Internet Zaps Fan Clubs Into 21st Century

The late Jayne Mansfield will never know that, thanks to her Internet fan club, she’s recently become a cyber-pinup.

Bobby Darin, who struck piles of pop music gold with “Mack the Knife” before he died at age 37, is remembered online for his manicotti recipe, as well as for his mellifluous voice.

At Barbra Streisand’s owner-operated fan site, https://www.barbrastreisand.com, Babs’ groupies can read nefarious tabloid rumors about the prima diva, and revel in Streisand’s heartfelt rebuttals.

And while he can’t quite equal Elvis Presley in celebrity draw power--Presley’s name is reportedly linked to at least 500 fan clubs--Billy Joel is so ubiquitous on the Web that plugging his name into the Google search engine retrieves 164,000 matches.

The power of celebrity has long been enough to make strong men swoon and weak women grovel--especially at the sight of Raquel Welch in a bathing suit or Frank Sinatra making love to a mike. In the pre-Internet days, the avocation of being a fan meant poring over dishy journals such as Photoplay or Modern Screen, and pushing the envelopes, literally, by sending off letters by snail mail (often with a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the return of an “autographed” photo).

But as the Internet--all 1.2 billion Web sites, and growing by the minute--mushrooms to become a core source of mass communications, it is also emerging as a revolutionary avenue of access to celebrities, where Britney Spears is only an arm’s length away, virtually.

The Net is, all things considered, a perfect instrument for celebrity worship: Nearly instant availability to information such as biographies, tour schedules, hot gossip and photo galleries showing stars such as William Shatner and B.J. Thomas in their best light. Plenty of cyberspace to post love letters and mash notes. Chat rooms to collectively debate the merits of Madonna’s latest A) record; B) boyfriend; C) baby; D) hair color.

“If you define yourself by an interest in a celebrity, there’s something mildly thrilling about hopping from Web site to Web site, collecting information about your obsession,” said Erik Flannigan, who formerly was an editor for celebrity web site Mr. Showbiz (https://www.mr showbiz.com) and is now a senior vice president for the Disney Internet Group, which owns Mr. Showbiz.

“It’s kind of a hip thing to do now,” said Linda Kay, with some satisfaction. She’s president of the National Assn. of Fan Clubs, based in Oceanside.

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Liz Smith, Newsday’s veteran gossip columnist, sees the cyber-scene from the celebrity’s point of view. “Years ago, in fan magazines such as Photoplay, the big studios would concoct imaginary outings and articles and photo sessions to please the fans,” she said. “Now the stars do it for themselves.

“I think it’s all about control,” Smith added.

Stars with Web sites, she explained, “can further shape themselves, with the release of photos they approve, fan letters they approve, gushing articles they approve and their very own--usually scripted by others--words to their fans.”

For all of the profusion of fan clubs in the United States--Kay estimates about 7,000 official and unofficial operating now--mining the celebrity lode in multimedia is still very much a work in progress.

“I think that a lot of celebrities still don’t know what to do about the Web,” said Susan Mulcahy, who helped to create Mr. Showbiz in 1994. “Look at how long it took Julia Roberts and Madonna to register their names online.

“If you were to run a list of the top celebrities, it’s amazing how slow they were,” Mulcahy said. “There’s still a tremendous amount to be exploited.” In fact, one of the issues in Hollywood that provokes anxiety among executives, said Kay, is how to contain fans’ online enthusiasm and channel it into profits for the TV / movie / music money-making machinery.

Though fan club organization never was an exact science, the explosion of celebrity sites online has made the form even more cosmic.

“Many people ask me if fan clubs are obsolete, and in fact, the Internet is opening fan-clubbing up to a whole new group of people who would probably never have become involved before,” Kay said. “While traditional fan clubs published newsletters, advertised through magazines and fanzines, the turnaround time of correspondence was 10 days at best. Now it’s all immediate.”

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The availability of chat rooms and message boards online has also added another dimension to the instant-gratification factor. Said Mulcahy, “If you ask Brad Pitt a question and he responds to it, you’re gonna feel, ‘Wow, when has that ever happened before?’ ”

“I go to our message board two or three times a day,” said Lynne Margosian, who runs an “official” club / Web site out of her Freeport, N.Y., home, devoted to the pop music group the Cowsills. “Even if we don’t always put something down on the site, we’ll at least monitor it every day.”

Margosian, a fan of the band since 1967, ramped up the site about three years ago with four or five other fans.

“Pen-pal lists are great, but of course letters take time to send and receive,” Kay said. “And apart from conventions and fan meetings, it was hard for a large number of fans to communicate with one another on a regular basis and share information and ideas. Now it can be done immediately via the chat rooms.”

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Besides bringing the fan-club concept into the 21st century, the Internet may also be redefining its impact on breaking young stars.

“It’s way ahead of the curve,” Flannigan said. “It was fascinating to watch the Web site of Wes Bentley, who played the boyfriend in ‘American Beauty.’ The online fans were going nuts over him, long before he was in People and the other magazines.”

But what seems to be most enduring about fan clubs, no matter what medium they adopt, is that they are so . . . enduring.

“Although the idea of what kinds of people are celebrities has changed over the last 30 years, the need for celebrities doesn’t ever seem to die out,” said Mulcahy, who recalled that, when she was stuck for a draw to put on the Mr. Showbiz home page, Pamela Anderson was the automatic choice.

“There’s just never enough Pamela Anderson information on the Web,” said Disney’s Flannigan, who ranks her, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as perennial online attractions. “The interest in them just never wanes.”