A Gawker’s Gallery

In 1977, a weekly tabloid called the National Enquirer scored a coup by publishing a grainy black-and-white photo of the recently embalmed Elvis Presley lying in state in his sleek copper coffin. Within a week, more than 6.5 million copies of the paper had flown off the racks of the nation’s kiosks and supermarkets. The King was dead and the American public wanted nothing more than to gaze on him one last time. The Enquirer had become a household name, and a newly minted style of creepily voyeuristic celebrity journalism had announced itself.

Now, Talk Miramax Books has seen fit to serve up several hundred greatest hits of the Enquirer’s enterprising paparazzi, all by way of appealing to the public’s apparently endless appetite for celebrity destruction. For if, on the one hand, Americans idolize the rich and famous, mooning over the pleasures and powers ostensibly reserved for the happy few whose handprints are forever imprinted in the concrete sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, on the other hand, we secretly like nothing more than to see our idols tarnished with sleaze. Indeed, one needn’t be a Freudian to see that when it comes to celebrity worship, an envious anger is the obverse of adulation.

Making one’s way through “Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images,” one cannot help but be struck by the undeniable coarsening of American culture over the last several decades. While the Enquirer’s photographers were never exactly looking to present the stars with their dignity intact, in images culled from the weekly’s early days one finds a certain grudging respect, a kind of dark affection, for the denizens of Hollywood. To see a radiant Sophia Loren holding her newborn child in 1969 or Charlie Chaplin being pushed in a wheelchair by his wife Oona just one month before his death in 1977 is to gaze on the stars during what ought to be private moments, though there is nothing terribly untoward in these tender images.

At times the book’s celebrity images are positively poignant, as in the touching photograph of an aging Lucille Ball holding a lighted cigarette and a handkerchief in her right hand as she daubs tears during the 1980 wedding of her daughter Lucie while a blurry accordionist plays happily in the background. One can almost hear ex-husband Desi Arnaz crooning Latin melodies as Ball appears to think of happier bygone days. One of the book’s more bizarrely moving images is of Richard Nixon, Watergate’s biggest star, sitting alone on his fishing boat in 1993, soon after his wife Pat’s death, gazing out into space with a deep frown that suggests inveterate sadness.

More recent photos, by contrast, have a harder edge, even when the actual image at first appears entirely anodyne. What reader will not shiver upon seeing fellow Colorado youths JonBenet Ramsey and Eric Harris, she decked out in full pint-size beauty queen regalia complete with weighty gold earrings and deep red lipstick, he dressed as a skeleton for Halloween at age 6. And to see Michael Jackson in 2000 with a post-plastic surgery bandage on the tiny piece of cartilage that now passes for his nose is to confront something truly gruesome in our culture. Just what that thing is remains hard to sum up in a word or two, and so we are left to marvel at page after page of beguiling, insidious images as well as the unusually acid paragraph captions that put them into context.

When Oscar Wilde adumbrated the logic of modern celebrity by archly remarking a little more than a century ago that “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he could hardly have imagined “Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images.” This volume thoroughly collapses fame and infamy with nihilistic glee, thumbing its nose at kindness and sincerity and at the kind of Wildean irony that has come to serve as a safeguard from the grotesqueries of contemporary culture.

Beneath the flashy veneer of the Enquirer’s images is a destructive rage whose depths remain to be sounded. So it is that the most unforgettable pages in the book present a collage of images of the dead John Lennon, the dead Christina Onassis, the dead Ted Bundy. To steal and maim a phrase from the excellently sycophantic Robin Leach, reckless huckster of celebrity culture: The National Enquirer, or “Famestyles of the Rich and Lifeless.”

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Adam Bresnick writes for several publications, including the (London) Times Literary Supplement.