'I think of celebrities as the transient royalty of a democracy,' Thomas Griffith wrote in The Atlantic in 1975. 'While reigning, they live like kings, with paid and unpaid courtiers to show them little attentions. But their powers and privileges last only during their flowering period.' Unlike royals, who pass their prominence on through bloodlines and establish long-lasting dynasties, many celebrities 'become only half-recalled names in trivia.' Ouch. But Griffith wasn't wrong: Fame famously lasts for only 15 minutes, as the Andy Warhol axiom goes, and then it's off to the land of pub-quiz deep cuts. Stars 'live with the constant, terrifying possibility that their special gifts or their celebrity will vanish, exposing them as the insecure mortals they are in their own experience,' the psychoanalyst Sue Erikson Bloland, the daughter of the well-known German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, wrote in The Atlantic in 1999. That fear leads some people to clutch their crown with both hands,...
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