Book review: ‘Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers’ by Anthony Slide

Who would have guessed that in 1922 the fan magazine Screenland’s film critic was none other than that curmudgeonly man of letters H.L. Mencken? Not surprisingly, he didn’t like much of what he saw on the screen, and his stint was brief, about a year — but that was long enough for the witty, elegant silent leading lady Aileen Pringle to become his mistress. At that time, even Eleanor Roosevelt and Theodore Dreiser wrote pieces for movie magazines.

These are but a few of the nuggets mined by veteran film historian Anthony Slide in his exhaustively researched, endlessly fascinating and insightful “Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers.” Slide makes his case — and then some — that the “importance of the fan magazine in American society as an arbiter of (not always good) taste, a source of knowledge, and a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its people cannot be denied.”

Slide discovered that the leaders of the fledgling motion picture industry were opposed to fan magazines for the same reason that they had resisted identifying the stars of their movies: Publicizing actors would make them famous and thereby drive up their salary demands. Nonetheless, J. Stuart Blackton, co-founder of the Vitagraph Co., with Eugene V. Brewster, launched the first fanzine, Motion Picture Story Magazine, in February 1911. As the magazine title suggests, it was composed of story adaptations of upcoming movies. But they would be gradually supplanted by interviews and features on stars and soon columns on news items and, ultimately, gossip. Both men were much-married and major womanizers; Brewster lost his fortune trying to turn one of his wives, Corliss Palmer, into a star. Eventually physical fitness guru and publishing tycoon Bernarr Macfadden — a tireless lech — got into the fan magazines in a big way.

Slide rightly devotes much attention to James R. Quirk, the man responsible for the greatest fan magazine of them all, Photoplay. He set high standards for his writers and editors and was an early, blistering foe of censorship. Slide, who has published volumes of selections of film reviews from the movies’ earliest days, found that in the 1920s the magazines took reviewing seriously — but started to decline in the 1930s.

Early in his career Slide had the good fortune to meet, among others, two major fan magazine writers: Adele Whitely Fletcher, who changed Lucille Lesueur’s name to Joan Crawford in a “contest” and whose career spanned the teens to the 1970s, and Ruth Waterbury, arguably the doyenne of fan magazine writers. Waterbury was a short, vivacious woman, full of fun and enthusiasm, and a vigorous, knowledgeable writer. Howard Strickling, MGM’s legendary head of publicity, thought so highly of her that when she was ailing in her last years he personally called members of the entertainment press to request them to send her a Christmas card to cheer her up.

Slide says that such pioneering writers “believed quite sincerely in much that they wrote and that much of what they wrote was closer to the truth than fiction (with some reservations).” Indeed, at times some writers were simultaneously studio publicists. Not surprisingly, the studios, which at first ignored fan magazines, exerted increasing control over them. Slide surveys thoroughly the array of Hollywood columnists, starting inevitably with Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper and ending with Rona Barrett.

Fan magazines came and went at a dizzying speed and their writers and editors were constantly moving from one publication to another. Confidential magazine’s exposés in the late-1950s forced the magazines into an increasingly sensational direction and, undercut by television and changing times, they faded away. Photoplay ended its 69-year run in 1980 — but, as Slide points out, fan magazines still live on in People, Us and the Internet.

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