by Tim Wu
To run the new magazine with a measure of respectability, Time-Life chose Stolley, an in-house editor and established journalist. He’d made his reputation covering the civil rights movement for Life in the 1950s, and was also famous for having persuaded Abraham Zapruder, who’d inadvertently filmed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to sell his film to Time-Life for $150,000. But all that was now ancient history, and if Stolley had any qualms about the new venture he never showed them. In fact he apparently took to it with relish. “People never sounded downscale when he talked about it,” said a colleague. “If they thought People was garbage, Stolley would just say, ‘Well, that’s your opinion.’ ”
The test issue, developed before Stolley’s appointment, tended to confirm an intention to copy the Enquirer. On the cover was perennial gossip fodder: the marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both best known in the 1970s for their notoriously stormy relationship. To focus groups, as well as Time-Life’s board, the effort seemed to be aiming rather low. It “exuded a sleazy, tabloid quality, with its rough photographs and its typewriter type…there was even a picture of the Chiquita banana girl, with her breasts bared.” At a managing editor’s lunch, the words most frequently used were “sleazy” and “cheap.” Stolley would later allow that it “looked like a whorehouse magazine.”4
Nearly a year later, on March 4, 1974, People finally arrived on newsstands. From the press release: “This week Time Inc. takes its co-founder’s [Henry Luce’s] thought a large step forward by bringing out PEOPLE, a new magazine based on the old journalistic precept that names make news.” Indeed, under Stolley’s influence, the new People looked like Time, with its glossy paper, conventional fonts, and modest-sized headlines. The first cover was graced with a strikingly beautiful photograph of Mia Farrow, holding a string of pearls in her mouth; that year she would star as Daisy Buchanan in the film version of The Great Gatsby. As to what was inside, however, that was little different from the old gossip rags. There was a story about Marina Oswald (widow of Lee Harvey), who professed to being “finally at peace with herself”; another featuring Stephen Burrows, “fashion king of the sexy cling,” and yet another in which heiress-turned-denim-designer Gloria Vanderbilt told of “a fourth marriage that finally works.”
With $40 million sunk into it by Time-Life, the new People was one of the largest investments in magazine history. Stolley was unabashed explaining the concept, “There is nothing abstract about the name. People is what we are all about.” The critical class, however, did not appreciate the beauty of that simplicity. William Safire, for instance, then a new columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay entitled “Who Needs People?,” describing the magazine as an “insult to the American mass audience.”5
When the world’s most powerful publishing empire launched “the first national weekly magazine to be started in twenty years,” its executives must have asked themselves: What will compel magazine buyers to snatch our new magazine off the newsstands? What subjects are sure-fire audience-grabbers at this point?
By their choice of topics the Time people have given us a stop action view of what they think most interests wealthy young people, their prime target audience. By their handling of these topics, the editors give us their frank assessment of that audience: a collection of frantic, tasteless fadcats deeply concerned with social climbing and intellectual pretension, panting for a look at celebrities in poses that press agents staged back in the thirties….People fails on the tawdry terms it has chosen: the sex is not sexy, the gossip is not current, the exploitation not with-it. Great effort is needed to lift it up to superficiality.
Safire was not alone. There were even voices within Time-Life expressing dismay. A senior editor at Time was anonymously quoted as calling People the product of “no richness of genius, but rather a poverty of ideas” and one edited to “exploit the baseness of the market.” Donald M. Wilson, Time’s vice president of publicity, would write in his memoirs that “of all the new developments in the company, [People] was the only one I secretly deplored. I disliked People from the beginning. Like many other journalists, I too thought it was unworthy of Time Inc. But in my capacity as head of public affairs for the company, I did my very best to support it in its success.” The conscience of an attention merchant!6
Of course People was an outrageous success. The very first issue sold almost a million copies, a debut matched only by Playboy’s launch in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, waving to the reader and promising more. Heiskell, like Luce, had not erred by betting low, for People was hardly a passing fad. If the late 1960s and early 1970s had managed to achieve a measure of liberation without renouncing seriousness, by now the seriousness had begun to wane, and liberation was yielding to license, in a climate of easy indulgences. It was reflected in broadcast, where 60 Minutes was now keeping company at CBS with Charlie’s Angels and other examples of “jiggle television.” It is no surprise, then, that from 1976 to 1980, People’s income more than quadrupled, with the largest paid audience of any American magazine. By 1991, it was the most profitable magazine in the world, and thus the most valuable. So it has remained ever since. (By the 2010s, a full-page advertisement in People was running about $350,000, as compared to a mere $12,000 for an advertisement in Harper’s, or about $160,000 for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times newspaper.)7
His life as a hard-hitting reporter behind him, Stolley would now focus his journalistic acumen on deciding each week’s cover, a crucial part of the magazine’s appeal and the chief determinant of newsstand sales. In time he would devise a few rules. First, to appear on the cover, “the face had to be recognizable to 80% of the American people.” Second, “there had to be something about the person you wanted to know.” After that it was a matter of hierarchy, one of almost Darwinian brutality:
Young is better than old.
Pretty is better than ugly.
Rich is better than poor.
TV is better than music.
Music is better than movies.
Movies are better than sports.
And anything is better than politics.
No one at People or Time-Life really understood exactly why stories about celebrities captured so many readers; it was enough that they did. And despite decades of academic and quasi-academic writing on the topic, there isn’t a completely satisfying answer as to what gives celebrities such a powerful grip on human attention—why so many of us seem to care about the lives of men and women we have seen only in films or on television, “people who make no material impact on our lives and are, in many respects, just like ourselves.”8
Even if you don’t consider yourself particularly interested in famous people, it is nonetheless likely, through some informational form of osmosis, that you can recognize a few hundred strangers who are celebrities, and probably can even recite some basic facts about them. How they found their way into your mind you may not really know; it can sometimes feel as if you’ve been the victim of an involuntary mental implantation. You don’t have to be a fan to identify Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, or Leonardo DiCaprio as famous actors, known to you the same way you might know the names of major cities you’ve never visited. And that would be to describe an ordinary participant in our attention economy. There are many who take a more active interest, who know by name and sight many thousands of strangers, and hold in their minds veritable memory palaces of personal facts and relationship histories, enough synaptic investment to put a medieval Jesuit to shame.
Nor can the physical sensation caused by meeting celebrities—feeling “starstruck”—be denied, except by the most jaded. You might think back to a moment when you saw or met a very famous person, and remember that you began to feel your heart beat faster, that urge to take a picture, the sense that this moment was somehow important. Time can seem to stand still; it can feel like breaking through, momentarily, to what seems a slightly different realm. When you meet Scarlett Johansson, Barack Obama, or someone known to you and
many others from afar, when that face, familiar from your screen yet usually somehow transformed in the translation to three dimensions, is suddenly before you, an icon manifest in real flesh and blood, at that moment it is hard to deny that something happens in the typical nervous system.
The strength of these feelings is one reason why our celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship. For that ecstatic possibility of transcending the ordinary and glimpsing the infinite hardly originates in the twentieth century, but is a universal longing reflected in almost every spiritual tradition. The historian Karen Armstrong describes it as an “essential craving” of all humanity to be connected with the “extraordinary”: “It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life.” Such transcendence of the mundane condition has since ancient times been identified with heroes, demigods, and saints, humans who occupy a somewhat exalted position yet also remain accessible, allowing us some taste of another realm. At one time, this was also true of royalty (and in a few places it still is).9
What is particular to modernity, then, is not the existence of such individuals but rather the idea of constructing an industry based on the demand for feeling some communion with them, on our willingness to idolize them (literally)—an industry that monetizes their capacity to capture our rapt attention.
Perhaps, as the sociologist Chris Rojek theorizes, this is “secular society’s rejoinder to the decline of religion and magic,” for in the “absence of saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies the void is being filled by celebrity culture.” Of course, this is hardly to suggest that celebrity culture actually is a religion. People and other celebrity pantheons do not aim to provide cosmogonies, or ethical teachings, even if celebrity manners do have a depressing tendency to become normative. The point is simply that whatever the neurological basis of religious experiences, something of the same mechanism seems to be activated by the existence, and particularly the proximity, of the most illustrious. That perhaps explains why, for some, celebrity culture is so abominable; it is the ancient disgust with idol worship, triggering an atavistic emotional reaction, like the rage felt by Moses when he burned the golden calf, ground it into a powder, and, scattering it on the water, forced his people to drink it.10
In the age of mass culture, industry always sought to harness the power of celebrity. With the rise of the studio system, stars were cultivated for their power to draw audiences to otherwise mediocre productions, as they still even are in our day of their free agency. From their initial appearance on what we have called the first screen (the silver one), it was clear that realistic visual representations of famous figures had a stirring effect. In his essay “The Face of Garbo,” critic Roland Barthes describes the awe inspired by Greta Garbo’s iconic image; he also mentions how previously that of Valentino, following his death, was driving fans to suicide. But the reaction needn’t be so ecstatic or traumatic. Indeed, the sensation would later become one more of familiarity than reverence.
In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.” The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.”11
So it is that, for many people, celebrities have become part of their built attentional environment, allowing them regular glimpses into that other world inhabited by magical creatures who look something like us, yet are beyond us. Our deities are of course nothing like the God of Abraham, or even His saints. They are, rather, more like the pagan gods of old, prone to fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness. But this only lends to their illusion of accessibility, and at least for commercial purposes makes them more compelling to follow.
Over the 1970s, as People took off, its editors made a crucial observation, not about their audiences but about the figures they were covering. It had once been understood as the goal of the rich and powerful to keep their personal lives as private as possible. There were exceptions, like Elizabeth Taylor, an actress whose spectacular string of marriages and divorces were far more public than most stars’, but many famous people either did not care to be in the public eye, or could afford not to be. In the era of People, that was changing.
Richard Stolley could not fail to notice: “We found out that people in the news were quite willing to talk to us about themselves. They’d talk about lots of personal things—their sex lives, their families, their religion. They’d talk about things that a few years earlier wouldn’t even be brought up.” Perhaps it was the glossy paper or the fact that Time-Life, not the National Enquirer, was the publisher. Whatever the case, People found that celebrities were now increasingly willing to discuss the very sorts of things about themselves and their families that all people, the famous most of all, had once jealously guarded. All you really had to do was ask.
What was becoming evident was something that now seems virtually axiomatic: celebrities were becoming attention merchants in their own right. Fame, they were discovering, was not merely the by-product of what they did; it was their professional capital. And while endorsements were in vogue during the 1920s, during the 1970s celebrities began leveraging their drawing power as never before. Now was the time of Polaroid’s pathbreaking campaign engineered by the daring firm of Doyle Dale Bernbach. The camera maker, then a cutting-edge tech company, did a series of spots with stars including James Garner, Candice Bergen, Alan Alda, the Muppets, and perhaps most famously, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Two years later, ad agency Ted Bates would open the door for athlete endorsements when it tapped Buffalo Bills star running back O. J. Simpson for Hertz Rent-a-Car.
Eventually, the most successful actors would be the ones who transcended acting and began reselling the audiences they could attract. In this, however, they would find themselves in fierce competition with other celebrities, resulting in a veritable arms race of exposure. Of course, some are so famous that gaining more attention is unnecessary. But among those less secure in their prospects, revealing embarrassments or personal failings, appearing less than fully clothed on red carpets, and sometimes engaging in even more extreme exhibitionism would be the secret to besting their rivals in a zero-sum game. What People ultimately created was a platform for attracting attention through self-revelation that remained something short of tawdry, a kind of self-flaunting for the polite mainstream. Both People and the celebrity attention merchants have continued to gain from the new confessional culture, since the fans can never get enough. Once the race to the bottom had begun, it was nigh impossible to return to the old status quo—being a celebrity in the new sense now meant telling all, or facing the consequences.
People was important in and of itself, but also for what it spawned, directly and indirectly. Profits drew imitators, as they inevitably do; in 1977, even the New York Times Company could not resist launching Us Weekly, a close copy of People. Other media, like television, followed naturally, yielding shows like Entertainment Tonight. But the greater influence was more subtle and less measurable: on whatever platform was to be invented, celebrity would become the attention merchant’s go-to bait, offering a lure infinitely more dependable than any more artfully developed content. While not the beginning of celebrity or celebrity culture, People was nevertheless a turning point in both, the start of the “celebrification” of the entire mainstream, including, as we shall see, the lives of many with no reasonable
basis for expecting to become famous. Some would experience this as fulfilling the promise of a better life through technology, others as the logical extreme of a race to the bottom begun by the penny papers in the nineteenth century.
* * *
*1 Liebling also complained about the Grey Lady’s politics at the time, saying that the Times was “a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time.”
*2 In its first decade, Time hastily declared Mussolini a “virile, vigorous” man of “remarkable self control, rare judgement, and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.”
CHAPTER 18
THE OPRAH MODEL
In 1982 the then well-known film reviewer and television personality Roger Ebert was a guest on a local morning television show in Baltimore, hosted by a young and unknown host named Oprah Winfrey. As he later recalled, she seemed talented but suffered from poor bookings. “The other guests on the show included a vegetarian chef and four dwarfs dressed as chipmunks” who, as he recalled, sang the Chipmunks’ Christmas song while Hula-Hooping.1
Ebert, rather smitten, asked Winfrey on a date after she moved back to her hometown to host a program named AM Chicago. Airing weekdays at 9 a.m., the show faced tough competition in The Phil Donahue Show, airing at the same time. Phil Donahue was serious—for a talk show host at least—and popular. But Winfrey would rely on the age-old tactic of stealing attention by being more outrageous. She booked a group of nudists (who, naturally, did the show in the nude) and the Ku Klux Klan (who appeared in full regalia). On one episode exploring the question “Does sexual size matter?,” Oprah memorably pronounced, “If you had your choice, you’d like to have a big one if you could. Bring a big one home to Mama!” Scandalous it may have been, but hers was soon the leading talk show in Chicago.2