celebrity gossip, academic style

(Note: this post will function as a continuation of my previous post on the importance of the banal, boring, straight-laced fan magazines of the 1950s, which you can find here.)

First, a methodological note: fan magazines are notoriously difficult to locate. Photoplay is held by several large research institutions for most of its run — mostly on microfiche, with a few smatterings of battered print copies. Other than that, there’s very little that’s been saved. The Pop Culture Library at Bowling Green University apparently has tons of stuff, but they’re mostly unsorted and not available for Inter Library Loan. Same goes for the fan mag collections at the Herrick in Los Angeles. (If you’ve been out of school for awhile, Inter Library Loan is a magic feature where you can request items from basically all of the libraries in the US and/or world….articles are scanned and arrive in your inbox as a PDF; books are sent from Biloxi Community Library, etc. etc.). So for much of my research, I go to eBay, amassing at least $500 of old, dusty copies of magazines that smell keenly of my granddad’s house. People who don’t know what they have list them for cheap — usually between a dollar and five — while people who know they have something good charge upwards of $20-$50 dollars. I now have most of Confidential from 1954-1958 (when it was published by Harrison) and random yet crucial issues of Modern Screen, Photoplay, Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, Screen Stories, etc. from the ’40s through ’80s. (People Magazine is now available in full color PDF - every issue! — on its website. Thank you, conglomerate archiving).

Collectors love Hollywood memorabilia, and fan magazines are no exceptions. There seem to be many who have amassed full collections of mint condition magazines — troves I would love to explore. (AND IF YOU HAVE A GREAT AUNT BERNIE WHO COLLECTS FAN MAGAZINES, PLEASE LET ME KNOW). They’ve also put together resources such as MovieMags.com, which, through a very elegant interface, provides full color .jpgs of hundreds upon hundreds of magazine covers, organized by magazine and year. Here’s the page of Photoplays from the 1950s; here’s Confidential; here’s Modern Screen. (You can click on them and scroll through the enlarged images….really quite marvelous).

These images help supplement what’s available to me in the form of microfiche — which are basically shadowy x-ray scans of an otherwise vibrant magazine. Have you worked with microfiche? It’s pretty much the weirdest thing ever. I’ve made some new microfiche best friends: a middle aged professor looking at John Quincy Adams’ handwritten correspondence and journals from the mid-19th century and an elderly gentleman apparently scanning all obituaries in regional newspapers in the 19th century — amateur genealogist. And me, looking at bra advertisements in fan magazines. While the process is still oddly endearing in its slow and analog-ness (spool the reel; press the forward button; look at the blown up image) many libraries (UT included) have acquired technology that allows you to scan a page-size segment of the microfiche, even several page-size segments, and turn the entire deal into a nice little PDF on the attached computer.

But even the best PDF scans still can’t make up for the fact that you’re basically making a photocopy of a photocopy; the over-darkness, the infidelity of images, it’s all pretty horrible. For example, the introductory profile of Marlon Brando in a 1950 Photoplay, entitled “That Mad Man Marlon.”

Text is usually clear — and obviously that’s what’s important — but I can only assume that the picture is what the caption tells me it is. With all that said, cross-referencing with the color photographs online, I feel like I have a solid grasp of the magazine’s format, tone, style, and changes from 1948-1960. There’s a polemic to be published somewhere about the lack of archival funds allocated to pop culture materials such as these — and once I finish this dissertation, I’d love to attempt to help host a wiki of PDFs of the fan magazines that media scholars have already purchased themselves.

But for now, I’ll just write my way through some initial findings…

THE SET-UP.

Each Photoplay I’ve looked at begins the same: the cover, a full-page ad for a popular women’s item (Lux, Playtex, Revlon), the table of contents, and a full-page ad for the latest MGM extravaganza, highlighting the film’s stars. (This is a small but crucial point — by the end of the 1950s, the studios would basically cut off most advertisement in the fan mags, citing their scandalous and immoral content…and the fact that fan magazines didn’t actually sell movie tickets. The fan magazines countered that their readers were all that was driving Hollywood, etc. etc. But the fan mags have never really recovered — at the height of the studio era, all of the major studios paid for lavish ads, basically bank-rolling at least half, if not more, of the magazine. Cut out that income….and you need a lot of make-up and soap advertisements to take their place). You can see a representative table of contents below:

Note how each article is titled something catchy and flirty, but with a very explicit parentheses to alert the reader as to the single star focus of the article. When a parentheses is absent, it’s almost always because the star him/herself is proclaimed as the ‘author’ of the post. Above you’ll see that Joan Crawford penned a column entitled “If You Want to Be Charming” — one of a series that lasted around a year, all purportedly written by the star (who, at this point in her career, basically spent a large amount of time bitching about how low-rent and crass the new crop of stars were. It reminds me of the part at the end of Almost Famous when Fairuza Balk’s character is talking about the new crop of groupies and sighs “None of them use birth control and they eat all the steak.“)

Crawford was one of several stars of Classic Hollywood who fueled their dwindling careers on nostalgia for Classic Hollywood. For example, Claudette Colbert served as the magazine’s resident Dear Abby for several years while her career rapidly faded, answering reader queries of “What Should I Do?” (The evocation of classic Hollywood is central component of ’50s era fan magazines, and one that I’ll explore at length in a future post).

The covers also promise these first-person narratives — below, for example, you’ll see that Tab Hunter offers “Advice to Teenagers” while Doris Day offers an essay on “I’m Well Again.”

The pieces themselves are always well-written. Who knew all our stars were so good with grammar and vocabulary and turns of phrase! Mostly, they’re earnest; sometimes they’re witty or tongue-in-cheek. For example, in February 1954, Janet Leigh is credited with a piece entitled “Spoil the Brute!” detailing how she caters to the whims of husband Tony Curtis: “I’m an old-fashioned wife who holds the currently unpopular opinion that a husband should be picked up after, catered to, babied, waited on and made comfortable.” The rest of the article then proceeds to underline what a slob Curtis is, gently teasing him for his silly ways — a process made all the more endearing through the use of Janet’s first person voice.

Of course, these articles were not, in fact, written by the stars. At this point, they would have been written either by the star’s ‘press agent’ (what we now refer to as P.R.), regular agent (the person who got them work, most likely at William Morris or MCA during this time), or someone at the studio, depending on whether or not the star was under contract. These individuals would most likely collaborate with Photoplay and its editors to get the tone and format right. (I have little documentation of how much oversight editors during this time exercised on pieces generated outside of the magazine, but if you have any insight, let me know).

Now, did people actually believe that the stars wrote these articles? In recent years, much work has been done in star studies to correct the notion that fans of the time were clueless as to the machinations of the studios. As Adrienne McLean convincingly demonstrates in her work on Rita Hayworth, the magazines themselves often highlighted the ways in which stars were fabricated and transformed. (Further bolstering this claim is a 6-part series in Photoplay from 1950 on ‘How to Be a Star’ that explains, in pretty faithful detail, the process of transforming ‘raw material’ into a studio star). But what about these articles? People knew that stars had been changed — their names, their hair color, their walk, their accents — but did they believe that they would deceive them in this way?

If you’ve happened upon any research or information on this, let me know. Historical reception of stars is so difficult. For Jackie Stacey’s groundbreaking work on the subject, Star Gazing, she advertised in British newspapers and magazines, asking for women to write about their experience of fandom and spectatorship during the 1940s and 1950s. She received a wealth of responses, but even those have caveats, as these women were describing their experience through the filter of time, memory, and nostalgia.

A second means of getting at reception = letters to the editor. They’re contemporaneous and responding directly to the articles themselves — and I’ve happened upon several that indicate a belief that the sentiments expressed in an article (such as Marilyn Monroe’s heartfelt, four-page realization that “I Want Women to Like Me”) were those of the star him/herself. But Photoplay editors selected the type and tenor of letters they published; while they didn’t shy from printing letters decrying certain stories, I very much doubt they’d print a letter accusing the magazine and the star of purposeful deception. The letter below is a perfect example of this sort of interplay:

Mitchum was arrested in Sept. 1948 for possession of marijuana; he declared his career dead. But after a stint in jail, a triumphant reunion with his wife and children, and some deft publicity work, including a Photoplay mea culpa, referenced above and entitled “Do I Get Another Chance?”, he became a bigger star than ever.

As Marsha Orgeron points out, it behooved the magazines to encourage a strong (and oftentimes interactive) connection between the publication and the readers:“First, the magazines encouraged readers to consider themselves valuable critics and correspondents whose opinions could impact the industry and especially the stars. Second, the magazines relentlessly promoted self-improvement, a task with clear connections to the commercial interests of their advertisers…” For example, in all the issues I’ve read, half of the letters to the editor were devoted to “Casting” — basically, fans would write in with their suggestions for who should be in a picture together, or who should star in a potential adaptation of a popular book, or who should be cast in the remake of a classic (such as Gone with the Wind). Every month, dozens of suggestions.

The imagined connection between reader and star — that the star could speak directly to the fan; that the fan could voice his/her reply in fanmail — functioned in this very way. Of course, Photoplay editors selected the type and tenor of letters they published; while they didn’t shy from printing letters decrying certain stories, I very much doubt they’d print a letter accusing the magazine and the star of purposeful deception.

So I could fixate on this — and try to prove that people did or did not believe that the stars were writing them. Basically I’d be spending a long time proving that there’s no real way to get at the way that actual fans responded and thought and felt in the actual moment, and that’d be my conclusion. But I think it’s more productive to think about the fact that the magazines and the stars themselves thought it was a smart idea to perpetuate the illusion.

I mean two things by this: most obviously, the first person narrative connotes authenticity; a story would not only make the singular star appear more real, sincere, down-to-earth, loyal-to-fans, etc., but it would also help reinforce Photoplay‘s reputation as the most direct link to the stars. Orgeron touches on this — fans really want to believe that what they think can influence what happens in the films. Photoplay would authenticate that belief not only through first person narratives (the stars really want to tell you the truth!) but also through polls “Do you Want Ingrid Bergman back?” (Answer: 75% did; Photoplay pledged to serve as trusted ambassador of the results to Bergman herself). The magazine also held a yearly “You Pick the Stars” contest, asking readers to read bios and photos of a select group of up-and-coming stars. While many of the chosen ones never made their way to stardom, several previous winners — Ava Gardner, Kim Novak — are amongst the most renowned of the period…a point Photoplay is keen to remind its readers. The reader is rhetorically endowed with the power to influence the industry at large - at the same moment that his/her loyalty to Photoplay as the intermediary between the two is reified.

So what’s going on here? Building on the ideas of intimacy and Photoplay as the foremost in Hollywood publications, I want to think of these features in terms of the magazine’s attempts to fashion an ideal fan magazine reader — and an ideal fan-magazine-star relationship. This ideal reader would be wholly invested in the stars — and interested in them as people, interested in reading their human concerns, not just seeing their clothes. Along these lines, this reader will believe in the importance of a star’s personal morality: for these readers, what the star does and says in her personal life matters. A lot.

Now why would this be important? Pretty simple: if fans are interested in private lives, the magazines can generate (and recycle) an endless amount of material, detailing stars’ biographies, children, love lives, religious views, etc. etc. The moment that fans become disinterested in the persona lives of stars — instead focusing on (gasp!) actual performances — would signal the end of the fan and gossip market. You can only generate a finite amount of speculation over a character in a film — and a star only plays a limited amount of characters in any given year. In this way, the entire gossip industry is dependent upon fans caring about what the stars do and say.

This seems like a bit of an obvious point, but I think I take it for granted. The star-penned articles simultaneously create a demand — and feed it — for first hand access to the stars’ private lives. The more the star discloses, the more you want to know, the more you’ll be willing, as a fan, to write in and ask for more. In essence, these articles, as laughably forged as they may seem today, are the most perfect manifestation of this ideal studio-fan agreement: the studio promises to give you stars, shining and beautiful and moral new, if you promise to believe in and care about and consume them.

The star-penned articles, along with the ‘casting suggestions,’ disappeared slowly, just as the classical star system itself trickled slowly away. Photoplay attempted to change with the times, adopting the sensational tactics of the tabloids through the course of the 1960s, but it continued to lose readership: to Confidential in the ’50s, to The National Enquirer in the late ’60s and ’70s, to People starting in 1974. While larger industrial shifts in publishing are somewhat responsible, I believe that what really changed was the tacit agreement between those who made the stars and those who consumed them. As the Hays Code slipped into oblivion, the films themselves became more risque, with actors performing theretofore unspeakable deeds, including kissing horizontally. And as the stars refused and/or failed to cover their drunken or sexual tracks, it became more difficult for readers to ‘buy’ the illusions sold by the fan magazines. The scale was out of whack. Stars seemingly cared less; gave less. And the fans reciprocated: not by abandoning stars, per se, but by allowing themselves to believe the worst of their former idols. As always, it wasn’t that the stars of the 1950s and 1960s (or today) are necessarily more scandalous than the stars of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s that the cover-up was poorer….and that the fans, after the slow and silent breaking of the former agreement, were ready to believe the worst.

We might call the new agreement the “right to scandal.” Libel laws were substantially revised in 1964, opening the floodgates for what could be speculated and published concerning a public persona. The new fan didn’t agree to believe the best in return for personal information; rather, she agreed to believe the worst, especially so long as the star proved uncooperative. The more indignant a star becomes about her lack of privacy, the more the fan believes he/she has the right to read speculation about that so-called private sphere.

The question, then, is how to connect this shift to other cultural currents in the 1950s - 1970s…..? Ideas? I’ve thought of the general disillusionment concerning privacy and secrecy post-Watergate, but that’s a little late.