Stanley Kubrick and Alan Conway: Has Society Become Conditioned to Believe Anything a Famous Person Says, Even when that Person Isn't Who They Say?

There are certain ground rules that come with the decision to become a recluse. The most obvious one is that you should never announce that you are a recluse. Greta Garbo can be forgiven for making this tragic mistake since she had little precedent on which to go. The result of her pronouncement that she truly wanted to be left alone made her the iconic symbol of the non-mentally disturbed recluse. (Howard Hughes, of course, is the iconic figure for that particular brand of recluse.) Garbo's announcement that she was intent on becoming a recluse also served to make her the target for the rest of her life of prying fans, most of whom were not, fortunately, stalkers.

J.D. Salinger cannot be so easily excused; he should have learned from Garbo's mistake. Instead, he too became the target of generations of misguided fans who believed that Holden Caulfield was a model on which to base their own lives. Salinger had to deal with that particular type of literary fan who not only wants to meet the creator of his favorite character, but expects the author to be like that character. By contrast, of course, there is Thomas Pynchon who has had far greater success at avoiding his fans than Salinger, in part because he seems to have a sense of humor. (One oddity of pop culture is that a newspaper reporter once claimed that Pynchon was, in fact, really J.D. Salinger.)