One exemplar of these ageist beauty standards was forty-seven-year-old Susan Boyle, who became a star after belting out a killer version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables on Britain’s Got Talent. Her instant fame was propelled by the shock, expressed by both the show’s judges and the audience, that a conventionally unattractive forty-seven-year-old, slightly overweight woman with overly thick eyebrows and somewhat disheveled hair could actually have talent. When Boyle first introduced herself, stated her age, and said she wanted to be a singing star, the camera showed the judges smirking and audience members rolling their eyes. After the performance, the audience and the judges alike gave her a rousing standing ovation. Judge Piers Morgan exclaimed, “Without a doubt, that was the biggest surprise in my three years on this show”; what he didn’t say was that it was because of the contrast between her age, weight, and appearance and the stunning sound of her voice.106
Women of color may face less scrutiny in the world of celebrity gossip, but that’s because they are rarely featured. Studies show that white women are the most popular subjects of magazines and films and few Black, Latina, Asian, and Native women occupy the top tiers of the A-list. In 2016, Forbes listed Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, and Scarlett Johansson as the top three earning female stars.107 The only nonwhite actresses earning top dollar, Indian actress Deepika Padukone and China’s Fan Bingbing, are largely unknown to the Western media market. While some celebrities of color—Beyoncé, of course, and Jay Z, Kanye West (primarily because of his marriage to Kim Kardashian), Kerry Washington, and singers like Alicia Keys—are regularly the subjects of gossip, TV shows, and websites, it takes a major scandal or event, such as Beyoncé’s sister Solange attacking Jay Z in an elevator in 2014, and having it caught on surveillance tape, to have celebrities of color make it to the top headlines or magazine covers.
The same is true for LGBT stars. Much has changed since the 1990s in the acceptance and often sympathetic depiction of gay and lesbian celebrities. Think of Ellen DeGeneres, whose sitcom was cancelled in 1998, a year after she came out as gay on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Though People magazine covered Ellen’s marriage to Portia de Rossi, it was not until the early 2000s that Ellen returned to television and earned national adoration with her quirky dance moves and comical antics in a daytime talk show. And while we’ve seen more gay characters, even TV networks and YouTube channels aimed at queer audiences, few top stars have emerged from their ranks to break into the mainstream gossip press. Gay women continue to be regarded with suspicion. Stars like Michelle Rodriguez, Kristen Stewart, and Cara Delevingne have all been scrutinized for their choice of romantic partners; the idea that an attractive woman could want to be in a relationship with another woman continues to confuse the gossip press. Meanwhile, out gay men like Neil Patrick Harris, Anderson Cooper, and Ricky Martin have become media mainstays.
More recently, transgender stars have garnered public attention on reality TV shows and in the pages of tabloids. Since former Olympic athlete and Kardashian family dad Bruce Jenner’s 2015 revelation that he identified as a trans woman, changing her name and identity to Caitlyn, transgender celebrities have been the subject of fascinated and mostly supportive commentary; Jenner famously told her story in the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, where she became the first sixty-five-year-old woman to appear on the cover. The issue garnered 432,000 single copy sales, making it the highest-selling cover for Vanity Fair in nearly five years.108 Nevertheless, coverage of LGBTQ stars remains limited and compulsory heterosexuality continues to be a hallmark of celebrity coverage.
Considered together, these narratives reveal a limited framework of success and happiness that privileges a narrow range of identities, bodies, behaviors, and life choices while punishing or excluding those who don’t check all of the prescribed boxes, all of the time. It may be difficult to understand, then, how it is that audiences, especially those who do not fit the lauded models (i.e., 99% of us) can find pleasure in such representations. Why would I want to read about stars who seem nothing like my friends, my family, or myself?
Celebrity narratives provide us with the opportunity to consume vicariously, to indulge in a pleasurable escape to a world where money is no object. We enjoy the visual simulation of perfection and luxury that famous bodies, homes, vacations, and sports cars convey. We may temporarily forget our own financial constraints, our budgets, our rent payments. We may be seduced by the suggestion that, if we can buy some trinket that the stars love and recommend, our lives might be just a bit more glamorous. We are transported away from our workaday routines, our boring commutes, our ho-hum grocery lists, into a world of fantasy and fun.
While the pleasures of this type of transportation may be fleeting, celebrity narratives also promise us the potential for permanent escape. Stories that insist celebrities are “just like us” perpetuate the long-running tale that anyone can be famous; you, too, could live this life. Today’s digital platforms, where user-creators self-promote and brand themselves in an effort to attract followers and earn capital, both cultural and monetary, amplify the sense that we are all just a few well-conceived clicks away from Instafame. This fantasy of democratic access, of meritocracy and social mobility, may be especially appealing to audiences during our contemporary era, where inequalities between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, have widened and deepened.
As previously noted, celebrity news places women and girls at the center. The top-selling and most viewed magazine covers, TV shows, and Instagram feeds belong to women. Modeling and acting remain two of the few fields where women can actually earn more than men;109 here, the Kardashians earn millions just for Tweeting baby pics. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, where male politicians dominate and issues like women’s health care and child-care access are regularly ignored or fought against, in celebrity-world, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alfre Woodard, Gina Davis, and Robin Wright have all occupied the Oval Office as commander in chief. For many women, lacking political power and faced with much more logistically complex, and economically tenuous, situations, these stories offer an appealing reverie.
Celebrities as models for how to look and behave, embodying fantasies of rising above the herd and being seen as a distinctive individual, celebrity gossip as emotionally and cognitively satisfying puzzles to solve and, also, as a kind of social glue, celebrities as the inevitable result of the rise of leisure in capitalist systems, the media’s need for increasing numbers of celebrities to attract viewers and ad dollars, the role of celebrity culture in transporting us out of our everyday lives—all of these and more, when taken together, help explain why celebrity culture has exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
2
The Rise of Mass Culture and the Production of Celebrities
It would be quite easy to see celebrity culture and celebrity journalism as fairly recent phenomena, commanding our attention primarily in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But by the early nineteenth century, celebrities—what they stood for, what fans invested in them, what behind-the-scenes or self-aggrandizing promoters sought to extract financially from them—had come to assume an unprecedented role in the cultural life of the country. And despite the absence then of electronic media, which is now so central to celebrity production, many precedents were set about how stars were created, promoted, and embraced. This trend was enabled by the rise and intersection of several key technologies—the telegraph that expedited the spread of news, the railroads that carried entertainers around the country, photography that made the famous visible more quickly and cheaply, and, most important, the explosive rise of daily newspapers and then mass-circulation magazines, nearly all supported by advertising, that made celebrity construction and maintenance possible.
The Astor Place Riots
In 1849, in what was still the early republic, a feud between two well-known actors—or, more accurately, their fans—caused a riot in New York City in which twenty-two people were killed, 150 injured, and eighty-six arrested. It was the deadliest