CHAPTER 18

Celebrity Sin

There had never been a year so disconcerting for the House of Windsor. In fact, so scandalous was 1992 that Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II christened it her annus horribilis.

In March, the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, decided to separate from his wife, Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York), following revelations that she had been carrying on with a Texas oilman. In April, Elizabeth’s daughter, Princess Anne, and Anne’s estranged husband, Mark Phillips, were officially granted a divorce. In June, Her Majesty’s daughter-in-law Princess Diana of Wales was revealed in a shocking biography to be struggling with Prince Charles’s infidelity, her own bulimia, and a depression so deep that she had attempted suicide. (Diana had secretly authorized the book.) In August, “Fergie” was again in the news, photographed in Saint-Tropez—bare-bosomed and having her bare toes lovingly sucked upon (not by the aforementioned oilman, but by a different Texas financier). Meanwhile, the marriage of Charles and Diana continued to unravel. Rumors swirled of an affair between the princess and the polo player James Hewitt. Then clandestine tapes emerged exposing intimate discussions between Diana and her longtime friend James Gilbey—about masturbation, Diana’s pregnancy worries, and the travails of married life. (On the recordings, made several years earlier, Gilbey refers to Diana as his “darling” and, cringingly, as “Squidgy.”)

In late November, when a damaging blaze raged through Windsor Castle, it seemed a kind of elegy. The dirge sounded before Christmas: an official announcement came down from 10 Downing Street that, yes, Charles and Diana had decided to separate.

Not that 1993 was any great shakes either. Two weeks into the New Year, conversations from Charles’s hacked cell phone were leaked, exposing a string of nerd-perv come-ons to his not-so-secret lover, Camilla Parker Bowles (later his wife). On the tapes, the heir to the throne fantasized about how he’d like to “just live inside your trousers” and return to Earth in the next life as “a Tampax.” (The public could dial a number and, for a small fee, have a listen.) Next came Diana’s shaming. The owner of a London fitness center connived to rig up a hidden camera in the ceiling of his gym to spy on the princess while she worked out. The resulting photos—depicting Diana in a leotard on a leg-press machine—were published in the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror and scored the health club operator more than $300,000. For the price of a newspaper, the public could delight in two forms of humiliation: seeing a royal at her most plebeian (her face contorted while she worked up a sweat) and defrocked (stripped down to her skintight training attire).

There was a corrosive pattern here. The Princess of Wales had perceived her activity as private. So had Charles and Camilla. So had Fergie and her beau. Diana’s attorneys, in a stroke of sanity, decided to file suit. And a British court sided with her, ruling against both the newspaper group and the owner of the club.

For the moment, decorum and reason prevailed. Or so one might have gathered.

The current, however, was too strong. A scandal riptide swept across the U.S. in the 1990s, even more so than in the U.K. And it submerged the reputations of dozens of individuals who in past eras might have ridden it all out.

The popular press had become fixated on celebrities, colorful commoners, and their falls from grace: the steeper the descent, the sweeter. As a result, much of the decade’s media coverage would amount to a clown-car cortege of revelations involving sex, scandal, violence, crime, sleaze, or some combination of these, all Cheez-Whizzed across the culture.

The rot in the House of Windsor, then, was merely the drama of the royal enclosure. Theirs was a pox being visited on countless houses, especially in L.A., New York, and Washington, D.C. Herewith—to quickly survey the damage before assessing its causes—is a chronology of some of the decade’s nadirs of disgrace, moments that ranged from libidinous to criminal, from the purely prurient to the simply crass.

• Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., is snared in an FBI sting while smoking crack with an erstwhile girlfriend, Rasheeda Moore. A videotape records the scene as Barry is placed in handcuffs and declares, “Bitch set me up.”

• Donald and Ivana Trump, one of Manhattan’s golden couples of ’80s excess, announce a public separation after Mrs. T, on the slopes at Aspen, has a tense exchange with her husband’s paramour, the model and actress Marla Maples. The New York Post soon trumpets an alleged Maples comment about Trump on its front page (twenty-five years before he would ascend to the presidency): BEST SEX I EVER HAD.1

• Christian Brando, the eldest child of actor Marlon Brando, is arrested and ultimately found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Dag Drollet, the lover of his half sister Cheyenne.

• At the start of a San Diego Padres baseball game, comedian Roseanne Barr is drowned out by a jeering crowd during her yowly (and to many disrespectful) rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Barr expresses her appreciation by grabbing hold of her crotch and letting loose a hocker—on live television.

• Med-school student William Kennedy Smith, after venturing out in Palm Beach one evening with his uncle Ted (Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy), comes back to the nearby Kennedy compound in the company of a young woman. Smith is booked on—and later cleared of—rape charges.

• Comedian Pee-wee Herman (real name: Paul Reubens)—known for his TV and film roles as a mischievous man-child living in a Day-Glo mocktopia—is nabbed in an adult movie theater in Sarasota and charged with indecent exposure. Reubens, claiming his innocence, pleads no contest and avoids a public trial.

• Tennis ace Martina Navratilova is sued by her former partner of seven years, Judy Nelson, for “gal-pal-imony.” Nelson nets a bundle, including the $1.3 million house in Aspen.

• Actress Elizabeth Taylor weds her seventh husband, a construction worker named Larry Fortensky, whom she meets while in rehab at the Betty Ford Center. The ceremony takes place at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch in California, where a paparazzo paraglides from the sky and lands on the lawn, only to be clocked by burly security guards.2

• Mia Farrow, while visiting the apartment of her longtime partner, Woody Allen, comes across compromising Polaroids of her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn, who is romantically involved with Allen. A legal battle commences, in which Allen is accused of engaging in sexual behavior with Farrow’s daughter Dylan; the State of New York declares, however, that there is “no credible evidence [that Dylan] has been abused or maltreated.” Allen is cleared of the charges and denies any misconduct. Allen and Previn marry five years later.

• World heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson (who is divorced from actress Robin Givens following charges of domestic abuse) is convicted of raping Desiree Washington, a teenage beauty queen. Released from jail in 1995, Tyson regains his title but, two years later, forfeits his boxing license after a bloody bout in which he takes a chomp out of the ear of his opponent, Evander Holyfield.

• Teenager Amy Fisher, smitten with her married boyfriend—a mechanic named Joey Buttafuoco—shows up at his front door in Massapequa, Long Island, and shoots his wife, Mary Jo, in the head. Mary Jo survives but sustains facial disfigurement. Joey does four months for sleeping with a minor. Amy serves seven years for reckless assault. Their story is regurgitated in three quickie TV movies. Over time, Fisher’s career path traces a curiously bulbous celebrity bell curve: she pens two memoirs, writes columns for the Long Island Press, becomes a prison-rights reformer, performs in strip clubs, appears on Celebrity Rehab, and stars in a half dozen porn movies, including Seduced by a Cougar, Volume 22. Joey, over the years, is implicated in a fraud scheme, becomes a sometime actor, and agrees to a sparring match with Chyna, the female pro wrestler. Mary Jo, meanwhile, becomes a motivational speaker and advocate for sufferers of facial paralysis, writing a memoir of her own, entitled—wait for it—Getting It Through My Thick Skull.

• In a case that rivets Beverly Hills, brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez go on trial—twice—for killing their parents, Kitty and Jose, in the family mansion. (In discussions with a therapist, the brothers confess to the crimes.) The sons, despite their claims of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, are convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy, and must spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

• At a practice skating rink, an assailant takes a baton and whacks American Olympic hopeful Nancy Kerrigan above her kneecap, injuring her. It soon emerges that Kerrigan’s figure-skating rival, Tonya Harding, along with Harding’s husband, Jeff Gillooly, helped set up the “hit” with an accomplice. (The couple later plead guilty, respectively, of conspiracy and racketeering.) Kerrigan and Harding go on to compete on the U.S. Olympic team, finishing second and eighth, behind victor Oksana Baiul. Paydays follow. Kerrigan inks a $1 million cross-platform media deal. A Gillooly-Harding sex tape makes the rounds.

• Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, eccentric puer aeternus, and singer-songwriter-dancer-entrepreneur, agrees to an out-of-court settlement in a child-molestation suit, reportedly paying out $20 million to settle one of a series of sex-abuse charges brought against him. Jackson consents to let authorities take pictures of his genitalia after one of his young accusers describes purported discolorations. The singer calls the photo session “the most humiliating ordeal of my life.”

• Anna Nicole Smith, the pillowy Playboy and Guess jeans model, marries eighty-nine-year-old J. Howard Marshall II, an oil baron six decades her senior, who is worth half a billion dollars. He dies the next year.

• Actor Hugh Grant—a charming, self-deprecating rogue on the screen, and in real life the significant other of supermodel Elizabeth Hurley—is arrested in Hollywood in the company of a hooker named Divine Brown. Grant redeems himself by going on The Tonight Show two weeks later. He addresses the seamy situation rather seamlessly, responding to host Jay Leno’s question “What the hell were you thinking?” with a sheepish “I did a bad thing; there you have it.”

• Princess Stephanie of Monaco, the principality’s resident wild child, marries her ex-bodyguard Daniel Ducruet, already the father of two of her children. Within a year, a paparazzo photographs Ducruet cavorting naked on a chaise with a woman known as Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium. The princess and Ducruet divorce; she eventually weds a circus performer, taking up residence in a caravan.

• On the third day of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, the Star tabloid zaps a message to the pager of President Clinton’s go-to political strategist Dick Morris. The gist: the tabloid is about to publish a story saying that the married Morris has been spending time in the company of a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands. The Star exposé includes photos of the pair on a balcony at the Jefferson Hotel (a power spot a few blocks from the White House) and describes how Morris would occasionally put the telephone receiver to Rowlands’s ear so she could hear the voice of the commander in chief. Morris abruptly resigns.3 (Earlier in the week, he had appeared on the cover of Time. The headline: “The Man Who Has Clinton’s Ear.”)

• The brutal slaying of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado, sparks obsessive press coverage and intensifies criticism of the child beauty pageant boom. (The murder remains unsolved.)

• Robert F. Kennedy’s son Michael—campaign chief of his brother Joe’s run for Massachusetts governor (and his uncle Ted’s Senate reelection bid)—is alleged to have been carrying on with his children’s underage babysitter. (Michael dies several months later in a skiing accident.)

• Eddie Murphy, after visiting a late-night newsstand in Hollywood, is stopped by authorities in the company of a transsexual prostitute, Atisone Seiuli. The actor-comedian, who is not charged, explains through a spokesperson that he had innocently come to the aid of Seiuli, who appeared to be distressed.

• Popular sportscaster Frank Gifford—married to popular TV talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford—is caught in the company of flight attendant Suzen Johnson, part of a secretly photographed honey trap that may or may not have been coordinated by the Globe tabloid, which denies having set up a “sting.”

• Fashion legend Gianni Versace is murdered outside his villa in South Beach. The assailant turns out to be a twenty-seven-year-old gigolo cum serial killer named Andrew Cunanan.

• Princess Diana of Wales and her companion Dodi Al-Fayed die shortly after their limousine crashes in a Paris tunnel. Their driver, Henri Paul—legally intoxicated at the time, and killed in the accident—is believed to have been speeding to elude a contingent of paparazzi. Nine photographers (some of whom take pictures of Diana in the mangled wreckage) are arrested. Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, remarks, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.” Later that week the world tunes in to watch the funeral of Diana, age thirty-six, which becomes one of the most widely viewed events in British history.4

• Popular sportscaster Marv Albert is convicted of assault and battery, stemming from an incident with a woman who over the years had occasionally joined him for trysts. In court, a second alleged sex partner claims that on two occasions Albert had sunk his teeth into her and that she had escaped his advances by tugging off his toupee. Albert sits down with TV interviewer Barbara Walters to dispute the assertions as fabrications, insisting that all acts were consensual and declaring his hair to be an un-yank-off-able weave. (Dismissed by NBC, Albert resumes his post within two years.)

• At a star-studded industry soiree during Oscar week, Mike De Luca, the thirty-two-year-old bad-boy production honcho at New Line Cinema, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, “dropped his pants… and engaged in oral sex with a young woman as several guests looked on. The incident, which took place in the backyard of William Morris Agency President Arnold Rifkin’s Pacific Palisades home, elicited tittering as well as outrage from some guests and the host, who had security guards escort De Luca from the property.”

Kneecaps, honey traps, and penis snaps. No wonder the great American unwashed often felt like they needed a shower.

What common thread connected these ’90s scandals? Some had begun as personal encounters that took a criminal or horrific turn. Some involved sexual acts that were considered completely private. Some were the actions of sociopaths. But each, in the end, became spectacles witnessed and then dissected by the thousands—sometimes by the millions—spectacles presented not infrequently in the guise of “public interest.” (Indeed, Diana’s fatal crash—while being pursued by paparazzi—was a moment when contemporary media was knocked off its axis. Then and there, millions of readers and viewers decided to regard the Press-At-Large as a “pack,” effectively robbing an entire, vaunted profession of its hard-earned reputation as a defender of the public trust.)

How, then, did such dubious news become a genus of soft porn, diced up in gossip mills, intensified by paparazzi stakeouts, and siphoned through Web portals that would refract the stars’ every flicker?

The short answers? Flush with so many brand-new and evanescent media options, news consumers and Web surfers developed a collective ADD, pinballing from story to story, format to format. Average citizens, the beneficiaries of a robust economy, had more leisure time to indulge in the base, disposable pleasures of junk culture.5 Many viewers were looking for objects of their contempt, for public figures whose social evisceration might assuage their own angst or self-loathing in the face of their own foibles. What’s more, the widening social gap between right and left—between those supporting more conservative values and those bound to a broader definition of ethics and family—upped the national demand for morality tales. Tabloid stories taught lessons about how not to behave—and about how society might mete out punishment, or mercy, for such misbehavior.6

A final ingredient was a demand for proof. A booming visual culture, 24/7 news, and a surge in digital photography had all made Americans more image-savvy at a time when skepticism was rife—the result of countless cons from the political establishment, public authorities, advertisers, and celebrity spinners. People needed to see the goods before they believed the stories they were being fed. Mug shots, paparazzi photos, and surveillance videos would become the mother’s milk of tabloid culture.

The reality, however, was less lofty than all of this. Media and society, to be blunt, found these narratives to be lucrative. Journalist David Kamp said it best in his seminal 1999 essay for Vanity Fair in which he bid the ’90s adieu. “If the decade must have a name,” Kamp wrote, “it might as well be the Tabloid Decade, [which brought about] the tabloidification of American life—of news, of the culture, yea, of human behavior.” In his view, two elements set the ’90s apart: “advanced technology and increased vulgarity. It’s the dance between these factors, the downloadable and the down-and-dirty, that has led to the Tabloid Decade’s particularly explicit brand of tabloidism.… That has enabled us… not only to discover that Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles but also to hear a recording of him stating his wish to be her tampon.”

To tweak Kamp’s thesis, two forces had conspired to set the stage. First, beginning in the early 1970s, news and information were conveniently trivialized,⁷ sensationalized, and sexualized. An entire tabloid industry coalesced around personalities, gossip, voyeurism, sex appeal, crime, and a preoccupation with appearances. Second, a series of electronic advances would alter what we viewed and heard throughout the day. Culture critic Frank Rich would wisely surmise in a 1998 New York Times column that media had effectively replaced nature as “America’s backdrop.” What Rich was getting at was the fact that the public, thanks to the telecom boom, now had access not only to print, radio, and network TV, but to dozens (and then hundreds) of cable and satellite channels, followed, of course, by the Web and digital devices of all kinds.

When these electronic delivery systems got caught in the downdraft of tabloid culture, it caused a breach in that decorous dividing line that had separated our personal, secret space from our outward, shared space. We didn’t really understand where the boundaries were. (We still don’t.) And, voyeurs all, we didn’t really care.

The public appetite for a more gamey diet of sin, celebs, crime, and innuendo was whetted by three media creations in the mid-to-late ’70s. First, press mogul Rupert Murdoch brought his tabloid tastes to the States in 1974 when he started up a paper called the National Star (later named merely the Star), which would set off a tabloid war with its conjoined twin, the National Enquirer.8 That same year, an entirely new entity would prove to be even more influential: People Weekly, the infant divine—or demon seed—of modern celebrity journalism, which would become America’s most profitable magazine franchise.⁹ Then, in 1976, as Gotham sank into a fiscal funk, Murdoch purchased the city’s oldest paper, the New York Post. And overnight the death rattle of the town’s vices and bloodlust and financial woes would resound from the tabloid’s front page. A year later, a new section—the spicy, scandalous, and often anonymously sourced “Page Six”—would ooze schmutz, gossip, and glitz. (An item from day one: actress-chanteuse Claudine Longet appeared in court in Aspen for the shooting death of her skier boyfriend Spider Sabich. She would be found guilty of criminally negligent homicide.)10

The Star, People, and the Post were just the tip of the spear. In the ’80s and ’90s, the tabloid went steroid with the introduction of a new crossbreed: tabloid TV. “For most of this century,” notes the insightful David Kamp, “tabloid had been exclusively the preserve of print.… But suddenly tabloid was suburbanized, ubiquitous, and passively received—not a smudgy read on the subway ride home, but something that ‘more or less comes with the house, like running water and electricity,’ as the novelist Thomas Mallon wrote in GQ.”

Why so? First, programmers in the ’80s began devoting ever more bandwidth to talk TV. The format ran the gamut, filching elements from the American self-help movement, French opéra bouffe, and the lion-pit bloodfests of ancient Rome. Talk-show hosts became so popular they were known by their first names: Phil and Oprah and Sally Jessy, Morton and Maury and Montel. Their programs often featured a live studio audience, experts or authors or celebrities with something to hawk, or a collection of guests airing their hang-ups, quirks, or sex habits.

Certain hosts served as referees, presiding over on-air squabbles among feuding families, neighbors, coworkers, lovers, exes, and the psychologically tenuous. (The genre would hit rock bottom when one of the guests from Jenny Jones was sentenced to twenty-five-plus years for the 1995 murder of another male guest, who, while the cameras rolled, had professed that he had a crush on him.) And yet late into the decade, the frenzied, trash-talking Jerry Springer Show would attract eight million daily viewers. Springer’s program was a whirring Cuisinart of red meat, sexual depravity, dysfunction, and fistfights.

Local news stations were also going lurid, adopting the slogan “If It Bleeds, It Leads.” Journalist Michael Winerip, in the New York Times Magazine, attributed this switch to one main factor: Reagan-era deregulation that had allowed media owners in the ’80s to operate more channels, creating a scramble for local news ratings. This demand was met most easily through coverage that was more tabloid-tinged. Many local stations chose the low road—especially during “sweeps” weeks, when audience numbers were tallied to determine ad rates. One of the low-water marks for Orlando’s Channel 2 News, for example, came during one 1995 sweeps period in which the station, according to Winerip, aired “‘Boosting Your Assets,’ about the latest bust- and penis-enhancing underwear.… ‘I had to go into Mulligan’s [restaurant,’ reporter Kathy] Marsh recalls, ‘carrying penis-enhanced underwear in my hand and ask men at the bar whether they’d wear it. I was ashamed.’”

The networks, for their part, took a while to get on the gravy train. They ran serious news-oriented specials, genuinely believing in their mandate to uphold the public trust. Newsmagazines maintained their gravitas with social exposés, hard news, and law-and-order coverage—exemplified by 60 Minutes and 20/20, along with such ’80s stalwarts as West 57th, 48 Hours, and Primetime Live. But in 1986 the genre began its precipitous slide, thanks to a Murdoch-funded creation called A Current Affair (which, in one infamous segment, used stand-ins to “re-create” child-predator claims against Michael Jackson). By 1993, the category would grow to include Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and American Journal. A year later there would be sixteen (some perennials, others flashes in the pan; some concentrating on crime, others decidedly more downmarket). And why the glut? As Newsweek would explain, “While a typical half-hour sitcom can cost $1 million an episode, news mags cost less than half that.… Some executives look to the news magazines as money machines for the networks, not the prestigious ‘loss leaders’ that news programs used to be.”11

Up jumped TV movies based on each successive scandal. The impulse to ferment docudramas out of epic disgrace was not merely mercenary. There was also a sincere belief on the part of much of the viewing public that fictionalized renderings were a form of “higher art” pulp—as if Tonya vs. Nancy, portrayed in prime time by Hollywood actresses, would magically elevate the original maiming into something within striking distance of Medea. The smart “dumb money” migrated to scandal-themed TV movies—and to side projects that could be tacked on to larger package deals. “Simply for being kneecapped,” Entertainment Weekly would report, “Nancy Kerrigan will be getting a two-hour ABC TV movie… a prime-time ABC special, appearances at Disney theme parks, an exercise video, and a children’s book that she’ll coauthor for Hyperion.”¹²

Things soon went a bit gillooly. Alongside the TV newsmags and the docudramas came a groundswell of entertainment-news-and-gossip shows. Stations relied on syndicated programming to provide ad-friendly, sponsor-supported content during the dinner hour. And so, in the wake of Entertainment Tonight (launched in 1981, back in the Bill-Paley-o-lithic Age), emerged the E! Entertainment Television network (1990), Extra! (1994), Access Hollywood (1996), and so on. These programs ladled the celebrity cream off of other media and turned it into skim.

A concurrent phenomenon was Court TV, launched in 1991, which allowed audiences not only to see the wheels of justice churning but to become inured to a new form of unscripted entertainment. That same year, cable news triumphed. Though CNN had debuted in 1980 as the first round-the-clock news channel, it wasn’t until a decade later, during the network’s coverage of the Gulf War, that it became, in Time magazine’s assessment, “the common frame of reference for the world’s power elite.” So significant was CNN’s war coverage that Time’s 1991 Person of the Year was neither Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait, nor the military leaders behind the U.S.-led counterinvasion, but Ted Turner, whose network televised it all.

Indeed, the New York Times’ Frank Rich would call CNN’s play-by-play of Operation Desert Storm the pilot for a novel kind of news-as-entertainment series: “this new genre could be named the Mediathon,” he argued, “a relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism we have come to think of as All Calamity All the Time. ‘War in the Gulf’ paved the way for the host of breathless sequels that have blanketed the culture ever since: [from] ‘The O.J. Simpson Case’ [to]… the biggest crowd-pleaser of them all, ‘Scandal at the White House.’… War and assassinations were not required to make the form tick. Sex, celebrity and money would do just fine.”13

The tabloids, whether printed or televised, were serving as the culture’s fleet of “icebreakers,” says Art Harris, an investigative reporter, writer, and producer who worked at CNN throughout the ’90s. “Whether the stuff was 100 percent true and accurate or not, it didn’t matter. Suddenly, what qualified as news or human interest was being redefined. We were heading into areas that the ships—mainstream news—couldn’t go because there was no icebreaker there with orders to chop it up. [But together] they could break off bigger chunks and navigate the glaciers—celebs, public figures, etcetera.”¹⁴

All of these media platforms, of course, would pale in comparison with those enabled by the Internet. The tab-mob scramble, in truth, had just been the preamble. Once the Web elbowed in, wagging its social-media tail, anyone could participate in the pile-on: from a scandal’s protagonists, to its surrogates and spinners, to the Web’s clickering classes, providing death by a thousand keystrokes.

In terms of private exposé, there was another odious practice that came of age during the decade—a calculated, strategic move on the part of certain gay activists. The “outing” of public figures became a form of public shaming, a drive-by referendum on personal character and political bona fides, and a next-level parlor game. An individual’s sexual orientation—by definition a private matter—was suddenly a commodity that could be exploited by activists or members of the gay or straight press and transformed into another means of tabloid-age unmasking.

Outing had sprung up during a period of radical activism—a history laid out clearly in Larry Gross’s 1993 book Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing. Silence about AIDS had meant death. President Ronald Reagan hadn’t uttered the word “AIDS” during his entire first term. Some provocateurs, believing they were on a war footing (a war against a disease, government inaction and intolerance, and societal fear and apathy), rooted out hypocrites, demanding loyalty and action. Desperate times, some argued, justified desperate measures.

Concurrently, there was a strong politics in the ’80s and ’90s around the idea of stepping up and claiming one’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans identity, or HIV-positive status. And, as David Tuller would point out in the San Francisco Chronicle, if you were actively working against the LGBT agenda—and you were closeted—some activists felt they had a right or obligation to out you, especially if you were a public figure, a power broker, a role model. Outing left little room for sympathizing with someone’s life path, inner conflicts, or public and private relationships. Instead, it politicized, accelerated, and in certain cases tabloidized15 the coming-out process, which for many was a profound, protracted, and tumultuous undertaking. Outing, in short, hijacked a personal journey and made it political.

In 1990, Stuart Kellogg, the ex-editor of the Advocate, at the time America’s largest-circulation publication for the gay community, called outing “philosophical rape.” Others used the term “witch hunt.” Humorist and essayist Fran Lebowitz referred to the practice as “immoral, it’s McCarthyism, it’s terrorism, it’s cannibalism, it’s beneath contempt.”

The single tabloid-era vocation with arguably the greatest financial upside? The paparazzo—a media species that had been around for half a century.

In the 1990s, a new level of trench warfare broke out, pitting celebrities and their storm troopers against what Evelyn Waugh, sixty years earlier, had dubbed the Daily Beast. On the march were brigades of paparazzi (for photo agencies, tabloids, European publications, celebrity magazines, TV, and websites), whose increasingly predatory behavior had been practically preordained.

The prime motivator? Hollywood’s biggest names had accrued unprecedented power, often encircling themselves with a praetorian guard of management teams and PR machines. The stars’ talent agencies, attorneys, flacks, and studios started treating the press like the hired help and demanding spotless media coverage. In response, the press—and the public—sought some authenticity, some blemishes, some nasty. “The paparazzi packs began pushing back against the PR hacks,” photographer Harry Benson recalls, “trying to fill the void and capture anything real.” The winners in the fight, needless to say, were the paps and the tabs. And their peekaboo fare suited the tastes of media-stewed Boomers who by then had started to go granular about the unvarnished lives of their heroes.¹⁶

A European friend of mine in the photo business has an anecdote he wants to share. Over the second glass of wine, it tumbles out.

“I knew a paparazzo who had many exclusives in the ’90s,” he says. “He had an unbelievable story.

“It began with a mysterious voice,” he recounts. “Every year or two, this photographer would get a call from a stranger. Always the same British voice. Always very polite but direct. The photographer had no idea who this guy was. But then the phone would ring and it would be this guy—very specific instructions. ‘Go to this restaurant at this time. Or go to this apartment building at this address. Wait outside and you will get a surprise.’ Then the guy would hang up.

“So the paparazzo would go to the restaurant and wait, and, voilà. Coming out the front door would be a member of some European royal family—with a beautiful woman. Or a celebrity would be meeting a lover in a parking garage. Always, the calls were accurate. Always, the pictures were a sensation. The photographer was quite confused, actually. How did this man have [such] good information? And how come the man chose him to give the exclusives, never asking for anything [in return]?

“So one time the photographer’s phone rings, back in the ’90s. It’s the voice with the British accent. ‘Go this Thursday to this airport in this country’—it is a remote destination where people go on holiday. ‘Go to the corporate terminal. Wait for a private plane with this tail number. You will get a surprise.’ And he hangs up.

“The photographer goes there,” my friend says. (He tells me the name of the celebrity involved, but asks me not to publish it, to protect the paparazzo’s identity.) “And, voilà, just as the guy predicted, [the celebrity] comes out of the plane, but with a man who is not her husband. They are met by a van. They get in the van and they drive off and disappear. The photographer has no idea where to find them. They could be anywhere.

“So he calls a close friend—a business partner of his, who has a vacation house nearby. He is extremely good-looking, this friend. The photographer says, ‘Come, you have to help me. So-and-so celebrity is here with a lover. I have to find her.’ So his friend comes over. And both of them, together, go to all the rental car places, one by one. At one office, the boss comes out. The two of them ask about the celebrity. The boss is extremely disagreeable. ‘How can you ask such a question?’

“But they see a secretary off to the side and she is blushing when she looks at the paparazzo’s friend. So [the two of them] wait until the boss leaves, and the friend flirts with her. They ask her to go to dinner when she gets off work. Of course, they go out. The friend of the photographer goes back to her place. They make love. And the next morning, bravo, she gives him the address of the celebrity. The photographer and his partner spend a day hiding in the trees, taking photographs. And they are published all over the world. They make a lot—a lot—of money.

“But it doesn’t end happily ever after.

“Apparently, there are powerful people close to the celebrity. They want to [punish] the paparazzo. So they plan their revenge.”

We pour a third glass of wine.

“Three months later, the photographer’s phone rings. This time it is a different voice. This time the new voice says, ‘I think it would be interesting if you go to the entrance of a hotel near the Gare du Nord’—the Paris train terminal—‘at this time tomorrow morning. Go to this hotel and wait outside.’ And he hangs up. The photographer, the next day, does as he’s been told.

“And as he is looking through the viewfinder of the camera, he spots her. It is his own wife—the photographer’s wife. And she’s coming out of the hotel with the photographer’s handsome partner, the one who had seduced the secretary at the rental car office. The wife kisses the photographer’s friend. And they go off in different directions. The photographer is devastated, totally devastated and heartbroken.

“Slowly he begins to realize. This is how it feels to be the subject of one of his photographs.”