“Expert… the pain of losing a loved one” 6A surge in competition dating from the late 1990’s among cable news talk shows, intensified by the impact of 9/11, provided an initial context for the hero-widow’s rise to prominence. The analysis will focus on a specific medium and genre, the television news talk show, and ultimately on a specific vehicle, Larry King Live, through which Beamer’s celebrity primarily evolved. This section of the essay follows her early progress, when she was the subject of selection and cultivation efforts. The later portion of Lisa Beamer’s time in the public eye, when landing “one of the most sought-after interviews on the planet” garnered the highest Nielsen ratings ever received by Dateline NBC (Maryles and Donahue), provides ample demonstration of the first of these two strategies. Accordingly, efforts are regularly made either to seek out figures with whom audiences are already enamored or to identify and cultivate newcomers capable of generating this drawing power. Media 5Media enterprises have a vested interest in celebrities because celebrities have proven a reliable means of attracting and holding audiences. The task now is to reconstruct the process through which the complex construction that Larry King heralded as “it” took shape. It constitutes a chapter in the larger history of American reckoning with 9/11, and it offers reciprocal contributions to the fields brought to bear on its understanding. That much acknowledged, however, the genesis of her fame stands as a subject in its own right. Any assessment of overall significance must await consideration of the full arc of her experience. The story of Lisa Beamer’s 9/11 celebrity continues on from its making to an equally rapid unmaking. 4This leaves one final introductory note. Finally, Marshall’s insistence that the individual aspirant to celebrity status, the “living, breathing human being” (3), plays a role in the negotiation process, suggests the relevance of psychological perspectives, the utility of “dig into the self’s interior,” as Joshua Gamson puts it ( Claims to Fame 19), in order to understand a given celebrity experience. The factor of audience, whose predilections in the matter of celebrity are susceptible to the broad influences of culture, invites the approaches of cultural and specifically American Studies. Another, corresponding to the first-mentioned partner in the negotiation scheme, is media studies. 3The first of these, in order of precedence, is celebrity studies: the burgeoning scholarly discipline that has arisen to address what has arguably become a central phenomenon of modern life (Colvin vii). It also indicates why the inquiry needs to be interdisciplinary in nature and points to the specific fields that will come into play. This scheme guides the three-part organization of the analysis to be presented here. Marshall construes celebrity status as the product of an interactive “negotiation” among three parties: the media, the audience, and the individual (xlix,12). David Marshall’s seminal work, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. The most useful framework for comprehending this process is to be found in P. While that celebrity matched in some respects the type that has been called “accidental”-the ordinary person propelled by force of circumstances into the public eye (Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 110–14)-this essay will argue that it resulted from a broader, multidimensional process. 2The discussion that follows seeks to understand this spectacular ascent to public prominence, the making of Lisa Beamer’s 9/11 celebrity. A memoir completed in time for the first anniversary of 9/11 shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, adding to her draw as “one of the most sought-after interviews on the planet” (Beamer). The eventual birth of daughter Morgan Kay became a “media event rivaling little Ricky’s arrival on I Love Lucy” (Faludi 100). The President of the United States, meanwhile, lauded her before a joint session of Congress and invited her with her family for visits at the White House. Newsweek ranked her equally “central to the post-9-11 world” as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Advisor, and the president of Pakistan (Thomas). People magazine named her one of the “25 Most Intriguing People of 2001” (“Widow’s Profile”). 1In this guise, she was “everywhere” in the media following the attacks, making over 200 appearances in the first six months alone (“Iconic”).
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