[Red Moon]

The fame formula

What makes people famous? And once they make it, how do they stay in the public eye? Top PR agent Mark Borkowski has studied the celebrities, crunched the numbers, and come up with a formula

The decline in a star's fame follows a certain trend, and fame can be continued ad infinitum in the hands of a careful, clever "flack" or publicity agent. I spent a year poring over cuttings, pondering this notion as I studied the various methods and madnesses of the publicist. I started to wonder if Andy Warhol - an artist by calling but a master of the stunt and the soundbite - was right; does everyone get 15 minutes of fame? It occurred to me that it should be possible to look at fame statistically, to analyse the evidence we have all witnessed in the media, to see if fame's decline can be quantified. The answer, I discovered, is that it can be, and that Warhol was partially right - but the first spike of fame will last 15 months, not 15 minutes.

After that initial rush of fame, a new thermodynamic reaction must be set off under the famous thing or person, most likely by a publicist, if they are to remain in the public eye. All the research I have conducted, and the analysis of a select group of willing mathematically minded researchers, has revealed a relatively simple formula that illustrates how fame, left unattended, goes into decline, and why those who wish to remain in the public consciousness must be prepared to pay for it. They just need to pay the right people to come up with something new.

The formula is not as nice and accurate as, say, E=mc2, but, after all, I am applying an exact science to an inexact phenomenon. It nonetheless seems rather appropriate that the PR industry, which has coalesced into a slick, corporate, powerful and effective machine in the century or so since its chaotic inception, should have a scientific formula it can employ to ensure it does what it has always said it could - keep people famous. The formula is most potent now because of the realisation - impressed upon a generation of publicists by the American corporate PR firm Rogers & Cowan - that stars are brands and have a sell-by date. Hollywood is run by lawyers and agents nowadays - these are the people who have the funkiest parties, but they understand spreadsheets, not stories. Publicists Pat Kingsley and Stan Rosenfield rose to power thanks to their understanding that a brand needs a story and that storytelling is a key element of fame in our disparate, distracted world where real-life soap operas are played out in the papers. This formula illustrates that without intervention in the form of further publicity, fame follows an exponential slide to obscurity. It also shows how the repeated, carefully altered telling of stories can prolong the brand's period of fame.

The subjects tested for the formula included Kevin Spacey, Halle Berry, Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman, Richard Branson, Mel Gibson, Martha Lane Fox, Lindsay Lohan, Tom Cruise, Abi Titmuss, Angelina Jolie, Anthea Turner, Brad Pitt, Peter Mandelson, Hugo Chávez, Noel Edmonds, Chris Evans, Charles Ingram, Jeffrey Archer, Jade Goody, George Michael and Angus Deayton. A study was also made into brands such as Red Bull, Stella Artois, Heineken, American Express and Adidas. Each brand was measured by its appearance in print in the papers from 2000 onwards. The formula for illustrating the decline in fame from its peak works out as follows:

F(T) = B+P(1/10T+1/2(T*T))

where:

F is the level of fame;

T is time, measured in three-monthly intervals. So T=1 is after three months, T=2 is after six months, etc. Fame is at its peak when T=0. (Putting T=0 into the equation gives an infinite fame peak, not mathematically accurate, perhaps, but the concept of the level of fame being off the radar is apposite.);

B is a base level of fame that we identified and quantified by analysing the average level of fame in the year before peak. For George Clooney, B would be a large number, but for a fabulous nobody, like a new Big Brother contestant, B is zero;

P is the increment of fame above the base level, that establishes the individual firmly at the front of public consciousness.

This formula fits the data remarkably well, giving a precise numerical value to the 15-month theory: if I put in T=5 (corresponding to 15 months after the peak), it gives F=B+P(1/50+1/50), which works out at F=B+.04P. In other words, up to 96% of the fame-boost achieved at the peak of public attention has been frittered away, and the client or product is almost back to base level.

The study showed pretty conclusively that any specific boost to fame is sustained for approximately 15 months and that each celebrity or brand was surprisingly similar in the way their fame decayed. Out of this study, I came to realise that Warhol was wrong, although he was getting there - his assertion that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes has proved a mite optimistic. Fame still, on the whole, relies on someone being possessed of an extraordinary talent, even if that talent is as simple as owning an extraordinarily photogenic face, although this is not always the case, as Big Brother has proved. However, fame can be sustained and refreshed, just as long as there is something new to give it the necessary impetus. The formula is the perfect totem for the publicist's art, illustrating that a flack can keep their client famous with just a few well-placed spikes of coverage. Without these, their client will be a has-been after 15 months.

It seems so obvious when you look at it like this. Why else do Big Brother contestants vanish without trace within a year and a half? They have their moment of exposure on the claustrophobic set and then, when they exit the house, the luckier ones hire a publicist willing to slum it in the hope of a quick buck. If they do nothing but wallow in that one moment of fame, they will be forgotten, because there is always something or someone new waiting round the corner to take the public's attention away. Jade Goody, who failed to win Big Brother in 2002, became famous for being loud, vulgar and faintly ridiculous, the person who should have won but failed to. That image tired quickly - in about 15 months in fact - and she cannily reinvented herself a little and remained in the papers and the gossip journals, famous for collapsing when she ran the London Marathon without bothering to train and other such innocent, ludicrous feats of failure.

The public tired of this too, so Goody, who realised she needed a boost to stay in the fame game, published an autobiography and decided to return to the celebrity strand of Big Brother in 2006. Here, having deviated from the fame formula by trying something the public recognised her for, she made her first mistake. Trapped into repeating herself, Goody reacted with all the anger of a badger that's been cornered and lashed out at the person in the house she felt threatened by: the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. It led to Goody's expulsion from the house and from the front pages of the gossip journals and tabloids. She has done far better than some of the people who actually won Big Brother, however. Who now remembers Cameron Stout or Brian Dowling?

Big Brother contestants are perhaps the closest the modern era has come to offering Warhol-style fame for everyone, while the formula works best with major stars. In the period of study, the supermodel Kate Moss, for example, rose to an extraordinary level of fame when police dropped a case against her some months after she was photographed allegedly snorting forbidden substances. From a very public, famous presence prior to the incident, she became hugely famous, and her fame has run at twice its previous level ever since.

Ulrika Jonsson was another study - having been famous in the late 1990s, her presence dipped under the radar a little by 2002. She then had an affair with the England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson and published an autobiography alleging that an unnamed TV presenter had raped her. This led to her having a year of intense fame, which was only beginning to tail off by 2006.

Madonna is an excellent example of a celebrity working the fame formula to perfection. From her early days as a sharp-witted 80s party girl, she has moved onwards and upwards in her quest to stay famous, creating controversy through videos of her kissing a black Jesus, her Sex book and her flirtation with lesbianism, changing style for every album, acting parts in movies, adopting children, writing books for children and becoming a member of the English landed gentry by dint of marriage and money. Even her sporadic film roles, lambasted though many of them have been, are part of her success. Each new innovation has caused her fame to spike and kept her in the media spotlight.

Heather Mills is another good example. However much stick she may have received for having the temerity to divorce Paul McCartney, she has appeared in the media regularly with a new angle on her situation, be it dancing on a television show or simply asking for vast amounts of money in her divorce hearing, and she will doubtless continue to hit the front pages even now that the divorce is finalised.

And if anyone doubted that Rogers & Cowan were sensible to tie celebrity and product together, the fact that Britney Spears' range of cosmetics took the largest share of the UK market in 2007 despite, or just as likely because of, her very public meltdown proves that they were right beyond doubt.

The continued interest in the decadent soap opera that is Britney's life - or that of Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss or Lindsay Lohan - shows most effectively the need people have for stories. The lives of stars are the fireside fables of the 21st century, the contagious god myths that spread and spread and get better with every retelling.

The fame formula runs like a game show in which the rounds last 15 months - a kind of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire where all the options are Phone a Friend. If the friend is a good publicist and you have a reasonable amount of general knowledge, you're going to win as long as you make it to the necessary plateau where your fame is guaranteed. Of course, thanks to the internet, the audience doesn't need to be asked - it is quite free to proffer its opinion from the sidelines.

All of the publicists I spoke to noted how constantly shifting technologies have helped them and made it clear that their ability to adapt to them has kept them in business. As they get older, however, that revolutionary zeal has been replaced by a more reactionary stasis. In a world where the ability to become famous, or create a stir on behalf of someone famous, is made ever easier thanks to the vast array of new media, from the desktop publishing that revolutionised the 80s to mobile phones and high-quality cameras in mobile phones, from social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo to YouTube, email and virtual reality worlds such as Second Life - a formula for creating fame is a necessity. It is a vast, uncontrollable new world with endless ways of doing things, limited only by the ability of the programmer to program the code and the constantly increasing power of the desktop computer. This newness adds to paranoia and confusion, certainly, but when information can be at one's fingertips wherever one is and whenever one wants it, the world is going to be changing at the speed of thought.

The superheroes of cinema, created by the original publicists, have, thanks to the rise of the internet, been replaced by super-victims, such as Spears and Lohan, and it is part of the human condition to be fascinated by that. Will X find permanent happiness? Will Y win their fight against drugs or booze? Will Z avoid madness and self-destruction? Failure is necessary in the celebrity world, in much the same way that fairy stories are tainted with the horrific. The hero or heroine must fight against extraordinary odds to win - just look at the Greek gods; superhuman though they may have been, they were also prone to the most human of foibles such as pride, greed, envy, jealousy and self-destruction, and were all the more popular for it.

What the future holds is unguessable - technology's tectonic plates shift too quickly and throw up too much new landmass overnight for it to be sensible to try - but the world is always going to want to know about the famous and there will always be a need for publicists to help manage that fame. King Arthur had Merlin, Valentino had Harry Reichenbach.

It's not quite devil worship, as some would have you believe. It's not quite the Aleister Crowleyesque profession of popular legend, but the seeds are there. There's an arcane thrill about the practice of publicity; it's not fair or easy and can even be dangerous, but you'll have a fantastic ride along the way, and you get to mould people. But beware, there's no way out. It is a drug and as such must be handled with care, but the possibilities, now more than ever, are endless. The power really does lie with anybody who wants it and is willing to learn about fame, and the steps necessary to achieve it.

This is an edited extract from The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry by Mark Borkowski, published by Sidgwick & Jackson on August 1, priced Ł16.99.

Source: The Guardian