On fame and white feathers

Why do people behave so bizarrely when confronted with people who are ‘famous’?  I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 on which two relatively well known media personalities each admitted to being tongue tied even embarrassed when in adult hood they met their childhood sporting heroes. Over the years I have heard people from all walks of life say the similar things.

Twenty years before my son became an international film star I met many national and international sports personalities, actors, musicians, climbers, politicians, etc because I had pubs in England and bars overseas. In one, the Bamboo Bar on the West Coast of Barbados in the late seventies early eighties ‘personalities’ were two a penny. Now it may say more about a defect in my personality but I never felt any sense of the need for overt adulation or deference when I met any of them.

To watch a sporting hero score a try make a century etc  has left me breathless with admiration at the time, but regrettably ninety percent of the time meeting the person never moved me. I have liked some of them certainly as I liked the serious musicians I have met, I am talking millions of albums, and their incredible music and stage performances,  but alas  too often the sense of wonder has been shattered. ‘Ah, so this is so and so’, I would think, usually followed by; ‘they’re much smaller, fatter, less charismatic, etc than I expected’ and their conversation invariably disappointing. I have always believed in behind a bar, or not ‘Do as you would be done by’, and if they were rude arrogant or unpleasant, which I have to say very rarely happened with the real stars it was always the ‘D’ list dross who had a problem, then I would let them know I was not best pleased. Conversely respect and courtesy were accorded.  The ‘A’ list/’D’ list business is not dissimilar to old and new money.

In the last five years I have met many film stars or ‘A’ list celebs. I have also met politicians, academics, musicians and sportsmen most I am afraid have left me more disappointed than awed over or otherwise. There are equally many I haven’t met that I always wish I had, like Willie John MacBride, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and writers too many to mention, but TV people absolutely not and as for the aristocracy, no desire whatsoever.

To be fair running a beach bar in the tropics is not your ordinary midden, but does fame automatically have a right to respect? I certainly do admire and have a high regard for particular talent, performances or achievements but sadly on meeting the human beings behind the image that regard has not always been sustained. I’m not much good at anything so maybe I should have a little more humility.

What I have come to realise over the years that it’s the ordinary, the insignificant, the self-effacing people that you meet and dismiss for all the wrong reasons, appearance being one, which can turn out to confound and surprise you most. There have been many encounters that have left me speechless, in tears or feeling very, very small.

There were two regulars who by chance one night I discovered were founder members of the SAS, and another who one of the pilots who flew Swordfish against the Bismark. A Captain in the Royal Navy who was with RND at Antwerp in 1914 and who until the age of one hundred, three mornings a week would walk two miles with his Jack Russell to arrive, at my pub at precisely at 11.30, where he would drink two Worthington White Shields, read The Telegraph and walk home. An ‘old contemptible’ who having survived some of the most savage fighting of 1914/15 on his first leave home to Liverpool, changed into his civvies to join his mates in the pub. He was stopped in the street by two young women who each gave him a ‘white feather’. He kept them in his bible, survived four years in the trenches and brought them in to show me.

A chap who ran a menswear shop in Chester ex RAF shot down over Germany and captured, he escaped to spend a year walking home across Russia, south through Iran to India. Young men on R & R Thailand in the early seventies, especially the ones with the ‘thousand yard stare’, and Russian Spetsnaz in Budapest in the nineties fresh from Afghanistan. These are just a few of the people I have met and in whose presence I felt truly felt overawed, at a loss for words or down right scared.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under Barbados, Bond 007, Fame and the famous, Sadness, Serendipity, White feathers and The Old Contemptibles".. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.