Pay attention to me — but on my terms

By Ted Anthony

updated 7:24 p.m. ET May 25, 2009

Look at me. Look at my life, my body, my antics, my kids, my home. It’s OK — come on in. It’s a fair deal: I’m getting famous, you’re getting entertained. Everybody’s happy. What’s the problem?

But ... whoa. Wait. Stop. I didn’t sign on for this. Why are you looking at me? How dare you look at me! Go away! Can’t you leave me and my family in peace? At least until next season?

A monthlong eruption of celebrity anger over unwanted attention — everyone from Miss California USA Carrie Prejean to Brooke Shields to the stars of the reality show “Jon & Kate Plus 8” — suggests a new, oddly paradoxical dimension to the way we look at famous people.

In short, Americans who traffic in the commodity that is their lives — Hollywood actors and reality-TV stars alike — aren’t at all happy when their carefully calibrated reality bursts out of the cages they have built to contain it.

“It destroys people’s lives,” Kate Gosselin of “Jon & Kate” said at a recent appearance — a publicity appearance — in Michigan.

Celebrities upset with intrusive coverage are nothing new — Greta Garbo wanted to be left alone as early as the 1930s. And, more recently, stars from Kanye West to Keith Urban to Sarah Jessica Parker have expressed dismay at the media frenzy surrounding their activities and families.

But there’s something different afoot today, something cloudier.

Video   Kate ‘hesitant to believe’ Jon’s infidelity May 7: TODAY’s Meredith Vieira talks to Kate Gosselin, from the TLC reality series “Jon & Kate Plus Eight,” about reports that her husband is having an affair. Today show

Where George Clooney could say a decade ago that his public performances were separate from his personal life, the lines between public and private have blurred. We are awash in an era of oversharing, an age where millions of regular people broadcast prosaic status updates to the world on Twitter and Huggies sponsors “The Potty Project” featuring real families toilet-training their toddlers.

Today, hundreds of everyday Americans bare their workaday existences to millions of their fellow citizens on reality shows, molding themselves into twinkling, if shooting, stars. On the other end of the spectrum, performers like Tori Spelling, Denise Richards and Jessica Simpson shoehorn their carefully edited personal lives into marketable narratives in a calculated bid to keep the buzz going.

We love it. And they love it. Until the “reality” goes off script and the prying eyes that made them wildly successful suddenly start making them angry. Then you get:

• Prejean, who competed in the Miss USA pageant in a bikini, condemning the people who circulated topless photos of her after she answered celebrity blogger Perez Hilton’s question about marriage by saying it should be between a man and a woman. Prejean said Hilton’s question had a “hidden personal agenda” and that she was “punished” for exercising her freedom of speech. Said Prejean: “This should not happen in America.”
• Shields calling it “inexplicable” that a media storm could erupt over her connection to the New York arrest of Kiefer Sutherland this month. “It is frightening and shocking the access people have to everybody else,” she said last week. In 2005, Shields appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to discuss deeply personal aspects of her life, including her suicidal thoughts and postpartum depression.

• Video   Farrah’s Story: Battling the tabloids (Part 6) A breach of Farrah’s medical records at UCLA were discovered and dealt with -- a victory for Farrah as she fights on two fronts. NBC News Web Extra

  A new documentary about 1970s uber-celebrity Farrah Fawcett, dying of cancer, that includes footage of her discussing the supermarket tabloid that she says robbed her of her privacy — the privacy that she herself is surrendering by starring in a highly publicized documentary about the same topic.

Not to say that anyone is wrong here. It’s all just gotten a lot more complicated in recent years as personal and public lives merge — something that might be expected in a nation where the notion of privacy as a legal right is only about as old as the movie industry.

“You put yourself out there like this, these things are going to happen,” says Lou Manza, who heads the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.

“If you’re going to let the cameras into your life, you shouldn’t be surprised at what the cameras show,” he says. “‘I want you to film me’ — OK, well do that, and you’ll get famous, but that’s a double-edged sword. People are going to know all your dirty laundry.”

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