Roseanne Barr: Fame’s a bitch.
It’s hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It’s called losing perspective. Fame’s a bitch.
It’s hard to handle and drives you nuts.
Yes, it’s true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it’s a cut-throat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble.
“Winning” in Hollywood means not just power, money and complimentary smoked-salmon pizza, but also that everyone around you fails just as you are peaking. When you become No 1, you might begin to believe, as Cher once said in an interview, that you are “one of God’s favourite children”, one of the few who made it through the gauntlet and survived.
The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognise that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.
All of that sounds very much like the diagnosis for bipolar disorder, which more and more stars are claiming to have these days. I have it, as well as several other mental illnesses, but then, I’ve always been a trendsetter, even though I’m seldom credited with those kinds of things.