Vanity Fare
Boo, Katherine
Vanity Fare by Katherine Boo By reaching for the stars, general interest magazines have stayed alive. Too bad they've lost a reason for living. In the April issue of Esquire,...
...In an age when more young people "followed closely" the breakup of Donald and Ivana than the breakup of Drexel Burnham Lambert, more space spent on stars means less on everything else...
...When she faced it and got secure enough in it, she could make movies that made other people confront it, too...
...Instead, John Sack's excellent reporting from Saudi Arabia in the April Esquire was billed second to Phil Weiss and Ellen Barkin...
...Incredibly superficial...
...A bad movie...
...Sharper ideas, impertinence or sauciness . . . whatever [is] necessary to get attention so that the service then could do its work...
...The Alter piece illustrates a critical difference between the general interest magazine of '68 and of '91: the debasing of real life, the inflation of life on the reel...
...The mass-market magazines could ride the vector and specialize...
...In any other setting—a federal office, a corporate boardroom, the locker room of the University of Texas—it might have been an act of foolish, even fatal, bravado...
...Weiss's struggle to get the boob scoop from the actress makes a funny read about the mechanics of the celebrity interview...
...W]e were the most mistrustful of power and the least nationalist of any generation that America has produced," Styron asserted...
...Celebrities, in other words, are the new lodestars of American values...
...there were 500 new ones last year alone, from Crochet Celebrations to the bawdy Outlaw Biker...
...While magazine covers are, first and foremost, a way to sell magazines, they're also a window into an editor's soul, a gauge of what point he's trying to make with his product...
...When she resists—criticizing the studios, speculating on the emotional life of the waitress— Weiss can't control his impatience...
...Most publicists don't need to issue contracts to cover such arrangements...
...There's almost no institutional support for truthful journalistic pieces anymore," says another Hollywoodbased writer...
...I want a little narrative...
...Rainforest crunch The Hollywood press pack makes a fine case study in source journalism run amok...
...This month, for example, he's hoping David Letterman will lure you into an essay on sentimentality in the nineties...
...If that sounded like Plato, it would read more like People, which had emerged from the seventies as the decade's most successful new magazine...
...But thanks to TV, far fewer of them are reading...
...Yet Life was no mere compendium...
...Consider this memo, intercepted by Spy, from Tina Brown to Creative Artists Agency chief Mike Ovitz, the most powerful agent in Hollywood: Right now, the most hackneyed prevailing perception of you is as a "packager," a term which has a connotation of crassness that has little to do with what you actually achieve on a daily basis...
...One is the almost wordless, 30-page "Women We Love" spread, featuring actresses, rock stars, agents, and a handful of real people...
...But even this didacticism had an up side...
...McDonell insists the purpose was not artfulness, but art: "I stand by the picture," he says...
...and his dad's relationship to the Nazi party...
...But it also illustrates a troubling relationship between substance and celebrity in today's general interest magazines...
...He called back a few days later, from L.A...
...Demographers tell us the profile of mass-market readers is the same as it was in 1950: young, most without college degrees, with a median household income now at about $35,000...
...The subject is the Kennedys...
...In another forum, Phil Weiss's piece might have been a clever bit of criticism, an obituary for the mass-market magazine in which serious work buffeted, even prevailed over, the idiosyncracies of the stars...
...And you need movie stars...
...While lots of things you say are long paragraphs— they're Ellen Barkin, social critic—I have to break this up for the reader," he advises her at one point...
...The overly hopeful might suggest that, by renouncing real life for celebrity spreads, today's American mass-market editors are writing themselves a ticket to obsolescence, as the stars to which they've hitched their wagons fade...
...Sorry it took so long," he said cheerfully...
...While the writer had no doubt that the producer, entrusted with tens of millions of dollars, was carrying around a serious addiction, all indications of it were left out of the story...
...The answer, explains Terry McDonell, was yes...
...And Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, and Cher are just the sleekest of the hundreds of horses in Ovitz's stable...
...Amid the mass quantities of Americana between its covers were regular glimpses of the editor's simple anticommunist cosmology...
...When asked why so many celebrities, Esquire editor Terry McDonell protests, "I just came from a meeting where they told me I'm not doing enough...
...I think things are changing," says McDonell, heartened by the fact that earlier this year a George Bush cover sold almost as well as Ellen Barkin...
...3) He actually is a mess—that's why we love him...
...The New Yorker, that redoubtable franchise, began adding miniprofiles of theater, music, and dance personalities to the squint-print nightlife listings at the front of the book...
...It seems to me that a better term for your role in the life of Hollywood would be a catalyst: activating creativity by a gifted sense of talent, material, timing, and taste...
...But wait a minute," says a skeptical Schiff at one point, driving for the truth...
...But for better or worse, people feel celebrities can touch their lives...
...Yet despite editors' protestations, the Variety virus has an uncanny way of infecting even noble endeavors...
...Not to be confused with February's Ted Turner/Jane Fonda headline: "Some Couples Are a Perfect Match...
...It's like the pool coverage during the war," says Kim Masters, a former magazine writer who now covers Hollywood from the outback of the The Washington Post, "only there's no war...
...What happened...
...Absolutely nothing...
...by comparison, the White House press corps looks like an investigative team from the Village Voice...
...Tinier Esquire hawked three celebrities on its cover in 1961, one—Joe Namath—in 1971, and none a decade later...
...Make nice with Nazis Editors peddling a general interest magazine in today's market deserve merit badges just for surviving...
...he occasionally even writes for magazines like The Washington Monthly...
...He commissioned Gore Vidal to make Ralph Nader, his eccentricities and his drive, palpable to tens of thousands of 22-year-olds to whom he might otherwise have been nothing but a name...
...Or they could change their roles altogether...
...In August's Vanity Fair, the writer of a story on Daryl Gates, the L.A...
...And Lucian self-confidence gave way to economic terror...
...Real to reel In 1968, William Styron wrote eloquently in Esquire about his own "Silent Generation," grown up in the depression, horrified by World War II, wearied by Korea...
...James Spader and John Cusack, the stars, were available for interviews, and their faces would sell the cover...
...The spoilsport exegete might consider the in-between of, say, the August Esquire, with its requisite celebrity—Jennifer Connelly, star of three weak movies—on the cover...
...We use celebrities as fronts"—recognizable symbols employed to draw readers into more substantive pieces...
...Elizabeth Kaye's Palm Beach reportage on the Kennedys is all that separates this Esquire from People...
...Photoplay, Silver Screen, and Movie Mirror were mesmerizing housewives and teenagers as soon as there were movies to hype...
...its covers featured such postdebs as Francine Du Plessix Gray...
...In this year's "Women We Love," tucked between Jamie Lee Curtis in fishnet and Daryl Hannah in pasties, is an insurance policy taken out by the editors of Esquire: a group portrait of the female staff of LA's International Creative Management agency, women charged with packaging hundreds of future stars...
...I hated that story," Dominick Dunne later said of the Daryl Hannah piece, which, as it happened, he wrote...
...The actress's one-day walk-off from the set is portrayed as a personal epiphany, and veteran director Robert Towne's vital summary of his dealings with the actress—"Of all the actresses I have worked with in Hollywood, going back a lot of years, to my earliest days, Michelle was the most difficult"—is tucked parenthetically into the middle of the story...
...What you don't understand," he explains patiently, "is that movie star writing is partly glamour writing...
...I'm ambivalent about it...
...In the last year, Esquire's gone 8 for 12 in the all-star game...
...Number two is a humor piece written, presumably with help, by a child star of the seventies, the Partridge Family's prodigal Danny Bonaduce...
...Probably no one since Thalberg has seeded so many creative partnerships or brought so many movies to the screen...
...Charles Fleming, a writer for Weekly Variety, describes reporting a piece on Arnold Scwarzenegger for Time last year...
...But Hinson's conclusion, "I left her house thinking that the only thing wrong with Michelle Pfeiffer is Michelle Pfeiffer," has the ring, not of journalism, but of shilling...
...celebrity...
...In April, the cover was Madonna, but several stories inside addressed the subject of the Middle East...
...Phil wants to talk about Ellen's body...
...Talese took on Sinatra and lesser mortals...
...In 1988, a "reformatted" Time added a "Critic's Choice" section on movies, TV, and music and doubled the size of a column called "People...
...1) He thinks he's a mess but he's not...
...When Winston Churchill peddled his war memoirs, Luce was first in line...
...As more and more middle-class people disengage from politics, public schools, the deficit, and a hundred other aspects of real life, might mass-market print leaders try a little harder to help us face America's problems instead of serving up another paean to Kevin Costner...
...When I talked to Kevin Costner, our conversation was about how to live...
...When you read the news, so much of it doesn't really touch your life," observes Jesse Kornbluth, himself ambivalent about the celebrity phenomenon...
...I wanted to ask his opinion...
...Within a year, it had crashed mightily on the newsstand...
...Among the Hollywood press, a more informal arrangement obtains...
...Somehow, toward the end, the auteur finds himself writing the requisite wet kiss to the star...
...Besides the ubiquitous celebrations of madonnas and whores, theme issues focused on such unlibidinous topics as black separatism, leaps in reproductive technology, and the death of American avant-garde theater (a gleeful obituary...
...Might they strive to find some middle ground between selling and selling out...
...In fact, that's the point...
...Three years later, Esquire named Siegal one of its annual "Women We Love...
...Network TV viewing is declining, as cable fractures the medium into a thousand unreflecting pieces...
...It's much better to try and make alliances with the people who affect your destiny...
...The question brings us back to Phil Weiss...
...The others vivified such stuff as atomic warfare, the Korean front, Texas football, and children of poverty to an audience of 10 million people...
...With the rise of the VCR, mass moviegoing—despite the slicks' relentless cross-pollination—has stagnated...
...Sure, most of us are susceptible to the celebrity seduction—of preferring Havel on Jagger to Havel on Yeltsin...
...Isn't Havel a little more celebrity crazy than he's willing to admit...
...Such amiability has clearly paid off...
...1) He thinks he's a mess but he's not...
...It buys you the ability to do uninfected—if you will—editorial...
...How widespread is the conspiracy...
...Granted, astute analysis of what Michelle Pfeiffer is really like is probably not a priority of nineties journalism...
...But should economics be the only spur...
...By the mid-eighties, the point most of the general interest covers were making was celebrity—minimal spin, maximum starpower...
...The author, the usually acid-penned Washington Post critic Hal Hinson, finds himself suspending disbelief...
...It was about offering them something they didn't know—yet—they should care about...
...While he continued to tap unapologetically into Hollywood for titillation— Janet Leigh, Grace Kelly, and Eva Gabor were fifties constants—his covers formed a pastiche of critical moments in American life: Korea, Sputnik, the Kennedys, Castro, the H-bomb, Vietnam, the urban racial crisis...
...Vanity Fair, the standardbearer, is batting 1.000...
...One subject, several years back, was New York Times reporterturnedinvestment banker Steven Rattner, who traded his $50,000 salary for more than $1 million, uneasily abdicating his idealism in the process...
...If you do something nasty about a celebrity, you won't lose ads, you'll lose something even more crucial—the cooperation of a small, closed, almost monopolistic industry...
...You carefully place your hatchet jobs," acknowledges one writer...
...2) Lots of other people think he's a mess but he's not...
...He had the best-selling debut in history...
...2) Lots of other people think he's a mess but he's not...
...The movie has problems," Alter wrote, before noting that "Cusack, 25, and Spader, 31, deliver the quality work that is turning both of them into big stars...
...A long time ago, before Tina Brown was ever born, Henry Luce grasped the exploitative potential of the celebrity—second on his scale only to photos of corpses, executions, and other necrobilia...
...many of the royal princesses are porky...
...Did editors rally 'round the writer in the name of journalistic integrity...
...He wouldn't turn Mick Jagger away at the door...
...What could possess Tina Brown, editor of one of the most successful magazines in the business, to compromise herself so plainly...
...And last, there's a piece in Esquire's ancient journalistic tradition...
...That sort of editing wasn't premised on giving readers purely what they clamored for...
...his friendship with Kurt Waldheim...
...And there was one thing they had to grill him about mercilessly: his appointment to the President's Council on Physical Fitness...
...At the height of Vietnam, Esquire's Harold Hayes gave Michael Herr license to draft the seminal antiwar piece, Dispatches, in his pages...
...In the long, hot summer of '69, he printed a sympathetic portrait of a wizard of the KKK...
...This May, Newsweek's media critic, Jonathan Alter, chronicled another generation for Esquire—the "Nowhere Generation" of cynical twentysomethings who grew up after Vietnam...
...General interest magazines found themselves, more often than not, losing...
...Perhaps, instead of shaping mass taste, a general interest magazine could reflect it—or rather, reflect those reflections, movies and TV...
...Which may or may not explain why last month, in a story about the furor over the allegedly homophobic movie Basic Instinct, Ovitz appeared briefly but heroically in an article critical of his archenemy, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas...
...Perhaps, as those dominant media continue to splinter, diminishing the power of the mass-market icon, some editor might try to expand the horizons of the general interest magazine again, bringing middle-class readers more reality, less dream...
...In the April issue of Esquire, journalist Philip Weiss records, with a director's distance, his interview with actress Ellen Barkin...
...Vanity Fair depends on newsstand buyers for more than a third of its sales, making celebrity covers seem essential...
...I mean, do you understand this BCCI scandal...
...She knows how the game works...
...Unfortunately, there's an ethical price for the celebrity dependence that has allowed them to stay alive...
...con leche and wrestling over what this celebrity profile will be...
...Brown grew up in the British equivalent of Hollywood...
...Today, movies have moved up in the rankings while TV has slipped, but as readership dwindles and ad revenue dries up, Stolley's Law has become the general interest magazine's mantra...
...I've been talking to some folks about a movie...
...What it did have were Mailer's politics, Talese's sociology, Galbraith's economics, and Nabokov's memoirs...
...Ron Rosenbaum on the ethics of euthanasia in Vanity Fair...
...Even The Washington Monthly managed to devise a, uh, perfectly good reason for featuring Julia Roberts on its cover this spring...
...I tend to feel that you can't take on the world," she once told Newsweek...
...We have that at least in our favor...
...But general interest editors seem oddly equable about the compromise...
...Enter Brown, whose first issue featured a blindfolded Daryl Hannah in a tight red dress, a profile of rehabilitated Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and his modelwife, and advice from famous people on how to read The New York Times...
...Of course, you can't judge a general interest magazine by its cover...
...Celebrity profiles carry a subtext, a code about morality...
...his past steroid use...
...Despite state-of-the-art technology for cutting the lag time between production and publication, Vanity Fair's March cover featured actress Shirley MacLaine, gossip columnist Taki, and Hollywood mogul David Geffen—and no Gulf war reporting at all...
...While there are brave exceptions, most journalists who want to be in the slicks agree to play by a specific set of rules...
...They could die a slow death, like the Saturday Evening Post...
...What is new is the celebrity encroachment on more earnest publishing ventures...
...It's nutty," marvels Jesse Kornbluth, until recently one of Vanity Fair's leading celebrity profilers, "but people today take their values from the media, and they relate to celebrities like their friends...
...We don't do that sappy profile stuff," says McDonell...
...And there are a dozen other cases of writers who burned their bridges in Hollywood only to find agents rebuilding them six months later...
...The cover type: "What does Michelle Pfeiffer need...
...And the question became, should I do an article on the movie anyway...
...We'd been talking about doing a piece wrapped around the movie, but the movie wasn't very good," says Alter...
...He wants to know her secrets, not her politics...
...A contributing editor at Harper's and a former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, Weiss doesn't usually do movie stars...
...And the bottom line is often quid pro quo...
...Simple rules: Daryl Hannah's got a new movie, and you're a cog in the rave machine...
...They accept their own righteousness before the Lord too comfortably to be successful apostles," sniffed The New Republic about Life's editors in 1953...
...Commerce made us dance," he once wrote...
...In pursuit of the reader in a cable-ready world, these magazines are increasingly the handmaiden to the very forms of media—TV and movies—that threaten to supplant them...
...So you're trapped...
...While Luce's passion couldn't convince six million middle-class readers to like Chiang Kai-shek, it could help determine what those readers would have passionate opinions about...
...And getting those celebrities sometimes requires the ceding of editorial independence, from dulling the hatchet to performing outandout PR...
...But Luce's ego resisted editing to the lowest common denominator, so he chose Margaret Bourke-White's photo of Fort Peck Dam—in Montana, of all places—for that first cover...
...It ended up being a strange piece," says Alter...
...In a recent Vanity Fair interview with Vaclav Havel—a philosopher trying to erect a democracy on the ashes of a totalitarian state—writer Stephen Schiff pauses to press the leader about his thoughts on...
...Life, which once sold 10 million copies a week, averaged only two million (and dwindling) this year—one seventh of the circulation of TV Guide...
...It's a little nauseous-making," says Peter Kaplan, a former editor at Esquire and Smart, a magazine that by policy was to have a beautiful, famous woman on every cover...
...But Esquire is a general interest magazine...
...Young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, TV is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports, anything is better than politics...
...I wanted you to tell me the story about what it was like wearing falsies...
...Market research told publishers that they had approximately two and a half seconds to convince the newsstand browser or lose him altogether...
...Ladies who launch When Frank Crowninshield's legendary Vanity Fair was exhumed in the early eighties, it was envisioned as an irreverent literary enterprise in competition with The New Yorker...
...Between 1975 and 1990, Esquire's audience shrank from 1.2 million to 750,000...
...Buried in almost every issue of the slicks are pieces blessedly remote from the Hollywood ethic: In Esquire, Denis Johnson's powerful dispatch from Liberia...
...With Jodie Foster, it was the same deal...
...Instead of saying, 'We stand by our reporter,' your editor's negotiating with the agents, saying, 'We'll give you a puff piece...
...Yet these heartening stories are not the ones editors invoke when talking candidly about the Hollywood hitch...
...It's not that mythraking was invented by Vanity Fair's Tina Brown...
...But under the heading "Personalities" in a 1971 Esquire, there's simply Dean Acheson's memoir of Harry S Truman...
...You become conspirators in the dream...
...I called a veteran editor at one of the slicks, who is frustrated by the narrowness of the enterprise, the emptiness of his professional life...
...Alter's political thesis is literally and figuratively wedged into a plug for a movie called True Colors...
...One Roseanne gets you a rainforest, as one editor puts it...
...The first issue of Life, in 1936, pictured Greta Garbo and Helen Hayes inside...
...But there's an enemy within the print medium, too: New technology has made putting out a magazine easier than ever...
...The writer who expects editorial support for writing category 4—he's a mess and should probably be sent to Hazelden for rehab before he does any more damage to decent people—would do well to consider the case of writer Lynn Hirschberg, who drew a tough portrait of Beverly Hills Cop producer Don Simpson for Esquire in 1985...
...You can be brain dead and sell 100,000 copies of an issue with Cher...
...Post-blacklist, Hirschberg's been relegated to interviewing substars like Madonna...
...3) He actually is a mess—that's why we love him...
...But the "service," strange term, occasionally seemed real...
...In editors' minds, an idea simmered: Could Hollywood, the competition, be a catalyst, too...
...In the past two years, more than a third of Vanity Fair's covers featured CAA stars...
...her father made movies...
...And that—not deft prose, not acid analysis— was the real power of the general interest magazine...
...Research assistance was provided by Jennifer Bradley and Kate Martin...
...Rodney King, the victim, appears somewhere between Bob and Tom...
...Before Schwarzenegger would agree to the interview, Time higher-ups had to agree not to ask him about: a recent, unflattering unauthorized biography...
...While being interviewed over a long period of time by a prominent writer, a producer occasionally excused himself for "coke breaks," making little effort to disguise his departures...
...It's a bargain, if you ask me," says another...
...Brown was rewarded with the worst selling issue in years...
...Is such sycophancy necessary...
...police chief, manages to squeeze John Candy, Robert Stack, and Robocop Peter Weller into the second paragraph, Bob Hope into the fourth, and Tom Berenger into the seventh...
...Celebrity...
...And just as surely, whatever its defects may have been, it has been this generation's interminable experience with ruthless power and the loony fanaticism of the military mind that has by and large caused it to lend the most passionate support to the struggle to end war everywhere...
...Virtually all Hollywood profiles come in one of three packages...
...As the general interest magazine's own history demonstrates, great editing, like great leadership, consists in appealing to what's best in us, not in letting us wallow happily in the mush...
...It allows you to do great work in between...
...In 1950, fewer than a quarter of Life's 52 weekly covers were devoted to Hollywood types...
...I don't...
...Helen Lawrenson savaged that nice, nice Julie Andrews...
...What's troubling about Rattner," Weiss concludes, "is that in recognizing that no profession is inherently moral, he also seems to have given up on the idea that individuals should strive to be useful to society...
...Examine the cover profile of a neurotic, intensely self-critical Michelle Pfeiffer that ran last December in Esquire as the movie Russia House opened...
...In a way, it's kind of comforting," says an editor now...
...What could be harmful about something as innocuous as celebrity...
...But no transformation has been quite as pronounced as that of the general interest magazine, a barometer, like phone surveys and focus groups, of American middle-class taste...
...How trapped...
...In addition to a fine investigative piece on the assassination of Yasser Arafat's second in command, there was a celebration of the wartime ascent of CNN, a profile of "The Texas Buccaneer Who's Poised To Be a Major Player in Iraq," and a piece on King Fand and his playboy scions...
...One of the royal princes goes to New York for urine baths, we learn...
...Like Luce, Hayes was keenly conscious of the market...
...Not exactly...
...For his preachiness Luce took his share of heat...
...Last year, in a fit of boldness, Tina Brown awarded Mikhail Gorbachev her cover, displacing Ellen Barkin...
...The result is that virtually all Hollywood profiles come in one of three packages...
...This winter, when confronted with Desert Storm—the first war many of its readers had ever seen, an experience that a great editor might've leapt on to engage the young—not a single general interest magazine editor dared displace a celebrity to put the conflict squarely on the cover...
...The writer's editor, when questioned about it, defends the decision...
...Trouble is, journalistic values are paying the price...
...The economic forces, he suggests, may finally be coming around...
...Part of the problem, of course, is TV...
...But this is 1991...
...Weiss doesn't just describe the conflict between politics and celebrity inherent in popular writing—he eventually chooses sides...
...People's managing editor, Richard Stolley, once codified his strategy for reaching the restless with his covers...
...With the right writer and enough vigor, they would care...
...That's understandable...
...He likes celebrities...
...The same, of course, might be said of the editors of general interest magazines...
...After flipping past the usual columns, he'll find three articles within...
...And so on...
...You have to...
...Unfortunately, she hasn't made that mistake again...
...Ellen Barkin had been scared of herself, of who she was...
...Yet in an era of dismal ad sales and declining readership, such idealism appears to have gone the way of the Saturday Review...
...Because to get Cher on the cover, you may have to do some pretty sleazy things...
...And in fact, you'd probably want to be...
...Or does it...
...At the fade-in, Phil and Ellen are tete a fete in a New York restaurant, downing caf...
...But even more disturbing than occasional ethical violations is the creeping tendency to level editorial aspirations, transforming even the esoteric into the easy...
...plus, of course, extraordinary business acumen in putting it all together...
...If Luce was careful about the limbs he crawled out on, others took greater risks...
...Ellen wants to talk about sexism and cowardice in Hollywood and other, realer places...
...Take your choice of writer.'" How does that dynamic affect what gets written...
...It's the blackball that sticks in the mind—a perceived powerlessness that justifies future grovelling...
...Hirschberg's piece, the accuracy of which was never disputed, prompted Simpson's publicist, Peggy Siegal, to blacklist Hirschberg, barring her from screenings involving Siegal's other clients...
...After much disclaimer, Havel finally breaks down...
...Between 1980 and 1990, the number of magazines on American newsstands doubled...
...But superficial was more or less the point...
...As demand for saleable stars exceeds the supply—hot actors have dozens of choices, from Esquire to Forbes to The New York Times Magazine—access, once a given for the big magazines, has become a drawn-out series of negotiations and written agreements...
...In Hollywood, it was safe...
...Katherine Boo is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Coming away from the tangle, Weiss sums up the experience: He'll look at her differently on-screen—she's smart—but he'll "continue to admire her breasts...
Vol. 23 • September 1991 • No. 9
