I've been traveling through Europe this past week, catching up with friends, family, and contacts in Saint Tropez and London, and honestly it's been the best kind of working trip, equal parts poolside in the south of France and laptop open in an English garden, escaping into the celebrity world in between. Every story in today's issue is really about the same thing: what famous people choose to hide, and what it costs them either way. Katie Holmes is running her decade-old playbook on discretion again, giving us just enough to speculate and nothing to confirm. Taylor and Travis are twelve days into a media blackout so tight even People had to write around it. And on the other end of that same spectrum, Mick Jagger and Millie Bobby Brown are doing the opposite, opening up about what five decades and five years of fame, respectively, actually do to a person's mind. Plus a Howard Stern retreat that says a lot about where legacy media is headed, and Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen on why nobody can talk to their own partner about sex. Enjoy it all!
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Mick Jagger Admits Fifty Years of Fame Left a Permanent Mark
Mick Jagger, Credit: NYT YouTube
Speaking to The New York Times’ The Interview podcast, Mick Jagger, 82, gave one of the most candid accounts a rock star this famous has offered about what the job actually does to a person. Asked about comedian John Mulaney’s old bit suggesting decades of adoring crowds had made him not “nice,” Jagger didn’t dodge it. “Obviously, it’s not normal,” he said. “It is not like most people’s lives. It does affect you. You can become disassociated. From other people.” He described how performers end up sealed inside an industry bubble, “a lot of people in show business only hang around with people in show business,” which quietly cuts them off from what he called “real life.” He said he actively fights it, going for ordinary walks, buying his own newspaper, but admitted the effort only goes so far. “That’s only temporary, because psychologically your actual state of mind is permanently damaged,” he said, adding that the twenties and early thirties are the most dangerous years for anyone in the business, since the job demands a huge ego to survive it, and the people who don’t have one “have to manufacture a completely different personality.” He even admitted a friend jokes that he behaves at dinner parties the way he behaves onstage.
Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Hearing one of the most famous people on the planet lay out the choice, either build an ego big enough to survive fame or manufacture a separate personality to cope, is a startling admission. It also tracks with the research. Media psychologist Dr. David Giles, who has studied fame extensively, has written about a character-splitting effect between the celebrity self and the authentic self, exactly the divide Jagger is describing between his onstage persona and dinner-party self. It’s a real warning for anyone chasing this kind of career: the psychological cost isn’t hypothetical, and even fifty years on, Jagger says it never fully goes away.
