Is success fame?

SOUL FOOD

I have a screensaver on my desktop computer that’s a slide show of

quotes, some of them pithy one-line quips, from humor-writer Erma

Bombeck. Among them, is: “Don’t confuse fame with success: Madonna is

one; Helen Keller is the other.”

For months I took the remark at face value but, now and then, I

found myself giving it a second thought.

I was 12 years old when Ann Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Patty

Duke as Helen Keller rocked my world with the movie, “The Miracle

Worker,” the remarkable story of a determined teacher who helped her

young student overcome the solitary confinement of being deaf, mute

and blind.

Sullivan’s student went on to graduate from Radcliffe College with

honors. In a letter Eleanor Roosevelt, Keller once wrote that she

envisioned “a new world where the light of justice for every

individual will be unclouded,” and she spent a lifetime working for

that cause.

It would be more difficult indeed to consider Keller anything

short of successful. Or famous, for that matter.

Her achievements were so remarkable that her name is an entry in

dictionaries and encyclopedias. Her name has long been part of the

American vocabulary, although, these days I find more and more people

who don’t know who she is.

My niece, Kellen, first introduced me to the phenomenon of Madonna

in 1985. I had been living in Germany at the time and had returned to

California to visit family for Christmas.

At my sister’s house, Kellen, who was still a toddler then,

greeted me with a grand entrance that started from the top of the

stairs. Her curly locks framed her face and several brightly colored

scarves, tied in big bows at the top of her head, framing her curls.

A full wardrobe of necklaces, chains and beads hung from her tiny

neck, accessorizing her costume -- a Wonder Woman bathing suit and

sparkly, marabou-trimmed, Barbie high-heeled shoes.

She took the stairs step by step, each with a deliberate pause.

“Hi,” she said with a toss of her head and one hand on a hip that was

cocked, “I’m Madonna.”

With a hairbrush microphone, Kellen belted out, as well as a

toddler could, the refrain from “Material Girl” -- “we are living in

a material world and I’m a material girl.”

She was, well, cute. But the message of the song, which I hoped

was tongue-and-cheek, still made me wince.

If Madonna’s success is questionable, her fame surely isn’t. I

found just how famous the pop singer was when, before another

Christmas, a few years ago I went to the post office to buy stamps.

I asked the clerk for 50 Madonna stamps and watched a faint smile,

the smile of someone about to break bad news, surface on his face.

“There is no Madonna stamp,” he told me, closing his eyes and

shaking his head.

“No Madonna stamp?” I echoed. I was sure he was pulling my leg.

“No Madonna stamp,” he repeated and shook his head again.

I tapped on a stamp pressed under the glass on the countertop

between us. “Of course there is,” I said, “There’s one right here.”

The clerk raised an eyebrow in sudden comprehension. “Oh,” he

said, “You want religious stamps.” Then I raised an eyebrow, too.

Upstaging the Mother of God, especially at Christmas, is fame, heaven

knows, even if Bombeck might have called it infamy.

The distinction between fame and success, which is the power in

Bombeck’s dig, doesn’t reside in dictionary definitions. On the

whole, dictionaries largely define both success and fame without the

weight of value judgment.

Success, says my dictionary, is “the gaining of wealth, fame,

rank,” and fame is “the state of being well known; famous; renowned

(for something).” By all accounts Madonna has been there and done

that.

Apart from a definition of success that is based on values --

personal, social, philosophical or religious -- Bombeck’s remark

lacks force.

Since the interviews she’s done to publicize the release of her

latest album “American Life,” Madonna has taken a lot of flak for

trying to throw off the material and hedonistic values she once

embraced.

Now, a mother and wife, Madonna hasn’t exactly gotten religion.

(In her song, “Nothing Fails,” she sings, “I’m not religious/But I

feel so moved/Makes me want to pray.”) But she has taken up the

mysticism of Cabala and she seems to have taken serious stock of

herself.

Some say too serious. Commentator Bill O’Reilly, among others, has

criticized her for “no longer [being] fun.”

Madonna seems to have expected that. In “I’m so stupid,” another

track on “American Life,” she sings, “Please don’t try to tempt me/It

was just greed/And it won’t protect me/Don’t want my dreams/Adding up

to nothing/I was just looking for something.”

I wish Erma Bombeck were still here to tell us what she thinks of

that.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.