Most of your friends don’t like you very much

The only trouble, writes Rob Long, is it is hard to know which ones

In an unlikely pairing, Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart are to present a cooking show. That's nothing, claims Rob Long (Photo by Rich Fury/Invision/AP, File)

Martha Stewart is the world-famous queen of home decorating and entertaining. She’s known for her prim and highly-controlled public persona and her obsession with details. She is probably responsible for the stressed-out looks on housewives and hostesses all over the world, who attempt to live up to her exacting standards with minimal success.

Snoop Dogg – the Los Angeles-native rapper and recording artist – is famous for being as close to the opposite of Martha Stewart as possible. He’s a casual, sloppy, shambling figure – he speaks in his own special patois, and has never once expressed an interest in arranging flowers for an attractive centerpiece or the correct spoon to use with sorbet.

And yet, showbusiness creates unlikely friendships. Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are, according to all reports, friends. They are close enough, in fact, to be starring in a reality television show together, in which the unlikely pair host a dinner party with celebrity guests, give cooking instructions, and where (one can only hope) Snoop Dogg makes a fun floral centerpiece.

This friendship seems strange, and probably entirely made-up, only to people outside of the entertainment industry. Inside the bubble that encloses much of the New York and Los Angeles media-opolis, it makes perfect sense. Famous people may have little else in common other than fame, but that’s often enough.

The paparazzi and publicly machines that surround well-known people act, in a way, like celebrity sheepdogs, herding the famous and the infamous together into a tightly-formed knot of bold-faced names. It’s only natural that, say, Elton John and rapper Eminem – two people who might otherwise have very little to say to each other -– would be (as has been reported) SMS buddies.

And there's a certain logic to the story that Harry Styles from One Direction would be chums with Zach Braff, the star of the television show Scrubs. They're all famous together, which makes them different from you and me.

Of course, friends, like romantic partners, break up occasionally. The sold-out nightclub appearances of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, back in the 1950s, did nothing to keep those friends from a bitter split. The Top-10 pop hits of Simon & Garfunkel back in the early 1970s didn’t keep those old friends together, either. And fans are keenly curious about the status of Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s long-time close relationship. Still pals? What’s the deal?

Hollywood – and probably every other business, if you really think about it – is what people call a “relationship business”. People in this industry like to work with their friends, and in the media business, “friends” can have a very elastic meaning. There is an almost chilling photograph floating around the internet showing a beaming Bill and Hillary Clinton, both dressed in their formal best, embracing an ebullient Donald and Melania Trump on their wedding day. At the time the image was snapped, of course, all four were a merry and mutually-supportive quartet. Now, well, not so merry.

The question arises: were they ever really friends?

Alex Pentland, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently completed a study which revealed some disturbing statistics. Barely half of all friendships are mutual. When he asked a group of people to rank each other in terms of the closeness of their friendship, they only matched up 53 per cent of the time. In other words, the people you think of as your close friends may not (and statistically, do not) think of you the same way.

It gets worse: in the survey, a subject who reported a “close friendship” with a person who did not reciprocate was 94 per cent more likely to expect the opposite. The study managed to deliver two uneasy messages to the socially paranoid: one, a lot of your friends probably don’t like you that much; and two, you have no idea which ones do and which ones don’t.

Clearly, Donald and Melania and Hillary and Bill are evidence that this study is sound science. It’s hard to look at that famous photograph and not think that these guys are really close. Now, as the world knows, at least two of those people are at each others’ throats. Which one got it wrong?

Or, perhaps, it’s really the opposite. It’s not certain that those four ever were true buddies, just as it’s not totally settled that Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg were friends first and reality show co-stars second. A study of friendship in Hollywood and in politics may yield vastly different results than the one conducted at MIT, among the unfamous and unknown.

Perhaps the celebrity-based study would reveal that something closer to 100 per cent of the celebrity subjects surveyed disliked their celebrity friends 100 per cent of the time and were 100 per cent certain that their famous friends felt the same way.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl