Desperate diva Norma Desmond should act as a dire warning to those reluctant to let go of past glory
It was just as I left the swimming pool that I saw him, the man whose name I used to have written on my pencil case. He looked older, or at least he swam like an older guy, his head jutting forward and up, turtle-style, his breaststroke as stately as the luxurious suite in which he would no doubt sleep that night. But it was definitely him. Thirty years on, my Smash Hits collection long since dispatched to the council dump, and yet still I would know him in a single glance. The beautiful one. The one who had all the girls, all the drugs and all the best looks.
Wrapped in a towel, I whispered news of this sighting to my husband, who laughed out loud at my beadiness – sunglasses might have been invented to facilitate my gathering of useless intelligence about total strangers – and at my corny taste. Naturally, he would not have known the Beautiful One if he'd come right up to him and begged for a quick squirt of Ambre Solaire.
But still, he was intrigued and for the 24 hours that this once famous group was unaccountably billeted at our hotel, we duly talked of little else, a compulsion born of curiosity, certainly, but also of fluttery unease.
How had time gone by so fast? What had gone wrong – or right – with the world that these people, and us, were, albeit briefly, inhabiting the same space? And was that really a hardback book one of them was reading?
My husband said they were lucky: what a wonderful life. A writer who is down on his luck is broke. You can't tour an old novel. Nor can you remix it, though plenty try. A pop star, so long as he was moderately successful in the first place, can take those creaky hits out on the road and reprise them to a middle-aged audience whose waistlines are about as trim as his own. And if he is pierced, for a moment, by the remembrance of times past – the groupies, the limos, the fat royalty cheques – he can remind himself that listening to a certain drum solo for the 4,000th time is surely better than a life shuffling paperclips.
But I disagreed. It's so sad, I wailed, keeping going when you should be done. In a building, faded grandeur is plangent, but lovely. In a human being, it's purposeless and pathetic, accompanied, as it tends to be, first by thin-skinned pomposity, then by mild delusions and finally by absolute desperation (slowly, the words: "Don't you know who I am?" transmute into the silent cry: "I don't know who I am!").
I kept thinking about Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, a film that should be required viewing for the wannabe famous, the once famous and the might not be famous forever. The buffs call it "noir", as if it were eyeliner, but it's really just about the greatest horror film ever made. Are middle-aged pop stars – I mean the kind whose new "material" no one ever wants to hear – tugged along by hope or by madness? Or is it just that they are unable to earn a living any other way?
Eventually, we moved on. Or the band did (and no, I'm not going to name them; some tender things, one's earliest crush included, are sacred). We went back to our hardbacks and then we came home. And what did we find when we landed at dear old Gatwick?
Only that Tony Blair, a man who looks as if he enjoys the odd squirt of Ambre Solaire himself, would like to make a comeback. Of course, he has been touring the hits for a while, now. Man, that old riff on Islamic extremism! He could play it forever and it would still sound good to his ears.
But the venues – in Kazakhstan and other dubious places – are just too small. He longs, it seems, for the stadiums of old. So he is limbering up. He can't, or won't, promise new material; he is the kind of guy, all false modesty, who will mutter: "This is just something I've been fooling around with" before launching swiftly into a classic. But he clearly believes, because no one in his bubble has thought to tell him otherwise, that the old magic is still within. You can see this Norma Desmond-ish conviction in the lines at the corner of his eyes, as if he were already out there, squinting into the lights as a crowd roars.
Will he get the big booking he longs for? It could go either way. A lot of Stone Roses fans trooped off to Heaton Park last June and enjoyed themselves mightily. On the other hand, my sense is that an awful lot more stayed away. I will never forget the look on my brother's face as he told me how, at the last moment, he'd decided to sell his tickets, the better to preserve the memory of Sheffield University, 1987; it was as if he was about to swoon with relief. And even those who had a great night might not be eager to revisit the experience. Blair, like all of us, must beware nostalgia: it's warm to the touch, but as fleeting as a shoal of minnows.
One thing is for sure: it will be the Labour party that puts the brakes on this, not Blair. History is littered with individuals who should have known better, who should have retired, or retrained, or thrown themselves into charity work, but who went ahead with the big repeat anyway. Lying in the slipstream of departing New Romanticism, I contemplated the toxicity of fame, the hollowing out that occurs when, to paraphrase Wilder, the parade has passed by.
There is a way to deal with it and that is to be utterly ruthless – to scratch its eyes out first. You might call this the JD Salinger approach, though others have pulled it off in a less dramatic fashion (Salinger apparently ceased writing in 1964; I like to think this is because he would rather not have published at all than have published rubbish, and I live in fear of "lost" manuscripts).
But those who go down this path, thorns scratching the soft soles of their feet, are in the minority. Most can't take it.
Like the American film star I heard about, who wore a prosthetic face to the shopping mall and hated every moment of his new-found invisibility, they grieve for what they have lost when mostly they should just be grateful they had a moment at all.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/29/rachel-cooke-tony-blair-comeback
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