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1 by Arthur Black Fame is the name of the game { Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, June 25,2003 - 5 Ron and Betty Hope, Liz Walton, and Dwight Hickson downtown Newcastle business business owners, volunteered for last weekends Massey Days in Newcastle last weekend weekend dressed in period costume. "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. " Andy Warhol Fred Allen once described a celebrity as "a person who works hard all his life to become well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized". Fame's a curious commodity, to be sure. A little surprise package that can turtle^wax your glide path through life or bum your fingers fingers to the bone. Elvis and Jimi and Janis all had their fifteen minutes on the world stage, but came to ends as squalid as any skid-row junkie's. That's the catch-22 of fame: you're never exactly sure when your 15 minutes minutes are up. Take Vaughan Meader. There was a time, about 40 years ago, when he was the second most famous man in all of the United States. The most famous American at the time was John F. Kennedy. Vaughan Meader was a household household name because he could do a devastating impression of JFK. He was a sensation at nightclubs from Los Angeles to New York. He put out a comedy album called The First Family that became the fastest-selling record in history. history. Vaughan Meader was well on his way to becoming even more famous, but then, on November 22nd, 1963, three rifle shots rang out during a Presidential motorcade through Dallas and instantly, nobody wanted to hear anybody anybody making even gentle fun of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Meader tried shifting gears. He put out an album without his trademark Kennedy impersonations. impersonations. It sank without a ripple. He tried singing and stand-up in smaller bars and nightclubs. Audiences yawned and trickled out the exits. He ran the American dream in reverse, going from riches to rags. Vaughan Meader went from hero to zero in one day. His fifteen minutes were up. In no time, Meader became a chronic alcoholic, then a crack addict. He's still alive, but not by much. He's lost all his teeth and is in the late stages of emphysema. Incredibly, he still dreams of fame. "I'd like to come out with something, just one song, and be a hit. To hear my words and music on the radio, to me, would be a bigger thrill than anything." And then there's Charles Webb. He wasn't quite as personally personally famous as Vaughan Meader, but his work was. Webb wrote a novel called The Graduate, which was turned into the classic movie of the same name starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. In 1967 Charles Webb was. the toast of Broadway and Los Angeles, as rich and famous as Vaughan Meader's wildest dreams. Publishers were at Webb's door waving open cheque books. Hollywood was his for the asking. And Webb turned it down. All of it. He formally forfeited all claims to The Graduate and gave away the fortune he'd received for the movie rights. He and his wife turned their backs on two homes they owned. They took to living in their van. They even sold off their wedding presents. They moved to England, where they've lived ever since, getting by doing menial jobs - short order cooking, dishwashing, dishwashing, fruit picking - even janitors janitors in a nudist colony. And why? Were they nuts? On drugs? Nope, they just had a problem with fame. "The success felt phony" Webb said. "It wasn't slumming for slummirig's sake. It was the need to study something - to understand something. And being short of money was part of it. There's nothing wrong with wealth. It just didn't work for us." Fame is a demanding mistress. mistress. Some people, like Elvis, Jimi, Janis and Vaughan Meader, get gobbled right up by it. Others, like Charles Webb have to throw it right out of the house to survive. And a few - a very few - handle it with class. Like the poet W.H.Auden. When he was young and on the way up, someone asked Auden what effect he thought fame might have on him, should he ever be so anointed. Auden reflected for a while and then said: "I believe that I would always wear my carpet slippers". And he did. Which is why when he later became Britain's most renowned poet, it was commonplace to see Auden at a fancy dress ball or a black tie dinner, resplendent in tails, bow tie and cummerbund, with a pair of very ordinary carpet slippers on his feet. 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