My enjoyment of Star magazine dates all the way back to my teenage years, actually. It didn’t matter that many of the celebrities it reported on were from an older generation — some, like, say, Shelley Winters, dinosaurs from the Eisenhower era; others, like Lucille Ball, walking mummies from the Old Hollywood days of Pharoah Howard Hughes — and I may or may not have ever even seen them on the screen, large or small. My appetite, sociological or anthropological, was to get as down as possible into the nitty-gritty details of the lives of others. Also, to pick up cookie-crumb clues to who someone like Erik Estrada was in the social order, what their taste was like in cars, shoes, and interior decoration.
Lorne Greene, Joan Collins, Tanya Tucker, Ryan O’Neal, Rue McClanahan — the devoted reporters of Star magazine provided readers with a good, up-close look at a whole galaxy of stars.
Gawp at the stars’ strangely carpeted sunken living room! Examine the pill bottles and hair emollients in the medicine cabinet of the cavernous, marbled jack-and-jill bathroom each shares with her husband, who sleeps in a separate bed!
Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds were the queen and king of this tabloid universe. Also, Liz Taylor and her string of inappropriate, working-class boyfriends. (Poor Liz. “Horrified Liz Taylor, 57, Forced to Strip for Love Scene With Mark Harmon, 37,” read one headline in the 1980s.) Vanna White — the silent hostess on “Wheel of Fortune,” who waved her arms gracefully around dishwashers, power boats, and new Chevrolets — was a constant topic of feature stories, presumably because the readers of Star magazine were largely the sort of people who spent their days on sticky, vinyl-covered kitchen chairs in hot, rural small towns watching daytime soaps and game shows. By the mid-1990s I knew a great deal about the private life of Vanna White, about her fiancé who died in a plane crash, and about how Linda Evans stole another one of her boyfriends.
When they saw me deep into my copy of Star in the lunch-break room, those who did not read the supermarket tabloids (or pretended not to) always made the mistake of believing (or pretending to believe) that Star magazine published stories about alien babies born to surprised mothers in the Midwest, or statues of Saint Francis that wept real tears, or “I Was Bigfoot’s Love Slave.” But that was the Weekly World News (“600 lb. Gal Adopts World’s Fattest Cat!”), an entirely different brand of supermarket tabloid. Star magazine didn’t make things up, whole cloth, or publish sci-fi fiction.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the winning formula for Star magazine was a combination of intense reportage and absurdity. The reporters were ruthless old-school news hunters who absolutely did not consider it beneath their dignity to root through the garbage cans on the curb outside Liza Minnelli’s mansion to determine what she had been eating for a late-night snack after missing out on the statuette at an awards show. The gossip hounds of Star delivered the most intimate details, understanding that their readers’ fascination with other people’s lives extended even to curiosity about the contents of Loretta Lynn’s refrigerator, down to the kind of diet soda, Fresca or Pepsi Free.
Personally, I found Star genuinely and continually funny. The human comedy. I’ve just gone on a nostalgic dive into eBay to see what some of the coverlines were in Star magazine’s glory days, and it still gives me a chuckle: “Why Bryant Gumbel Really Hates Willard Scott”; “Falcon Crest’s Jane Wyman in Bitter Feud With Co-Star Lana Turner”; “My Wild, Sexy Romp With Pat Sajak”; “Richard Chamberlain Is Gay”; “How Soap Opera Witches Find Real-Life Love”; “Betty White Keeps Her Dog’s Ashes in Solid-Gold Urn Worth $150,000” (and, on the same cover in 1991, “Dolly Parton Streaks Nude in Beverly Hills”). Those are all real headlines.
Star was vigilant in maintaining a constant divorce-watch on Hollywood, reporting indefatigably on the marital woes of the Sinatras, the Springsteens, Joan and Ted Kennedy, Michael Landon, Jane Fonda, Tom Cruise. It also constantly tracked the diet and dress size of Liz Taylor (poor Liz), Oprah, Delta Burke, Marie Osmond, Cher, and Princess Diana.
All of this went to hell in 2004, when the fools who bought Star magazine from The National Enquirer’s parent company — who had bought it in 1990 from Rupert Murdoch, the devil himself — made the boneheaded decision to redesign it and put it under the editorial management of Bonnie Fuller, who had been at the helm of the (dreary, insipid, unimaginative, weak tea) Us Weekly. As you can tell by my incensed tone, I’m still more than a little piqued about this. Change is good, but change for the worst is intolerable, and the destruction of Star still rankles. It was a sure harbinger of the cultural doom the Millennium brought. (And if you don’t know what I am talking about, I am talking about the universally homogenizing power of the internet and social media, the glossification of entirely everything.)
You couldn’t force me to read People or Us. Even in the doctor’s office or on a treadmill, I will not read People or Us. These celebrity magazines hold zero interest. A “tasteful celebrity magazine” is an oxymoron, and the publishers shouldn’t try. It’s like tasteful Christmas wrapping paper or tasteful Barbie Doll clothes: It’s not; it can never be; and the tackiness is the essence of its joy.
The boringness of Us and People can be blamed on the fact that their editorial stance — their venom, their independence — is compromised by the publishers and editors being (it seems to me) in cahoots with the moneymaking industries they are reporting on. They are in the business of trading fawning coverage for access, which results in puff pieces. The old Star magazine very rarely published puff pieces. Puff pieces are boring. I need another word for “boring,” worse than “tedious,” with which to express just how boring a story such as “Meghan Markle’s 44th Birthday Inspired Us to Recreate 4 of Her Polished Outfits” is. By contrast, the very best of Star in its glory years, the pinnacle of its editorial genius, was a weekly item titled “Would You Be Caught Dead in This Outfit?”
“Would You Be Caught Dead in This Outfit?” was a special sidebar box on the “What People Are Wearing” page, with a highlighted photo of one lucky star wearing his or her worst look at some event or other. The Duchess of York in a dumpy yellow polka-dot dress at a book party, looking like a maternal Minnie Mouse, or Carol Channing in a cardigan sweater incongruously paired with 1970s lace-up knee boots at a restaurant opening — the copywriter sharpened his or her fingernails and sharpened her pen and captioned the unfortunate image with hilarity. Linda Lavin wore a giant faux corsage on a navy-blue evening dress and Star said it looked like she was being eaten alive by a carnivorous flower from “Little Shop of Horrors.” I remember, immortally, whoever this unsung hero was at Star writing, evilly, that a television actress in a tube dress looked like “two pigs fighting under a blanket.” Now that’s talent.