Before the insistent voice of Billy Mays had thoroughly embedded itself in my consciousness, I overheard a 12-year-old refer to the direct-response TV pitchman as “some clean freak.” Even pre-adolescent sophisticates who have grown up with media—especially pre-adolescent sophisticates who have grown up with media?—have difficulty separating the roles actors play from the actors themselves.

Well, who these days can? By the time Mays died last week, he had begun to star in a Discovery Channel documentary series, “Pitchmen,” in which an otherwise unremarkable man known to the public only for selling commercial products had become a kind of commercial product himself. As is increasingly the case, show biz turns ever inward and becomes its own subject. Figuring out where reality ends and something else begins becomes completely impossible. More disturbing still, it becomes impossible to understand or explain the difference between the two. The exercise itself becomes absurd.

MSNBC, a few days after his death, called Mays a “pop culture icon,” which he surely had become. This, for more and more Americans, seems to be an end in itself, but there are considerable risks involved in the pursuit of such hollow notoriety. The sad story of Michael Jackson, a genuinely talented individual thoroughly crushed in the mint of fame, is plenty proof of that.

Still and all, there’s something charmingly and reassuringly American in the fact that a college drop-out who sold dubious what-nots on the Atlantic City boardwalk could become such a success and provide so well for his family. At the time of his death, Mays had ensconced himself and his wife in a $1.8 million house. Good for him.

But you do have to wonder what price he paid. The cause of death seems to have been sudden cardiac arrest and, if Mays was anything like the hard-charging loudmouth he played on TV, this was, as they say, a heart attack waiting to happen.