The Creative Edge: 17 Biographies of Cultural Icons

By Brent D. Taylor

Discover the x-factor—the driving force behind extraordinary success.

What accounts for the difference between the mega-success of Madonna and a thousand other wannabees waiting in the wings? Why did JK Rowling succeed where so many others aspiring writers have failed? And what was it about the slightly neurotic and mediocre schoolboy Sigmund Freud that ensured his position as one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in history?

In this engrossing new book, Taylor builds on his theory that feeling like an ‘outsider’ from an early age, whether consciously or subconsciously not fitting into the norm, creates an edge that can drive outstanding success in later life. To this core philosophy Taylor adds a new ingredient: that of creativity, and he explores the interplay of these two factors—a lack of belonging and creativity—in the lives of a sparkling cast of individuals. Go beyond the glitz and glamour to discover how creative energy, harnessed to produce lives and works of extraordinary genius, can often exist against a backdrop of personal struggle and despair.

From childhood outsider to adult icon, understand the journey of the following celebrities:
Brad Pitt • Elvis Presley • Frieda Kahlo • Walt Disney • Sigmund Freud • Albert Einstein • Andy Warhol • Coco Chanel • David Beckham • Dan Brown • John Lennon • Sir Edmund Hillary • JK Rowling • Angelina Jolie • Tiger Woods • Amelia Earhart • Madonna

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118319451

Book preview

Introduction

Nobody saw the Harry Potter phenomenon coming! Not the author, and especially not the publisher, who only printed 500 copies for the first run. The last book in the series sold an incredible 250 000 copies an hour over the first day and the total series has sold more than 300 million copies. In 2003, long before she completed the Harry Potter series, the BBC declared JK Rowling richer than the queen. Rowling, an apparently ordinary struggling single mother, rocketed from poverty to wealth and fame in two short years. Why her when there are tens of thousands of struggling novelists in the world?

Elvis Presley arrived on the music scene rather suddenly too. A self-taught singer, he virtually stumbled into his career when he went to Sun Records recording studio to cut a disc. In those days, few people had personal recording equipment and he merely wanted to hear what he sounded like. An assistant at the studio was impressed by his voice and Elvis was given a chance to record professionally. He fluffed the recording, but luckily for him the owner was listening when Elvis did his voice warm-ups — he heard the distinctive Elvis sound, and within weeks Elvis had his first hit. Elvis would go on to sell more than 200 million records and star in 33 movies over the course of his career. Why him and not the huge numbers of young people struggling to make the big time?

Madonna and the Beatles worked a bit longer at their craft in public before becoming overnight sensations. Like Elvis, nobody saw them coming. They arrived almost in full flight and rocketed to stellar careers.

Sudden arrivals of superstars are not confined to the media. As the first man to conquer Mt Everest, Edmund Hillary arrived at the top of the media world even before he had come down from the real top of the world. Einstein and Freud struggled for years before gaining recognition but their legacies will be much more enduring than the other icons in this book. Andy Warhol had longer than his allotted 15 minutes of fame.

All of these people were involved in supreme acts of creativity. They made something out of nothing. In some cases, the process may look like a simple addition of a few ingredients to the witch’s cauldron of modern culture, yet the impact of these ingredients was much greater than the sum of the parts.

In this book I take a look at what it is that turns an ‘ordinary’ person into a cultural icon. Most modern ‘heroes’ belong to the cultural industries, especially film, TV, pop music and professional sport. Almost every child these days wants to grow up to be a pop star, actor or sports star. Many dream of strutting the boards to receive the adulation of millions. Most people can name dozens of pop stars, movie stars and sports people, but there are and continue to be many important cultural icons in other spheres of life as well. I will concentrate on the most popular cultural forms, but in the interests of completeness will also cover some that are of historical significance, such as science and adventuring.

These days stars are idolised and an increasing number of people want to become cultural icons. We hear reports of children opting out of education because they believe they can become rich and famous. Maybe they can, but as more and more people hitch their wagon to that particular hope, the competition rises and the probability of success declines. It is tougher and tougher to become famous through conventional performance because the standards are rising rapidly. Where once a singer only had to sing, he or she now has to sing while executing exquisite dance moves — and this is just to get into the chorus.

Yet there are still famous people who aren’t excellent performers in this polished, professional sense. They bring something special to their craft. Curiously enough, these imperfect performers also seem to be the ones who become the most famous. The Beatles weren’t the best musicians or performers but their impact is phenomenal. Einstein was not a great physicist in the sense that he could do experiments — he left that drudge work to others and got on with what he was best at. Rowling is not the best writer but still vastly outsells the literati.

The icons all did something different and hugely appealing. They changed the rules of the game, thus ensuring they left the competition far behind.

This book will look at what it took for a group of cultural icons to become famous. It will find the answer to the question: why them?

The importance of creativity

Shifting the fame game to suit their talents and vision gave the icons their phenomenal success. To do this they needed to be creative.

Few people are born rich and famous. The rest of us have to work hard to get ahead, but it isn’t hard work alone that makes the difference. What usually makes the difference is how much other people value your work. New and interesting ideas are valued more than that which is familiar. Take any product, for example mobile phones. When the mobile phone industry was new, the cost of handsets was high and so was the cost of calls. Now that the industry is maturing, the cost of handsets and calls is plummeting. The industry is trying to maintain the wow factor, packing more and more technology and styling into smaller and smaller handsets for less and less money. Phones now come with cameras, MP3 players, fancy styling and what not. The novelty of new and different handsets is holding the value higher than it would otherwise be, but there is inexorable decline in the sexiness of mobile phones. They will soon be about as sexy as a refrigerator. Nevertheless, there has been and will continue to be huge levels of creative effort pumped into the mobile phone market to keep consumers interested.

Creativity is even more critical for the cultural industries. Novelty is king! Imagine a fashion industry without seasonal changes or if networks only showed documentaries and news on television. Without creativity, any offering fades to grey and the public wanders off. Elvis Presley suffered from this. When he burst onto the world stage, his style was young and fresh with hints of danger and sex. He attracted fans by the millions. As he matured as a performer, his style became old and tired, so that by the time he died he was nearly bankrupt. He would have been called a shadow of his former self if he wasn’t so corpulent. His later success — a posthumous boom in his appeal — was linked to nostalgia.

More than any other star, Madonna understands the importance of novelty and change, and she successfully recreates her image every few years. She was hugely different when she first emerged and since then has worked incredibly hard to keep just ahead of her market and always in the money.

Because consumers want new things all the time, creativity has become incredibly important in this rapidly changing world. People want new movies and TV programs. They want new music. They want new fashions. They want new art and literature. They want new technology and new sensations. People want to be entertained. Where does all this newness come from? It has to be created, which is why creativity is important — it underpins so much of what changes in the world and, most of all, in culture.

Creativity doesn’t just happen. It is something people do. A lot of learned research has been undertaken to understand creativity and how it can be developed. If creativity were a process to be simply learned, then there would be no Warhol or other painting greats because anyone could learn creative painting just as one learns house painting. Yet there are obviously big differences between the two types of painters and there is still only one Warhol — it looks as if creativity may be associated with particular people, rather than being a taught process.

Obviously everyone is creative to some extent, but the evidence suggests that extreme creativity is personality related. What it is to be creative will be looked at very closely in this book.

Creativity and cultural icons

When trying to understand creativity and its place in the world, a good group of people to analyse are cultural icons because they are both creative and extremely successful. If nothing else, they have created themselves. They have all risen from relatively lowly ranks to occupy a disproportionate share of our collective thinking.

Cultural icons are certainly not the only people in the world who are creative. They are merely the most successful at exhibiting their creativity in front of masses of people. In addition to this, what is considered to be creative varies markedly from person to person, time to time and place to place. It is very difficult to come up with a simple rule to determine what is creative and what is not. One person may believe that a particular painter is creative while someone else may think that he or she is simply copying another artist’s work. Some people think that creativity is the exclusive preserve of the arts, while others have a broader perspective.

Creativity is in the minds of the beholders. It isn’t an absolute thing that can be measured like a pound of rice or a mile. The more people who consider a person or thing to be creative, the more creative it is. No single person is the arbiter of taste; it is the market that decides.

We all know people whom we think are creative but are yet to find their market. For a person to be considered creative, they have to do something different that other people value. Having different thoughts without doing anything about them may be diverting for the thinker but it can’t be judged by others as creative. The doing may be as simple as telling someone else, entertaining mates over a drink at the pub or reading a poem to a small audience. It may involve making something like a painting or a decoration. The more people want to hear those thoughts or admire those things, the more creative a person is judged. If their work is valued by many people then they may become a cultural icon.

Everyone knows people who are different but unless that output is valued by others, the person could just as easily be judged as crazy. Creativity and craziness are sometimes thought to be fellow travellers and the connection between the two will be explored in a later chapter. Suffice to say that while it is true that a proportion of extremely creative people are crazy, many more are not. Often the extreme strangeness of an artist’s early work is confused with mental instability. Mental instability will of course make a person different and there are plenty of instances of highly creative people being unbalanced, such as Vincent Van Gogh famously cutting off his ear in a fit of insanity. On the other hand, crazy difference is not enough since plenty of insane people or criminals are not considered creative. This is why creativity is a matter of judgement by groups of people and depends as much on value as it does on difference.

Since creativity is dependent upon people’s judgements, cultural icons are the only group whose work is valued by large numbers of people. It is to this group, therefore, that we need to look to understand creativity and its causes.

How the cultural icons were selected

It is very tempting for anyone doing a project like this to simply pick favourite cultural icons. That temptation has been resisted!

As in my first book, The Outsider’s Edge: The Making of Self-made Billionaires, I gathered information from a number of sources. Three independent sources were used in selecting the icons. The first was an American publication, They Changed the World: 200 Icons Who Have Made a Difference; the second was the UK publication, Great Lives: A Century of Obituaries; and the third was Forbes Celebrity 100 List 2007. Wherever possible, the icons in this book are in two of the sources.

The Forbes list has been assembled using the most objective criterion of all — how much the icons earn. The public has voted on their worth with money. Unfortunately, by concentrating on earnings, cultural activities that don’t generate much money are overlooked. It is for this reason that the first two publications have been used. These books have been assembled by panels of experts and rate icons by impact, not by the money they earn.

Despite the homogenising effect of big media on what is considered culture, culture is not homogeneous and icons operate in very different disciplines. Many different types of culture are included in this book. Along with the obvious ones — movies, pop music, writing and sport — four other forms have been included because they were at one time foremost in the public’s mind. These are science, adventuring, art and arts business.

A book could be written about the factors that lead to becoming an icon within each cultural form, but this would only be necessary in the unlikely event that the causes of success in different cultural forms are shown to be markedly different. I have included two or three individuals from each discipline to ensure there is a sufficient spread of people.

Culture is very transient and it is quite difficult to see the true cultural impact of particular icons until they are either well advanced in their career or dead. Movie stars come and go. Who thinks much about Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo or Mary Pickford these days? Pop stars come and go too. The pop music giants Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra are rapidly fading from memory. Bing Crosby, the singing star of the 1940s, would have disappeared completely if it were not for the song White Christmas getting an airing every Christmas. Hardly anyone will remember Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt once they retire, even though they now occupy high-level positions on the Forbes Celebrity 100 List. Celebrities are often just shooting stars! Stars that have been dead for some time yet still hold our attention must have some enduring qualities. It is for this reason that a number of dead but still giant celebrities have been included. They have passed the test of time.

Some of the people in this book, such as Madonna, are already considered fixtures. She is in the Forbes list as well as the 200 Icons list. She has been working for a long time and is considered to have made a considerable social impact beyond pop songs and shows. She has been at the vanguard of change for women. Other cultural fixtures such as Elvis Presley and John Lennon also stand at important entertainment crossroads and are in the 200 Icons list as well as the Obituaries.

These days, the financial muscle of pop music, show biz and professional sport have largely driven other forms of cultural creativity into obscure niches, but it would be a mistake to overlook other fields of endeavour. Visual artists such as Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol attracted as much attention as their show biz contemporaries in the 20th Century, and if Warhol’s impact is to be judged by the prices his pictures fetch now, he is a supernova.

Popular culture has been chosen over science except in the cases of Einstein and Freud. While the days of the hero scientist died along with the end of the space race, these two have become the archetypal image of the great scientist, and indeed both were cultural icons in their own lifetimes. Both managed through strength of character to drive some quite strange ideas into the culture, many of which remain to this day. Given their cultural status, both Freud and Einstein are in both 200 Icons and Obituaries.

Writers of literature used to be stars in their own right. Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf were literary giants of their day but have largely dropped out of the public mind. These days, it is usually only the owners of huge franchises that become literary stars. JK Rowling and Dan Brown are two examples of this and can be found on the Forbes list.

Walt Disney and Coco Chanel started their careers as artisans to become colossuses in their chosen fields of cartooning and fashion. They switched over to run huge corporations based on their original talents, and their names remain as recognisable and enduring brand names to this day. They are both featured in 200 Icons and Obituaries.

Professional sport is undoubtedly a huge cultural phenomenon and is now a highly lucrative part of the entertainment industry. The two top-earning sportsmen on the 2007 Forbes list have been included. These are Tiger Woods and David Beckham, famous and wealthy from golf and football respectively. Woods and Beckham are examples of extreme cultural achievement and their early start and training regimes were spectacularly different from the norm. It is hard to know if sport is creative and I have argued long and hard with myself about including these two admittedly fine examples of their own sports. In the end I came down on the side of including them. Whether or not the sport is a creative endeavour, the icons created themselves with the assistance of others. Certainly Beckham has gone on to create a persona with his wife that has become a colossal commercial franchise.

Childhood is key in the formation of cultural icons. It is during childhood that cultural icons find and hone their creative edge.

Adventuring was popular in the days when there were plenty of new frontiers to conquer. Amelia Earhart was an early aviation exemplar while Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mt Everest, was one of the last adventurers to capture worldwide public attention. They are included in The Creative Edge because they demonstrated levels of creativity in their adventures as well as both writing autobiographies. They are both featured in the 200 Icons book.

I have attempted to include equal numbers of women and men. Women occupy fewer places in the Forbes Celebrity 100 List than males, and with the exception of Oprah Winfrey and Madonna they tend to be in lower positions. There are only four females in the top 20 positions. Brad Pitt is nine positions higher than Jolie even though the number of awards she has won would suggest she is the better actor. Both Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are included in this book.

The other important criterion for selection is that there are reliable biographies available for each that deal with their childhood in detail. Childhood is key in the formation of cultural icons. It is during childhood that cultural icons find and hone their creative edge.

The market

Each of the icons chosen for this book appeals to different people with different types of activity. Some are commercial, some are not. For example, Edmund Hillary has never been commercially oriented and famously conquering Mt Everest was a media phenomenon from which he made little direct money. Earhart started off in a very similar situation but was more calculating in making it a well-paid career, putting in paid appearances, book deals and product endorsements much like professional sportspeople today. Freud and Einstein occupy a middle ground where their product is ideas and their market was both learned associates and the public via the media. They made little money but that was never their interest. Einstein actually argued for a smaller salary when he was offered a job at Princeton University. Warhol and Kahlo as artists are not seen as being blatantly commercial, yet they were, Warhol more than Kahlo. He died leaving an estate of more than $100 million. Their market was anyone who would buy art. All the other icons in this book operate in a commercial market where they have fans or followers and their success can be measured directly with money. The media is the first link between themselves and their buying public.

In order to avoid clumsy qualifications about the constituencies of each icon, throughout this book I have used the term ‘market’ as a shorthand way of talking about who each icon appeals to. This will be applied whether what they produce has commercial value or not. There is a non-commercial market for ideas, just as there is a commercial market for music.

Curiously enough, even though we expect cultural icons to get rich, they are rarely seen as greedy or self-serving (unlike politicians or business people). Their image is washed clean because of their hero status and the desirability of what they do. The emotional argument goes something like: ‘we love their work, they are their work, therefore we love them’, and since their work is good, everything about them is good. That is why there is no such thing as bad press for celebrities, yet a money, sex or drugs scandal almost always leads to career destruction for politicians. Bad press for a celebrity is part of the entertainment contract we have with them. We expect them to entertain us with their exploits even if we haven’t bought a ticket to see their work.

The dark side

We all like our heroes to be heroic. Unfortunately they, like most of us, are much more complex than that. They have highly admirable qualities (often associated with what they are famous for) but they also have flaws. Many icons have bigger flaws than the average citizen. If these flaws didn’t exist when they started their careers, the pressures and temptations of a famous life tend to create them anyway.

If you like your celebrities as one-dimensional cut-outs, then this is not the book for you. All of the characters in this book are multi-dimensional and in most cases their public face is considerably ‘better’ than who they are in reality.

All of the characters in this book are multi-dimensional and in most cases their public face is considerably ‘better’ than who they are in reality.

For example, Elvis died from food and drug addiction in a kind of isolated madness. He had moved far from the raunchy-looking but innocent-sounding sex god he was at the beginning of his career, but his fans don’t really want to know about this. They like Elvis to remain what he originally appeared to be. Even though John Lennon sang beautifully about love and had millions of women in love with him, he treated his own women terribly. Yet the Beatles were the Fab Four and Lennon’s faults were hidden by the media because everyone wanted him to be the way they hoped he was.

So there is hope for us all. We see ourselves as more complex than celebrities, but almost all the celebrities in this book had nagging doubts about their own worth; in fact most had raging insecurities, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at their public front.

Be that as it may, the work of these figures is worthy of honouring. But if this book only did that, it wouldn’t add anything to the volumes of information already published. This book is much more — it examines cultural icons to see if there are any common factors that can explain why they became colossal successes and explores the part creativity played in that success.

The challenge

Most biographies are stuffed full of interesting facts about their subjects. This makes them entertaining reading, but a typical biographical approach makes it very hard to work out what was critical to the person’s success and what wasn’t. Was it the times they were living in, the parents they had, the school they went to, the moves they made, or was it just blind luck?

Everybody’s life is its very own uncontrolled experiment. Unfortunately, life isn’t a computer simulation game; we can’t say, ‘let’s go back to the beginning and change this and see what happens’. If we did, would the result be better or worse? In the game of life, we are given limited choices and every subsequent choice depends on what happened before it. Many of us could be tempted to marry someone else, or take a critical job, or move country, and so on. Even if we could, the final result may not be any better because we don’t know how all the factors interact. Changing any event would set off a whole chain of changes that would go right through a person’s life. Most importantly, we can’t tell which part of our life made the difference.

So it is with cultural icons. Well-written biographies abound but they are limited in that they can only show us what an individual has done; the authors sometimes guess at the critical factors but without some form of comparison, these are just guesses.

By itself, a biography of Elvis Presley can’t tell us which key factors made him what he became. Nor can the biographies of John Lennon and Madonna alone shed light on the critical factors in their life. But put these three biographies together to look for common patterns and there is a chance. When we identify influences and events that happened to all three icons, we can be reasonably sure that those were important factors in becoming a pop star.

What I expect to find

Hardly a day goes by without some celebrity childhood exposé being released somewhere in the media. Most often they talk about hardship when growing up. There are tales of drunk mothers, abusive fathers, abandonment by both. Some of the celebrities were sick or shunned by other kids. Some were bullied and many were moved around.

I suspect some icons come under pressure to admit to more growing pains than there really were, yet the overall impression is that by and large celebrities are a troubled lot and the trouble started early. They seem to get into scrapes with the law more often than conventional folks, to suffer from substance abuse more, have more failed relationships — but then, since there is no such thing as bad press, such problems are trumpeted rather than hidden as they would be for most of us.

Others, more typically those in this book, make light of their upbringings. While they usually don’t give the impression of a childhood paradise, it wasn’t too bad either. Madonna lost her mother to breast cancer when she was young, yet she doesn’t dwell on that. She is always onto the next thing. David Beckham recounts a happy but unorthodox childhood, while Elvis always loved his mother.

To a casual observer, there appears to be no particular pattern. Simply put, it is hard to know just how different celebrities start out compared to normal folk.

What I am setting out to do is to find out just what made them what they are and whether (as seems to be the modern thought) childhood suffering is at the bottom of everything. The media gives us this impression but there is no real analysis about whether this is true. Just how such suffering shapes celebrities is not clear. Childhood suffering makes a good story though and is much more interesting than alternative stories — maybe only those with suffering stories get to tell them.

Typically celebrity interviews (and biographies) are packed full of colourful incidents but which ones, if any, make a difference? Luckily, in my book The Outsider’s Edge: The Making of Self-made Billionaires I have already done a lot of work looking at what made very rich people. Having analysed the lives of 17 self-made billionaires I made several important conclusions: they were all outsiders. As such they looked at the world differently than other people and that, along with a trading ability and incredible drive, gave them their edge.

With the exception of trading ability, I concluded that being an outsider, being different and having incredible drive were all a result of the things that happened in their upbringings. Some were good things but most were negative experiences.

Once I sifted through all the details of their lives I found a common thread of parents who did not properly fill the parenting role. Perhaps they were bullying, abusive, alcoholic or just plain hyper-demanding parents. In all cases, the billionaires also had social problems at school and as a result they fell to the bottom or outside of the social pecking order. A good indicator of this is school sport; none of them willingly played team sport. Team sport is a great builder of pecking orders, particularly if you play well (as did David Beckham). If you don’t play team sports well, and particularly if you are male and don’t play at all, then you are usually right outside the pecking order.

Other things that make it hard to hold a high place in the pecking order is anything that disrupts your time in this order or your ability to compete. Moving from school to school will do the trick. So will being accelerated or held back, so learning disabilities such as dyslexia can play a part. A disruptive illness will also do it.

Existing outside or low on the pecking order is painful. Being isolated and a social outcast is a difficult and lonely existence, fraught with danger. Down there, kids are liable to be bullied, taunted or (if they are lucky) just ignored. They become loners or outsiders.

But it isn’t all bad and its benefits begin to show after school for those lucky outsiders that stumble onto activities that they enjoy and that later on, people will pay lots of money for them to do. What happens is that outsiders, isolated as they are with few friends to direct their thinking, range over a whole lot of different activities. They become skilled at things that others aren’t. Bill Gates is a nerd who fell in love with computing when most people thought it was simply a bunch of flashing lights in Star Trek. Oprah Winfrey fell in love with preaching and what a success that turned out to be. Maybe it is something as obscure as falling in love with mail-order catalogues, as happened with the Swede who gave us IKEA.

In addition to falling in love with an activity, these outsiders began doing business in that area. They had the other great advantage of having so few friends that they never sought other people’s opinions so they were never told a scheme was a stupid idea by anyone who mattered to them.

As outsiders, they were also only loosely connected to the place they came from. They had few relatives to care about and no friends. They moved away geographically or professionally as soon as they could.

‘But making money isn’t creative’, I hear people say. Actually, earning such huge amounts is creative. These people invented completely different ways of doing so. What is more interesting is that most of them didn’t set out to be quite so rich. Their money came as an offshoot of their primary interests of computing, preaching and mail catalogues as in the examples above.

I expect to see most of these childhood experiences influencing the rise of cultural icons. I expect that they will be outsiders and that they will have suffered various problems at home and dislocations during their school years. I expect that they will have been close to the bottom of their school pecking order, that they spent a lot of time alone doing different things from their peers and that they eventually discovered a particular activity that gave them emotional rewards that they didn’t get from elsewhere. I doubt that any of them, aside from the sporting starts, played much sport.

They will have been loosely bound to their home town culture so were prepared to travel to where the work was, whether it was Hollywood, New York or Mt Everest. Lastly, they will not have been held back by other people telling them that such high achievement is beyond what ‘people like us’ can expect.

Obviously the icons are all special. By the end of this book we will have a clear idea of what it took to make them this way. But I expect to find that what made them special as they were growing up was not seen as special at the time, because the outsiders weren’t approved of by the popular kids in class. They would have been seen as very uncool.

I also expect to find that the future icons did not initially embark on their journey with the aim of becoming rich or famous. That came later. They most likely embarked on their journey to gain some much-needed approval at a time when approval from peers was almost as valuable as food.

While childhood suffering often seems to be associated with extreme achievement, the critical factor is not the suffering. It is being an outsider and thus different.

Being helped to get ahead

Cultural icons so often dominate the spotlight that it is easy to forget that they usually have armies of people helping them. They have promoters, agents or managers, and many are almost totally reliant on these people to do their business; that is, find and arrange the work and negotiate contracts. This is especially critical in the early stages of most cultural careers. For example, Elvis Presley would not have achieved the success he did if Sam Phillips of Sun Records hadn’t recognised his talent and saleability when the young Elvis walked in off the street. Brad Pitt occupies a niche that could easily have been filled by someone else. He is there because he was good for other people’s business and those people make sure he is kept working. Madonna and Andy Warhol, on the other hand, may have been good for other’s business but they put themselves in the driver’s seat to a much greater extent than either Pitt or Presley.

... each of the icons had something special, some creative edge that brought them to the attention of fame’s gatekeepers before they came to the attention of the market.

The extent to which the icons had help along the way is a complicating factor in considering their success. Nevertheless, each of the icons had something special, some creative edge that brought them to the attention of fame’s gatekeepers before they came to the attention of the market. The extent to which they received help will be considered but not used as a criterion for selection.

What are outsiders?

We all have a loose idea of what an outsider is, particularly if you consider yourself one or live with one. The outsider concept has three overlapping meanings, only two of which are permanently related to the sense in which it is used in this book.

The first meaning of outsiders is simply whether a person is in or out of a group. If you live in the US or Australia then obviously you are an outsider when touring France. It may be amusing, interesting or upsetting but whatever the emotion it causes, it is a temporary state and it will pass once you go home. While in Europe, you will be unlikely to get below the surface of French culture. If you want to do that, you have to shed some of your outsiderness by making friends, learning the language and customs. The same sort of process applies if you change jobs, move to a new neighbourhood or join a new club.

Some people are good at fitting into new groups. Their outsider status soon disappears. Others never really manage to make the transition to belong to their new group. The chances are that they didn’t fit in too well where they came from either and the extra effort of fitting into the new place is beyond them. They will constantly feel like they don’t belong and remain outsiders. So the second meaning is the continual sense a person has of not belonging.

It is easy to understand this in the case of a person who never makes the full transition to a new group. There is, however, another group with the perpetual sense of not fitting in or belonging. They didn’t fit in when they were growing up and this lack of fit became hard wired into their brains. These are the true outsiders. As adults, they may not think about it much. Some may even deny its continuing impact but other people will sometimes sense their difference.

The third sense in which people might be outsiders is if they are considered odd, eccentric and yes, sometimes even creative. Often they are uncomfortable to be around. They don’t quite get the social rules right. They say and do odd things. We all know plenty of these people and usually filter them out of our lives if we can. Unless we are related to them we wouldn’t ask them home for dinner. This applies to the cultural icons too. While you may have been honoured to have had John Lennon home to dinner, you would have been unlikely to have made the same mistake twice. Lennon’s lack of fit made him an outsider.

Obviously a sense of not belonging and actually not belonging are related. True outsiders have this as an enduring state. People who are not true outsiders can usually get out of that state by drawing on social and organisational skills that outsiders don’t have and fit in. On the other hand, outsiders usually know that they haven’t a chance of fitting into ‘normal’ society so get on and do other things. In addition to their difference they also have more time to concentrate on their edge.

Some outsiders are true loners. Others can form confederations based on mutual interests but these are usually short-lived and turbulent. Imagine a rock group. In fact imagine the Beatles; the Fab Four were a brilliant confluence of creative talent drawn together for a short time by mutual interests but the group was inherently unstable and it collapsed.

The structure of this book

Seventeen cultural icons have been found who are the subjects of biographies and who also fit the criteria described earlier in this introduction. This is sufficient to explore the pattern of their development and in what ways they have an edge.

Chapters 1 to 17 examine each cultural icon’s life. I do not go into the minutiae but concentrate only on the big events. Each summary or mini-biography is split up into three sections. The first concentrates on their achievements. The second discusses the circumstances of their development, in particular their family back-ground, mother, father, other family, schooling and friends, and so on right up to the point that they embarked on their careers. The third section of each mini-biography provides an interpretation of the first two sections and identifies key elements in each of the developing icon’s lives.

Chapter 18 is a discussion of the common patterns running through each of their lives, and chapters 19 through to 25 are a discussion of those patterns in a broader context.

It is time to answer the question, ‘Why did Rowling or Madonna or Lennon or Pitt and all the rest become cultural icons?’ Why them?

Part one:

The cultural icons

Chapter 1

Elvis Presley

Kinky king of rock ‘n’ roll

Achievement

Elvis Presley was much more than a hugely successful performer. He was a colossus standing at the crossroads of popular music. He burst onto the US and international music scene in 1956 and began performing just when popular music was ripe for a transformation — all it needed was a catalyst. Along came Presley.

Elvis became ‘the king’. He was a brilliant natural rock ‘n’ roller, credited with moving popular music tastes away from the white style that had dominated for the first half of the 20th century. Originally he reworked existing songs into a fusion of black and white sounds, country and rhythm and blues (rockabilly), to which he added his unique hip-shaking movement. He drove the girls wild.

His legacy as a popular artist can be measured in terms of record sales and revenue, but it is larger than just that. He rammed through a change in style so successfully that he trail-blazed for much that was to follow in popular music. The pop/rock revolution in the 1960s owes much to Elvis — corporate control on music style was broken (for a while) and artists came to the fore. That change gave the world the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and a plethora of others. John Lennon considered Elvis an essential forerunner to their success.

Importantly, by crossing over so successfully into black music, he legitimised it in the white market. In keeping with the times, segregation of music began to disintegrate. Where previously a few black musicians such as Louis Armstrong operated in the white market with white sounds, black music and then black musicians now began crossing the boundaries. Established performers in the African-American markets such as Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Chubby Checker were pushing at the white market from their side while Elvis gave it a big shove from his. He accelerated the integration of the black sound into mainstream music market. Motown music became mainstream along with the careers of Diana Ross and many others.

In the 1950s, everything about Elvis’s stage presence was controversial. In one appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show they