Three stories

A tale of three people:

1. A few months ago, the word "unknown" wouldn't go far enough to describe Susan Boyle. She was simply an Englishwoman who liked to sing. Then she appeared on a talent show in Great Britain, apparently without even bothering to comb her hair. As has been written before, she walked on stage as the subject of ridicule, and walked off a star. There were some bumps in her life after the show, but Boyle did indeed get a recording contract.

Now here we are in December, and Boyle has a compact disc out. Care to guess how many copies that CD sold in the first week of release? Try 701,000. That's the biggest such number of the year.

All of a sudden, every single dream that Boyle ever had about music has come true, and then some. Her life has been changed forever, hopefully for the better. Even music company accounting won't be able to keep her from being financially secure for the rest of her life, assuming she gets a good team behind her.

And now comes the tough part. I'm not sure there's anyone who has been less prepared for this rush of fame than Boyle. Let's cross our fingers and hope that she comes out the other side O.K.

2. We may never know the whole story of what happened in the Tiger Woods family household late Thanksgiving night. We may not want to know, come to think of it. But we do know that Woods' life has been changed, perhaps forever.

Woods tried to successfully balance being the most public of figures in some ways -- television appearances through golf, commercials, etc. -- with the most private of personal lives. There were whispers about extra-curricular activities a couple of weeks ago, but he probably could have dodged them ... until he drove into a tree at 2:30 a.m. That unleashed the hounds in the form of the world's tabloid press. All of a sudden, we've had claims of so many affairs that I expect to see a bumper sticker that reads "Honk if you've slept with Tiger."

No matter that it's not exactly our business, it is interesting to wonder what Tiger's motivation was for the transgressions. Does he live such a cocooned life that his super-competitive side pushed him to engage in risky behavior? Can he rebound from this, something that Kobe Bryant apparently has done to some degree in spite of worse allegations? Stay in your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy flight.

3. When Bruce Springsteen first played in London around 1975, the promoter plastered fliers all over the city saying something like, "Is London ready for Bruce Springsteen?" Bruce reportedly went around tearing the papers off the walls, saying something like, "This is not what I bargained for."

Then, looking back years later, he said he realized, "That was exactly what I bargained for." He probably could have a talk with Woods about that, and have some good advice for Boyle.

The nature of celebrity

Recently Tina Brown came to town to speak at the University at Buffalo. Brown is a former editor of The New Yorker, among many other accomplishments. She's working as an American columnist for a London newspaper as well as researching a book on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Her speech, though, was all about Princess Diana. She wrote a book on Diana a few years ago -- "The Diana Chronicles." Brown had gotten to know Diana over the years, and talked to a ton of people about her life. She sold a lot of books, so I can't blame her for speaking on this subject.

However, during the question-and-answer session, I had the strange feeling that Brown was feeling a bit conflicted over the book and the whole concept of celebrity worship. That's not an unfamiliar feeling for anyone in the media.

Diana was an extremely public, popular figure, of course, and there was intense interest in everything she did. Diana used that popularity to her advantage by dragging the media along when she dealt with important causes, such as AIDS and land mines. However, in the end that relationship with the media turned tragic. Her car got into a chase with a photographer, and a fatal accident followed.

The question comes down to this: where's the line for determining what a "celebrity" is? Diana probably qualified as something of a world figure, even if her level of influence probably was overdone. Most of us are trying to figure out why anyone would chase Paris Hilton down a street to take a picture of her doing, well, something, since she hasn't given us much reason to care about her life. The line is in-between the two of them. But where?

There's a really good story about the paparazzi in this month's issue of the Atlantic magazine. The author spends some time with the photographers, who often run red lights and race down one-way streets the wrong way in order to get yet another picture of Britney Spears. At least Britney sold some CD's once upon a time, but it's tough to know when she made the transformation from music star to caricature. (Probably when the hair came off.) Anna Nicole Smith, moving even farther down the scale, was much more famous in death than she ever was in life. Nevertheless, the money involved in taking pictures of such people on a daily basis is larger than you could believe.

The media is in the business to tell the public what it needs to know and what it wants to know. Sometimes it's easy to feel like you're on a board sitting on top of a cylinder, trying to maintain balance while knowing it won't take much to push you off. I wonder if Tina Brown feels that way sometimes.