From Byron to Elvis, history's most adored sex symbols: Swoon by Bea Martinez-Gatell

During one performance on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2023, fans dancing in a Seattle stadium generated seismic activity to the equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. On hearing of the death of Hollywood heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, a pair of Japanese schoolgirls dived into a fiery volcano. And while doggedly pursuing the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb sent the poet a lock of her own pubic hair complete with the blood from slightly too close a cut.

Bea Martinez-Gatell’s Swoon, a raucous prehistory of the fangirl, proves that rather than vacuous and foolish, fangirls have always been the ‘central engine of pop culture’.

She begins with Byron, as he is arguably the mould from which all modern celebrities are cast. His public and private personas, his affair with Caroline Lamb, his failed marriage to her cousin Annabella, his supposed incestuous affair with his half-sister, and the cult-like devotion his poetry garnered would slot him perfectly into today’s media culture.

Women adored the ‘Byronic Hero’ depicted in his poetry, but to the men in society Byron was a rakish, corrupting force from whom no woman was safe. Replicas of this ‘Hero’ are found throughout literature – most famously Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff.

After ‘Byronmania’ came ‘Lisztomania’. According to Martinez-Gatell, 19th century composer Franz Liszt was the ‘first proper pop star’. A beautiful young protege, he stole the hearts of Europe’s elites. Hans Christian Andersen described how when he entered the room ‘it was as if a ray of sunshine passed on every face’, but when Liszt sat down at the piano, he ‘was a demon nailed fast to the instrument’. There was something about the way he played that took emotional hold of women.

The turn of the century brought with it Rudolph Valentino, a southern Italian who rose to peak swooniness in 1921’s The Sheik. His dark good looks captured the hearts of women all over the world and struck fear into the hearts of many husbands. He was ‘the physical embodiment of desire’. As the American film magazine Photoplay put it, after the premiere of The Sheik, ‘never in the history of the screen has the public fallen so prostrate before an idol as they have before Rudolph Valentino’.

Swiftly following on from Valentino were two of the swooniest crooners of all time – Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. One night, at New York’s Paramount Theatre, a girl was so overcome when Ol’ Blue Eyes walked on stage that she fainted. As for Elvis, his gyrating hips made him a ‘cultural lightning rod’.

Then came four boys from Liverpool, who aligned themselves perfectly with the ‘sexually charged winds of change’ that were sweeping the country. The Beatles’ lyrics brought the realisation that ‘sex, emotion and desire were shared experiences’ and their special brand of vulnerability took over the world. Nor was their popularity limited to teenage girls. At a party at the British Embassy in Washington, one older man slipped behind Ringo and snipped off a lock of his hair. Caroline Lamb would be proud...