in their own performances and articles about them—provided the scripts to follow, the looks to try to imitate, for impression management and the presentation of self in everyday life.26
In a famous essay from 1944, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” which analyzed magazine profiles of famous people between 1901 and 1941, Leo Lowenthal argued that what he labeled “idols of production”—self-made men, captains of industry, political leaders—had after World War I given way to “idols of consumption”—primarily entertainers and sports heroes who were often elevated by “lucky breaks.” The former were active agents, doers, while he saw the latter—at least as profiled in popular magazines—as passive; things happened to them. The article was noteworthy because it laid out an important turning point in unpacking the depiction of celebrities as both just like us yet not like us at all, a framework still very much with us.
Lowenthal’s main question asked about the reason for this turn, noting that “there must be a social need seeking gratification by this type of literature.”27 He concluded several things. Celebrity biographies provide “unbroken confidence in the opportunities open to every individual,” with the life stories of others serving as “educational models” one can envy, but also try to emulate.28 Yet with the idols of consumption, the reader enters a “dream world” that focuses on the private lives, behaviors, and personal preferences of the hero (as opposed to what actually got them to the top) and provides instruction on consumption and how to spend one’s leisure time, but not necessarily on how to actually succeed in life.29
The profiles let us into stars’ personal spheres; we learn who likes to be “the life of the party,” who drinks and who doesn’t, who likes “Brazilian cigars,” who likes to cook “Viennese dishes.”30 They urge us to judge celebrities according to their behaviors toward their tasks—if they work hard and are energetic and capable—and their behavior toward others. Are they generous, friendly, and cooperative? Do they moderate their own emotions—are they restrained, or have they succumbed to being thin skinned, irritable, or humorless? The behavioral judgments meted out provide normative codes about how we ourselves should act with others.
Yet in all of this Lowenthal emphasized the persistence of passivity in the heroes of consumption and found an odd brew of luck mixed with predetermination as explanations for their success. On the one hand, the profiles emphasized the stars’ parentage and background: for example, Clark Gable’s “stubborn determination” was derived from his “Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors,” as if Gable himself bears little responsibility for his character traits; he simply inherited them. “The individual himself appears as a mere product of his past.”31 As children they were “midget editions” of their future selves, because they were just born with talent or predilections and always knew what they wanted to do. An athlete is described as having “been born with a love of the game”; a businessman has “an instinct” for promotion; a movie star knew she wanted to be an actress “from the time she could walk,” and so they were “rubber stamped” from birth for their future careers.32 Thus, while there was, in these biographies, an emphasis on early travails, hard work, and coming up “the hard way,” there was almost always the “lucky break” of being discovered, so these celebrities were not really responsible for their own success except for how their instincts or personalities helped them. Success “merely happens,” usually by chance, so it is “an accidental and irrational event.”33 There is a fatalism here, where some people become rich and famous because it was meant to be, and the rest of us don’t. But we can vicariously enjoy their success through reading about them and trying to emulate how they behave and what they consume. By consuming like they do, we can become a little like them.
Industrial Production of Celebrities
As celebrity culture has continued to metastasize in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some scholars have turned their attention to the even more intensified, amped up production of celebrities, while others have explored the more individual, psychological explanations for the enormous appeal of celebrity culture. As Josh Gamson and Paul McDonald have emphasized, celebrity production is an industry—in fact, a quite elaborated one that can often look like mass production—that has relied increasingly on a growing cadre of workers: managers, talent agents, press agents, publicists, personal stylists, trainers, and the like. Both scholars see contradictory explanations for celebrity. On the one hand, it cannot be totally manufactured—its potential in a person can be spotted and nurtured, based on hard work, talent, and charisma, but not just anyone can become a star. On the other hand, fame is obviously manufactured, the stars’ images tightly controlled, and, as we have learned through reality TV, almost anyone can indeed become famous. In fact, these are the two stories about fame today, that it is earned and related to achievement and talent and yet that it is cynically produced through public relations and publicity that churn out the worthy and unworthy alike.34 Of course, there is truth to both of these stories.
Both Gamson and McDonald trace this escalated production of celebrities to the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s when television made significant inroads into movie attendance. In Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, most stars were bound to one of the five major studios, which, for the most part, produced and owned the stars. With the erosion of the studios’ power, stars had to become “‘proprietors of their own image,’” which meant, in part, mastering the image of being unique and apart from the crowd while also, of course, being “just like us.”35 Thus, the need in the 1950s, and beyond, for agents, managers, publicists, and the like to manage image control, with celebrity production becoming an increasingly elaborated and extensive business.
In the 1970s, with the success of People magazine and its imitators, and a growing number of television shows profiling famous people, especially movie, television, and singing stars, the industrial production of celebrities ramped up even further. By September 1981, the first movie actor to become president would be shot by John Hinckley Jr., who was bizarrely trying to impress another celebrity, Jodie Foster, while a new, syndicated TV show Entertainment Tonight premiered. Americans began to get a sense that celebrity culture was assuming a much more commanding role in their culture. By the late 1980s, when Dan Rather included accounts of problems in the marriage of Robin Givens and boxer Mike Tyson on CBS Nightly News, we knew we had come a long way from Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America” who had steered the country through the John F. Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. When Britney Spears shaved her head in February 2007 it was a lead story for two days on CNN, “the most trusted name in news.”
New networks and cable channels were emerging to challenge the big three—ABC, NBC and CBS—on TV. As the “national market” gave way to market segmentation and niche marketing, competition for viewers increased. Channels needed to “brand” themselves, and to produce shows that would attract specific demographic niches of interest to advertisers. Cooking channels produced “celebrity chefs,” while channels on finance and investing produced celebrity financial advisers and celebrity CEOs. And with the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and their ever-needy news holes to fill, celebrity scandals, crimes and trials, or crimes and trials that turned unknowns into celebrities, further broke down what was once a solid wall between “the news” and entertainment. Because the problem now was there weren’t enough celebrities—true “A-list” actors or rock stars and the like to fill the need for all this programming. Reality TV, which had the advantage of being very cheap to produce compared to scripted programming, could get and hold an audience and produce its own celebrities.
The radiation of the tentacles of celebrity culture has been driven further by the media consolidation of the 1980s and beyond, as the octopi conglomerates have bought up publishing houses, news outlets, movie theaters, production studios, amusement parks, record companies, television stations, cable systems, and the like and insisted on “synergy” and maximum profits from them all. And twenty-four-hour cable television, with all its competing, insatiable programs, needs to be constantly fed; celebrities are the fodder. New profit-maximizing alliances within these media behemoths mean that all kinds of cross-promotions
