Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried hard, but nobody was interested in his detective Sherlock Holmes. He only managed to sell the story on 20 November 1886, and waited another year for its publication. Seven years later, he was almost sorry he had given it up. Sherlock Holmes, with his intellect, which in real life could have been found in Holmes’s former university professor Joseph Bell, immediately networked the English. He became so popular that Doyle was courted. Because of him, he felt, his more serious work went unnoticed. He solved the problem radically: in 1893, he killed the unpopular detective. The English revolted. They begged Doyle to save him, but he would not give in. He was not revived under public pressure until eight years later, and in the meantime fans had already started writing their own stories starring their favourite character, pioneering so-called fan fiction.
In literary Slovene, the English word fan denotes a fan, but the Slovene Dictionary also allows the jargon fan, which is an abbreviation of the word fanatic, derived from the Latin fanaticus. The word once referred to someone who belonged to, served or worshipped in a temple, but over time it has taken on more negative connotations, such as elation, madness, obsession and so on.
In America, the word fan was originally used to refer to passionate baseball fans, but was soon transferred to fans of other sports. However, since the word fan also means “blower” in English, it was once thought to suggest that sports fans are people who blow themselves out at games or fights.
Another version of the word is that it is derived from the English word fancy, which in 18th and 19th century England was used to describe fans of a particular hobby or sport, especially boxing. Over time, the word was shortened to fan and finally to fan. Thus, in 1822, the essayist William Hazlitt wrote of a man whose behaviour was that of a fan when, after three months, he rose from his ‘sick bed’ to go to his ‘victorious bout’, or boxing match.
The fan is definitely Nonno Ciccio, who is just over 90 years old. He was still a boy when, in 1937, a friend persuaded him to steal his uncle’s bicycle and cycle more than 50 kilometres away to cheer on his club, Foggia. Since then, he has tried his best not to miss a single match. During the war years, he had no influence: he fought some hard battles in Africa, fell into the hands of the English and saw the end of the war in their captivity in Scotland.
“War is terrible. But in football, if you can learn to respect your opponent in the stadium, you can learn to respect them in real life”, he explained less than two years ago that he is not one of Italy’s traditional football hooligans and never has been, which is why his cap always says Peace among the ultras or passionate fans.
Over the past 80 years, he has followed his football club all over Italy. He has cheered them on in almost every stadium in Italy, and has also visited the city’s sights in passing. “Football is my way of getting to know my country. Without this passion, I would never have seen all these amazing places.”
Nonno Ciccio is not embarrassed to say that he is an ultra-fan or passionate supporter of his team. Because he is passionate about football, it would be easy to attribute to him pathological traits, hysteria, loneliness, which he compensates for by his adherence to his club, or all the things that are usually attributed to fans in the first place. But Nonno Ciccio is no different from passionate lovers of literature and classical music, art collectors, activists and political supporters, not even from academic researchers, say scholars who study the cultural role of fandom.
They all feel the same passion for what means something to them, they all have the same feelings about it, they all behave the same way and live the same way. The only difference is what they feel passionate about: if they feel passionate about football, science fiction, celebrities and the like, their passion is negative in the eyes of the average public; if they feel passionate about high art, social activism or academic research, it is positive.
But the host, who prepares a five-course dinner, passionately explains Wagner’s Ring and describes at length his experience of the opera, which lasts 15 hours in total and for which he has taken the whole week off, is not so different from Nonna Ciccia and his ilk. Neither are the supporters and colleagues of a politician who, after his electoral victory, gather in an election centre and, when he arrives, surrounded by cameras and microphones, begin to chant his name enthusiastically. All the other fans are similar to the reality show researchers who spend hours in front of their TV sets, monitoring internet forums and discussing a topic of such interest to them with colleagues around the world.
None of them would describe themselves as fans, and none of them would be happy if someone else did, but there is no essential difference between them and fans: they all know in detail what they are interested in, they are emotionally attached to it, they spend a lot of time on it, and they like to share their experiences with like-minded people. Yet we value some for their passion and accuse others of wasting time and losing their minds.
This is especially true of fans who scream in the front rows of concerts or in football stadiums, or like Mark Chapman, who shot John Lennon on 8 December 1980. Lennon became the most famous victim of a stalker and a fan, but by no means the only one.
Hollywood whore
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was just 21 years old when she opened the door to the wrong man on 18 July 1989. She was on her way to audition for a part in Godfather III when the doorbell rang. She saw in front of her a scruffy, blond-haired boy her own age. He was her fan, but not in the sense of the word as defined by the Slovenian Dictionary, which says that a fan is someone who feels a very positive attitude towards someone or something.
The boy in front of her was angry, even though he had never met her before. He only knew her from the TV screen, where she was slowly working her way towards a film career after having landed a supporting role in the comedy series My Sister Sam three years earlier. The dark-haired Oregonian, who moved to New York alone at the age of 17 to become a model and actress, did not know that Robert John Bardo had already sent her many letters and that he had even travelled to Los Angeles in 1987 to meet her, but was turned away by security guards. Angry, he returned a month later with a knife, but again could not reach her.
He returned to his home in Tuscon, and Rebbeca rented an apartment in West Hollywood. Serious and responsible, she slowly built a career, taking acting classes, appearing in small roles and waiting for her chance. She hoped it would come with a role in The Godfather III.
Robert John Bardo imagined a different future for it. When he saw her in a love scene in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, he thought she had become just another Hollywood whore, so he had to get her back on track. That she had no right to do so did not reach his sick mind.
He hired a private investigator. He got the idea from Arthur Richard Jackson, who, with his help, found the address of actress Theresa Saldana in 1982, stabbed her 10 times and, after her arrest, was disappointed to find that his mission had failed because she refused to die. His only regret was that he had not shot her, because that would have been more humane and more likely to kill her. He was given the maximum sentence under Californian law, 12 years, but was released early because of his good behaviour, even though the psychiatrist assured him that he was still dangerous.
Jackson got the address from the vehicle registration office, where Robert John Bard’s detective found Rebecca Sheaffer’s address. With it in his hand and a brown bag clutched to his body, he went to her neighbourhood, wandered around and made enquiries for her. When he was sure he had the right address, he rang her doorbell.
Sheaffer’s intercom was broken, but she answered it confidently. After a few words, she answered it. He returned, dissatisfied with her response, only this time he no longer clutched the paper bag to himself, but took out a gun. He shot Rebecca in the chest.
He ran away lightly, she fought for her life. In the hospital, she breathed her last 30 minutes after she opened the door to Bardo, who returned to his home in Tuscon. When police arrested him there the next day, he denied anything. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of release. Ten years ago, on his way to breakfast, he was stabbed 11 times by a fellow prisoner, who was sentenced to 82 years to life in prison. Unlike Rebecca Sheaffer, Bardo survived.
Trust restored by destruction
Selena Quintanilla was not so lucky, 16 days away from her 24th birthday, when she was shot in the back by 33-year-old Yolanda Saldivar. Yolanda was no ordinary fan. She didn’t have to stalk Selena and intrude into her life uninvited. Yolanda could ask Selena anything she wanted – she was her friend.
Selena may have been the queen of tejana, or Mexican music, with a sprinkling of other musical styles, but she was not swallowed up by the false glamour of so-called high society. Ever since her father Abraham recognised her talent for singing at the age of six, he had been guiding her down a path he had once wanted to follow himself, but was not good enough to do so. He put his three children together in a group that performed in a local restaurant until the restaurant went bust and they lost everything they had.
Their home has become a dwelling place, their life a road. Selena sang with her family band, Selena y Los Dinos, wherever they wanted her. But hard times became a memory when, aged just 15, she won the Tejano Music Awards for Best Female Singer and Best Artist. Her career began to take off, culminating in 1994 with Amor Prohibido, or Forbidden Love.
Until then, she had been the queen of Spanish-speakers’ hearts, although she had only started learning Spanish when her father thought it would make her more accessible to Spanish-speaking audiences in interviews, and now she wanted to conquer the English-speaking market. Finally, she was working on an album in her mother tongue, English, whereas before she had sung the lyrics, written by her brother, only by ear.
The family, which Abraham had run as a business with a controlling hand, was now wealthy, and Yolanda Saldivar had a taste of Selena’s fame. A San Antonio nurse who had cared for her brother’s three children after he abandoned them, she asked Selena in 1991 if she could start a fan club. Abraham, who had a managerial role alongside his role as a father, was opposed to such clubs, but Yolanda’s barbecue won him over.
She ran the club excellently without pay and became close to Selena, who spared no expense in gifts for her friend. When she opened a jewellery boutique, which also housed a hairdressing and beauty salon, the new company Selena Etc. Inc. was run by Yolanda, this time for a fee.
In 1995, members of Selena’s fan club started complaining that they had paid their membership fees but had not received the promised gifts. Yolanda assured Abraham that the club was running smoothly. She repeated the same when he accused her of pocketing money from boutiques. She claimed that she had documentation to prove that he was falsely accusing her. She wanted to hand it over to Selena.
She was supposed to go to Yolanda’s hotel room in Days Inn alone, but she brought her husband. Yolanda had nothing for her. The next day, 31 March 1995, Selena left home again at 9 a.m., this time alone. No one knows what happened in Yolanda’s hotel room, but suddenly a shot rang out and Selena, wounded in the back, dragged herself to the lobby. While she waited for an ambulance, Yolanda barricaded herself in her semi-truck with a 38-calibre pistol strapped to her temple. Selena died in hospital an hour later, and Yolanda got out of the car after almost ten hours of deliberation.
She regretted her actions, but to this day it is not clear why she fired the shots. After his daughter’s death, Selena’s father was convinced that the reason was money. Yolanda knew that Selena would forgive her, so she hatched a plan, brought a gun and murdered her. Others dismissed the theory. More likely, they thought that Yolanda could not bear the realisation that she no longer had a friend and never would again, after Selena had ended their almost sisterly relationship weeks earlier. She had destroyed her rather than fill the void in herself with someone else. Yolanda kept saying it was an accident, but changed her mind a few years ago, saying the gun did not have her fingerprints on it.
Sentenced to life imprisonment, she is eligible to apply for release in 2025, although it would be difficult for her to survive at large. For the last 22 years, she has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and allowed to walk for 1 hour. No fellow prisoner is allowed near her. Not because she is dangerous, but because they are dangerous to her. The death of the scandal-free Madonna, as Selena was called, caused such outrage that it would have been easy for one of Selena’s obsessed fans to have found a way to take her life.
Pen or knife?
On 30 April 1993, tennis player Monika Seleš realised that not only her own fans were dangerous, but also foreign ones. She won the French Open at the tender age of 16 and had eight grand slam tournament victories under her belt before the age of 20. She finished 1992 as the best tennis player in the world once again. It seemed that nothing could stop her, not even Steffi Graf. In January 1993, she beat her in the final of the Australian Open and a few months later, she looked set to do it again in Hamburg.
Günter Parche was obviously convinced that Steffi Graf was not capable of dominating the tennis world on her own, so he decided to help her – he would take the better one out of the game and relegate the worse one.
On 30 April 1993, 19-year-old Monika Seles was leading in the quarter-finals against Bulgaria’s Magdalena Maleeva. During the break, she sat down on the bench as usual, took a rest and leaned forward to stand up. Then she felt a sharp pain in her back. She stumbled towards the net. She didn’t know what had happened, she was just breathing heavily.
Only later did she learn that Günther Parche had stabbed her in the back, missing her spine by a few centimetres. Because Selesheva accidentally leaned forward, he could not stab her very deeply, but he managed to achieve his goal – he knocked her out of the game. The physical wound was insignificant, as the blade penetrated only an inch and a half into the body, and healed in a few weeks. The psychological wound was deep. Selesheva did not play for two years and Steffi Graf got her chance to become the best tennis player in the world.
Selesheva never regained her former form, that perfect focus, ball sense and powerful strokes that made her opponents moan so loudly that they regularly complained about her. But even when she was playing, she did not want to play in Germany.
She did not testify at Güntehr Parche’s trial, but she could not understand why the man who deliberately stabbed her was not convicted. Because of his mental health problems, he was given only two years’ probation and had to seek professional help. In mitigation, he said that he had not meant to kill her, but only to hurt her and get her out of Steffi Graf’s way.
For Monika Seleš, this was not an extenuating circumstance. She lost her career, she never recovered mentally. Parche was one of the many tennis fans sitting in the stands. In front of thousands of people, he jumped the fence and stabbed her on the court or where she was convinced that nothing could happen to her except defeat. This left her feeling unsafe in public for many years, including in the shop, she explained. Or as Martina Navratilova said, “When people were running against you before, think: Ah, they want autographs. Now you’re like, ‘Oh my God, are they carrying a pen or a knife?'”
Seleševa “cured” her emotional distress by overeating. She binged on crisps and biscuits and gained 30 kilograms. Today, at the age of 44, she has the problem under control, but she has not eliminated it.
Aunt from Neptune
American late-night show host David Letterman overcame his problems with an uninvited guest who was a regular visitor to his home with humour and the police. The police kept Margaret Mary Ray locked up, but each time she reappeared at Letterman’s home just a few weeks after her release.
He made fun of her on his show, even though he never mentioned her name, people mocked her on the street, and her five children, who had been taken away from her by the social work centre long before, wished they had never been her children. Her daughter Anna-Lisa, when she was old enough, tried to hide her origins and once even asked her mother for a restraining order. When she grew up, she was no longer ashamed of herself, but of the people who mocked her.
Psychiatrists have never been able to find out why Margaret Mary Ray chose Letterman as the subject of her fixation, but it has long been clear that she has schizophrenia. Her father had suffered from this mental illness, which is very likely hereditary, and three of his four children had suffered from it. The father died of a heart attack and three of his children committed suicide. In 1973, the eldest son, 22-year-old Billy, drove full speed into a tree. Four years later, 21-year-old David took his own life in a garage with carbon monoxide, even though he had promised his younger brother Tom he would never do it. Their sister, Margaret Mary, knelt on the tracks in 1998 at the age of 46, put her head on them and waited for the train that ended her life instantly.
She wrote her farewell letter to her mother at a good psychological time. She explained that she had reached the end of her road. She had decided to end her life painlessly and quickly in the valley she loves. She went to Colorado.
By then she was no longer a regular guest at David Letterman’s home, having stolen his Porsche in May 1988 and driven off with his 3-year-old son Alex. When stopped by the police, she explained that she was Letterman’s wife and Alex was his son. She could not pay the fine because she had no money.
She was then imprisoned and sometimes sent to a psychiatric hospital by a judge. He also had to decide where to send her when she camped out by Letterman’s private tennis court and when she explained to the workers in his house that she was a housekeeper and had herself driven into town to get food.
One Sunday morning, Letterman and his girlfriend woke up to see Ray watching them from the corridor. It was the only time he felt threatened, Letterman later said, otherwise her presence in his home was merely unusual. When she appeared, he called the police, and sometimes he didn’t. In between visits, she wrote to him. When she was taking medication, it was letters from her aunt; when she was not, it was letters from her aunt in Neptune, Letterman explained.
Two months before her death, she chose a new target, retired astronaut Terry Ellingson, but she did not live long enough for him to experience what Letterman did, if perhaps he would have.
Assassination for Jodie
John Hinckley Jr. was also struggling with mental health problems when he tried to take the life of then US President Ronald Reagan on 30 March 1981 in order to get the attention of actress Jodie Foster. He had noticed her in 1976 when he was impressed by the film Taxi Driver, in which she co-starred with Robert De Niro. He watched the film 15 times, or enough to become obsessed with the then 14-year-old film prostitute.
Three years later, he bought his first gun and started collecting pistols. Mentally, he felt worse and worse, and slowly, even the medication stopped helping. In 1980, he returned home from California and sought psychiatric help, but this did not put an end to his obsession with Jodie Foster. Twice he managed to summon her, but when she refused both times, he came up with a plan to win her over – he would kill the President.
First on the list was Jimmy Carter, because he happened to be President of America at the time. The plan fell through before he could even try to implement it. Hinckley had to wait for a new President. On 30 March 1981, Ronald Reagan was just leaving the Winston Hilton Hotel in Washington, where he was giving a speech, when Hinckley fired six shots. Four found their mark.
The President was hit in the wing of his lung, but was successfully operated on. His spokesman was shot in the head – leaving him with permanent brain damage and confined to a wheelchair. Until his death in 2014, probably by suicide, he was one of the most passionate advocates of gun control. Hinckley managed to wound a police officer and a member of the security services before he was subdued.
Instead of prison, he was sent to St Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital after his trial in 1982, after he said he had shot the President as a one-off demonstration of his love for Jodie Foster. From prison he corresponded little with serial killer Ted Bundy, but after his execution he became a model patient with a girlfriend, a former patient, and a clerical job at the hospital.
It was only 18 years after Reagan’s assassination that he was allowed to leave the hospital in the company of his parents. When a book about Jodie Foster was found in his room in 2000, they changed their minds again, but his parents tried so hard to prove that he was no longer a danger that he was allowed to go back to Washington with them three years later.
The President’s wife and daughter, Nancy and Patti Davis, were strongly opposed to any privileges, but he was slowly allowed to spend more and more time out of the hospital until, in 2006, he was allowed to spend three days together at his parents’ home in Williamsburg, Virginia. Over the years, more days were added until he was home 17 days a month. In August 2016, after the death of Nancy Reagan, who said goodbye in March while her husband had died 13 years earlier, John Hinckley Jr. was found to be well and allowed to return to his 90-year-old mother after 35 years in a psychiatric institution.
A 61-year-old man was allowed to drive but was restricted in his movements. He had to attend regular individual and group therapy and a psychiatric check-up once a month in Washington. He was forbidden to speak to the press. He was not allowed to contact the victims of his shots or their relatives, nor was he allowed to contact Jodie Foster. The intelligence service was given permission to monitor all levels of his privacy, without violating ethical and national laws, without violating a shred of personal dignity and without violating any human value, which a man who makes unauthorised invasions of another’s intimacy and privacy cannot have.
His days were not empty, though. He joined the local religious community, volunteered there and at the local psychiatric hospital, went to meetings for people with mental health problems, lectured at the local museum and attended concerts. He painted, played the guitar and took up photography, although his main ambition was to work. He wanted to stay fit and be a good citizen. Unlike his mother, the President’s son Mike Reagan did not mind.
Creative passions
All these stories are extremes that give fans a bad name. Researchers have tried to break down the established prejudices through cultural studies, but they have run into a problem: it is not possible to lump all fans together in a single definition. The expression and experience of admiration changes over time and space, and researchers cannot even agree on the criteria by which to classify and study admirers.
Interestingly, for example, fans themselves create new content, often of the same quality as that of formal culture. For example, every month, Dutch Lord of the Rings devotees gather in a local pub of their choice, learn Tolkien’s language and invent new stories. Sometimes dressed as hobbits and other characters from the fantasy novel, they act out their Lord of the Rings scenes in the woods.
But they also differ from each other. One group loves the Lord of the Rings book, another the fantasy theme and another the film trilogy of the same title. The first group’s affiliation comes from reading the book, the second from watching the fantasy films and the third from the film trilogy. The first group, which reads, is the most connected to The Lord of the Rings and the third group, which watches the trilogy, is the least connected.
Researchers also have a problem with identifying who is a true fan and who is not. The line between the two is extremely thin, they point out, and anyone could be aware of it if they honestly asked themselves when they were really passionate about something.
In principle, adulation could be about identity and differentiation from others, and this may be the common point of fans, opera lovers, researchers and others: just as a fan looks down on someone who is not, a high culture fan looks down on the worshippers of popular culture, a socially active citizen on the socially inactive, or a researcher on the unsystematic knowledge of journalists.
To be authentic, a fan must be truly committed, and what they are committed to often depends on their social class, gender, sexual orientation, age and ethnicity. Beatlomania, for example, was primarily a part of girl culture, whereas going to a football match dressed in their team’s jerseys is predominantly a male experience. Eurovision fans tend to be gay. Expressing political affiliation through adulation can be seen, for example, when members of a party chant with their favourite politician, dressed in the colours of his party.
Of course, again, it is not without question who shapes who, the consumer entertainment industry shapes the fans or the fans are active individuals who shape their own lives in their own original way, resisting consumerism. Most researchers disagree with the assumption that fans are produced by consumer culture, although they probably oscillate between consumerism and rebellion all the time.
After the Second World War, for example, they started to promote films that were different from the commercial films we see in the cinema, or cult films. They marketed the idea that cult films were not subject to the laws of the market, which had to be fought against, and thus artificially created rebels against Hollywood and cult film worshippers.
Similarly, the entertainment industry works in the music sector by developing genres and promoting music within them to specific audiences. The Lord of the Rings trilogy sought its target audience in the same way as reality TV shows seek theirs.
With the development of the internet, blogs and social networks, fandom has changed because people from all over the world can now connect and easily post whatever comes to mind. It was very different in the time of James Joyce, a writer with one of the first fan clubs. Readers were particularly attracted to his book Ulysses, and so, in a letter to Mrs Weaver on 27 June 1924, Joyce mentioned a group of people celebrating what is known as Bloom Day, or 16 June.
Organised by artist, critic, columnist and founder of Envoy John Ryan and writer Brian O’Nolan. They symbolically walked through the rooms where the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, spent his time, read the novel and performed the content, and otherwise wrote their own stories about Leopold Bloom.
The oldest fans are also railway enthusiasts and science fiction fans. Long ago, they formed an informal club called First Fandom and are still active today. There are several levels of membership: for example, a dinosaur is someone who was active in the club before 1939, when the first Worldcon or World Science Fiction Congress was organised, and an associate member is someone who has been active in the club for more than three decades.
Members of this fan club were among the first to use their own invented jargon or fan language to communicate. They even gave rise to the Association for Creative Anachronisms. Precisely because fans contribute to cultural life, and because this contribution is often of the same quality as the official one, researchers point out that it is pointless to evaluate fandom in terms of good or bad (the theory that fandom compensates for a lack of social contact has been rejected before), but wiser to look at what it gives.
