"I USED TO BE SOMEBODY."

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING, CARL JUNG, MADONNA, AGING, and ME

I am honestly surprised when someone remarks about my being known as a writer. I find it both curiously comforting that people continue to read me and yet even more deeply discomfiting that I find such comfort still in being known. So I turn to self-deprecation as I way to calm the discomfort. ‘Yeah,” I say with a performative shrug. “I used to be somebody.”

I have always found “somebody,” which is a generic word used as a term to describe a person’s renowned singularity, itself disorienting more than ironic. Aren’t we all somebodies in our own ways? It doesn’t require a modicum or more of fame, or recognition from strangers. It only requires owning one’s worth. But even writing this Substack column and asking for readers to become paid subscribers instead of reading my words for free is a form of further discomfort. People once bought magazines to read my cover stories (and I was paid top-dollar to write them) as well as purchased my first two memoirs after a publishing house paid me to write them, but now I, trained by social media, have settled into giving away my words for free. Yes, I hope that those of you who have not become paid subscribers do so at some point soon since this is my only job right now, but I told someone last week - a somebody in the media world - it felt like begging to ask you to do so. “You don’t think you’re worth $5 a month?” the somebody asked me. I guess that’s a deeper question than monetizing one’s worth: How do we own our own worthiness? How do I?

Owning my own worth is in many ways the pilgrimage I am now on in my life as I use this Substack column to document it. Indeed, owning my own worth is just about the only thing I have left these days since I don’t own much of anything else after having sold or donated almost everything I had in my life to set out to discover everything I am. I have stripped it all away to get to my essence, which is being a writer. That is all I have left. It is in many ways all that I am. It is, I am coming to realize, all that I ever was. Celebrities and movie stars and magazines were the wrapping and ribbons around which my gift as a writer became a different kind of present, a bit too gaudy, not God-given but periodically affirmed.

More people read my stories most months in Vanity Fair over my dozen years or so there than even read my two New York Times bestselling memoirs, Mississippi Sissy and I Left It on the Mountain. That first memoir made the Nonfiction Bestseller List. But the second - back when the Times had many different categories of bestsellers - made the Celebrity Bestseller one which felt a bit like cheating and even deepened the Imposter Syndrome from which I too long suffered regarding my being a “real writer.” Writing about celebrities for so many years, I had become, according to The New York Times, nothing but one myself. I had turned to writing books in the first place in order to stop utilizing my talent to make somebodies out of other people by codifying their fame and framing it from the proximity of paragraphs constructed from the construct of the kind of colloquy I would describe to friends at the time as “instant intimacy as performance art.” I would explain that my profile subjects were at their seductive best during such shared private performances but the ultimate seduction was allowing them to think I was being seduced. We were each getting into the other’s head; it was a heady time.

Many people still think of me as that Vanity Fair writer. It took years for even me to free myself of that definition. I was encased in it, a chrysalid layered upon itself with first-generation computer screens, decrepit in hindsight, filled with a harried and harrowing raft of too-readily inserted copyedits and queries, of expense accounts and town cars, of make-sure-to-give-me-a-booth lunches at the Royalton and could-I-have-a-quiet-corner dinners at Odeon in New York and a wearying wealth of languid days when in LA lounging by other people’s pools. My first cover story for Vanity Fair was on Madonna in 1990. I just did the math. I am now 66 so that was half my lifetime ago, and almost as long ago for her. Now that she has announced her 40th anniversary tour, which sold out in minutes here in London and in New York and in Paris, I have been thinking about that story and the Helmut Newton photos - lord I loved Helmut - and not only how it all changed my life, but also how differently Madonna and I have aged since then. Or have we? I haven’t had plastic surgery or had the means to sweep through Africa doing good and gathering up children to adopt, but, like her, I continue to try and find a stage for the only thing I know how to do. Plus, we both love an audience. Her songs could be sung in her shower without one (or, knowing her, there might be a small one in there with her, come to think of it) and I could write this sentence without another person ever reading it. But we both have an innate need to be heard. As for each of us now being in our 60s, that is where the divergence lies since women are judged differently than men as we all age. I think Elton John is a much bigger talent than Madonna even though they are each culturally iconic. Elton is in his 70s and has been on a world tour, but no one criticizes him for being too old to do it. We rightly celebrate him for it. No, that’s not Madonna’s real face anymore. But that’s not Elton’s real hair either. I have never interviewed Elton and would love to do that one day once he retires (if he ever really does) and lets his couture coiffure down. He inspires me with his longterm sobriety and his commitment to his HIV/AIDS charities and the grace with which he has navigated his career and his catalogue of songs that became early on the soundtrack of my life as well as - this is the most important - how he has found fatherhood through finding love. Hell, I’d also like to have a face-to-face with Madonna again. My habits are old, too, I guess. They die hard. I’d even like to hear the bawdy jokes that Madonna and Elton could make about that.

(Above: Charlotte Rampling walking the runway at the AMI show in Paris during the recent men's fashion week. Photo by Peter White/Getty Images.)

(Above: Rampling and I at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. 2016. Photo by Andrew Haigh.)

And while we’re at it, I also always wanted to interview Charlotte Rampling. I loved the upper photo above of Rampling that popped up all over the internet for a few days recently after she walked the runway in the AMI show in Paris during the men's fashion week there. Age graces her face - deepens her beauty - in a way that surgical skill can only give a scant glance to as it tightens the surface of beauty’s shallowest shoals. She proves that Old is the new Jung, who said, “An ever-deepening self-awareness seems to me as probably essential for the continuation of a truly meaningful life in any age, no matter how uncomfortable this self-knowledge may be. Nothing is more ridiculous or unsuitable as older people who act as if they were still young - they lose even their dignity, the only privilege of age … Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin and certainly a danger to be too much occupied with himself, but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself … The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Instead of aging, Charlotte Rampling just keeps becoming who she truly is and any photo of her is fine by me since I think she just might be the coolest person alive along with being a great female actor. So here’s another excuse for one. The latest Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday and that prompted me to remember the lower photo above of Rampling and me at the Vanity Fair Oscar party seven years ago.

This column started off with my owning my worth as a writer, one who reconfigured the magazine cover story into a different kind of narrative, moved on to writing a couple of memoirs, and is now building this community of readers here on Substack with my weekly columns. It has taken me a long time to believe I am a “real writer” no matter the forum. On another more quotidian level, however, movie stars, let’s, yes, face it, were the products of the business I was in for so long, not writing. There is an aspect to what I once did of being a "stevedore of glamour.” Tina Brown, who hired me at Vanity Fair when she was its Editor-in Chief, coined the term when we were bonding over some Hollywood absurdity I had complained about but at which we finally had to laugh. Tina created VF’s high/low cultural template based on her taking-the-piss temerity and deep curiosity about the deeply serious before Graydon Carter took over its Editorship and gave the template his own gentlemanly impertinent, brilliantly urbane spin mussed about a bit with a kind of war-correspondent mien, rumpled and real with sentences plied from unpleasant places, when the editorial one became a tad too well-groomed in its masculinity. In the high/low nexus of each of their tenures at the top of the masthead, I was a lowly stevedore and those movie star products were my cargo, the merchandise of my trade. People signaling a need to be considered serious could attack me for that trade which was often labeled with the oxymoronic “celebrity journalism." But as I told that media somebody last week who challenged me to own my own worth, I never thought of myself as a journalist. "I'm too lazy to be a journalist," I told that somebody, falling back into the comfort of self-deprecation. "I know narrative and am unintimidated by fame," I said. "That was how I looked on it all. But there was a certain sort of art to it because I knew how to sculpt a story." I still do. I’m sculpting this very column, in fact, as I write it.

I wasn't intimidated by Rampling at the Vanity Fair party back in 2015, but I certainly did not look at her as cargo. She was nominated for an Oscar for 45 Years earlier that night. Brie Larson - remember her? - won for Room. Andrew Haigh, who wrote and directed 45 Years, took the photo of Rampling and me after the three of us talked a bit as we took it all in - the party, the semiotical signaling, the high silliness that sets in after the night’s seriousness, tiring of itself, notices that its slip is showing and no longer gives a fuck. Rampling could not have been more gracious for she long ago had no more fucks left to give and has figured out how not to give them with a kind of generous aloofness. I don't think the Vanity Fair party was her milieu and because of that my cultural crush on her that night only deepened. Just looking at her in these photos though can still, conversely, summon within me the capability of still giving a fuck myself. In some way, this cultural and spiritual pilgrimage I am on is getting back in touch with that capability. I hope my path crosses with Rampling’s in Paris in the spring when I'm there for two months on the next leg of my pilgrimage. Or maybe there is an even better narrative about never running into Charlotte Rampling while there but always feeling beckoned by her because the personal cargo I carry has always been about longing.

I once longed to be a writer.

I wake now in London a writer longing to write.

I long. I write. I have lived a long life to live this one.