, and inadequate in their personal lives; and that the most celebrated are as plagued as the rest of us by serious difficulties in living and relating, despite their charisma, their astounding abilities, and their awe-inspiring achievements. We cherish the magical excitement and the profound reassurance that our idealization of celebrities brings to our lives, and we fear that greater insight into their human vulnerabilities will deprive the magic of its power. Is there any compelling reason, then, for us to push past this fear and look more closely at the distortion inherent in our idolizations?

When we substitute the glorified images of real human beings for the symbolic heroes of old, we pay a seldom-recognized price. No one is deceived by fairy tales into believing that a small child could literally be as brave and resourceful as Jack the Giant Killer, or that a young woman could be as uniquely beautiful and pure as Snow White or as exquisitely sensitive as the princess in the story of the Princess and the Pea. However, when fairy tales are constructed around the images of contemporary celebrities, our perception of reality is distorted and we embrace a deception. We allow ourselves to believe that the people behind illustrious public images are exactly like, and every bit as admirable as, their public representations would make them seem. We are convinced that we can know the famous intimately through our experience of their appearances (or performances) in public or through the splendor of their creative works. But this is, of course, an illusion. Real human beings, no matter how attractive, gifted, or celebrated, can never be as one-dimensional—or as easy to know—as the imaginary heroes of the fairy tale. The true emotional complexity of our idols is blocked from our awareness by our powerful need to believe in such purely heroic figures.

I have always been amazed at the conviction with which people have maintained their image of my father as a person. The intimate quality and tone of his writing, combined with his personal charisma, suggested to his admirers that in his most intimate relationships Dad must have been exactly as he seemed in his books and in his public persona. Yet this image of him was inevitably more one-dimensional than a real person could possibly be. It obscured the true complexity of the man.

The cost of such distortion, I believe, is that people have compared themselves to the idealized image of my father (as they have to countless other celebrities) in a way that the heroic figures in the fairy tale never invited the listener to do. It has always been clear to me that many of my father’s admirers held themselves to be less successful than he was—not only as thinkers but also as human beings. This awareness led me to realize how often in modern life we compare ourselves to the glorified images of the famous and feel diminished personally by the comparison. We are deceived into believing that some members of our species have transcended all that is least admirable in human nature to represent only the best and most sublime, forgetting a fundamental truth about what it means to be human: that we are all, including our idols, a complicated mixture of the most and the least heroic qualities common to our species. It would never occur to most people that even a person of my father’s great wisdom and charisma suffered as much as the rest of us from the conflicts and contradictions that plague the human psyche.

I was exposed at an early age to the kind of fairy-tale imagery that heightens the magical aura of a public figure and distracts us from the more human underside of the person we revere. Both my mother and father loved to tell stories about their early lives that depicted them as being very like figures in a fairy tale who had transcended experiences of childhood rejection to find idyllic, romantic love with each other and to ascend together to the modern-day equivalent of the throne: fame. The real story of my father’s childhood lent itself readily to such tales of enchantment, since he never knew who his biological father was, and actually imagined in his youth that this mysterious person might have been a member of the Danish royal family. How often in the European fairy tale does the hero emerge from childhood obscurity to his rightful position on (or next to) the royal throne? My parents also loved to recount how they had first met at a masked ball at a palace on the outskirts of Vienna—clearly reminiscent of the setting in which Cinderella and her prince had magically found each other.

These stories and many others, oft told through the years, delighted my parents’ friends and admirers and added enormous charm to their image as a couple. But they were demoralizing to me. They so heightened the magical aura of my parents’ life together, and my father’s rise to fame, that they made the real world, and everyone in it, seem mundane and colorless by comparison; and it was in the real world that I needed to make my own life and find my own place. Just as confusing, these romantic tales obscured the more complicated emotional reality of my parents’ past and their relationship to each other. It is not that these accounts deliberately obfuscated the truth, but that they represented my parents’ way of defending against the painful memories that they had carried with them into adulthood. Knowing of the pain concealed behind the fairy-tale version of their lives, I found it difficult to reconcile my intimate experience of them with the more magical account of the road they had traveled to fame.

Perhaps it is understandable, then, that I have been preoccupied with trying to clarify the distinction between fairy tale and reality where fame is concerned. My reasons are undeniably personal. I have needed to free myself from the overwhelming effect of my father’s public persona. But I have also needed a means of connecting more intimately with both my parents as real human beings (even now, after their deaths) because of the way in which their own investment in fairy tales and their public image distanced them from me. I have felt compelled to try to understand my parents better through the lens of my own experience to help me reconcile the more magical public image of them with my personal reality. This search has helped me to appreciate the complexity of the people who brought me up and gave me so much, and it has deepened my love for them.

In the process of this quest, I have been inexorably drawn to a broader examination of the nature of fame and the reality behind the public images of celebrities other than my father. What I have learned about the emotional lives of other people of renown has helped me, in turn, to better understand my parents.

What follows is an account of my lifelong effort to make sense of—and come to terms with—my experience of my father’s fame. It is my hope that the story of my own struggle will be a source of insight for others who must also come to terms, in their own way, with the glorified images of the famous that pervade all of our lives.