Babe Ruth endorsed underwear, WG Grace lent his name to Colman’s Mustard, and Mark Twain started his own brand of tobacco. He is especially good on the economics of fame, that increasingly elaborate, corrupt capitalist machine in which individual celebrities are but small whirring cogs, trying to grab their own share of the profits before their time is up. Photograph: Florence Nighingale Museum/BBCĪs in his previous, action-packed bestseller, A Million Years in a Day, Jenner here moves back and forth through the centuries at a pace, as he examines different types of celebrity, the imagery of fame, tactics of self-promotion, the fascination with celebrities’ bodies, and the joys and pitfalls of fanhood. ‘Properly live-in-a-country-house, summer-in-Italy posh’ … Florence Nightingale. But it was scooped by its rival, the New York Journal, which triumphantly ran a full-ear portrait, sketched from life. One local tabloid, the World, reported breathlessly that its correspondent, having “pleaded with her for a glimpse of her ear”, had been granted a brief flash of “a bit of rose-tinted flesh”. By the autumn of 1897, when Mérode arrived in New York to begin an American tour, ear-mania had crossed the Atlantic. Maybe they were huge, or tiny, or completely missing? Newspapers across Europe theorised feverishly on the subject, while purveyors of prints and postcards rushed out imagined images of the fateful lobes. And soon after that, perhaps because Mérode had already publicly displayed every other inch of her body – on stage, in sculpture and through photographs – a peculiar fixation gripped the media: what did her ears look like?įor months, this bizarre question became an international obsession.

Naturally, this coupling of stars acquired the irresistible nickname “Cléopold”.

I n 1896, the hottest new celebrity in Paris was a dazzling 21-year-old long-haired beauty called Cléo de Mérode: ballerina, nude model, and supposed lover of Belgium’s (61-year-old) King Leopold.

Dead famous greg jenner