when he’s 64

The sad tale of Paul and Heather McCartney’s breakup continues in today’s Daily Telegraph. I read it, so you don’t have to (it’s a public service for my high-minded readers):

• He’s devastated by the porn pictures, because he had no idea about her sordid past.
• She found him boring.
• She didn’t get how huge the Beatles were, and was jealous of everyone fawning all over him.
• His daughter Stella was “violently opposed to the union with Mills.”
• He has hired a $1200-an-hour barrister in London and has also engaged the services of the law firm run by his late wife Linda’s family.

And:

“The latest salacious revelations are proof, if proof were needed, the divorce case of McCartney vs Mills-McCartney looks set to be one of the bloodiest and most vicious in modern history.”

From Lipstick.com, via Jeff Jarvis. What a great link—I love celebrity gossip! Plus, it’s completely legit. Don’t believe me? Check out Claims to Fame by [Professor] Joshua Gamson):

Moving from People magazine to publicists’ offices to tours of stars’ homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today’s heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity’s transparency and commercialism.Gamson examines the contemporary dream machine that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars.Gamson also looks at the celebritization of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.

After Claims to Fame, if you’re interested in digging deeper into the black arts of celebrity manufacture and maintenance—and I dare you not to be—read High Visibility, which, I note, has been updated for the digital age. Gotta order that.
In those two books, you will find a lot of the answers to the question “Why do we love celebrities?”… And you’ll still love ‘em…if you’re like me, that is.

There’s a longer reading list, but I’m not in the mood to do all the linking and stuff.