Hunger for Heroes, Villains Rooted in American Psyche : Media: In a society that venerates the individual over community, coverage often glorifies fame--and infamy.

By DAVID SHAW

Feb. 17, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s an old American folk saying, dating back to the mid-19th Century:

“The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.”

The Japanese don’t see it that way. They have a saying that translates as “The nail that protrudes gets hammered down.”

The difference in these aphorisms goes a long way toward explaining the strange fascination with personality and celebrity in American society and in the American media compared not only with Japan but with the rest of the world.

Americans have a unique “hunger to identify with personalities, larger-than-life personalities especially,” says Peter Jennings, anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “No country in the world is so driven by personality as this one.”

This infatuation with celebrity--real or synthetic, Madonna and Michael Jackson or Lorena Bobbitt and Amy Fisher--stems to a considerable degree from our indigenous emphasis on the individual, rather than the community.

Although historian Daniel J. Boorstin says that a sense of community is “a leitmotif in American history,” he notes pointedly that several of his books--with titles like “The Americans,” “The Creators” and “The Discoverers”--emphasize the role of the individual.

This is not surprising in a country based on the sacred notion that the rights of the individual are the bedrock of freedom, a country founded by individualists, “people who were trying to buck the system (and) get out of a place they didn’t like,” says John Tomlin, executive producer of the syndicated TV shows “Inside Edition” and “American Journal.”

“We’re fascinated by people who do different things . . . strange things . . . (who) break the mold,” Tomlin says. “We’re fascinated by ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances.”

That may not seem to be a singularly American quality. Indeed, populist media in other countries, from England to Japan, are filled with gossipy, sensationalized tidbits about extraordinary happenings. But nowhere is the phenomenon as pervasive and as constant, throughout the media, as it is here. And nowhere does the phenomenon reflect the national character as much as it does here. Not only are we a country dedicated to the concept of individuality but we are a young country, without either royalty or an official church.

So, with the help of the mass media, we have created our own history and our own heroes and villains, our own everyday popes and princes--and our own rogues, rascals and reprobates.

In some countries, media preoccupation with personality and celebrity is beginning to resemble that in the United States. But that may simply be further testament to the influence of the American media and pop culture.

As a character in the German film “Kings of the Road” says, “The Americans have colonized our unconscious.”

Until relatively recently, many Asian cultures traditionally taught people, almost by osmosis, to avoid being perceived as different or as breaking the mold, to know they shouldn’t stand up or stand out. Some Americans also prefer being part of a crowd. But that is generally more a matter of individual or family or even community behavior than it is a national culture.

In Japan, despite some notable exceptions, “the culture . . . historically has tended to value the group more than the individual up until very recently,” says Ellis Krauss, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who has studied Japan since 1965 and has written about Japanese media since 1983.

In the United States, the individual is not only valued, he is exalted.

Leo Braudy, a literature professor at USC and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown,” notes that there’s an academic term--”American exceptionalism”--for our tendency to imbue those who distinguish themselves with “an aura they don’t have in Europe.”

In his book, Braudy notes that Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and writer, likened American society to a skyscraper such as the Empire State Building--”exactly the same floor to floor, until the top, where individuality with all its curlicues and baroque elaborations could flourish.”

“European societies were more homogenous (than ours), up till recently,” Braudy says. “The repression of the individual, of individuality, for the communal good was the European ideal.” Indeed, in his book, he says individualism “has generally been considered antisocial” in Europe.

This is especially true in countries where the Roman Catholic Church has played a dominant cultural role. Historically, most people in those countries “don’t value individualism the way Americans do,” says Steven Englund, who is writing a book on the concept of nation in French history.

“Catholicism puts a very strong emphasis on what mainline American Protestants--and nonbelievers--would consider an almost claustrophobic sense of community,” Englund says.

In non-Catholic Australia, there is a phrase for the notion that individuals shouldn’t become too prominent--”the tall poppy syndrome.”

“If you become too famous and too self-important, they chop you down,” says Landon Y. Jones, managing editor of People magazine.

Pompous “poppies” often get chopped down in the United States, too. Only here, the news media does the chopping--after having shoveled the manure that fertilized the poppies in the first place. It’s what makes America’s cult of personality both fragile and fickle.

“There’s something of a mean streak in the American media which . . . derives some energy from building characters into personalities, only to deconstruct them once they’ve been created,” says ABC’s Jennings.

But Jennings thinks the media, to some extent, “reflect . . . the people’s instinct” in this regard.

The interview--a journalistic form we now take for granted--was an early indication of America’s fascination with personality. The interview is a “distinctively American invention,” the British journalist William Stead wrote in 1902. In an essay to appear in two forthcoming books, Michael Schudson, a communications professor at UC San Diego, traces the earliest interviews to U.S. newspapers in the mid-19th Century.

Before then, he says, “Much reporting remained nothing more than the publication of official documents and public speeches, verbatim. Reporters often talked with public officials but they did not refer to those conversations in their news stories.”

Scholars disagree on who conducted (and who granted) the first published interview--at least one thinks it was Horace Greeley’s report of his conversation with Brigham Young in 1859. But the interview is now enshrined in our culture, from Playboy magazine to late-night TV to the loftiest journals of opinion. Americans want to know what their favorite personalities have to say.

Even Edward R. Murrow, the patron saint of broadcast news, succumbed to that temptation 40 years ago, with the creation of “Person to Person.” The show began with a noble objective, to profile unknown people--”none of this fame stuff . . . (just) the extraordinary ‘ordinary’ man . . . whose quality and character would come through on the screen,” in the words of Murrow’s biographer, Ann Sperber.

That was in early 1954.

“By fall, of course,” Sperber writes, “ ‘Person to Person’ had evolved into live camera visits with the rich and famous, the quintessential home tour of celebrities.”

Jennings, the most cerebral and sophisticated of our current network anchors, had a similar experience. He says “Person of the Week,” which appears on ABC’s “World News Tonight” every Friday, was conceived in 1986 as “a way to get at certain subjects in the country in a more communicable way . . . (through) a series of American portraits . . . ballet dancers and scientists and engineers . . . various disciplines, social and otherwise, which didn’t have obvious celebrity value.”

But even before it first aired, the feature was modified to give it more “edge,” something that would command viewers’ attention. “Person of the Week” would profile people who “made a difference, for good or ill,” Jennings says. That quickly evolved into “a prize,” a celebration in a “purely positive sense.” The one time the program departed from that approach--for Jackie Presser of the Teamsters Union--”The phone rang off the hook,” Jennings says. Callers demanded to know, “How dare you celebrate Jackie Presser?”

Jennings isn’t completely happy with the way “Person of the Week” has evolved, but he’s a realist; it’s now the second most popular feature on “World News Tonight.”

Moreover, Jennings is especially well-qualified to speak on the American fixation with personality and celebrity. He was born and reared in Canada, and he worked and traveled throughout much of the world before settling in the United States 10 years ago.

“Our political campaigns, largely at the behest of the media, have been covered like sports contests,” he says, “and sports is another personality-driven facet of our national life.”

The most celebrated American celebrities of all are movie stars (and their latter-day progeny, television and rock stars).

“Our greatest export is culture,” Jennings notes. “Our culture is Hollywood; Hollywood is built on personalities.”

Americans love stars--on the screen, on the playing field, in the political arena--in part, Jennings says, because “We are a fairly celebratory people. We are too young as a nation to be skeptical, cynical. That’s part of the national character of France.”

In addition, he says, “I know no other society which moves with the speed that we do through every 24-hour period . . . . In order to make your mark on life . . . you gotta be noticed. And to be noticed is to draw attention to yourself.”

This syndrome “is not unique to the American psyche but to American commerce,” argues Van Gordon Sauter, president of Fox News and a former president of CBS News. “People are thrust into public consciousness, frozen in Lucite for two weeks,” then fade from memory and are replaced by new pseudo-celebrities, Sauter says, because the profit-driven news and entertainment industries require “a constant supply of personalities as fodder.”

C. Wright Mills, in his landmark 1956 work, “The Power Elite,” made a related point about the capitalist marketplace. Celebrity, he said, is “the crowning result of the star system in a society that makes a fetish of competition . . . . It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated.”

But many others argue that capitalism and competition only begin to tell the tale of America’s enormous interest in personality and celebrity. It’s an interest, they say, that’s woven deeply into the fabric of our social structure as well as our national character.

Despite some recent shifts toward a more American approach, especially in Italy, the news media in most countries are considerably more stratified--and the societies more hierarchical--than they are here. Personality stories fill the gossip sheets abroad, but they don’t routinely enter the mainstream media, Le Monde and Asahi Shimbun and the BBC, as they do here.

There are weekly magazines in Japan, for example, that publish “spurious . . . speculative . . . gossip . . . that no American publication could ever publish without a libel suit,” says Ellis Krauss, the University of Pittsburgh professor who studies Japanese media. (Libel laws are looser in the United States than in many other countries.)

But Japan’s major daily newspapers are more serious and more devoted to “just the facts, ma’am” reportage and so less likely to indulge in personality journalism than are most American dailies.

England has its tabloids--still more aggressive and outrageous than their American counterparts--and their frantic pursuit of the royal family essentially drove Princess Diana out of public life late last year. Most other western European countries also have celebrity-driven, personality-obsessed magazines and newspapers.

In fact, Brits and Australians brought the modern-day tabloid to the United States--and play a large role in “A Current Affair,” the first tabloid TV show here. But the proliferation of tabloid TV and the adoption of many of its topics and tactics by the mainstream media is almost exclusively an American phenomenon.

This phenomenon contributes greatly to what Jennings and others call a devaluation of the concept of heroism in our society. Virtually everyone, it now seems, can be a hero or a heroine in the multimedia United States.

Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis while he lay sleeping, was hailed as “a national folk heroine” by Vanity Fair. Earvin (Magic) Johnson, who says he contracted HIV from one of the large number of women he slept with, sans condom, during an epidemic, was hailed as a hero simply for having said publicly that he had the disease.

In the first five years (1946-1950) that the Gallup Organization polled Americans on whom they admired most in the world, singer Kate Smith was the only person in the top 10 who was not a political, religious or military leader; in the last five years, Gallup’s “most admired” lists have included not only Johnson but Cher, Bill Cosby, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump (twice), Princess Di (three times), Michael Jordan (three times), Elizabeth Taylor (four times) and Oprah Winfrey (five times).

The United States is increasingly “a nation of hero-worshipers . . . . It is . . . (a) national fetish,” Jim Murray, the sports columnist, wrote last fall in the Los Angeles Times. As a result, says Jennings, “Americans use the word hero more readily than any other group of people on the planet.”

Landon Jones of People magazine worries that our “hunger for heroes” has “weakened our concept of (the) truly heroic . . . . Celebrities are people who are famous for acting in their own self-interest basically . . . Heroes are people with a cause larger than themselves.”

As Daniel Boorstin writes in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” the modern “machinery of information has brought into being a new substitute for the hero . . . the celebrity . . . Anyone can become a celebrity if only he can get into the news and stay there.”

In earlier eras, Boorstin says, the hero “created himself.” Today, the celebrity is “created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name. Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary to keep him properly in the public eye.”

Boorstin cites Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as a model of heroic behavior, not only for what he achieved on the battlefield but because “he had the reputation for never having given a newspaper interview. He steadfastly refused to write his memoirs,” insisting that to do so would be “trading on the blood of my men.”

In contrast, a recent military hero, retired Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, appeared regularly in news conferences, gave lectures at upward of $50,000 each and sold his autobiography for almost $6 million.

In contemporary America, we have turned celebrities into heroes--and heroes into celebrities.

Why?

One explanation is that unlike many countries, we have never had a royal family to fill that dual role.

Americans and the American media have adopted Princess Diana; she’s been on the cover of People magazine more than anyone else in the world, more than Michael Jackson, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Tom Cruise and Woody Allen combined.

We’ve even tried to create a home-grown royal family.

The Kennedys have become “America’s one chance to be able to say . . . ‘We have our own monarchy,’ ” says Steve Dunleavy, the Australian-born reporter for “A Current Affair.”

Linda Ellman, co-executive producer of the rival “Hard Copy,” says Hollywood stars are actually “America’s uncrowned royalty.” Other, less traditional “celebrities”--Bobbitt or Schwarzkopf--regularly flash in and out of the news, each anointed queen--or king--for a day. Or a week. Or a month.

Athletes are especially lionized here.

“We substitute point guards, quarterbacks, cleanup hitters and pugilists for archdukes, earls, barons and counts,” Murray wrote.

Individual performers are often perceived as transcending their teams and their sports. When Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls before the start of the current NBA basketball season, many sportswriters predicted the immediate collapse of the Bulls, and several wondered in print how the game itself could survive the combined loss of Jordan, Johnson and Larry Bird, all of whom retired in the past two years.

But the Bulls lead the central division, with a better mid-season record than they had during seven of Jordan’s eight years--third-best among the NBA’s 27 teams, in fact. League-wide, attendance and television ratings are both up. Professional basketball is doing quite nicely, thank you.

Other observers suggest that American hero-worship is a search for parental replacements--for authority figures in a society that lacks them. Or that our fondness for “heroes” is a manifestation of our tendency to see things in black and white, not shades of gray, to divide everything into good and bad and to categorize people as heroes--or villains.

“Americans hate ambiguity,” Anna Quindlen wrote in the New York Times last fall. “That’s why so many of them liked (Ross) . . . Perot.”

That’s also why Americans--and the American media in particular--often seem so determined to find answers and explanations, no matter how random or inexplicable a given event may be.

Our fixation on heroes and villains and our preoccupation with personality and celebrity often combine to blur the lines between celebrity and notoriety and lead to oddly sympathetic news media portraits of malefactors.

Maynard Parker, the editor of Newsweek, ordered a story on the slayings of several tourists in Florida rewritten last year because the story gave almost as much attention to “how the alleged perpetrators had no jobs” as it did to “the horror of the killings”--as if, Parker says, economic hardship “justified predatory murder.”

Ellie Nesler was hailed in many quarters as a heroine last year after gunning down a man accused of molesting her son. (Nesler was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison.)

Robert Reinhold, former Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times and now an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, says that in “playing up” such stories and “making heroes” of people like Nesler, the news media may encourage violent acts.

Last September, Katherine Ann Power turned herself in to authorities 23 years after driving the getaway car in a Boston bank robbery in which her accomplices killed policeman Walter Schroeder. Newsweek’s cover story ended with the observation that “it’s hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for”--the dead officer’s nine orphaned children, Power’s own family or Power herself, “the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the ‘60s.”

Many were outraged that Newsweek could equate Power’s self-inflicted suffering with the pain she helped inflict on Schroeder’s family. One reader wrote Newsweek to complain that the magazine was “trying to make a heroine out of a murderer.”

We have always tended to glamorize villains. Look at all the movies about Al Capone and other Prohibition era gangsters over the years. There aren’t necessarily more villains now. But there are more media--and there is, indisputably, a lower threshold for both celebrity and notoriety.

Rap star Snoop Doggy Dogg was indicted for murder last fall--and made the cover of Newsweek.

Arthur Seale kidnaped an Exxon executive and locked him in a wooden box while awaiting ransom, and after the executive died, Seale was interviewed for one hour by Barbara Walters on ABC’S “20/20.” (Seale and his wife both went to prison.)

If a story is sensational enough, even murder charges are not necessary.

After the 1992 riots, Los Angeles gang members known as “Li’l Monster” and “Bone” made the rounds of TV talk shows--including two appearances on “Nightline.” Almost a year later, members of the “Spur Posse”--a group of Lakewood High School boys who were accused of sexually mistreating teen-age girls--were vigorously courted on the TV talk circuit. (Of the 17 Spur Posse cases presented to the district attorney’s office, 15 were rejected. One teen-ager pleaded guilty and was sent to a juvenile camp; another faces one felony charge.)

Amy Fisher was the subject of three made-for-television movies last year after she shot her boyfriend’s wife. (Mary Jo Buttafuoco recovered--and “A Current Affair” paid Joey Buttafuoco a reported $500,000 for his story.)

As Barbara Goldsmith, the author and social historian, wrote in the New York Times Magazine:

“Today we are faced with a vast confusing jumble of celebrities: the talented and untalented, heroes and villains, people of accomplishment and those who have accomplished nothing at all, the criteria for their celebrity being that their images encapsulate some form of the American dream, that they give enough of an appearance of leadership, heroism, wealth, success, danger, glamour and excitement to feed our fantasies.”

In the United States, Goldsmith wrote, “The line between fame and notoriety has been erased.”

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

Heroes, Then and Now

Heroes behave differently in the Age of Celebrity than they did in the days before People magazine, tabloid television and CNN. Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander in chief of the Confederate army in the Civil War, was reputed to have declined all interviews and all entreaties to write his memoirs because he did not want to trade “on the blood of my men.” Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, field commander for allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, apparently felt differently about the matter; he gave interviews and news conferences, delivered lectures at more than $50,000 each and sold his autobiography for almost $6 million.