Personalities Non Grata?

The United States has long been a society fascinated by--obsessed with--celebrity. We are, after all, the land of Lindbergh and Elvis, of Jackie and Marilyn, of Michael and Madonna.

In recent decades, amid the burgeoning growth of mass-market magazines, all-news television networks and such TV magazine shows as “60 Minutes” and “20/20,” the coverage (and the creation) of celebrities has become a cottage industry for much of the nation’s news media.

But within days after the terrorist attacks, magazine editors in New York began discussing whether the continuing celebrification of America--and the gossip and scandal that often surround the famous and the infamous--is appropriate to the new mood of the country.

At a time when thousands lie dead, when war--in one form or another--seems inevitable, and when firefighters and police officers are being recognized as our true heroes, how much appetite will Americans have for the continuing journalistic glorification of movie stars, rock singers and basketball players?

Certainly, all those stars participating in Friday night’s nationally televised “Tribute to Heroes” performed a valuable and generous service that might not have been as successful without our celebrity fixation. Just as surely, “interest in celebrities, real and manufactured, won’t go away because of what happened on Sept. 11,” said Leo Braudy, a literature professor at USC and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown.”

But Braudy expects that “some sense of proportion will come back. ... The very idea of normal celebrityhood seems even more empty than usual now,” even to magazine editors.

“I suspect we’ll see a new sense of seriousness,” Braudy said, “but I don’t know that it will be a coherent seriousness of purpose so much as an unwillingness to offend anyone.” This shift in attitude is likely to be accompanied by a similar shift in tone--away from a pervasive air of cynicism that defined some magazines for the last two decades, if not longer.

The kind of “ironic detachment” that’s been so popular in recent years is also likely to fade, said Art Cooper, editor in chief of GQ. “People are not comfortable with that now.”

Although GQ has changed 60 pages in its November issue and will include several stories related to the terrorist attacks in its December issue. “We’re not going to turn ourselves into Yank magazine,” Cooper said. “We can’t be a magazine that covers only the war. That would be a mistake.

Magazines have had to adapt to previous deadly crises, of course--two world wars, the Great Depression and Vietnam all shattered the last century. Some failed to change--and died.

The nation is in a new kind of crisis, though, with a shadow enemy whose first strike left more dead people on American soil than any single day since the Civil War.

Under the circumstances, just talking about magazines and celebrities seems frivolous. But even in times of war and Depression, Americans have turned to movies and music for a temporary escape from their worries. Films, TV shows and music now are our major cultural exports, so much so that they have come to symbolize the nature and hegemony of American popular culture that infuriates so many Islamic militants. The challenge for editors is to maintain an individual niche in an increasingly crowded media landscape, without seeming either insensitive or oblivious to the suffering and anxiety in the country.

Specialty magazines in virtually every field from fashion to sports are likely to tone down their more frivolous, strident and garish presentations until some sense of normality returns. Sports Illustrated’s latest cover: “The Week That Sports Stood Still.” But adjusting to the new reality presents a special problem for those magazines that rely most heavily on celebrity covers to lure readers into their pages--magazines such as Vanity Fair, People, GQ and Esquire, which might be thought of as the four horsemen of the celebrity apocalypse.

“Internally, we’re talking a lot about how we handle celebrity ‘crises’ and some of the more trivial things we deal with and what books we review and what’s the right tone for the magazine right now,” said Susan Toepfer, deputy managing editor of People, which helped usher in the age of celebrity when it was founded in 1974.

“Our first two issues after the crisis were totally devoted to the crisis,” Toepfer said. “We’ll probably return to our normal mix but still pay attention to what’s going on in New York and the world, with the space we give to that being determined by what develops.

“But we’ve always been a mix of extraordinary people doing ordinary things and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and people will still be interested in the lives of celebrities. The bar will probably be higher, though. They’ll still want Jennifer [Lopez] and Brad [Pitt] to be happy; the question for us is will they still be interested in [actress] Anne Heche’s mental problems?”

David Granger, the editor of Esquire, and his staff have also been discussing tone and content. He said one of the first things he told them was, “You can’t just all of a sudden think that because of this, what you do in your life is silly.”

But Granger said he has always “dealt somewhat reluctantly in celebrity realms” and has tried to “break out of it whenever possible.” Such breakouts might be easier now, he said. “It’s kind of a welcome relief that I think people will be looking for more substantial voices who can interpret what’s going on in the world, and there will be more hunger for meaning and ... some kind of perspective on what’s happening.

“I haven’t heard a single celebrity being asked for his opinion on these events yet,” Granger said last week before Friday night’s celebrity telethon. “I think we’ll move into an age of better, more substantial journalism.”

Still, he said, “I don’t know that the celebrity culture is dead.” Indeed, the December issue of Esquire, which Granger said would contain 10 to 20 pages “related to the state of the world after Sept. 11,” will feature two movie stars on its cover.

Vanity Fair, which has long been known for putting celebrities on the cover and serious journalism inside, will also have a movie star on its December cover. “I wrap the magazine in something that will get it off the newsstand, and I try to fill it with things that will keep people in their homes reading it,” said editor Graydon Carter.

“This magazine goes around the world, and movie stars have been a common currency around the world. Each country has its own television and music stars, but movie stars are global. This might change in the new cultural order, and that wouldn’t be the worst thing ... but people do want to escape out of their own lives.”

The desire to escape the routine--or the horror that has disrupted the routine--is not uniquely American, of course. But the preoccupation with celebrity is, if not unique, at least far greater in this country than elsewhere. As Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” once observed, “No country in the world is so driven by personality,” has such a “hunger to identify with personalities, larger-than-life personalities especially ... as this one.”

Hollywood has helped to both create and feed that hunger. There isanother, even more distinctively American force that contributes to the cult of the celebrity: our historic exaltation of the individual. In such diverse cultures as Western Europe, Australia and many Asian countries, the desires of the individual have traditionally been subordinated to the needs of the community.

But the United States was founded on the bedrock of individual freedoms; liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been self-evident truths of the American life since July 4, 1776. Academics use the term “American exceptionalism” to describe our tendency to attribute to many achievers a stature not so easily given in other countries. We are, after all, a democracy, with no monarch, so we create our own royalty out of these achievers--or, in some cases, malefactors or even innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystanders.

They may be genuine achievers--Colin Powell, Kobe Bryant, Barbra Streisand--or what USC’s Braudy calls “temporary” or “manufactured” celebrities--Monica Lewinsky, Rep. Gary Condit, Heidi Fleiss--people who are famous simply for being famous. But celebrities of all kinds (and the gossip and scandal that often surround them) have increasingly become a staple in the news media

Gossip columns immediately cut back after the attacks, and while gossip is no more likely to disappear from the news media than at the corner bar, the barber shop or the office water cooler, many editors do think the most egregious manifestations of gossip, scandal and celebrity-worship may at least diminish, if only temporarily.

Some publications may find that paradigmatic shift more difficult than others, though.

“Bigger magazines have to have a broader appeal,” Carter said, and movie stars have the broadest appeal of all. “Magazines that put politicians on the cover sell 4,000 copies. ... We have movie stars and 1.3 million circulation.”

Vanity Fair plans to distribute with its November issue a special 48-page magazine devoted entirely to the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. The November issue itself--traditionally devoted to music--will be unchanged, but Carter said about 80% of the December issue will be related to the attacks.

Carter is critical of the original Vanity Fair, which was founded in 1913 and stopped publishing in 1936, in part because “it became irrelevant to its times. The Vanity Fair of the 1930s was still, by and large, a cafe society magazine,” he said. “There were only two references to Hitler up to 1936, and both were in a lighthearted vein. The Depression never really entered the pages of Vanity Fair.”

Vanity Fair was reborn in 1983, and Carter said he does not want to make the same mistake. He expects the impact of the terrorist attacks to dominate his publication and many others “for the foreseeable future”--and to extend beyond the magazine world.

“I think in three years, we will look back and say, ‘That’s the time when a lot of things changed,”’ Carter said. “A new culture may come out of this, a new and fresh culture that will be unlike so much of the things produced in the last 25 years, most of which is self-consciously mimicking or making fun of or being ironic about something in the past.”

But Carter said he expected Vanity Fair to gradually increase the space devoted to its normal fare in ensuing months.

“As much as people will be consumed with this for however long it will be, there is also a desire for women to put on lipstick and men to get a haircut to look nice and for people to go home and water their plants--not momentous things but things that help keep us normal in a time like this.”

GQ’s Cooper agreed, saying, “We have to acknowledge what’s going on. But our cover will not be anything to do with this. It will not be Rudy Giuliani. It won’t be George Bush. It will probably be a celebrity--an actor or a sports figure. That’s what we do.”