Will Rogers and other unknown famous people

[Satchmo Distel]

TV host Jack Paar was as big as Ed Sullivan as a late night host in 1956-65, and was the first host to show The Beatles (January 3, 1964) but I hadn't heard of him until I started to research the group's US career.

Norman Vaughan was as big as Bruce Forsyth in the 60s but seems to have been condemned to obscurity by the rise of Forsyth, Tarbuck, etc.

[Various Artist]

That isn't terribly unusual for the period.

The terrific You Must Remember This podcast regularly provided deep dives into forgotten stars.

Deep Dives Into Forgotten Stars would be a great title for some 1930s sci-fi or thereabouts. It sounds like a collection of rediscovered early works from, say, Olaf Stapledon.

[WOM]

TV host Jack Paar was as big as Ed Sullivan as a late night host in 1956-65, and was the first host to show The Beatles (January 3, 1964) but I hadn't heard of him until I started to research the group's US career..

I was actually going to post Jack Paar, Steve Allen and mostly Dick Cavett. Three enormous names rarely known outside their relatively recent windows of fame.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I'm a bit puzzled as to the intention of the thread. Are we talking about famous people about whom not much is known or those whose reputations are sullied in some way (examples in previous posts)?

No not necessarily sullied, just that they're difficult to pin down in spite of colossal fame.

It's impossible to read anything about US social or cultural history in the 20s and 30s without coming across Will Rogers name. Lindbergh, FDR, and Chaplin are the only others in the same ballpark, and they were known for attributes in specific fields. Rogers did everything. He was in theatre, radio, film, and journalism. A genuine multi-platform player. Because of this he was able to hone and protect his own public persona in a way I'm not sure anyone else has been able to do, before or since, in such a complete fashion. Was that conscious? I've no idea. Was it honest? I think so, but don't know for sure. Was it everything that could be said about the man? Unlikely. These are the questions I'd like answers to.

[MsD]

He seemed very modern and good-looking on telly back in the 60s, young man.

There were other modern, good-looking people on telly, but they were way-out and not part of the telly establishment. So it was a bit like having a trendy popstar on Newsnight, you know how there's a frisson of having "one of ours" upsetting the grown-ups.

[Gangster Octopus]

Erm, who?

[Nocturnal Submission]

Simon Dee, I think.

[Gangster Octopus]

Ah, thanks.

[Gangster Octopus]

The curse of the page break...

[elguapo4]

John Maynard Keynes, well known to economists and his surname is still a word. A lot of people would know the name but not have a clue about anything else about him.

[Gangster Octopus]

Part of the Bloomsbury Set. Killed by the Americans during the post WW2 negotiations.

[Benjm]

Invented wine gums. Son Bill found fame on TV as Selwyn Froggatt and The Gaffer.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Invented wine gums. Son Bill found fame on TV as Selwyn Froggatt and The Gaffer.

And still found time to front (sic) the band Tool.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

On the domestic front, DJ and TV presenter Simon Dee was often cited as someone whose brief but intense period of stardom was hard to explain to anyone who hadn't witnessed it, so swift and complete had been his fall into obscurity.

As far as mystery goes, when I first heard about him in the late '70s and '80s, it was difficult to see any archive footage of him in action to get a sense of what his fame was based upon. There were also various rumours about the degree of privation into which he had descended.

When he did resurface, on a tribute of some kind, it turned out that he was just a cheesy proto-Partridge who was slightly bitter about the way that the business had spat him out. The public had happily let him go, perhaps because he was too closely associated with a particular time when it passed and came to be viewed with the embarrassment saved for recently expired popular culture.

I remember that return - can't remember the exact circumstances (was it maybe part of a season of some sort), it was heavily hyped and fell a bit flat when it actually happened.

[Flynnie]

Dick Cavett’s a funny one, he’s still alive (and only 83, which is amazing as he’s been on TV for 60 years) and working. His heyday seemed to be the early 70s, but he’s hardly in obscurity either. He’s even made a decent career out of playing himself in TV shows and movies set during the 60s or 70s.

Athletes, especially ones who die fairly young, are pretty good examples of this.

Jimmie Foxx was the second player to hit 500 home runs, Mel Ott the third. Both were incredibly famous in their day and are nearly forgotten now except by hardcore baseball fans, in a way Lou Gehrig or Hank Greenberg or Ted Williams, all contemporary sluggers, are not. The Babe stands alone, of course, he is still seemingly as famous as any ballplayer today.

The common factor in their fall into obscurity is two fold: the teams they did their best (for Ott, only) work for moved in the 50s (the Giants for Ott; the Athletics for Foxx) and they both died young. Ott died in a car crash a few months before the Giants began playing in San Francisco, if he’d lived another 30 years as he should have, he’d have probably popped up on documentaries and done the autograph circuit and become much more famous.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Actually, why speculate when we've got the internet:

In 2003, Victor Lewis-Smith arranged for a one-off new live edition of Dee Time to be broadcast on Channel Four, following Dee Construction, which covered Dee's career.

The same wiki page also includes this gem:

On another occasion he was jailed for vandalising a lavatory seat with Petula Clark's face painted on it, which he thought was disrespectful to her. The magistrate who sentenced him was Bill Cotton

[DCI Harry Batt]

I have heard of almost none of these people. Interesting.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Simon Dee frequently came off as a bit of a prat. There was one show when Shirley Bassey and Eartha Kitt were guests, and Dee decided he was going to flirt with them ('cos they were sexy ladies, right?) They embarrassed him like he was a thirteen year-old kid. He was left literally speechless, banging the desk and pretending it was all a joke.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

JD Salinger was a total recluse.

"J D Salinger, Media Whore" was one of the better comic strips in Viz's history.

[WOM]

I'm with Amor on Will Rogers, btw. Books of quotations are full of his quips, along with those of Rita Rudner who seemed to dodge fame while saying lots of quotable things. A lot of syndicated newspaper columnists also get name checked purely by dint of having large readerships without necessarily being famous in the traditional sense - Jimmy Breslin for one. Newspaper-famous to young people being the equivalent of Internet-famous to older folks.

[Sporting]

How about Thomas Pynchon?

[Satchmo Distel]

Thomas Pynchon's Flying Circus?