The dark side of fame and what it does to the brain

Sana Qadar: Have you ever wanted to be famous? Depending on your personality, the answer might be a hard 'no, no way'. But it might be a yes, even if you're embarrassed to admit it. And why not? Fame seems to offer huge benefits; wealth, access, validation, adoration. But we also know being a celebrity comes at a huge cost, and the experience can be incredibly isolating.

Natalie Gauci: You can get into this headspace where everything feels like a fantasy and then nothing is reality anymore, and that's where things get dangerous.

Sana Qadar: So today, we examine how fame can affect a person's psychology. And what happens when the brain you've lived with your whole life suddenly gets the spotlight.

Ben Lee: When you're famous, it does feel like you're at the centre of the world and all of the various problems or issues kind of revolve around you. And you generally have a lot of people treating you as if that's true also.

Sana Qadar: Recognise that voice? It's musician Ben Lee.

This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar, and this week's episode comes to you from producer Jennifer Leake.

Natalie Gauci: I really very clearly remember when I was eight years old, I said to my mum, 'I want to be on television.' And then after that, at every birthday wish, I wished that I wanted to be famous.

Jennifer Leake: Natalie Gauci won season five of Australian Idol. That was in 2007. A young Matt Corby was runner-up.

Natalie Gauci: So I was singing on Hayman Island. And then I got really tired of singing covers and covers and covers and covers and covers and I thought I want to do something else. I just wanted to follow my dream. And so I thought Australian Idol would be kind of the best way for me to get myself out there and open up a platform and expose myself to a bigger, wider audience.

Jennifer Leake: Natalie was 26 when she won the competition, it secured her a record contract with Sony BMG, and a tour around Australia. Her debut album was certified platinum. But despite all her success, just before the release of her second album, Natalie walked away

Natalie Gauci: I was so close to releasing the single I'd recorded, Sony were ready to take it to the radio, they were playing it, it was like their hit before it was even a hit, they were loving it. And I wrote the song. I mean, I got creative freedom, I got everything I wanted, you know. So it was not…it wasn't them. I ran away from Sony, I left Sony, I didn't go ahead with that album, and it was my choice. And I tried to find…I'm laughing now but it's kind of sad…I tried to search for that record deal again, for seven years, trying to be someone else that I wasn't, you know?

Jennifer Leake: You're going to hear more of Natalie's story later, particularly what happened in that year after she won Australian Idol.

Donna Rockwell: I was around a lot of famous journalists and people and newsmakers, and I just started checking it out and seeing how people were.

Jennifer Leake: Donna Rockwell is a clinical psychologist who specialises in fame and celebrity. But before that she was a journalist working in Washington, part of a group of reporters who helped set up CNN. Donna saw people around her becoming famous, and was fascinated by how the experience changed them. When she left journalism and went to retrain at university, she got her doctorate in the psychology of fame and celebrity.

Donna Rockwell: It is written up in the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, and it remains the only published peer-reviewed research on the actual experience of fame and celebrity, and I did it 17 years ago. So it really speaks to the fact that you can't access this population to interview them about what their experiences are. And since I was so connected, if you will, I was able to do this study.

Jennifer Leake: Donna's research examined the experience of being famous through interviews with 15 well-known American celebrities. They were at different stages in their careers and from a range of professions. But they all shared similar problems.

Donna Rockwell: An inability to trust people: 'Why are you my friend? Is it because you like me, or because I'm famous?' So that was one thing, mistrust, not only of new friends but old friends, of everyone actually. So you and I go out into the world and we see people and we have an equal relationship. But when a celebrity goes out into the world, there is no equal relationship, there's only the fan who's trying to get as much from the celebrity as they can, if you will. And it's called reflected glory. When we, as someone on the street, go up to a celebrity and we talk to them and we say, 'Oh, my goodness, I can't believe I see you. This is amazing.' One person told me that people liked to touch her, and then they would turn to their friend and say, 'I just touched Patty,' you know. So what happens is the celebrity starts to feel like an object, so they lose their sense of trust in old friends and new friends.

One of the research participants said, 'Fame sits on the table between you like a bloated cod,' and he says, 'You know, sometimes friends leave and you have to understand why they do because you're special and they're not.' In fact, there is this 'has been' problem with celebrities, because you can't keep that bright light forever, right? So there is a dimming of the celebrity for the famous person.

One person who was an r&b superstar in my study told me that, you know, she's an older woman now, she walks down the street and people yell to her and they say, 'Hey, I recognise you, didn't you used to be…?' and they'll say her name. And she says to herself, 'I'm still her. I may not be a celebrity anymore, but I didn't used to be me, I'm still me.' Family issues, temptation, a whole slew of existential problems that come simply from fame. Celebrities can experience acquired narcissism, acquired situational narcissism, because they're famous.

Jennifer Leake: This term 'acquired situational narcissism' was first coined by Robert Millman when he was Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, and medical adviser to major league baseball. He defined it as a person who exhibits narcissistic behaviour after becoming successful or popular.

Donna Rockwell: So they start acting as though they are in a different category than everyone else. So they are used to all the incoming adulation, adulation, adulation coming in, coming in, coming in, and they forget how to go back out. Because neurologically their brains change, because there's so much incoming that they lose the even need to reach out. And that's why you see so many failed marriages, unhappy children of celebrities.

Fame becomes an addiction, we become addicted to that level of not only attention, but adulation: 'You're fabulous. You're fantastic. I love you. You're great. You're my favourite.' And they are so used to that, the brain of a celebrity gets addicted to that level of neurological stimulation.

The excitation in the brain from being recognised is so exciting. And then if it's quiet, the brain, just like hungering for heroin, hungers for recognition, adulation, affirmation. Am I still okay? And all the people I interviewed in my study, the celebrities have anonymity for confidentiality reasons, one person said, 'Oh, please use my name.' And that was child star Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family in the States. And he said to me, in the course of our interview, he said, 'I've been addicted to almost every substance known to mankind, and none are more addicting than fame.'

One of the questions that I asked as sort of a literary device was 'when was the first moment you realised you were famous', to each person. And so one person said, 'When I walked out of my apartment building, someone looked at me and said, 'Hey, aren't you that lady on TV?'' And that's when she knew she was famous. I interviewed an NFL hockey player, and when did he first know he was famous? When he was walking down the hall in high school. So everybody has their first moment of realising, oh my gosh, this has happened. The window for that feeling terrific is very short, because people start feeling like a toy in a shop window, a Barbie doll, that guy on TV, a clay figure, with all those eyeballs looking at you, you come to see they're actually looking through you, they're not looking at you at all.

Ben Lee: Anyone who has any involvement in showbusiness or has any taste of celebrity, understands that there is a really sweet spot on this continuum.

Jennifer Leake: This is an Australian singer-songwriter, Ben Lee.

Ben Lee: And that is where you have access to what you want access to, but people aren't bothering you. I mean, that's the dream, the dream is that you get to work with people you want to work with, you get to…I mean, even just socioeconomic access, you get to eat good quality food, you get to travel nicely, you get to stay in nice places. But no one wants people bothering them. So sometimes in my set I say this thing before I play 'Cigarettes Will Kill You' about how, hey, this song came number two in the Triple J Hottest 100 to 'Pretty Fly For a White Guy' by The Offspring. And the message to you here today, kids, is if you work really hard, you also can be number two. Number two is the dream. Everyone should want to be number two, who wants to be number one? When you're number one, everyone's looking at you, even at a level of subversion, like what you can do with culture.

I suppose the first time I put it together that there were certain feelings of validation or excitement that you could get from performance was in first or second grade. In year one or two my school put on a concert, it was a musical called Uncle Moishy and His Mitzvah Men, I went to a Jewish school, so it's a Jewish themed story. And they made everyone stand up and just sing do, re, mi, fa, so, la, te, do, you know. And they went one at a time and literally every kid is like tone deaf basically. And then they went past me, I'd never thought I could sing or anything. But I went do, re, mi, fa, so, la, te, do, and just sang a scale. And I saw they made a note, and I had this moment of realising that whatever had happened in the room when I sang brought someone happiness and then brought me approval. And I think, in a lot of ways, that magic combination set the scene for everything else I would do in my career, basically.

Jennifer Leake: Ben Lee got a record deal for his band Noise Addict when he was just 13. It was off the back of a four-track demo he made in his bedroom. Ben sent it round to labels and radio stations and managed to get signed.

Ben Lee: I mean, it's usually the first flushes of fame that are the most discombobulating or disorientating, and it comes with an intense sense of drama. Because fame…when you're famous or experiencing some fame it does feel like you're at the centre of the world and all of the various problems or issues kind of revolve around you. And you generally have a lot of people treating you as if that's true also. So it's very often just these first flushes of fame that I think are the most just unnerving.

Jennifer Leake: If you think back to the 'Cigarettes Will Kill You', the sort of peak mainstream awareness of Ben Lee, if you like, what were the elements of that you really enjoyed and what were some of the elements where you were like, oof?

Ben Lee: The Arias of 2005, whenever Awake is the New Sleep won the awards, and Missy…there was a moment culturally where like Missy Higgins' record has done well and mine had done well and they were both sort of acoustic pop records and between us we'd sort of scooped the Arias, and that was probably the biggest moment of, you know, you get in a cab and the cab driver wants to take a photo for their niece, and that whole thing. It makes the after-shows and stuff…in some ways it's kind of really fun because you have people who want to hang out with you and everyone wants to have a party. But it also is a bit limiting in terms of you can't just go everywhere and do anything.

I do remember when I played the Commonwealth Games, the closing ceremony, and did 'We're All in This Together', and walking around Melbourne for that was just…it was just unpleasant. In Australia, basically being some level of celebrity for 20-odd of them or 22 of them, I've just realised it's a thing that comes and goes. And if you're on the telly, there'll be a few days where you'll go to the airport and people will recognise you, and then they'll forget a week later. You know, humans have this remarkable inability to imagine life beyond the moment that they're living in at that time. And it's very hard for them to realise that the current moment they're in of celebrity is not going to last forever, and actually that is guaranteed.

Michael Schulman: I've talked to a lot of famous people over the course of my career so far, and people react to fame in such different ways.

Jennifer Leake: Michael Schulman writes celebrity profiles for The New Yorker.

Michael Schulman: There are people who have been ready to be famous since they came out of the womb, and they know exactly what to do as a famous person, but other people are completely thrown by it or are just uncomfortable with it. You know, I did a profile for The New Yorker of Adam Driver a few years ago, and he is someone who is just sort of palpably uncomfortable in the world in his own skin. I think that's what makes him interesting, both as a person and on screen. And when I spent time with him, he was about to release the third Star Wars movie that he was in, and I could just tell that being recognised in the way that he was because of Star Wars made him so deeply uncomfortable. He talked about how he was in a Broadway show at the time and people would gather at the stage door and give him fan art, and they knew the name of his wife and their dog and they would like make drawings of them together. You know, some people were jealous of his wife and hated her. And I think that level of attention that came with Star Wars was more than he bargained for. He was palpably uncomfortable with it.

Jennifer Leake: Here's Michael reading from his piece on Adam Driver.

Michael Schulman:

During Girls, strangers would often share details about their sex lives with him. One guy stopped him in the subway and said, 'I love that scene where you pee on her in the shower,' then turned to his girlfriend and said fondly, 'I pee on her all the time.' But Star Wars has made him uncomfortably famous. And then he says, 'This one woman who has been harassing my wife came to the show and gave me a creepy woodcarving that she made of my dog,' he said.

Okay, so it's funny. So that in itself is funny. You see what kind of fame…how fame changes from Girls famous, you're on like a weird HBO show, to Star Wars famous where there's people making sculptures of your dog. The crazy thing about that though is that he just kind of said that to me and I didn't think much of it, I just put it in the story. But after the story came out, it turned out that this fan who had made this artwork of his dog was a known person in the Adam Driver fan community, and it exploded on Reddit, that my story mentioned her and she felt targeted, she felt like why is Adam Driver making fun of me. It was just this whole crazy little world of Adam Driver's super fans that I kind of fell into. Personally, I feel like if you're making art of someone's pet, that is sort of crossing a line of comfort. You can understand why you might rue that level of fame.

Jennifer Leake: Social media has had a big impact on celebrity. For one, it's allowed famous people to have direct access to their fans, here's clinical psychologist, Donna Rockwell.

Donna Rockwell: There's another way besides the paparazzi to connect with your fan base, and it's directly: 'DM me'. And so there is this direct connection and a lot of celebrities like that because they've gotten rid of the middleman. On the other hand, what I'm so…I don't want to say 'afraid of' but think is so dangerous is the level of snark, how people think they just have the right to tear another person down just because they're a celebrity. And this is my opinion on this person and that person and the other one, and like, oh, she's horrible. And celebrities read this stuff, and guess what they are? They're human beings.

One person I interviewed, and this was 17 years ago, so before social media really became embedded, could not even read her email anymore, she couldn't look at Twitter anymore, because the attacks were so personal, with such vitriol, that it broke her. Celebrities are human beings, their feelings get hurt just like ours do.

Jennifer Leake: Even before Natalie Gauci was announced as the winner of Australian Idol, she started getting exposed to feedback from fans. A lot of it was really positive, but there was a lot of difficult stuff as well,

Natalie Gauci: YouTube was out and people could write comments on our videos and things like that. So I had to stop reading the comments because I did get a lot of hate, as much as I got a lot of love, I got a lot of hate as well. And it was really hard to read those comments because people can be very mean. So yeah, I had to stop reading them. It's like, well, I'm a human being on the other side.

Jennifer Leake: Ben Lee agrees social media can be brutal. But he also says it's an unavoidable part of putting creative work out into the world.

Ben Lee: Is social media dangerous in that sense to the emotional wellbeing of an artist? Absolutely. But so was the casting couch in movies in the '60s. It's like, the world of being a creator in a capitalist society and in a patriarchal power structure is an innately rebellious and treacherous path to try and take. So yeah it's scary, and it's hard, and you've got to learn to take your hits.

What's really complicated about it is that it is both unfair, the amount of…like, I understand the idea that it's unfair, the amount of just the brutalisation of creative people that can happen on the internet, who are often very sensitive people just trying to share their work, and they can be often romantic dreamers. But on the other side, I also think the slings and arrows of culture coming at you, in whatever form they take in your generation, is actually what ultimately is how you prove yourself, and how you become great. And whether that's Bob Dylan having to face journalists from Time magazine in the '60s, or Doja Cat being on TikTok, it's the same thing, it's a sensitive, creative person saying, I will speak out, I'm not going to keep my work hidden away in my room, I'm going to bring it into the marketplace, I'm going to bring it into the conversation, and I'm going to deal with the consequences of that.

Jennifer Leake: In 2007, Australian Idol was a really popular TV show, and after 11 weeks competing, Natalie was already pretty famous, but then winning and what followed was a whole other deal.

Natalie Gauci: It was all just systems go, there was no time to think, there was no time to really celebrate. At the time it was my 26th birthday on that night. I knew that I had 67 interviews the next day, but I still partied all night and did the interviews with basically no sleep. I had to record an album after that. And then we went on tour, so we went on tour for about 20 days after that nationally. I think for that time, for the first maybe six months, I just had to keep on going in that bubble but I was out of the bubble, so it was a little bit confusing for me, because I wasn't really sure where my support was, where my foundations lay, where I was going to live, where I was going to go, I hadn't planned any of that. So there was a lot of pressure for me to just be where I needed to be at the time I needed to be because that was my role as a winner.

Jennifer Leake: Natalie experienced trauma as a child, and in her 20s the pain was still largely hidden. Winning Australian Idol and becoming famous brought it all forward and was ultimately why she abandoned her record deal. It took another seven years and the birth of her son before she was able to properly heal.

Natalie Gauci: And so it all started to reveal itself after I won Australian Idol. And I was recording my second album and I went to America. I just turned into a really different person, and I just sabotaged my next opportunity that I had with Sony. And during Australian Idol, there was so much pressure and I worked really well under that pressure. It was when the pressure stopped that I didn't know what to do. I had time to think, I had time to feel, and that's when things went downwards for me. And I felt like I've failed my whole fans, I've failed Australia, it was actually quite bad. And I left Australia for a long time to try and find myself and find out who I really was.

Jennifer Leake: In Donna Rockwell's study on the experience of being a celebrity, she identified four phases of fame.

Donna Rockwell: The first phase is love/hate. They love—finally, I'm getting acknowledged—but then it gets creepy and then they hate it. So there's a love/hate phase. Then there's an addiction phase. Then there's like, I may not like this but for some reason I can't live without it. Needing to go out just to be seen happens to some people, as well as the opposite of having to disguise yourself because you can't take being seen.

Jennifer Leake: The third phase is acceptance. And finally, adaptation.

Donna Rockwell: What I found, the one thing that does help is knowing that you are part of something larger than yourself. So you see the people that do well with this kind of addiction, they give back. If you can do things that use fame as currency, so that you're using it for something useful in this world, not just another house with another swimming pool, with another Fendi purse, but actually using fame as currency to make a difference in the world, so that can help that addiction phase.

The third phase is acceptance: Hey, this is where I am, I have to figure this out. This is uncomfortable. I can't make any sense of it. But I have to accept it. I'm a talented pianist. What else am I going to do? I'm a rock and roll star. I can't hide, so I have to accept this.

And then the fourth and final stage is adaptation, in this way of realising that fame is currency, and you're a part of something larger than yourself, you can leave this world a better place than you found it.

Ben Lee: You know, I've had friends that you lose touch with, you know, you might have some friends who are musicians or they're actors, and then they become famous musicians or famous actors and there's a five-year period where you lose touch. And then five years later you reconnect, and they're like, 'Hey, it's been a while, I'm normal now.' Cool, right on. Because I also have a certain sense of empathy or compassion for people who want to take that journey, and who want to know what celebrity is like, get in there, man, find out, dance with it.

Sana Qadar: That's singer songwriter Ben Lee. You also heard from: 2007 Australian Idol winner Natalie Gauci; clinical psychologist specialising in celebrity mental health, Donna Rockwell; and staff writer with The New Yorker, Michael Schulman. This episode was produced and reported by Jennifer Leake, our sound engineer was Simon Branthwaite. That's it for All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening, I'll catch you next time.