Low Profiles
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Journalism Low Profiles By Andrew Ferguson If you picked up October's GQ magazine, the one with John Travolta on the cover, you probably assumed, reasonably enough, that you could read an article...
...Writers have to draw the line somewhere...
...He has met several of her beaux...
...And these nullities, these pouty-lipped zeroes-the writer has to make them interesting...
...New Journalists "penetrated the lives of their characters," just as the great realist writers of American fiction had done...
...All include dialogue-whatever the writer said to the celebrity, and vice versa...
...Sessums is too modest to come out and say it, but it's pretty clear that Meg Ryan thinks Kevin Sessums is okay-more than okay...
...he confesses that his testicles don't swing as they're supposed to...
...They discuss a book they've both read about Savannah: She didn't like it...
...Nothing works...
...I tried walking like John Travolta," Junod writes...
...Suddenly, in print, Junod offers the reader a gusher of data: The star likes iced tea, seldom drinks alcohol, often orders three desserts at a time, and uses the word "pee-pee...
...Now Sessums is talking to Meg again, about Quaid's cocaine addiction...
...A final question remains: Why do editors let them get away with it...
...I'm sorryI haven't ...' The tears won't stop...
...They are not, however, above consoling the subjects of their profiles, so long as it places them at the center of the action...
...From sex to God: This is a tough interviewer...
...They have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and of Watergate...
...Not that it would make much difference...
...You don't hear much about New Journalism anymore...
...Here at last is some solid information: John Travolta cries easily...
...And once more he assumes the journalist's burden...
...And then to be confronted by a vacuum-with-legs like . . . Keanu Reeves . . . or Brad Pitt...
...I tried rolling my shoulders...
...We are not strangers...
...It survives only in its decadent phase-as an influence, an indulgence, an excuse, a license, a husk of Wolfe's lofty ambitions...
...Why anyone would care to read about Meg Ryan or John Travolta in the first place is a separate mystery...
...they afflict the comfortable...
...And yes, over there on page 182, that is an article with the name "John Travolta" in the headline...
...That is indeed Travolta on the cover, hips jutting, fingers splayed, tongue glistening, a Creature from a Seventies Black Lagoon...
...And it is, almost without exception, a point of view that is stu-pefyingly banal...
...Journalists today are skeptical, hardheaded...
...Me neither," I say...
...This is the theme Junod wrestles with for the duration of the story...
...It is important to stipulate here, in the interests of fairness, that Ses-sums's self-references- like Tom Junod's, like the dozen other instances that appear monthly in the slicks-are wholly unnecessary...
...Carly greets me at the door," writes Marie Brenner in a Vanity Fair profile of Carly Simon...
...I'll get a [bad word for oral sex], but I cannot [bad word] unless I'm in love...
...A squib on Errol Flynn's visit to a Hollywood High football practice would neglect to mention that he was trying to seduce the quarterback...
...Open it up," Mickey says, laughing, pointing at my crotch . . . My zipper stays closed...
...Poor Tom Junod is having a heck of a time-as is the reader, who is 250 words into the story and has yet to read much of anything about John Travolta...
...And at last they've met professional success...
...Before long she is telling him about her estranged mother, "speaking out for the first time about the situation...
...They add nothing to a reader's knowledge of the celebrity being profiled, and I cling to the conviction that readers are drawn to a movie-star profile because they want to know about the movie star and not the journalist...
...Telling us about it, actually, is the point...
...The message is unmistakable...
...But there is more going on here even than this-more, even, than the poignant spectacle of puppyish hacks nuzzling up against movie stars in hopes that the glamour rubs off...
...You would have been only half-right...
...The self-referential celebrity profile is a new twist in the annals of show biz journalism...
...Done right, it required the rarest combination of gifts: heroic reporting skills on the one hand, and, on the other, a technical mastery found only in superior literary artists...
...Junod is a writer-at-large for GQ, and if you want Tom Junod to tell you about John Travolta, you're going to get an earful about Tom Junod, too...
...Junod worries that his hips aren't loose enough...
...Thus could a journalist re-create, with unprecedented vividness, events he may not have seen himself...
...I tried swinging my arms...
...I would not go near a 16-year-old girl...
...Here, then, is what remains of "the first new direction in American literature in half a century...
...I've gotta be in love to [bad word] a woman...
...but reading them is a less appealing option...
...In the March Esquire, Bill Zehme wrote a profile of Sharon Stone that revealed some data about the star, but none so important as the fact that Bill Zehme is one of her pals...
...I tried...
...More precisely, the star is teaching the writer how to duplicate the walk Travolta perfected in Saturday Night Fever...
...And so it goes: "One morning Carly telephones me, saying . . . ." "When Carly and I sit down for our first interview . . . ." "One evening Carly telephones me, saying . . . ." It is an impeccably postmodern device...
...Just the two of them...
...At its close we read: "I had interviewed him about his life, his childhood, his acting, his comeback [alas, none of this material made it into the article], and yet the interviews were never about him- somehow they were always about me...
...The journalist of tomorrow would abandon the stale constraints of old journalism and fashion his reportage into narratives by means of techniques heretofore known only to novelists: dialogue, scene-setting, the accumulation of status detail, and, most trickily of all, their characters' point-of-view...
...Then the pace of the story slows, and we're back to business-back to Tom Junod...
...He has ridden in her car...
...How about a [bad word for oral sex again...
...He is careful to render his own observations verbatim...
...To a man (or woman), they're egomaniacs...
...If John Travolta can do what he does because he is so big," Junod wonders, "then does that make everyone else . . . namely me . . . sort of, um, small...
...Are you O.K.?' I ask, crossing the room to where she has sunk into a sofa and holding her until she can regain her composure...
...The technique also, most deli-ciously, lends itself to self-aggrandizement, a quality prized by all writers...
...I have lain naked with her," he wrote in the story's lead paragraph, "only because she insisted, only because other people were present, only because I could tell you about it...
...And then they dig into that sweet potato pie...
...Tom Wolfe wrote the genre's manifesto, in 1973, with a good humor that just skirted the edges of pomposity...
...I place the sweet potato pie on the kitchen counter," he writes...
...The word went forth-a bacillus cratering through the journalism schools, infecting the ranks of aspiring freelance writers, all of them unaware that there was one minor problem with New Journalism: Not many people could pull it off...
...Junod's article begins with John Travolta giving Tom Junod a dancing lesson...
...Their production values are uniformly high, their pages so fragrant and thick and luscious it's all you can do to keep from slurping them into your mouth...
...Not just any journalist-not just any guy- can sit down with a gorgeous movie star and ask her point-blank about her husband's erections...
...If you were intimate with him, how could you not know he was snorting coke?'" Meg's answer is less important than the question itself, and the fact that Kevin asked it at all...
...So he does...
...For decades, reporting on movie stars was merely an adjunct to a movie studio's larger public relations apparatus...
...Sessums writes: "'Cocaine may harden one's heart, but it makes one, well, less hard in other places,' I venture...
...and so on...
...I told him a sad story," Junod writes, "and he cried...
...Before the reader can gauge Quaid's reaction, the scene shifts...
...With Meg safe in Kevin's arms, the story deliquesces to a gentle close...
...Is it any wonder that by the end of the story, Kevin is feeding Meg again...
...People become writers because they want to draw attention to themselves...
...And so he may be...
...Do you pray?' I ask her...
...Journalism Low Profiles By Andrew Ferguson If you picked up October's GQ magazine, the one with John Travolta on the cover, you probably assumed, reasonably enough, that you could read an article about John Travolta if you wanted...
...We learn relatively little about Sharon Stone, but the average Esquire reader-that unhappy fellow who's still trying to get his new suspenders to look like they do in the Perry Ellis ad-that guy surely comes away thinking that Bill Zehme is one lucky dude...
...After twenty or so paragraphs, Sessums sits down for a heart-to-heart with Dennis Quaid, Meg's husband, and tells him that he's very moved by the two of them...
...But the truly important words are just below: "By Tom Junod...
...For GQ readers he is something more: He is an occasion for Tom Junod to think and write about . . . Tom Junod...
...he did...
...And, hold onto your hat, he has gotten a massage with her...
...Perhaps you thought John Travolta was a famous movie actor, or a faded cultural icon, or a former sex symbol reestablishing himself as a character actor in several hit movies...
...Skip to the top of the next section of the Travolta profile...
...Back in the thirties or forties, a Photoplay profile of, say, Joan Crawford might show the psychotic star surrounded by her beleaguered children, but mom would look loving, and the kids would look happy, and MGM's photo department would have taken care to airbrush the cigarette burns from their little scalps...
...It makes the unpleasant task of constructing a narrative infinitely easier...
...A rapport is established...
...He has cooked with her...
...And all of course are drenched in point-of-view-the writer's...
...In particular, the celebrity profile-always a staple of this market-has fallen on hard times, a victim, and not the only one, of the self-referential journalist of the 1990s...
...All the upscale mass-circulation magazines seem to suffer from the same malady these days, whether GQ, Vanity Fair, Esquire, or any other of the "slicks...
...Well, thank God...
...or Nicole Kidman...
...The celebrity profile becomes a story of a writer trying to write a celebrity profile...
...They speak truth to power...
...Last spring, Kevin Ses-sums of Vanity Fair unfurled a long narrative about the ingenue Meg Ryan...
...The answer lies in the dimmest past, in New Journalism, the profoundly influential "movement" begun in the early 1960s...
...Even the most starstruck journalist would much rather write about something of intrinsic interest: "namely me," as Tom Junod would put it...
...All celebrity profiles these days set scenes- whatever scenes the writer happens to have been in...
...Hardly anybody, in fact...
...New Journalism, he said, was "the first new direction in American literature in half a century...
...We are left with such scenes and dialogue as this, from Scott Raab's profile of the sleazeball movie star Mickey Rourke, in a recent GQ: I ask him about [a] 16-year-old supermodel...
...Of course, we are not allowed to think that our present-day journalists would be a party to duping the public in this way...
...She begins to sob...
...Kevin and his movie star...
...She's hungry...
...The profile began, as profiles usually do nowadays, in medias res, with Kevin escorting Meg around downtown Savannah, Ga...
...With Wolfe and his colleagues, magazine journalism changed forever...
...She does regain her composure...
...he feeds her...
...A scoop...
...Of course the self-referential technique has its uses...
...Consider the situation the poor writer finds himself in...
...A slick magazine is paying them big money...
...I don't even [bad word for sexual intercourse...
...And if you don't like it, you can go buy another magazine with John Travolta on the cover...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 8
