celebrity gossip, academic style

Note: The post that follows is yet another except from the seemingly unending dissertation — this time focusing on the fan magazines in the 1960s and the fixation on Jackie Kennedy. If you’re interesting in learning more about the bombastic writings of Irving Schulman, quoted at length below, please consult my earlier post.

In 1969, screenwriter, Hollywood insider, and burgeoning media scholar Irving Schulman was fed up. He had surveyed the moral and cultural landscape and found it in crisis. The cause? Fan magazines. More specifically, the exploitation of the former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, soon to be Onassis, at the hands of these magazines. To articulate this argument, Shulman surveyed hundred of fan magazines, culled quotes, interviewed past and present authors in the industry, and conducted extensive, if flawed, ethnographic research of fan magazine readers. He stalked readers at supermarkets, formed focus groups, and corresponded with stars, studio executives, and editors at the trades, all in an effort to understand what was powering the industry. His conclusions was nearly as bombastic as the magazines headlines he decried. To his mind, the fan magazines were

considerably more than a trifling symptom of American malaise, and this symptom could explain the American public’s conditioned acceptance of such obscenities as genocide, favorable kill ratio, nuclear fallout, murder, a geometric increase of violent felonies, starvation, slums, denigration of the human condition, fine print in consumer contracts, demagoguery, venality and stupidity in public office, and a spate of social violences which imprison juveniles in a delinquent society of adults.

All that was wrong with the world, then, could be traced back to the fan magazines and the attitudes and ethics they represented.

Shulman was not some hack yelling on the figurative street corner. His book, Jackie: The Exploitation of a First Lady, was reviewed in the New York Times and Variety and it is still widely available today. The book’s thesis, however jaundiced, articulated a generalized frustration with the fan and celebrity culture which, over the course of the ‘60s, had reached a fever pitch, with “Jackie,” Liz Taylor, and Richard Burton at its center. Paparazzi stalked celebrities’ every move; magazines had never been more suggestive or declamatory. Taylor and Burton gallivanted around the world on their yacht, milking studios dry with their excess. And all of this against the backdrop of seismic cultural change, both in American and abroad. The enduring interest of the fan magazines in Jackie’s love life, compared with the Prague Spring or May 1968, seemed, to many cultural critics, an indication of how trivial and unengaged the majority of Americans remained.

For decades, the fan magazines, and the cult of fandom they attracted, seemed relatively harmless, toeing the same line of respectability and morality as the movie industry at large. But by the late ‘60s, the trajectory set in motion in the late ‘50s, when the magazines expanded their coverage beyond Hollywood stars, had reached its inevitable end point. The magazines now focused on a combination of celebrities, stars with no studio affiliation, and personalities from the world of television and music. As neither Kennedy nor Taylor would willingly provide material, editors relied wholly on the tactics first refined in the late ‘50s: photo decoupage, suggestive and scandalous headlines, paparazzi photography, fabricated “theoretical” dialogue, and borrowed quotes from interviews with other sources. The innocuous fan magazines had become full-fledged scandal rags, and sales had never been better.

It was this economic imperative that most enraged Shulman and the like-minded critics. The more outrageous and inappropriate the coverage, the more people bought it. To critics, these magazines enflamed the most prurient of human desires; they made deviance and “poor taste” quotidian reading material, visible at every supermarket check-out, coffee table, and beauty parlor. The pathology of smut, once isolated to the likes of Confidential, had spread throughout the entire industry, even infiltrating non-fan publications. Confidential’s tactics and tone, once the exception, were now the rule.

JACKIE FEVER!

In September, 1961, Photoplay’s cover proclaimed Jacqueline Kennedy as “America’s Newest Star.” This declaration was the culmination of months of coverage, both on the part of the fan magazines and popular journalistic outlets. The young, handsome President and his young, glamorous wife were a perfect antidote to the dowdy Eisenhowers — finally, American royalty to match the monarchies of Europe.

The beginning of JFK & Jackie Fascination -- All the way back in 1953

Over the course of the President Kennedy’s first year in office, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Life, Look, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Nation, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Time, Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, and dozens of other publications published profiles of the first couple.

At once glamorous, domestic, and political, the Kennedys were equally at “home” in news, fashion, women’s, general interest, and fan magazines.

American Royalty

The White House attempted to quell attempts to use the first family as subjects for gossip. In July 1961, the Associated Press had released a bulletin declaring Kennedy “the nation’s top feminine star.” The “chic First lady,” according to the AP, “has supplanted Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and other movie queens as the idol of young girls.” Soon thereafter, The Washington Post reported the President’s “horror” at the “growing number of tasteless fan magazine articles.” Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, had notified the magazines of the president’s “displeasure,” but to no avail. As one unnamed editor proclaimed, “we plan to go on writing about stars, not only of the screen but of life itself.”

Photoplay understood the gravity of declaring Kennedy a star, and attempted to nip reader critique in the bud with an editorial in the October issue. “We fully expect there will be those who, on seeing Jacqueline Kennedy on the cover of PHOTOPLAY, will shake their heads in righteous shock….We can just hear the members of Hollywood’s grown-and-gripe brigade popping off with, ‘Isn’t it just terrible to what lengths some editors will go?’” Yet Photoplay did not view their decision as a publicity stunt. Rather, “Photoplay has always, in its fifty years of publishing, been proud of its reputation for tastefulness and beauty. For our part, we cannot understand how we could have ignored Jackie Kennedy, a woman who is, today, the symbol or tastefulness and beauty.”

As for the contention that a star must hail from Hollywood, Photoplay’s defense is a work of rhetorical genius. The “star system is dead,” the editors admit, but “stardom in not” — it “transcends professions, countries, races, and creeds.” Stardom is not simply a matter of being an entertainer; rather, it has “a light of its own.” Further, stardom is “the light of individuals who — in their very bodies and souls — have the radiance of everybody else’s dreams.” To prove this point, the editors offer a comparative list: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a star; Harry Truman was not…Grace Kelly and Greta Garbo, both retired, are still stars; Jo Van Fleet and Julie Harris, who are not retired and who are brilliant actresses, will never be movie stars.” Under this rubric, Jacqueline Kennedy is “the complete star.” She does not merely “exude beauty, glamor, and excitement,” but embodies it.

The cover article, “America’s Newest Star!”, further elaborates this argument. The author cites an “unofficial definition” of star as “a person whose private life is always public, whose every word and action may be publicized and criticized.” Kennedy yet again fits the description perfectly: “like a star, whatever she wears is copied. Like a star, whatever she says — on child upbringing or politics — is discussed and analyzed. And like a star, she lives in a goldfish bowl.” Kennedy’s status as a star thus stems from two qualities: an inherent, intangible star-like light, and the non-stop fascination with and scrutiny of her life. A social theorist would call the first quality charisma, and is, as the Photoplay editors point out, a quality shared by select politicians, military leaders, public speakers, and entertainers.

The second quality, however, is somewhat more circular. To wit: Kennedy is star because people demand and consume discourse about her. However, a significant catalyst for that demand is the initial existence of coverage. One taste, and the appetite is whetted. The argument might be reworded to claim “a person is a star because we say she is star.” Which, recall, is exactly what Photoplay had just done, just as they had made stars of hundreds of young men and women before, regardless of the presence of actual charisma, skill, or pre-existing demand for information about them. If the fan magazine editors could, in collaboration with the studios, make stars of Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, and dozens of others, so too could they make Kennedy a star — simply by putting her in their pages. In 1961, as throughout the history of Hollywood, an actor became a star because she was sold as one, both in the filmed and gossip products in which she appeared.

The decision to declare Kennedy a star, therefore, was predicated on economics. The fan magazines had increasingly turned to teen idols, rock ‘n’ roll singers, and television stars in the late ‘50s not only because such figures were more cooperative, but also out of necessity. There simply were not enough major film stars left, and Debbie Reynolds, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis could fill only a certain modicum of pages. By turning to Kennedy, the magazines opened up an entirely new source of content, replete with the sort of mass appeal usually possessed by only the most charismatic of stars. What’s more, information about her was seemingly endless. For while Kennedy never sat for an interview with any of the fan magazines or posed for a photo, she was, as the result of her position as wife to the president of the United States, constantly on display. Unlike film, television, and music stars, whose popularity was based both on displays of talent and attention to personal lives, the text of Kennedy’s star was her life. Put differently, Jackie Kennedy’s public life was the performance; her skill at handling the pressure her talent. The editors’ decision to cover her was, at least at the time, inspired. But, as we shall see, followed to its logical conclusion, it altered the industry, and what was expected of it, to such an extent that it rendered Photoplay and the fan magazine obsolete.

When Photoplay put Kennedy on its cover, it opened the gossip floodgates. In addition to four additional appearances on the cover of Photoplay, the first lady appeared on multiple covers of Modern Screen and Motion Picture over the course of 1962. At first, stories focused on documenting her family, her romance with John, and their cosmopolitan lifestyle: “Jacqueline Kennedy’s Christmas Plans” “Jacqueline Kennedy’s Complete Life Story” , “From Shirley Temple to Caroline Kennedy: America Falls in Love Again!” and “Happy Anniversary: A Diary of 9 Years of Love and Marriage.”

During this period, Kennedy’s media visibility also increased. The First Lady led a tour, broadcast in primetime, of the White House in February 1962; the next month, a good will trip to India and Pakistan was heavily documented in photos and print. Positive Kennedy Kennedy coverage was at saturation.

Kennedy during her goodwill trip to India

To provide product differentiation, the fan magazines began to tint their coverage with hint of scandal or mild titillation, employing the selfsame tactics with which they mediated the Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and other stars. By the end of 1962, headlines exclaimed “Minister Attacks Jackie! Has she gone too far — or has he?”, “Exposed! The Threat to Jacqueline Kennedy and Her Family,” and “Jackie’s Daring Photos That Started Talk.”

Just as most of the promised revelations concerning Hollywood stars turned out to be highly innocuous, so too with even the most scandalous Kennedy-related headlines. A Motion Picture cover story asking “How Long Can They Hide the Truth From Caroline Kennedy?” for example, wondered how long Caroline’s parents could “hide the truth” that she was a celebrity.

Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 did not mark the end of Jackie Kennedy’s celebrity. Rather, it extended it, even to the point of her death in 1994. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the magazines were sympathetic, cultivating a mournful tone in their description of how the former First Lady and her children would cope with their loss.

By the end of 1964, Kennedy’s actions became fodder for negative gossip, where anxiety concerning appropriate behavior as a widow and mother could be hashed out. Kennedy was critiqued for her parenting, for her choice of companions, for taking her children out of America to vacations, and for moving on too quickly. Even articles in ostensible defense of Kennedy critiqued her. In Photoplay’s 1965 feature, “We Say: End the Indecent Attacks on Jackie,” author Jim Hoffman bemoans others’ critiques as “etched in acid and venom, framed in envy and spite.” Yet Hoffman then charges Kennedy with a litany of offenses: she “took a two-week vacation from her children — and away from the U.S.,” she “plans to live abroad permanently,” she “allegedly wanted ‘privacy’ but exposed herself to publicity by involving her brother-in-law Bobby’s campaign,” she “pledged to spend a year in mourning [but] began dating again before the first anniversary of her husband’s death, and even plans to marry again.”

Stories oscillated between affection and disgust, but all expressed extreme investment in the First Lady’s everyday actions, regularly inviting readers to express their opinion concerning Kennedy’s behavior, potential suitors, and even the design of her wedding dress. Her presence on the cover could mean the difference between profitability and loss; as one magazine editor explained, “I try to have Jackie on the cover every month…if you take Jackie off your cover and put someone else on, sales go down.” The magazines generated material much in the same way they did for other stars: “an assembly line of writers, editors and researchers” would borrow from other stories, read recent biographies, and seek out sources, such as former dressmakers and butlers, with some “Jackie morsel” to convey.

These “Jackie Factories,” as one Los Angeles Times article termed them, were almost entirely self-sufficient, and could conceivably continue to produce material for years, even without new public appearances or interviews to serve as grist for the gossip mill.

Kennedy’s coverage “competition” was Elizabeth Taylor — another woman whose life had become a rhetorical grounds on which cultural anxieties and judgements could be levied.
I’ll be going in depth on Liz: her involvement in the infamous love “triangle” involving Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, her “near-death” bout with pneumonia, her miraculous recovery and acceptance of the Academy Award for Best Actress, and, most lastingly,“Le Scandale”between her and Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra. Lusty Liz, coming soon…