Brooke Shields shows that fame can last

Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience delivers the news that Lindsay Lohan Is Here to Stay: Fame Not Fleeting, Study Finds.

Fifteen minutes of fame? More like 15 years.

Once a celebrity claws their way to the top, they're unlikely to get knocked off the pedestal, a new study finds. In fact, 96 percent of people mentioned in newspapers more than 100 times in a given year were already famous three years before.

"There is almost a consensus among scholars in the field of the sociology of fame, that most fame is ephemeral," study researcher Eran Shor of McGill University said in a statement. "What we've shown here that is truly revolutionary is that the people who you and I would consider famous, even the Kim Kardashians of this world, stay famous for a long time. It doesn't come and go."

I'm including this not only as an example of the science of celebrity, nor to join James Howard Kunstler in bemoaning celebrity culture as part of the "Consensus Trance,"* but because I have my own experience with the longevity of fame.

Back in 1979 or 1980, I was already getting tired of Brooke Shields and wondered when I would no longer have to see her on my TV screen. Then I saw her as a guest on a Bob Hope Special in a context with a full range of women who were still considered attractive and famous enough to be on TV then. Some of them were pushing 50, if not past it. I then realized that there would be men lusting after Brooke Shields well into the 21st Century, so I might as well get used to her.

I was right to tell myself that. More than 30 years later, she's still with us as a celebrity, although HollyScoop describes she had help in Why Brooke Shields Didn't Become A Tragic Child Star.

Brooke Shield's reveals the trick that kept her from walking down the path of Hollywood destruction.

Shields' career still has life in it, as HollyScoop points out in Brooke Shields: The New 'View' Co-Host?

Brooke Shields could be the next woman to try to fight over other talking women. Yep, she is in talks to join The View.

May she be more successful than Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who ended her career the same way she started it, by being voted off the island!

*In his latest missives of DOOM, Kunstler has replaced Jennifer Lopez, who he mentioned in "The End of Suburbia" as a subject of popular fascination, with Kim Kardashian, so it's only fitting she'd be mentioned in this study.