I was listening to the radio on my way to work the other day, and heard Adam Carolla talking about a character he used to do on various call-in shows. He remembered talking with one radio executive who told him that the character was funny, he would hire the character, but Adam himself wasn’t funny.
So I briefly imagined Adam giving up his career as himself, and becoming that character as a full-time career. And then I wondered to myself if there were any celebrities that actually did this. Created a wholly artificial public persona, and did all their public appearances in character.
Now, most celebrity images are at least partially fake in that we don’t see them going about their day-to-day lives, we don’t know if they yell at their spouses, we don’t know if they kick puppies in their spare time, we don’t know if they have an uncontrollable sexual attraction to sea creatures. News and talk shows are to a greater or lesser extent a performance, so even though someone seems like a nice guy on David Letterman, we really know almost nothing about them. And the use of stage names is not unknown either. Yet there is generally some sort of relationship between the public face of the celebrity and their everyday personality, even though they may be trying to show their appealing side and conceal their unappealing side.
The only person I can think of with a public persona that was without doubt wholly fictional was Pee-Wee Herman. Paul Reubens used to appear on the talk shows as Pee-Wee, he was refered to as “Pee-Wee Herman” in the news rather than Paul Reubens. He created a character that everyone liked, and he decided to never break that character in public. Until the adult theater incident.
Obviously there’s a continuum but other smaller deceits, like someone concealing their sexual orientation, or details of their past, or even things like Billy Tipton concealing that he was genetically female, aren’t quite what I’m looking for. Billy Tipton wasn’t a character played by Dorothy Tipton to get ahead in show business, Billy Tipton was a transsexual that lived his life as a man. Liberace isn’t an example, because even though he denied he was gay he always acted like the flaming queen he really was.
So, can anyone else come up with examples of public figures who were or are really characters played by actors with different personalities? Speculation is OK, but you should give some justification. Merely saying “Eddie Murphy” isn’t enough, merely saying that Eddie Murphy pretends to be a family man but goes out at night and picks up transsexual prostitutes isn’t enough. It’s got to be more extreme than that. Any ideas?