Mags' face lift
Star wattage fuels war of the monthlies
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There's just one thing she neglected to mention. The cover photo of Zeta-Jones' new body was two years old.
In a practice unusual among mass-circulation glossies like Glamour, with its 2-million-plus readers, Fuller dusted off old pics of the starlet and slapped them on a celebrity "write-around" -- an unauthorized profile with recycled quotes.
The gambit misfired. Celebrity publicists cried foul -- "They've stooped to a new low," said PMK managing director Leslee Dart -- as did editors at Conde Nast sister mag Vogue, which had been promised an authorized Zeta-Jones cover for July.
Now Fuller is out of a job, a victim of an ad and newsstand slump that's sent top fashion titles into a tailspin (Hearst recently axed Katherine Betts, editor-in-chief of Glamour rival Harpers Bazaar).
But Fuller, who ran 10 celeb covers last year, up from six in 1999, is hardly the first editor to bank on a Hollywood face to give her book more newsstand cachet.
"A face can make a difference of 10,000 to 50,000" in newsstand sales, said Talk editor-in-chief Tina Brown. "That's a big swing."
And these days, the faces that swing for the fences tend to be box-office stars.
"I'd love to be in an age when you could put scientists and philosophers on the cover," said Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. "But the reality is, people in the entertainment world are the only people recognized around the world."
While Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and other top mags have seldom, if ever, resorted to a cover-story "write-around," they now face new competition from other quarters.
Vogue and Bazaar have joined Glamour in dropping models from their covers and sparring for exclusive rights to the same few celebs. That's led to cat fights between glossies, as when Britney Spears committed to the August cover of Bazaar after promising to do Vogue later this year, to Vogue's great chagrin.
Popular newcomers, like InStyle and Maxim; a gaggle of young women's books, like Cosmo Girl!, Teen Vogue, Teen People and Teen Movieline; and even newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek are now chasing the same stars.
Add around-the-clock TV coverage of Hollywood news and hundreds of junketing small-time reporters to the mix and it's a wonder that a journalist can wrest a single original word from a celebrity's mouth.
"It's really hard," said Esquire editor at large Tom Junod. A two-time National Magazine Award winner, Junod just published a freewheeling profile of R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, half of which he invented from scratch.
Washington Post media critic Stephen Carlson called the story "tripe." But Junod defends the piece, which opens with a patently fictitious account of Stipe slurping sugar from a jar in an L.A. coffee shop, as an attempt to combat the generic nature of the genre.
"There's always an element of ritual to celebrity journalism," said Junod. "To break out of that is quite a challenge."
Pumped-up publicists
Further tightening the screws on magazine journos are newly emboldened celebrity publicists. Shopping their stories to an ever widening spectrum of media outlets hungry for Hollywood news, celebs now have new leverage to dictate the terms of their interviews. And their demands have grown ever more outlandish.
"There are artists whose record isn't even released yet who already think they should have photo approval," said Warner Bros. Records senior VP Liz Rosenberg, who reps such artists as Madonna and Cher.
No magazine editor interviewed for this article would admit that a cover subject gets photo approval, but it's widely assumed that a top star like Madonna has plenty of influence.
"If they want an artist, they are going to make the deal as sweet as they can," said Rosenberg.
Tilting the balance still further toward stars is the increasing scarcity of genuine "exclusives." In order to hit all demographics, celebs will often strategically appear on a wide range of covers.
Janet Jackson heralded the arrival of her new album this spring by gracing the front of stalwart women's title Redbook and Blender, a pugnacious new music mag from Maxim parent Dennis Publishing. More surprising still: The headlines of both articles were nearly identical.
Rex Reed, whose star profiles in the 1960s and '70s bore some of the hallmarks of that era's more outspoken New Journalism, said writing about stars never used to be so complicated.
"When I was writing for the New York Times," said Reed, "the publicist wasn't even allowed to be present at the interview. Now most of the time they're demanding covers."
Reed once profiled Jane Fonda as she sat smoking marijuana in her father's apartment on New Year's Eve.
"Her comment when the piece came out," said Reed, was 'I don't mind that he said I was smoking pot. I only minded that he didn't say he was smoking it, too.' "
Air-brushed stories
That approach doesn't fly with today's celebrity gatekeepers. "Ultimately, unless you're some scummy magazine, we're all out to make the person look good," said Dart.
But are we? Plenty of magazine readers don't just want a beautiful face, after all. They want an intriguing back story, warts and all.
Stars with "more baggage," said Carter at Vanity Fair, "tend to be more interesting than someone with a tidy, perfect life."
But the imperfections of an untidy life rarely surface in the safe encounters that now serve as material for a major magazine cover story.
In the months before "Bridget Jones's Diary" hit theaters, the most adventurous things Renee Zellweger did with a reporter were scarf doughnuts and pie (Vanity Fair), attend the Paris couture shows (Vogue) and drift through a Hollywood photo exhibit (InStyle).
That's just fine with InStyle managing editor Martha Nelson. "We know the difference between breaking news and lifestyle coverage," she said. "We are a lifestyle magazine."
But it's a Catch-22 for a magazine that prides itself on tougher reporting, and it's led some to risk the occasional cover devoid of a tentpole star.
"You do some things purely for the reader and for brand differentiation," said Brown, who bumped Estella Warren from the cover of June's Talk in favor of Broadway stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick -- flouting the usual wisdom that two men on a cover translates to death at the newsstand.
And Vanity Fair made the unlikely choice of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy as the subject of its September 1999 cover. It sold a record 641,000 copies.
Such offbeat cover calls are rare, however, as most editors remain caught in the merry-go-round of Catherine, Leo, Julia and Gwyneth.
