The celebrity insider – America is all about re-invention
Published: 01 January, 2010, 02:51
Edited: 02 January, 2010, 04:16
TAGS: Celebrity, Fashion, Music, Scandal, Mass media
A lot of people, especially in America, leave their pasts behind and the world of celebrities and showbiz is not always glitz and glamour.
RT sat down with one of America's most provocative best-selling non-fiction authors and journalists, Michael Gross, who told us the inside story of the world behind the photoflashes.
Gross earned his popularity by going behind the scenes of the rich and famous in America. Madonna, Calvin Klein, Richard Gere and John F. Kennedy Jr. – the list is very long. Michael says that the most fascinating stories are those about the most obscure people, stories of the complete, total reinvention, where people think that they can leave their identity behind and become someone completely different who no one will notice.
“I have been threatened a handful of times in my career and in every case the people who threatened and tried to stop me from writing about them were people that had things to hide,” concluded Michael Gross.
He shared that in his opinion in this time of recession, those people who used to have a lot of money just have a little less.
“What you’re seeing now is a lot of people who are reluctant to flaunt it, but they still have it. They just do not walk down the street carrying a thousand shopping bags and boasting about their yacht and their five homes. They are just quietly traveling between their five homes in their yacht and not talking about it anymore,” said Gross.
Speaking about the modeling business he wrote about in his book ‘Model: the ugly business of beautiful women’, Michael Gross noted that “you are dealing with a superficial image and behind it is a vast pool of reality”.
“Modeling is a machine that eats young girls. For every angel who dances on the end of the pin of fashion and fame there are probably a thousand girls who have failed in the process.”
“Personally, I would trust none of show business… I would not believe anything that I read about an actor or actress in a glossy magazine story and I would believe half of what I read in so-called scandal magazines… What passes as entertainment journalism is actually promotion,” said Gross, who believes that modern newspapers are invertebrates simply because they are too afraid to operate and are “sucking up” to powerful people.
01.01.2010, 00:24
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I feel the same way, Michael. People are scrambled with their motivators in the strangest of places. We are to worship the outside and forget the inside so that several end up in the wrong places. They say, you're just jealous because you can't have it. I don't want it. You're in denial. Who can say they aren't in denial? This puts you in a trap where you don't want something, but you're thinking about it. Add a little doubt of self and a hint of acceptance to a desperate person lacking awareness with the potential of success and voom, you're there, even though you aren't then you've chased the white horse when you can't have "your" dreams. The only way to win is shatter your containers by their faults and vanities and force them to sin in ways that will end them. Unfortunately, the revenge reactions get a little complicated and unpredictable and are not just if you do too much. They say, I have truth too. You still value your lifestyle, don't you? If someone isn't a loyal servant to you/ you don't have anything on them, anything they know about you will hurt, especially if you are a cheat or have made them overly jealous. You can sue and lock up as many people as you want in a psych ward, but America is still a free country, so they'll come back at you with a little knowledge and have overcome their past just as you did, and if you've been too comfortable for too long, oh no, and they still want what you have, so they'll take your place and the giants with strange priorities will use them. If you wouldn't have trapped these people with enchantments, emptiness and shallow promises, bad things wouldn't be happening to you. As for having something and not having something, it's relative to the system that you are as well as what you have and where, how you got it. In order to have big money, you have to have connections. It's why new money often fails and we have the clone wars. The political dynamics of this are interwoven in the strangest of ways.
the illunsion is the thing. substance is measured in appearance. if you appear to be doing well to others then your estimation of yourself is high. if they don't believe that you are doing well then you don't either. perception is focused from without as opposed to from within. when most americans walk into a public place their point of view is on the outside of themselves looking back at themselves and "seeing how they look". while they are aware of "how they look" they have little or no idea of how they actually are...inside. the inner man has been sacrificed in america and has had his place taken by a shell without a soul.












People imagine that the lives of celebrities are better, but they are not. They get old, kill themselves, are killed, get fat, get ill, etc. etc. like the rest of us. But there is a kernel of envy and admiration for celebrities that is real, i.e. most people work in jobs they can barely tolerate because there simply is not room at the table for jobs for all of the creativity people have. So people perceive that at least the celebrities are doing something they are passionate about. People envy this. This is the kernel of "real" that the corporations, including media corporations, use to sell products in a manipulative way. I think the celebrity culture in my country, the USA, has become a real killer...so many celebrities have died under very strange circumstances, and it was revealed they led miserable lives. They bcome a "product" and are slaves to corporations. It is very sad, Michael Jackson being only the latest in a long line.