What Would You Do For Fame?

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Friday, July 11 2003, 11:17AM

From P. Diddy's MTV reality show The Making Of The Band to Tyra Banks's new UPN show America's Next Top Model, Americans are asking themselves one question. What would you do for fame?

Remember Fame? It was a hit movie and a hit song. Now it's a hit-or-miss idea for every GenXer looking to bust out of the suburbs and make it big.

Of course, the search for fame has a long tradition in our history. Andy Warhol famously predicted, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." But there was a time when people worked hard, slummed up from the mail room, and carefully plotted and backstabbed their way to the top. Remember All About Eve? These days it seems everybody wants their fame like their coffee - hot and instant.

Why aren't we willing to work for fame anymore? And for those who live, dream and die on the hope of fame, why are so many of them so ill prepared when they arrive?

I thought about these questions while watching The Making Of The Band a few weeks ago. In this hip hop version of The Real World, the young and talented cast members live together in New York and compete with one another to win a chance to become a hip hop star.

On one episode, when Puffy told the crew to get out of the house and explore the city, he ordered them to walk from midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn to buy him a slice of cheesecake from Juniors on Flatbush Avenue. The young men and women complained the moment they walked out of the door. Puffy must think we're his slaves, they said. Well, yeah, duh. If you wanna make it big, you gotta do what it takes to succeed.

I have no interest in being a hip hop star, but if I did and I were a young talented twentysomething, I would walk wherever Puffy told me to walk if I knew it would give me a shot at my dream.

I have another issue with Robin Manning on America's Next Top Model. She complained vigorously and self-righteously when she was asked to pose nude for a photo spread on the show. That's a fair complaint. Not everybody wants to be seen in the nude. The photographers agreed to put body-colored bands around the models' private parts to create the "illusion of nudity" but still Robin balked. She invoked her Christian religious principles to justify her opposition. But shortly before that time, she had no problem exposing her boobs to a man in the dressing room.

On a date at a French restaurant, Robin snarled at the food and refused to even try the escargot. "You know I'm not going to eat no snails! Not unless you put barbecue sauce on them," she told her hometown newspaper in Memphis. We're not talking Fear Factor here where you have to eat a bucket of cow gonads. We're talking about a small sample of French cuisine.

Again, I wonder, what are young aspiring stars willing to do to be successful. Apparently, not much. In an era when kids become famous just for living together on an MTV show and parents gleefully trot out their troubled teens on Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer, many of us have come to believe fame equals success and success comes without work. But as Dr. Joycelyn Elders once told me, the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. To her credit, she said that long before the reality TV boom hit the nation.

Finding success does not mean we have to sell out, but it does mean we have to work hard. In his new memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, bestselling author E. Lynn Harris writes, "No matter how much I have accomplished since that night in Washington, D.C. [when I attempted suicide], filmmakers and movie studios aren't rushing to make my life story a feature film or even a movie of the week."

I have to admit that I am familiar with the dilemma of finding success on one's own terms. I have had some success in my life and I would like to enjoy more. But there are some personal boundaries and limits we can and should place on ourselves so that we do not lose our souls in the search for fame. Hard work should not be one of those boundaries.

I'm still learning which boundaries and limits to release and which to embrace in my own quest for success. I have recently decided to do more television and radio appearances and maybe host my own show. To do so, I've been told to loosen up, to change my look, and not to be so revealing about my personal life. I've also been chastised more than once for not remembering people's names. I can usually remember a face, but I'm horrible with remembering names, especially if I haven't seen you in more than a year.

On top of all that, I have struggled to reconcile my need to maintain privacy and personal space with my willingness to be a public figure. What works for me? I'm still figuring it out. I do know I have much more work to do. But like the song says....

"Baby, look at me
And tell me what you see
You ain't seen the best of me yet.
Give me time,
I'll make you forget the rest."

After studying the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome and Egypt, I remember my high school Humanities teacher put one final question to our class for a term paper. He simply asked, "Why does man create?"

I struggled with that question for days before I could finally start writing. Eventually I came to believe that we create so that our lives will have meaning. We create to make our world a better place. We create to leave a legacy for future generations. And we create, perhaps most importantly, so that our lives will live on in that which we leave behind.

Perhaps that's the same reason the characters in Fame wanted to leave their mark on the world. The song says it best:

"Remember my name. Fame!
I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly--high!"

And so, like the final few repetitive words of the song, we "remember, remember, remember, remember."

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