Sometimes, I look at those “successful” people in life and wonder how they did it. I just read an article about Beyonce and Jay Z buying a new home. It is a 30,000-square-foot home in the prime area of Malibu. They paid $200 million for the property, making it the most expensive home ever sold in the entire state of California. It’s also the second most expensive real estate deal in the country. The top deal went at $238 million for an NYC apartment.
At any rate, I imagine when they first had aspirations of becoming performers, they probably never imagined such a thing would be possible. Or maybe they did.
I wonder what a lot of these people “think” and “do” and how they “act” in their everyday comings and goings. But the truth is, in many cases, these people face significant challenges like everyone else. They also keep secrets.
Since I mentioned her already, Beyonce employs a “visual director” who records her for up to 16 hours a day and has done so almost every day since 2005. She stores this footage in a temperature-controlled room she calls her “crazy archive,” extensively cataloging her public and private life. What she plans on doing with all of this remains a secret.
Regardless, I can’t imagine insisting on having myself filmed endlessly.
But enough of that .What about the people from the past? There have been lots of notable and famous folks all throughout history.
And many had their secrets.
Like Albert Einstein.
For one thing, he had a secret daughter. Most of us know that Einstein had numerous affairs while married to his first cousin, Elsa Einstein. This was his second and final marriage, I should add. Additionally, he and his first wife, Mileva Maric, had a daughter, Lieserl, in 1902, a year before they were married. Lieserl’s existence was concealed and only discovered in 1986. Einstein never met Lieserl, and her fate remains a mystery.
Another smart man, in a different way, was Abraham Lincoln. During his presidency, Abraham Lincoln suffered from chronic depression and refused to carry a knife for fear he would harm himself. He consumed a medication called “blue mass” to treat his depression and/or constipation. That “blue mass” concoction contained 100 times the safe limit of mercury. Lincoln would take this stuff every day for months.
I’m not sure how “smart” this next fellow was, but he had a secret too. The man who painted happy trees. Yes, Bob Ross. In his youth, Bob Ross worked as a carpenter and lost his left index finger in an accident. On TV, when he painted happy clouds, he hid this old injury from viewers with his paint palette.
Keeping secrets sometimes results from keeping scandals. And many “stars” of old had scandals longer than their sleeves. This was true for funny man Charlie Chaplin. He once fired an underage girl from his movie after she refused to abort his child. He knew her from age eight and seduced her when she turned fifteen. He narrowly escaped this scandal by marrying her in secret.
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“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack
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“I thought about how there are two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you don’t dare to let out.”
― Ally Carter, Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover
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“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”
— Jean Racine
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Everybody has a secret. Some more than others.
