When this newspaper asked me to write a weekly personal column I said I’d do it, if I could refract it through the icons who shaped me, a different one each issue. The section of my 2022 memoir Busy Being Free that seemed to resonate most (for readers and me) was the year my marriage collapsed, 2016, in the time spanning the deaths of David Bowie, Prince and George Michael. How I feared that if we didn’t file for divorce in a timely fashion, the icons of our youth would keep dying before they were due.
I decided this on a beach in California, where, before I returned to London, I was still living. Most people I know vacillate between believing their lives are meaningless and believing that their feelings affect the ocean tides.
Iconography, both hypnotic and as suspect as chem trails, has intertwined with my life from the very start. When I was a tiny girl my babysitters included my parents’ friend June Roberts (who would go on to write the hit film Mermaids) and her roommate Tim Curry, who had recently filmed the Rocky Horror Picture Show. To surprise my parents, they taught me how to smoke like Tatum O’Neal’s character Addie Pray in Paper Moon. My parents were surprised.
Just as our teachers were surprised when my sister and I proclaimed ourselves “sweet transvestites from Transylvania”, time warping with a precision we never managed in ballet.
“There was nothing wrong with us watching Rocky Horror at that age,” I decided when we were adults, “It’s no worse than a cartoon.” My sister went quiet a moment: “They slaughtered Meat Loaf.” To this day, my mother wishes she’d set stricter boundaries and I agree with her, but I dwell even more on how actors today aren’t brave enough to be like Curry and go so over the top it goes all the way around and becomes subtle again.
When I moved to New York at the age of 21, celebrities were so present that one understood Warhol could not have thrived anywhere else, his “icon” portraits of Elvis and Liz Taylor the logical end point of his childhood in the Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh. Pop culture worship was absolutely key to Patti Smith’s development as an artist. She kept praying to Dylan even after she was an icon, too, and Dylan knew exactly who she was.
Smith had intense love stories with downtown celebrities who became cultural icons (actor Sam Shepard and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) and her devotion to them may be what pushed them to the next level, energetically and pragmatically, too. Actor and designer Chloë Sevigny has always made fan art, her veneration of everyone from Morrissey to Gena Rowlands, once in fanzines, is now on her Instagram.
Among celebrities who are worshipped as particularly gifted or beautiful, it’s the ones who are themselves worshipful I find most interesting.
In the next chapter of my American life, screenwriting took me to Los Angeles, where, in the city of cars, I integrated my experiences from London Transport. I was on a plane heading to a film festival when an apparently crazy man sat in the seat next to me. I sensed without looking up how important it was not to make eye contact with him as he sang “Troo loo loo” all the way to Cannes. I had internalised enough bus rides to know my eyes must not leave my magazine. But the man seemed so happy about his humming that I started to doubt myself, and when the plane landed and I could no longer look away, I saw it was Matthew McConaughey. And this experience infected me as Addie Pray had – a new layer, a new flavour – because my daughter, born of an Australian man and English woman, grew up to have on certain phrases a Texas drawl, from the two animated films McConaughey released in 2016.
At a Golden Globes party, I showed Bruce Springsteen my Bruce Springsteen tattoo and he frowned and said he didn’t like it. I didn’t add that it was multipurpose: saying “Badlands”, it could also be used to entice a Terence Malick fan into my bed, which I had done. Also kept to myself that I went on a date with a man because he was namechecked in a Beastie Boys song. Since he was safe inside the song, I felt safe inside his car.
I am a cult author, asked in the street maybe five times a year: “Are you Emma Forrest?” And I am Emma Forrest. But it’s a surname invented by my grandfather to combat anti-semitism, so there are other more legitimate Emma Forrests, some with their own internet fame, like the Scottish judo star or the woman, also Scottish, who consumes 3,000 calories of fizzy drinks a day.
I know about them because my mum has a Google alert no matter how many times I ask her to terminate it, just as my father could never be dissuaded from cutting out and keeping the many clips of my writing that have been mocked in Private Eye Pseud’s Corner. The “shame” in “name and shame” is all mine.
My life has had many curious chemtrails in the sky. I find reflections of my own best and worst qualities in myriad artists, actors, architects and comedians, to be discussed each week. “We all perform,” said the great photographer Richard Avedon, “It’s what we do for each other deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognised as what we’d like to be.” I do and don’t feel great shame about this. If you come back for my next article, I’ll tell you why.
Emma Forrest is the author of Busy Being Free, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99
