“You want to see me driving up and down the Sunset Strip in my car picking up girls, right? Well, you don’t think I’d be stupid enough to let you see that side of me, do you?” –Warren Beatty, 1967 * For more than a hundred years, we’ve made celebrity worship a national pastime without ever calling it as much. With their beauty, ability, and fame, celebrities charm us, and we yearn to know if that charm extends to their daily lives. We want to know everything about them.
In the third decade of the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine a major star divulging their private lives to...
a writer. If a celebrity wants to document their life, they’ll produce a documentary or docuseries or fictional movie or podcast. They won’t leave it to a magazine, because why would they? But during the 1960s and ’70s, the balance of power tilted in the other direction.
Magazines, even low budget start-ups, had the freedom to publish nuanced, intimate, and occasionally revealing stories. Writers weren’t invincible but they had freedom to write what they wanted, and a magazine could publish a critical piece without fear of damaging relationships with actors and agents and PR teams. It was a time of provocation where the results could be damning or exposing.
Notable magazine articles on celebrities existed before, of course; The started doing their “Profiles” in the 1920s and occasionally wrote about a celebrity like silent movie star Rudolf Valentino. However, during the gold.
