Stars will be stars

A statistical slice-and-dice of the celeb stories that had us talking: The marriages, divorces, babies, drug arrests and bathroom brawls -- from Britney to Mel and beyond.

By Scott Lamb

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features, Year in 2006

Dec. 29, 2006 | If you can cast your mind back to the early days of 2006, back to those slightly more innocent first few weeks of the year when James Frey was still considered more memoirist than novelist and Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism was a presumption, not a documented fact, you might remember a time when the orbital paths of the celebrity world seemed eerily close to the more mundane, humble revolutions of the average person. At long last, Paris Hilton's star seemed to be on the wane, Britney Spears was settling into an apparently happy and uneventful domestic rut with Kevin Federline, and Lindsay Lohan was finally fessing up to some of her food issues. Even Angelina Jolie seemed content with having a baby the old-fashioned way, announcing to the world she'd actually made one with Brad Pitt. The stars were getting downright average, or so it briefly seemed.

But it wasn't long before events -- just around the start of February, with the announcement of the Heather Locklear/Richie Sambora split, the unearthing of Paris Hilton's personal diaries and Britney Spears' visit from the Department of Children and Family Services for driving with her baby on her lap -- served to remind us all that there's a massive difference between the everyday world, full of house chores and grocery shopping, and the universe inhabited by the souls whose names populate the gossip pages.

From that point on, 2006 was basically a yearlong reminder that, despite what Us Weekly wants you to believe, stars are not just like us -- for instance, we don't bounce our cellphones off the heads of our hired help, or go on racist tirades during our arrests or stand-up acts, or fly our 150 closest celebrity buddies to 15th century Italian castles to attend our Giorgio Armani-tailored weddings.

Lest there be any doubt on that point, researchers at University of Southern California released a widely cited report in September -- billed as "the first systematic, empirical scholarly study of celebrity personality" -- that reached the not-exactly-stunning conclusion that celebrities are, indeed, more narcissistic than you or I. Using something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, they subjected more than 200 anonymous celebrities to diagnostic analysis and then compared their findings with those of similar studies performed with both MBA students and, you know, normal folk. Surprise -- the celebrities had "statistically significantly higher narcissism scores" than everyone else. (Also worth noting: Reality TV personalities scored the highest overall, beating actors, musicians and comedians in the competition for the title of world's most self-centered demographic.)

While the study's results may not have been exactly groundbreaking, you did have to admire the authors' bracing attempt to treat celebrity life with scientific rigor. In the gossip netherworld of slippery innuendo and hard-to-confirm assertions -- is there a clear hierarchy between a source and a source close to the couple? -- it's nice to occasionally have a hard nugget of fact to hang one's hat on. And so in sifting through this year's gossip trailings, the Fix has decided to imitate the researchers' approach, at least in spirit, and attempt to use the inflexible laws of math and science to help illuminate what were really this year's biggest stories, trends, themes, memes and moments -- and, we hope, make clear other ways in which celebrities are special. Using the most technologically advanced tools available, including Google, Nexis and Microsoft Word's word-count feature, we've analyzed the year that was -- using the Fix as a primary source text but linking far and wide -- to give you a handy, at-a-glance index to what happened in gossip in 2006.

It's not always pretty, and while some of what we found was predictable -- Britney Spears was the most-mentioned celebrity -- other facts may surprise you. (Drug addict/Kate Moss boy toy Pete Doherty, a personal favorite in the D-list pantheon for somehow being less stable than the old Courtney Love, got more mentions in the Fix this year than did Jennifer Aniston.) We also have a survey of the year's marriages, divorces (it will probably not come as a huge surprise that the latter far outnumbers the former) and babies, a rundown of the year's biggest fights, and all the numbers that made 2006 such a very special year in gossip.

Next page: Who got more Fix mentions, Paris or Lindsay?