Fame And Adulation

We really and truly are our own worst enemies. When people are highly successful, straddling the heights of acclaim and celebrity as performance artists something peculiar happens to so many of them. Where they should feel secure in having achieved recognition of their talents, they appear to become insecure in some manner.

Restless and bored, or dissatisfied and unhappy they turn to drugs or alcohol or wild social behaviour to give them release from the tension and misery they feel.

That self-destructive behaviour leads to another kind of celebrity, one that does their career no good, and which does them personally, as human beings, great harm. Their personal relationships suffer, particularly those of an intimate nature, and they stop respecting themselves, and can no longer perform as they once did, faltering toward failure.

The predictable occurs; they attend rehabilitation, become temporarily restored, attempt come-backs, then fall back into old habits.

Why, one can ask legitimately, should talented people who have managed to arouse great public interest in their performances, and who earn heaps of money enabling them to live lives of sumptuous luxury, be dissatisfied with what they have achieved, to the extent that they self destruct in this way.

If not through suicide as a result of their depths of despair as their self-imposed degradation, then accidentally, through drug overdose.

One famous name after another, discovered dead in the prime of their lives. The latest in a long line of entertainers whose errant life-cycle and popular presence as successful performers, fizzled and collapsed, Whitney Houston.

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Her inner demons made her wildly successful career a final travesty. From a family of highly successful entertainers, this Grammy-winning soul and gospel singer became a pop titan. Her albums sold millions of copies. And her stunning beauty and grace won her the admiration and adulation of young women who dreamed of achieving the fame and recognition in the future that she did.

Years of self-abuse became evident in her appearance, but worse, in the quality of her voice and her performance. She herself, single-handedly, brought ruination and despair to herself. Now why would that occur?

It would, of course, give her no comfort whatever to know that her record sales have soared since her death, and tributes to her talent, her personality and her life have poured in from everywhere; her public broken-hearted at her ultimate collapse.

People view a makeshift memorial outside "The New Hope Baptist Church" in Newark, New Jersey. Singer Whitney Houston died on February 11, 2012 at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Houston's mother, Grammy-winning gospel singer Cissy Houston, led the music program at the church for many years. (GETTY/GALLO)