And Baby Makes News

It’s a typical movie plot: Smart-mouthed swinging single comes in contact with winsome child and goes suddenly soulful and soft. Only this time, it’s the Hollywood press who are mooning amid the baby bottles.

With the recent deliveries of a string of A-list stars, celebrity scribes -- historically the gleeful chroniclers of Tinseltown’s love triangles, court appearances and rehab relapses -- have ditched the wasp-tongued, dirt-digging persona for one of doting godparent.

“Oh, Baby!” “Getting Ready for Baby!” and, of course, “Twins for Julia!” have been the headlines at grocery checkouts and newsstands as, in the span of a few months, Gwyneth Paltrow, Courteney Cox, Helen Hunt, Kate Hudson, Debra Messing and Heidi Klum all gave birth, Julia Roberts announced she was pregnant with twins and Jennifer Lopez got married very quickly, privately leading to much speculation. (“Is She Pregnant?” ran a less-than-subtle headline in People.) And no sooner had Britney Spears said she’d become engaged to dancer Kevin Federline than an online betting service set odds on her first-born’s gender (10-to-11 on either) and whether she’d have twins or triplets (20-to-1).

Even George Clooney’s recent star-studded Lake Como party -- a Rat Packish respite amid all the baby talk -- wasn’t completely safe, including as it did Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who are the subjects of the most intense baby watch since Japanese Crown Princess Masako produced an heir.

The telephoto lenses of paparazzi, which once scanned for illicit embraces or bad behavior, are now glued to Aniston’s abdomen in hopes of getting the first glimpse of a hoped-for “bump” or parked in front of Paltrow’s home for the latest “money shot” for fan magazines -- the celebrity newborn. Hard-core fans who previously gobbled up news of public debauchery and spats on the set are now cooing over Cox’s baby, Coco, and applauding Hudson’s once-again trim figure like a bunch of besotted aunts and uncles.

The shift is an indication of changing attitudes toward celebrity and motherhood -- along with good business sense. Following the trail blazed belly-first by Demi Moore and Sarah Jessica Parker, today’s new celebrity moms are taking their pregnancies public mere weeks after conception and showcasing their growing “bumps” -- the preferred description in celebrity magazines -- with a pride once reserved for six-pack abs or a pear-cut pendant from Harry Winston. Thanks to Parker (with a nod to Reese Witherspoon), they have realized that far from dimming the glamour, an actress’ tips on surviving morning sickness and sleepless nights only endear her to fans by providing common ground and a sort of surrogate kinship.

“Having a baby is the most human experience that can happen,” says Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly. “And it provides a real connection for fans, to know that even though celebrities have these perfect lives, they still get stretch marks or gain weight or have their ups and downs.”

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Cooperating for Privacy

Up until relatively recently, family photos were controlled by studios and publicists -- think Bogie and Bacall posed stiffly on the living room floor with kids -- and images of pregnant stars were exceedingly rare. But as magazines like Us and People play up the “real-life” images of celebrities, paparazzi have become more plentiful, and stars, out of personal inclination or necessity, have become more cooperative.

“There’s only two sets of pictures that the public wants to see,” says Gary Morgan, co-owner of Splash News and Picture Agency, which supplies celebrity photos to magazines and newspapers worldwide. “That’s weddings and babies.”

Instead of throwing a punch or destroying a camera aimed at their child a la Alec Baldwin (who in 1995 broke the nose of a photographer trying to get footage of Baldwin’s newborn), star couples will allow one or two shots to be taken and circulated in an attempt to buy a little privacy. However earnest these celebrity requests, their controlled photo ops do little to discourage the paparazzi simply because there’s so much money at stake.

Starlet-with-child shots can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars -- the first shot of Paltrow with her baby reportedly went for $750,000. As a result, according to Hollywood observers, there are about 100 paparazzi in Los Angeles alone keeping track of celebrity due dates. (Roberts and Liv Tyler are next.)

“You have people coming in from all over the world,” says Randy Bauer, owner of celebrity photo agency Bauer-Griffin. “It’s like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Far from scoping the club scene or leering into limo windows, paparazzi now hang out in parks and playgrounds. In Los Angeles, they hover around family-friendly sites in Malibu, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.

New York paparazzo Lawrence Schwartzwald, who landed the first grainy shot of Madonna’s then-infant daughter Lourdes, stakes out Central Park. And while he has had run-ins with stars including Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jodie Foster, he claims that more celebrities these days are willing to cooperate than not.

According to Schwartzwald, when Kelsey Grammer spotted him taking pictures of him, his wife and his 2-year-old daughter, Grammer’s concern was that the light and the background were bad and so the four decamped to a more lovely locale. Grammer’s publicist Stan Rosenfield remembers it a bit differently. “What Kelsey said was, ‘Why don’t I give you what you want and you’ll leave me alone.’ ”

Meanwhile, famous new parents or parents-to-be, including Paltrow and before her Parker, have begun arranging photo sessions outside hospitals and at their doorsteps in the hopes of preserving some privacy.

“It is our wish that by making this photograph available,” read a statement from Cox and husband David Arquette accompanying family photos in Us Weekly, “we will protect the privacy of our daughter by discouraging unwanted pursuit by photographers.”

“We call it ‘giving it up,’ ” says Bauer. “They are posed sessions that appear to be paparazzi-like. They don’t want to give the impression that they’re actually cooperating with the media, but they know they have to lessen the impact of the paparazzi frenzy. In reality, all it does is feed into it.”

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A New Attitude

Some of the seemingly insatiable interest stems from sheer coincidence: a crop of very popular, comely stars giving birth within months of one another. But it also reflects a new age in which “celebrities open up about everything,” says Us’ Min, including addictions, eating disorders, being molested. “There’s nothing they won’t talk about now.” By contrast, when studios ran Hollywood, a star’s private life was guarded by executives who believed image had to be tightly controlled; any indication that an actor did not match his screen persona would damage his marketability.

“These younger stars see themselves as role models,” says Bonnie Fuller, editor of the Star who, during her recent tenure at Us, was a major force in the domestication of celebrities. “They are comfortable being parents and proud of their parenting skills, and they are just out and about more.”

Exposure often breeds expectation of intimacy among fans. People want to know if Roberts’ twins are the result of fertility treatment because Cox went public with her difficulties. This tell-all attitude reflects an openness among younger celebrities and an understanding of how the celebrity press can help them.

Fans have always awaited the birth of celebrity children. These babies not only provided the stars with even more perfect lives, but were also genetic gold mines, the imagined repositories of beauty and talent beyond the proletariat’s wildest dreams.

“There’s something titillating about a Gwyneth Paltrow emerging from a Blythe Danner and then burning even brighter,” says Johanna Bradley, assistant director of USC’s Norman Lear Center, which studies the entertainment industry. “It’s like the Greek gods, such complex relationships on high but also with very gritty details. It’s much less interesting to have a nonfamous dad or ugly people in your family, like most of us do.”

The recent babymania reminds Bradley of the way folks in a small town pore over the local paper’s society pages, scanning for births, marriages and deaths among people they know. “This may be a replacement for that,” she says. “A creation of the larger community. And with the press now allowed to report on any salacious detail, the whole love and loathing that fuels our relationship with celebrity is even stronger. We can delight in a slender star getting fat.”

Fuller believes that candid shots of babies and children allow fans to glamorize and humanize the stars.

“It makes us feel like we’re like them,” she says. “In the age of reality TV, so many people think they’re 6 degrees away from celebrity as it is.”

Actresses, who once had to disguise their bulging contours or just drop out for a while, can now expect a level of accommodation from directors -- like Zeta-Jones, whose pregnancy did not keep her from her “Traffic” role. And images of them pregnant may be, from a career standpoint, better than no images at all.

“Actresses are so much more in the public eye, period,” says Fuller. “And they are style role models, when they’re pregnant, when they’re not pregnant. It’s a way to stay in the running.”

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Pregnant and the City

Although most people credit Moore’s naked Vanity Fair cover in 1991 with putting the X back in expecting, it was Parker who created the template for the current baby boom from the moment she and spouse Matthew Broderick announced her pregnancy in 2002.

Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City” remained baby-free with the help of increasingly ineffective blousy tops. But Parker herself did not hide her growing stomach, which was captured in innumerable photographs and run in many magazines. When the baby was born, she met the paparazzi head on, agreeing to pose if they would then just go away. And within months of giving birth, she was back to her old svelte self, doing a provocative photo shoot in W that landed on the cover with the headline “Sexy Mama.”

“Parker was the watershed,” says Min. “She controlled the first pictures of her baby and then she did that amazing photo spread, very racy.”

The trim post-pregnancy photo shoot or award-show appearance, Min says, has now become obligatory. “Now it’s a race to see how fast you can get back in the dress and on the red carpet,” Min says. “Look at Mary-Louise Parker at the Golden Globes, in that very low-cut dress, thanking her newborn for her breasts. Or Kate Hudson, who worked out until she cried to get her figure back so quickly. They have to reclaim their ground.”

Martha Nelson, editor of People, agrees that Sarah Jessica Parker was very generous with the press but doesn’t see it as calculated. “Sarah Jessica Parker was working in New York, and she obviously made a decision to live as a New Yorker, which meant she was on the street a lot.” Nelson is more pragmatic in analyzing the recent babymania, chalking it up to coincidence. But, she says, “there is definitely the sense that it’s OK to take a picture of a pregnant woman and run it, which it was not before.”

Parker’s pregnancy coincided with a revolution in maternity wear. A few years ago, A Pea in the Pod was one of the few places a pregnant woman could find something that did not look like a smock. Now, maternity clothes are everywhere, including stores such as Fred Segal and L.L. Bean. Babies have even more fashion and accessory possibilities, in part because of the Hollywood boom. Parker’s layette got almost as much ink as her belly, and when Miranda on “Sex and the City” was shown pushing her baby around in an $800 Bugaboo stroller, says Marisa Fox, In Style’s features editor, “it created this frenzy. Everyone wanted to have that cool, high-tech-looking stroller.”

High-end packaging has helped create the image of babies as the new star accessory.

“I think pregnancy is the chic-est thing out there,” says publicist Jill Eisenstadt. “They have these great clothes now, you can show your cleavage, and it’s OK to have curves.”

At People, Nelson cautions against reading too much into this or any perceived trend in the celebrity press. “It all depends on what the story is now. If you have the first picture of Jennifer Aniston and Marc Anthony, then that’s the ‘get,’ that’s the story,” she says, quickly catching herself and adding: “I mean Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony.”

Aniston and Anthony, now there’s a juicy story. And didn’t we hear she was pregnant?