Читать книгу Stalkers - Jean Ritchie - Страница 10
Оглавление‘WHEN I STARTED out, I didn’t have any desire to be a great actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.’
It was Katharine Hepburn who said those words, and she was being characteristically honest. There are many celebrities who talk about their vocation, their art, the importance of their work. They are not (necessarily) phoneys: as a breed actors and actresses have a high work ethic. Theirs is a craft that can be worked on and developed and improved, and the good ones are constantly honing their natural skills and talents for the camera or the stage. But few are as ruthlessly truthful as Hepburn; they did not lie in their childhood beds and dream of attending drama classes, voice training, stage technique; they did not fantasize about early morning calls to make-up, about finding their best scenes on the cutting-room floor, about difficult and demanding directors. What they dreamed about was fame. Names in lights, top billing, adulation. Some coveted the financial rewards of stardom, others would (in the secrecy of their adolescent yearnings) have even sacrificed that for the heady taste of public adulation.
Even had they been presented with a true picture of the downside of stardom, it is unlikely that any of them would have abandoned their dreams. Years later, having fulfilled their ambitions, and well-aware of the bitter realities that come with the other trappings of celebrity, a few genuinely wonder whether the chase was worth the quarry; most would still not exchange Hollywood mansions, hot and cold running servants and an eager public dancing attendance on them for obscurity, a nine-to-five job in an office or on a factory production line, and a modest home. They may feel afraid, angry, intruded upon and at risk at different times, but the balance still weighs, they reckon, in their favour.
And then along comes a monster …
It’s true that all Hollywood stalkers are deranged, but the degree of derangement varies enormously. Some will be content to write long, rambling, nonthreatening letters; others will turn up on the doorstep with a knife or a gun. Some celebrities attract more obsessive fans than others, partly because of the nature of the parts they play and their public profile. It’s fair to say, although no research has been done into it, that every above-the-title star will have at least one stalker, and some will have many. But there seems to be no way of predicting which star will attract the very dangerous life-threatening stalker – even though there may be ways of assessing which stalker may turn nasty, which star they will be fixated on is in the lap of the gods.
