Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?
There was a long-running TV game show in the 1950s and 1960s called What’s My Line? Regular people and celebrities would enter, sign in (please!), and then the panel would question them in order to guess who they were or what they did. They wore mask for the questioning of the celebrity guests.
Videos of the show are available on YouTube, and a couple of years back I watched Eleanor Roosevelt’s guest appearance. Despite the prize being cartons of cigarettes, the show can be fairly entertaining. And I’m not sure at what point I realized (years later) that the panelists were mostly New York-based writers, not just the top tier film stars you would see on such a show today: Dorothy Kilgallen was a journalist, Arline Francis was a radio and TV talk show host, and Bennet Cerf was an American author and publisher.
So perhaps the nature of fame has changed. Now we have Instagram influencers and YouTube stars who may have no real talent, or people who are famous for being famous and nothing else. The “famous people” I’ve met have been well-known in a wide sphere.
When I worked as Box Office Manager for Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 1990, I often spoke to the son of Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation) since he was dating one of my box office workers. I spoke only briefly to Patrick Stewart when he came for tickets to his son’s performance. He did not seem to want to engage. (Pun intended.)A
Also with one degree of separation, if we’re talking about celebrities’ children, I had Suzanne Somers’ son on a backstage crew for a show I stage managed at UC Berkeley. I recall meeting him briefly and thinking that he seemed like a really nice, happy person.
I’m not sure what brought Gregory Peck to an event in the Durham Theater on the UC Berkeley campus, but that’s when I was introduced to him. According to Wikipedia he dropped out of Berkeley, and I’m sure there’s a reason he was there but I’ve forgotten it. So he would be number 2.
Finally, there was Orson Bean. He was a frequent panelist on What’s My Line? before being discovered by the general populace on the TV series Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. Someone brought him in as a guest speaker to the Ohio State Theater Department. He left quickly after his presentation (about which I recall nothing), but I did encounter him prior to his speaking, when I realized that he was standing at the urinal next to me. In keeping with the unspoken men’s restroom etiquette, neither of us spoke at that time.
MUSOFYR 