By Larry Getlen

What kind of people spend their lives striving for fame?
As Larry Getlen finds out, the answer is sometimes sad, but rarely simple.

The Naked Cowboy is having a bad day.

Sitting at a car wash in his brand new Escalade, the Cowboy — real name Robert J. Burck II — is listening to what he calls his “Naked Cowboy dialogue,” a series of inspirational statements and life goals he keeps on his dictaphone, in an effort to overcome a severe disappointment. He had been interviewed for Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list, and thought he had made the list. As it happens, he found out just this morning that he did not. So to cheer himself up, he’s listening, as he often does, to his happy-talk dictaphone.

“It’s telling me that I’m the most celebrated entertainer of all time,” says Burck, “and that this whole entire world is beating a path to my door.”

This reinforcement is an essential part of Burck’s daily routine, because whether Time magazine agrees or not, he must believe — every minute of every day — that he is worthy of absolute fame. Being famous is the only thing Burck has ever wanted, and the only thing that’s ever mattered, taking precedence even over the development of close personal relationships.

“There is the down side that some people would say, that I don’t have anybody who’s really close to me (sarcasm his), and that I push everybody away, that kind of mentality,” says Burck. “But I don’t see that as a down side. I see that as a healthy way to live.”

Burck, who suffered from anorexia as a teen, had the direction of his life shaped by a book he read just before college: “Unlimited Power,” by Anthony Robbins. “I began to live with the idea that I could create anything with my life,” he says. “[Robbins] pointed out that you need to find people who have done things that [you wanna do] and who you would want to be like. The first thing I thought was, who are the coolest people in the world. That’s movie stars, and presidents of the United States. Either you’re gonna lead the coolest country in the world, or you’re gonna be a movie star. They go wherever they wanna go and do whatever they wanna do. They put out products, they’re high visibility, everybody loves ’em — they’re immortal. That’s what a movie star is.”

But becoming a movie star doesn’t happen overnight, and Burck needed to find his path.

Once he decided that fame was his ultimate goal, the anorexic teen went from seeing shrinks to lifting weights, and overcame his disease in the gym. He then put his buff new bod to work, first stripping at bachelorette parties, and then pursuing a modeling career.

“I had my picture taken by every photographer I could find who would work for free, or was in a gay bar or something offering free services telling me I was cute and should get my picture taken,” he says. “I sent out 4,000 modeling composites, sent it to every modeling agency, and only two people called me from it.”

One of the two, a Pasadena modeling agent, told him he needed to lose twenty pounds, cut his hair, and get a nose job — all of which he did the following week. After taking new photos and sending them along, the agent told him that they were “the worst shit he’d ever seen in his entire life.” But, impressed with Burck’s determination, the agent flew him out to L.A., to help him reach for the next rung on the ladder of fame.

Burck believes that “there’s nobody in this entire world who does not wanna be completely famous.” True or not, the intensity of the quest for fame in modern times is unparalleled in human history.

“Fame, for the first time ever documented, has become an autonomous motivator for young people,” says Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and author of the new book, “The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America.”

“If you’d asked an international sampling of twenty-year-olds fifty years ago what they wanted to do [with their lives], they’d say, ‘I want a family. I want to be successful financially. I want security.’ Fame wouldn’t register on their list of motivations. Now, internationally, fame has shown up as a common, autonomous motivator.”

This is troubling for several reasons. In interviewing and treating celebrities, Pinsky heard so many “tales of woe” that he realized that their pathologies — including clinical narcissism, childhood trauma, and addiction — were, as a group, way above average. But he also realized that it was the pathologies that caused the celebrity, not vice versa. “These kinds of people were becoming celebrities,” he says. “They needed to be celebrities.”

Jake Halpern, author of “Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite
Addiction,” learned while writing his book that when people in varied age groups around the world were given a test that measured levels of narcissism, “no demographic group in the world scored higher on this test than the American teenager.” Halpern attributes this disturbing and relatively recent development to the increase in the boosting of American children’s self-esteem.

“In our attempts to make kids feel good about themselves, we’ve overshot the mark,” he says. “We’ve not only increased self-confidence, we’ve increased narcissism. Because if you believe you’re great, you’ll become dissatisfied with praise from parents and teachers, and you’ll want more resounding applause, which is what fame offers.”

“When you go into psychiatric hospitals today,” says Pinsky, “what you find predominantly are cluster-B personality disorders, which are narcissistic. Clearly there’s been a turn in the narcissistic direction by everybody. Fame-seeking may be [perceived as] a way to solve that emptiness that is associated with narcissism.”

Coupling this with how technology — including blogs, niche cable channels, and YouTube — has leveled fame’s playing field, resulting in an atmosphere where, as Pinsky notes, simply screaming “Leave Britney Alone!” into your computer can land you on “The Tonight Show,” it’s easy to see why the pursuit of fame has led to a sort of societal insanity.

“People have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time,” says Halpern, “but they no longer seem so delusional, because there appear to be so many venues on which to become famous.”

Halpern once found himself among a group of young kids waiting to audition for agents. Since journalists weren’t allowed in, he wore a badge identifying him as an agent’s assistant. “I was literally attacked by these four-year-old children with headshots, all trying to give them to me,” says Halpern. “I’ve lived in India, and I don’t remember the child beggars there being that ferocious.”

Robert Galinsky, founder of the New York Reality TV School, sees this sort of thing on a regular basis from his reality television aspirants, and reels off story after story that demonstrates the depth of the problem.

“I had a guy who said that he ate his own poop, and that he’d be willing to do it again if it got him on a show,” says Galinsky. “One woman in my class exposed that she had an abortion at age fourteen, and another revealed that she was raped at fifteen by her best friend. Maybe they were doing some genuine purging, but I think there’s also shock value, [this sense of], ‘this is where I’m willing to go. You can take me and cut me up, put me out anyway you want to, because I’m willing to give it all up.’”

By 1998, Burck was taking singing and acting lessons, and sending nude photos to anyone he thought could help his career. One day, dressed in boots, jeans, a vest and a cowboy hat, he sang and played guitar for tips on Venice Beach as a photographer for Playgirl magazine snapped away. As Burck earned a grand total of one dollar — save for two pennies thrown at him by a couple of local kids — the photographer tossed out a casual suggestion.

“Why don’t you just play in your underwear? Do something different.”

Burck took the advice the next day. He made a hundred dollars, appeared on the local news, got his picture taken more times than he could count, and just like that, the Naked Cowboy was born.

Over ten years later, he now earns $150-250 an hour playing in Times Square and charges $5,000 an hour for personal appearances. He spends his life strumming and singing and has released several albums, but he considers his music “nothing more than another product.” What matters is not the talent, but the image.

“You can license the name and image for any product on the face of the earth,” he says. “Anything where you want visibility, you can attach the Naked Cowboy, plug into the internet, and send a press release that says, ‘Naked Cowboy signed with Fruit of the Loom today.’ It’s all about the persona. It has nothing to do with the music.”

But what it really has to do with, more than anything else, is the achievement of fame, and all that it entails.

“My goal has not been to be famous,” he says. “It’s to be the most famous man in the history of the world — period. The end of it. It’s all or nothing with me. That’s the way it works.”

When you think of Britney, Lindsay, Paris, or Speidi, it’s easy to forget that two of those four became famous for actual creative achievement, and were once considered to have at least some modicum of talent. But the way that their tarnished reputations have done nothing to lessen their fame shows how the notion of talent has become more nebulous and ill-defined than ever before.

“Personality has taken over the meaning of talent,” says Galinsky. “If your personality is alive, authentic, confident, bold, powerful, and truthful, then people will become fans, and that will make a person famous. That’s what’s happening right now. Talent is transforming into personality, and that’s what’s moving things on the Internet and on television.”

Part of the problem with that, especially when considering what actual talented people must go through to get noticed, is that it can be hard to tell the difference between art, attention-seeking, and marketing, and to distinguish the opportunistic and attention-starved from the truly inspired.

What should you make, for example, of conservatory-trained musicians who play crisp, authentic early 20th Century ragtime, but do so in subways and bodegas while dressed in furry animal costumes?

The Xylopholks, trained at institutions including the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, can be seen on YouTube (as they have over 400,000 times) playing in the West 4th Street subway station while dressed as a jovial blue monster and a dour-faced pink gorilla.

Jonathan Singer, the act’s creator, xylophonist, and resident blue monster or skunk — depending on his costume of the day — experimented with playing in a dog costume at a Halloween show. Buoyed by an impassioned response, he took the next logical step.

“I thought, if I could do what I do in this thing, then I can appeal to a much larger audience than trying to play ragtime xylophone music as a serious classical percussionist,” he says.

For The Xylopholks, the costumes are a combination of marketing and just plain having fun, a way to get noticed in a city where starving artists are more the rule than the exception.

But one who knows says that whatever the style, a gimmick of this sort is not just helpful, but mandatory.

“You see people out there with a guitar, singing and playing, just like a normal person, like, ‘I’m gonna play my guitar and someone’s gonna discover me on the street.’ To me, that’s crazy. It’s a waste of time,” says Burck. “You’re not standing out. I see that and I think, that’s a little delusional.”

But The Xylopholks claim no desire for fame beyond bringing their music to a larger audience, and hopefully make a living as musicians.

“I never wanted to be a musician for fame,” says Singer. “I do this because it’s something I like, and I like the response. People’s reaction isn’t always because they’re listening to music, but because of what they see. Then they start listening. I’m reaching people who would never in a million years get a ragtime xylophone record.”

“There are arts, and there are entertainments,” adds bassist and pink gorilla Bridget Kearney. “It works best when they’re together, and this is the best hybrid we can make.”

Comedian/songwriter Jessica Delfino understands this sentiment well. Delfino’s former band, Haunted Pussy, would dress in ghoulish attire and slather themselves in fake blood, and as a solo artist she released a song called “My Pussy is Magic” and wrote a show called “Songs About Vaginas.” This, combined with her latest CD, “I Wanna Be Famous,” would seem like a tailor-made attempt to propel her up the strata of sensationalized fame. Delfino, though, claims that her antics are a combination of natural creative inclination and astute marketing. Her feelings on Angelina-type fame are more complex.

“I’m an outrageous person, and I come up with outrageous ideas,” she says. “I do try to push buttons because it’s fun for me, and I’ve discovered that this is a way I could make a living. So I embrace it and use it for comedy fodder, and use it to achieve my ultimate goal, which is to be more famous than Bon Jovi.”

To that end, Delfino embraces stunts such as attending a Stevie Nicks event dressed like the singer (where, to her dismay, the news cameras missed her), and going to the set of an Angelina Jolie film in the hopes of presenting the superstar with a CD, along with a note that said, “you help the children, and now I’d like you to help me.”

Her motivations for all this, she says, are more focused than those of your typical psychically-damanged narcissist.

“It’s not so much the fame I want. It’s the money,” she says. “I want to be able to make a really good living doing what I’m doing, and in order to do that, I need an audience. Part of the problem with entertainment is that people start off with this mind set of ‘I want to be famous,’ and they don’t think or care about the art. People in New York have spent years studying their craft, and then there are others who just show up and go, ‘I’m gonna do this or that,’ and it doesn’t matter.”

And while also professing goals such as “I’d like to be memorable in a way that is unlike anything anyone else has seen or done,” she does seem to fit into what Pinsky describes as a healthier subset of the fame-seeking hoards.

“People that struggle for fame that had a purpose — like great musicians or authors — seemed to have less narcissism, and seemed to be more gratified by fame seeking,” he says. “Then it’s a creative outlet, rather than existing just to serve, ‘hey, it’s me.’ It’s a very unhappy life to try to climb into the media just because, ‘hey, it’s me.’ That’s a never-ending struggle to fill a bottomless pit that can never be filled.”

In discussing this personal-vacuum-filling nature of fame-seeking, Halpern cites a quote from Marilyn Monroe: “I knew I belonged to the public and the world not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I never belonged to anyone or anything else.”

This, he says, perfectly reflects the tragedy of our country’s obsession with fame.

“There are some stats in my survey,” he says, “that showed that kids thought their families would love them more if they became famous — which is kind of a heartbreaking thing.”

But Burck, the most unabashed of New York’s fame seekers, sees nothing but positives in his actions — not just for himself, but for all who are blessed enough to come in contact with The Naked Cowboy.

“People live with this idea that they shouldn’t be the light on the hill that everyone looks at,” he says. “I go into the streets each day, into the middle of Times Square, and do nothing but generate happiness for people all day long. I go out there every single day and everyone says, ‘hey, Naked Cowboy.’ They love and respect [what I do], and see that I’m a good man doing good work all day long. I’m not working for people. I’m working for God.”

Larry Getlen is the Editor-in-Chief of City Scoops magazine. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/larrygetlen.

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