In Praise of Messy Lives (19 page)

In the spring of 2000, a freelance writer named Tom Kummer was caught fabricating movie star profiles for one of Germany’s most respected newspapers,
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. He wrote graceful articles about stars he had never met. He had been doing it for years.
The Times
of London reported that his interviews were so good that
Marie Claire
interviewed him about “the secrets of his success,” which he ironically said was demanding at least forty-five minutes with his subjects. What eventually betrayed him was his inability to be banal, his desire to put ideas into people’s mouths that they would never actually utter. In other words, his fatal mistake was to make the celebrity profile interesting.
The Times
of London reported that he had Sharon Stone saying she is trying “to irritate men from wholly different classes of society,” and Courtney Love saying she felt “empty, depressed, rather dumb.” The fact that he was able to carry on for so long tells us less about Kummer than it does about the genre itself. The style of celebrity profiles has become so rigid, so absolutely predictable, that the substance, the poor ephemeral star herself, is wholly superfluous. That was the piece of information
Tom Kummer passed along, the valuable contribution he made to the journalistic community, the point he dramatized as no one had before:
All movie star profiles are the same
.

Our celebrity culture has become so greedy and wild that it overwhelms and consumes the writer’s individual voice. It feels, sometimes, like the writer gives up, thinks of the rent bill, and types on a kind of automatic pilot, giving the magazine or the reader or the movie publicists what they want—and nothing more. Our appetite for the same photograph of a movie star in a spaghetti-strap dress is insatiable, and so, it seems, is our appetite for the same article.
^*
But why are we interested in these articles when we could generate them from thin air as easily as Tom Kummer? It may be because the celebrity profile is not about information, it is not about journalism, it is not about words; it is a ritual.

No matter who the celebrity is, the pieces follow the same narrative arc. There is the moment when the movie star reveals himself to be just like us. (In
Vanity Fair
, “Pitt, then, turns out to be that most surprising of celebrities—a modest man” and “Paltrow jumps up to clear the table and has to be told almost sternly not to do the dishes.”) There is the moment when the movie star is not
mortal after all. (In
Entertainment Weekly
, Julia Roberts has “a long, unbound mass of chocolate-brown curls—just the kind of Julia Roberts waterfall tangle of tresses that makes America think of bumper crops and Wall Street rallies and $100 million at the box office.”) There is the fact that the movie star was funny-looking and gawky as a child (“I had braces, and I was skinny,” says Gwyneth Paltrow in
People
.) There is the J. D. Salinger book the movie star is reading (
Entertainment Weekly
reports that Julia Roberts “has a book of J. D. Salinger stories … on the coffee table,” and Winona Ryder tells
In Style
, “I have every edition, every paperback, every translation of
The Catcher in the Rye
“). And then there is the moment when the author of the piece wryly acknowledges the artificiality of the situation. (“I have firm instructions from your people to make you comfortable,” a
Harper’s Bazaar
writer says to Brad Pitt, “so perhaps you should choose where you’d like to sit.”) There is the disbelief on the part of both the celebrity and the author about how rich and famous and successful the movie star has become. In the end, it’s not hard to see why Tom Cruise might not be all that essential to a Tom Cruise profile. With the pieces themselves as strictly styled as a geisha’s makeup, the face behind them ceases to matter.

Start with the way the movie star looks. How should the aspiring plagiarist describe her? What should she be wearing? In
Esquire
, Winona Ryder was “in jeans, cowboy boots, and a clingy Agnes B.–type jersey,” in
Life
she was “in jeans and a long-sleeved undershirt,” and in
In Style
she was “makeup-free, hair swept up in a headband.” In
Harper’s Bazaar
, Gwyneth Paltrow “is wearing jeans, a blue cotton-fleece sweatshirt.… Her hair is held back by a wide black headband,” and in
Vanity Fair
, she wears “her long blond hair pulled back in a simple ponytail and
no trace of makeup.” Julia Roberts wears “Levi’s, a snug blue top.… Her hair is pulled back” in
Vanity Fair
and “Levi’s, a white shirt, boots, and no makeup” in
In Style
. In
Vanity Fair
, Renée Zellweger wears “jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers, and no makeup.” A stripped-down wardrobe is offered as proof of the stars’ unpretentiousness, their surprising accessibility.

If glossy magazines are to be believed, movie stars also have a limited number of character traits, one of which is vulnerability. Somebody in nearly every profile comments on that surprising aspect of the fabulous person’s psyche, and if somebody else doesn’t, the writer will. The mother of Jack Nicholson’s child, for instance, is quoted in
Cosmopolitan
as saying that Nicholson is “very strong yet very vulnerable.” Julia Roberts is described in
Vanity Fair
as being “boldly vulnerable,” and in
Cosmopolitan
, “her vulnerability brought Marilyn Monroe to mind,” whereas in
Good Housekeeping
, “that same vulnerability that made her a star almost destroyed her.” In
Rolling Stone
, she “show[s] some vulnerability.” In
Vanity Fair
, Meg Ryan has a “compelling vulnerability,” and Rupert Everett says of Madonna, “She has a lot of vulnerability”; in
The New Yorker
, Regis Philbin is described by a fan as “totally vulnerable.” And why not? Vulnerability is the natural counterpoint to the sublime perfection that the profiler has gone out of his way to chronicle. It is a vague way of satisfying the need for the movie star to be “human” without detracting from her glamour with undue or distracting specificity.

And then there is the physical illustration of vulnerability: the mere presence of a magazine writer makes actresses turn every shade of red. In
Vanity Fair
, Renée Zellweger is “pink,” and Meg Ryan’s “face flushes.” In
Harper’s Bazaar
, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “cheeks flush”; in a
Vanity Fair
article, she “concedes with a
blush”; and in a
Vogue
article, “Paltrow turns crimson.”
Esquire
reports a story in which Winona Ryder “turns scarlet.” In
Newsweek
, the mention of her boyfriend’s name causes Julia Roberts to blush, and in
In Style
, it “reduced her to almost girlish blushes.” Even Madonna blushes in
Vanity Fair
.

Not only do they blush; they glow.
Redbook
gushes, “It’s really true: when you see Julia Roberts in person, she just … glows.”
Vanity Fair
refers to her as “a lovely young woman glowing amid the flashbulbs,” and
People
says, “Fans can’t get enough of her glowing face.” In
Newsweek
, the writer doesn’t think Gwyneth Paltrow needs to lighten her hair because “she’s glowing already,” and
Vogue
rhapsodizes about her “big, glowing smile.” Other hackneyed phrases pop up regularly: in
Good Housekeeping
, Julia Roberts is “like the proverbial deer caught in headlights,” and in
Vanity Fair
, Meg Ryan “looked like a deer in headlights.” There is no need in movie star profiles to dispense with clichés because clichés—red carpet, flashbulbs, incandescence—are what stardom consists of: the role of the movie star profile is to reinforce and sell that stardom, not to examine or undermine it. Which is also why almost all movie star profiles from
People
to
The New Yorker
are peppered with superlatives—they add to the breathiness of the piece, the tone of worshipful trashy love and sheer commerce.
Cosmopolitan
calls Julia Roberts “the most desirable and successful actress in the world.”
Redbook
calls her “the biggest female star on the planet.” And
People
declares that “Roberts is, quite simply, the most appealing actress of her time.” In
Vogue
, Gwyneth Paltrow is “The Luckiest Girl Alive,” and in
Time
she is “the most beguiling actress of her young generation.” In
The New Yorker
, Tom Hanks is “the most disarming and successful of American movie stars.” In
People
, Brad Pitt is
“Hollywood’s hottest hunk,” and Tom Cruise is “The Sexiest Man Alive.” It is rare that one reads about a moderately successful actress, or the second-sexiest man in Hollywood.

Every actress over the age of twenty is also depicted as girlish, childlike, or adolescent. Take the description of Julia Roberts in
Vanity Fair
(“by turns childlike and sophisticated”), or Renée Zellweger (who has “little-girl moxie”) in
Vanity Fair
, or Meg Ryan (“whose adult allure is redolent of adolescence”) in
Vanity Fair
, or Sharon Stone (whose “childlike sexual greediness was perhaps the most eerily enticing quality about her
[Basic] Instinct
work”), also in
Vanity Fair
. In
In Style
, the then twenty-eight-year-old Winona Ryder is like a “defiant teen,” and in
Life
she “sits like a kid.” Fifty-something Goldie Hawn,
In Style
informs us, looks as “youthful as a teenager,” and a look of “childlike glee overtakes” Julia Roberts.
Cosmopolitan
compares Madonna to a “restless child,” while
Vanity Fair
describes “the little girl … behind the woman.” Male actors are invariably described as boyish. “Part of Hanks’s appeal,”
The New Yorker
explained, “is his boyishness.”
GQ
talks about how Tom Cruise “projects a sexuality that is boyish.” Even Warren Beatty appears “tousled and boyish” in
The New York Times Magazine
.

It often seems that the writers of magazine profiles have spent one too many Saturday nights watching
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
on late-night cable, because nearly every movie star is compared to Audrey Hepburn or Holly Golightly, as Charlize Theron is in
Vanity Fair
and Julia Ormond is in
The New York Times Magazine
. In
Newsweek
, Gwyneth Paltrow’s neck “brings Audrey Hepburn to mind,” and other qualities of hers provoke the same comparison in
Vogue
and
In Style
. Julia Roberts is compared to Audrey Hepburn in both
In Style
and in
Vanity Fair
twice, and
Redbook
reports that “she is the only actress now who can lay claim to Audrey Hepburn’s mantle.”

It is increasingly common for a magazine profile to include a pious denunciation or mockery of the tabloids, where, the highbrow writer points out, every little thing the celebrity does is being followed, every detail of what she eats and whom she dates is being observed—what an outrage to human dignity and privacy! And yet one wonders how the
Vanity Fair
or
Vogue
or
Entertainment Weekly
article is so wildly different. Indeed, it is often the same gossip, the same mundane details wrapped up and delivered in a different tone. But highbrow writers, and even not-so-highbrow writers, continue to be outraged by the tabloids, as if a slightly more literary turn of phrase changes the fundamental moral tenor and cultural worthiness of the venture. The anti-tabloid or anti-paparazzi moment serves a definite function: it justifies the profile as more than just gossip. One writer in
Vanity Fair
makes fun of an item from the
New York Post
about Julia Roberts eating brunch with Benjamin Bratt at Caffe Lure on Sullivan Street, and then proceeds to report in all seriousness that she shops for soy milk at Korean delis. The qualitative difference between these two observations is unclear. It may be a certain amount of self-contempt projected onto the “tabloids” for their invasive curiosity, or it may be that the highbrow writer really believes that his pursuit is more legitimate simply because it is juxtaposed with such psychological insights as “she’s no shrinking violet” and printed on higher-quality paper.

There are certain stylistic guidelines that immediately present themselves to the aspiring plagiarist. One of the transparent rhetorical tricks employed by movie star profilers across the country is a hip,
Bright Lights, Big City
, second-person voice. A
Newsweek
profile of Julia Roberts states, “On the way to her house, Roberts drags you into a lingerie shop and tries to persuade you to buy a nightgown for your wife.” And in
Entertainment Weekly
, “As you walk in the door, Roberts tells you she’s in her panic state.” In
Rolling Stone
, “what really throws you is what happens when Cruise puts the pedal to the metal.” This is a cheap way of drawing the reader into the encounter: offering the illusion that it is you who is admiring the view with the luminous cluster of glamour that is Brad Pitt. So much of the movie star profile is premised on the perception of the reader’s desperate desire to “meet” the movie star that it is no surprise that the fantasy should be so literally enacted in the style. The writer does not feel called upon to make the scene so vivid that we feel as if we are there; instead, he lazily types out three words:
you are there
.

One of the most important moments in the movie star profile is the moment of intimacy. That is, the moment when the writer proves that he has really contacted his celestial subject and has forged a genuine connection, distinguishing himself from the sycophantish hordes and servers-up of celebrity fluff. In
The New York Times Magazine
, the profiler writes, “Minutes after the plane lands, Ormond and I are slumped in the backseat of a limousine. We’re tired. We’re angry. We are about to have our first fight.” Or it can be something smaller, along the lines of this Julia Roberts profile in
Newsweek:
“Later she takes your arm. And crosses Union Square.” Or this one in
Vogue:
“One last hug. Paltrow, after two hours of fashion madness, smells very eau de fresh.” Or it can be a flirtatious voice-mail message, like the one Regis Philbin leaves a
New Yorker
writer: “(The next day I received a message on my voice mail: ‘Spend a whole day with you. Sing my guts out onstage for you. And not even a goodbye.’)” The writer
reports the flirtation, the few seconds of intimacy, the subtext of which is that he or she has really made an impression on the star, has penetrated the defenses. In
The New York Times Magazine
, the writer says that Warren Beatty “studied the artifacts of my life as if they were long-lost Mayan ruins.” Julia Roberts says to a
Vanity Fair
writer, “You’ve got a pretty good pair of lips there yourself.” These flirtations are never offered as evidence of the star’s manipulative powers or professional charm, but rather suggest the ability of this particularly appealing and attractive writer to get beyond the routine and glitter and impress the real person.