People
The 1981 marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was watched by millions around the world
Photograph by Anwar Hussein
sophia loren
april 6, 1962 | Portrait by R. Bouché
From Twitter to Tumblr to Gawker to Buzzfeed, the 21st century appears hopelessly addicted to fame and the private lives of celebrities. Day by day, secrets are revealed—or perhaps packaged—for a public wanting to know more and more gossip about their idols. Including whom they are dating, what they are wearing, where they are dining and, of course, the percentage of clay in their feet. But the power of celebrity news—and its insinuations—arose in the 1920s with the emergence of Walter Winchell, the first syndicated gossip columnist, whose dominance of print andradio, the most effective media of the day, made him one of the most feared journalists of his time. He popularized what is now called the blind item, a cryptic bit of mongering written in a way to spur maximum speculation. As TIME wrote in its 1938 cover story on him, “After studying a picture of Winchell’s nervous, foxlike face, examining the column and hearing his breathless voice on the radio, a psychiatrist recently classed Winchell as a sufferer from ‘sublimated voyeurism,’ a man who passionately wants to see, to know, hating a secret, vicariously participating in all the things he sees and learns about and living everybody’s life.” We may all be sublimated voyeurs.
Winchell was emulated by others: the gossip queens of Hollywood, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper (the latter on the cover of TIME herself in 1947), and through the decades, the high-society chronicler Suzy (the nom de plume of Aileen Mehle) and the genial generalist Liz Smith to Richard Johnson of Page Six, Matt Drudge and Nikki Finke. These are the high priests of the mythology of celebrity, propagating the parables of the rich and famous, sinners and sinned against, transforming them from paragons to pariahs or vice versa in the cautionary tales that the public craves.
Princes and princesses, of course, are almost always to these narratives born, royalty being our own ordinary families writ large—bedecked with crowns and jewels, exemplary at times but, just as often, a reason to wag fingers. Thus the fascination with King Edward VIII’s decision in 1936 to abdicate the British throne because “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.” In the 1990s, there was a similar obsession with the infidelities that led to the breakup of the marriage of his great-nephew Charles and his mediagenic wife Diana Spencer—as there were great expectations for the happiness of their son William and his bride Kate Middleton at their marriage in 2011. Royal families carry the burden of all families, happy and unhappy in every way.
In the U.S., where there are no hereditary titles, the role of royalty is played by a variety of people: the wealthy and the denizens of the make-believe kingdom of Hollywood. And the Kennedys. These stories were sprinkled with heroics, steeped in melodrama and simmered with scandal to provide an irresistible heat. Beginning with its very first issue, on March 3, 1923, TIME had a section called Imaginary Interviews, which declared, “During the past week, the daily press gave extensive publicity to the following men and women. Let each explain to you why his name appeared in the headlines.” There followed boldfaced names with statements fabricated from the known facts and placed between quote marks to give the impression that the words had actually been uttered by the celebrities. By Sept. 13, 1926, Imaginary Interviews had become the People section, a legendary department that remained a magazine staple till 2008. (The section would inspire the title of another Time Inc. publication, People, which was first published in 1974.)
But the pithy tales of the People section, which quickly involved real reporting as the magazine’s resources grew, were not the only stage for celebrities in TIME. The cover itself became a natural niche for their public and private lives. Tragedy would humanize heroic figures but also make them subject to tabloid reflexes. In 1926, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic and achieved almost mythic status because Americans saw themselves in his taciturnity. Fascination became near hysteria after his young son was kidnapped and later found dead—a story featured on the cover of TIME on May 2, 1932. More than 60 years later, the country and much of the rest of the world would obsess over the details of a Los Angeles murder case involving O.J. Simpson, transforming him from an affable former football hero to one of America’s most unwanted. Perfection, physical or moral, is hardly a requisite for celebrity. Otherwise, most would look like fashion models and live as hermits. There is always a certain oddness about the people whose lives we are drawn to. Hence Julia Child’s gangliness was key to her culinary charm, as Cher’s crooked teeth were to her sequined sexiness. This was how TIME described the woman on its April 6, 1962, cover: “Her feet are too big. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of ‘a Neapolitan giraffe.’ Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her mouth is too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.” Who was this? Sophia Loren. Through nine decades of TIME, the rule for celebrities has been this: You’re imperfect; don’t ever change.
Charlie Chaplin
July 6, 1925
During a career muddle, the future legend got advice from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, his comic predecessor in the movie world, who was felled by a sex scandal in 1924.
His first efforts to be funny in celluloid were dismal. Keystone [Film] directors feared that he was overpaid, offered to cancel the contract. Chaplin told Roscoe Arbuckle, the now deposed cinema clown, that he needed a pair of shoes. Arbuckle tossed him a pair of his own enormous brogues. “There you are man,” he said. “Perfect fit.” Chaplin put them on, cocked his battered derby over his ear, twisted the ends of his prim moustache. His face was very sad. He attempted a jaunty walk which became, inevitably, a heartbreaking waddle. He put his hand on the seat of his trousers, spun on his heel. Arbuckle told him that he was almost funny. Such was the research that led him to “create a figure that would be a living satire on every human vanity” ... His [$40] salary became $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a week ... He sat down in eggs. He held babies in his lap. His salary became $1,000,000 a year.
Leni Riefenstahl
February 17, 1936
Photograph by Martin Munkácsi
Adolf Hitler’s cinematic propagandist was a “cinemactress”—a time neologism with a brief lifespan—and a magnet for rumors about the German leader’s romantic life.
In 1934 she met Adolf Hitler, who had long admired her work on the screen. He perceived in her a personification of those qualities of health, energy, ambition, good-looks, youth and love of sport which are the German equivalent of female glamour, promptly amazed the German cinema industry by commissioning her to make the official film of last summer’s Nuremberg Party Congress in which she directed 800,000 men. When Herr Hitler’s crony, Air Minister Göring, married Cinemactress Riefenstahl’s crony, Actress Emmy Sonnemann, last year, Hitler was best man. That Realmleader Hitler, a confirmed celibate, has any such intentions concerning Cinemactress Leni Riefenstahl no one suspects for a moment, but that he holds her in high esteem, entertains romantic admiration for her achievements and her character as a prime example of German womanhood, is apparent to everyone. Functioning as an inspiration both to Herr Hitler and her female contemporaries is a job which, for Cinemactress Riefenstahl, is never done.
The Dionne Quintuplets
May 31, 1937
Their third birthday was a moment to remember the miracle of the five little Canadian girls. All other such multiple births had lived no more than a few hours.
Dr. [Allan Roy] Dafoe admits that he could not believe they would live. After baptizing them himself, he left them lying “like rats” under a blanket at the foot of their mother’s bed, while he went for a priest to give them a regular Roman Catholic baptism. Later that morning, as a matter of routine, he eye-dropped a little warm water into each shapeless mouth. When the tiny monstrosities continued to breathe, he added rum to the water, later corn syrup ... Next day he weighed the lot in a scoop scale usually used for potatoes. Gross weight of the five: 13 lb. 6 oz. Their average height was only 9 in. ... But then they began to gain and Medicine mobilized. From Chicago and Toronto had come incubators and bottles of mother’s milk ... No country doctor ever received such a volume of expert advice as did Dr. Dafoe from foremost pediatricians all over the continent.
Grace Kelly
January 31, 1955
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
The patrician actress took Hollywood by storm and abandoned it just as dramatically in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. Their offspring remain tabloid fodder.
Said one Hollywood observer: “Most of these dames just suggest Kinsey statistics. But if a guy in a movie theater starts mooning about Grace, there could be nothing squalid about it; his wife would have to be made to understand that it was something fine—and bigger than all of them. Her peculiar talent, you might say, is that she inspires licit passion ...” The well-bred Miss Grace Kelly of Philadelphia has baffled Hollywood. She is a rich girl who has struck it rich. She was not discovered behind a soda fountain or at a drive-in. She is a star who was never a starlet, who never worked up from B pictures, never posed for cheesecake, was never elected, with a press agent’s help, Miss Antiaircraft Battery C. She did not gush or twitter or desperately pull wires for a chance to get in the movies. Twice she turned down good Hollywood contracts. When she finally signed on the line, she forced mighty M-G-M itself to grant her special terms.
Julia Child
November 25, 1966
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
The woman who was once a spy became America’s tutor in French cooking. Her personality continues to resonate in the culture, with movies and countless impersonations.
The TV camera zooms in for a close-up and focuses on her hands. She may be dicing an onion, mincing a garlic clove, trussing a chicken. Her fingers fly with the speed and dexterity of a concert pianist. Strength counts, too, as she cleaves an ocean catfish with a mighty, two-fisted swipe or, muscles bulging and curls aquiver, whips up egg whites with her wire whisk. She takes every short cut, squeezes lemons through “my ever-clean dish towel,” samples sauces with her fingers. No matter if she breaks the rules. Her verve and insouciance will see her through. Even her failures and faux pas are classic. When a potato pancake falls on the worktable, she scoops it back into the pan, bats her big blue eyes at the cameras, and advises: “Remember, you’re all alone in the kitchen and no one can see you.”
Hugh Hefner
March 3, 1967
Sculpture by Marisol
The founder and publisher of Playboy magazine brought the sybaritic life and the joy of sex into the American consumerist mainstream, complete with centerfold. Oh, and thoughtful articles too.
Dialogue between Art Director Paul and Editor Hefner when choosing pictures for the Playmates-of-the-year feature:
Paul: This is the best shot of her face.
Hef: That shot makes the girl look too Hollywoodish. She doesn’t look natural.
Paul: Don’t her breasts look somewhat distorted? ... It looks as if the shots were made on a foggy day. We don’t want to mix the reader up. You can’t really be sure that this is the same girl.
Hef (viewing new layout): There is something wrong with the angle of that shot. Her thighs and hips look awkward. This doesn’t do her justice ... There must be other aspects to her personality.
Cher
March 17, 1975
Photograph by Richard Avedon
The epitome of camp, glam, kitsch and Vegas, she divorced her partner Sonny Bono in 1975 and later won an Oscar as Best Actress for her role in Moonstruck.
Her liberation from Sonny is a personal triumph, but it carries no ideological example for the rest of womankind, so far as Cher can see. As for being a sex symbol for males, that too is mostly in the eye of the beholder. It is true that after leaving Sonny she involved herself for more than 15 months in a much-publicized romance with David Geffen, 31, innovative president of Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records. “Look, I’ve traded one short, ugly man for another,” she zinged—typically—when she and Geffen ran into Singer-Songwriter Paul Simon. Then, a few months ago, she took up with Gregg Allman, lead vocalist in the rock band that bears his name. But these have not been casual affairs. “I’m a one-man-at-a-time woman,” she says. “To put it in the vernacular, I’m not an easy lay.”
In the late 1970s, New York’s Studio 54 was the planet’s hottest celeb hangout. From right: Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Interview’s Bob Colacello
Photograph by Ron Galella
Elton John
July 7, 1975
Portrait by Don Weller
The singer, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996, came out as gay in 1988. He and his partner David Furnish are now the parents of two children.
The disaster he was saved from was marriage to a 6-ft. 2-in. girl named Linda. He had been smitten by her when she came to a Christmas Eve bash he was playing ... Terribly insecure then (and now) around women, he may have been encouraged to unwonted boldness by the fact that her escort on that occasion was a midget. In any event, by the following summer she was sharing a pad with Elton and Bernie [Taupin, his music-writing partner]. Elton was miserably going ahead with plans to marry her, despite the fact that “she hated my music. Everything I’d write she’d put down ...” It was not exactly a match made in heaven. Still, when the pair broke up shortly before the wedding day, Elton was bereft. “I tried to commit suicide. It was a very Woody Allen type suicide. I turned on the gas and left all the windows open.” He has remained “wary of up-front women getting to know me.” There have been very few women in the Elton entourage since.
John Travolta
April 3, 1978
Photograph by Douglas Kirkland
Catching his big break on the sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, Travolta swiftly transformed himself from teen idol into a serious actor—with some serious dance moves.
The movie star Travolta most clearly calls to mind is Montgomery Clift. Travolta may lack the depth of Clift’s gifts, but he has much the same quicksilver charm. He too can give an audience the sense of immediate but always fragile intimacy, of shared secrets, of private truths known without speaking.
And sexuality. “Maybe the major thing is how sensual he is,” suggests Lily Tomlin, who will star with him this spring in a romance called Moment to Moment. “And how sexy too. The sensitivity and the sexuality are very strong. It’s as if he has every dichotomy—masculinity, femininity, refinement, crudity. You see him, you fall in love a little bit.” Adds Saturday Night Live Producer Lorne Michaels ... “John is the perfect star for the ’70s. He has this strange androgynous quality, this all-pervasive sexuality. Men don’t find him terribly threatening. And women, well ...”
There is a whole future in that ellipsis.
John Lennon
December 22, 1980
Portrait by Daniel Maffia
The Beatle’s murder in New York City occurred in the middle of a career comeback. He is commemorated by a circle called Strawberry Fields in Central Park.
The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that followed Lennon’s death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his creative force. That was what made the impact, and the difference—the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and pervasive traces of his genius—and it was the loss of all that, in so abrupt and awful a way, that was mourned last week, all over the world. The last “Day in the Life,” “I read the news today, oh boy ...”
Madonna
May 27, 1985
Photograph by Francesco Scavullo
The Material Girl is also a chameleon—changing personae with each new album and retaining a loyal fan base from the 1980s into the second decade of the 21st century.
She seems to have passed through the lives of a lot of people and to have remained in not many. She sees her father and stepmother only rarely. It can be hard, now, to get her to talk about her scroungy years in New York. She recalls being fired from a long succession of ratty jobs. She resents suggestions that she slept her way to the top. That is not because she didn’t learn her trade from a succession of musicians and deejays, some of whom she slept with, but because the idea that she couldn’t make it to the top on drive and talent alone is insulting ... Mark Kamins, deejay at the Danceteria, a funky, four-floor Chelsea disco that caters to purple-haired punks in leather and other exotics, is credited with “discovering” Madonna in 1982, although like America before Columbus, she was there all along. “She had this incredible sense of style,” says Kamins. “She had an aura.”
O.J. Simpson
June 27, 1994
Photo-illustration by Matt Mahurin
The cover caused controversy because Simpson’s face appears darker than the original mug shot. time apologized, saying it intended no commentary on race.
Friends who knew Simpson well understood that he was a creature of careful intention, the natural ease a measure of his discipline. He did not so much change, from the days of his raw, painful childhood, as add layers, coats of polish that only occasionally peeled. One day he was making a television commercial in Oakland, California, and fell into his first language, the street-corner argot of his gang years. Furious with himself, he stopped the shooting, regrouped and then said he wanted to do it again. The second try went perfectly. “That’s what happens when I spend too much time with my boys,” he said. “I forget how to talk white.” It’s not that Simpson was a phony; he was just a man who had traveled a long way, accumulating public expectations. When his image was autopsied last week, the story of his life provided evidence to both sides; that he was gentle and generous and violent and mean.
Ellen DeGeneres
April 14, 1997
Photograph by Firooz Zahedi
When the TV host wed actress Portia de Rossi in California in 2008, People magazine put them on its cover, with a story that, reflecting changed attitudes, focused on the flowers and food, not sexuality.
I always thought I could keep my personal life separate from my professional life,” says DeGeneres ... “In every interview I ever did ... everyone tried to trap me into saying I was gay. And I learned every way to dodge that. Or if they just blatantly asked me, I would say I don’t talk about my personal life. I mean, I really tried to figure out every way to avoid answering that question for as long as I could.” That became a lot harder last September when the news leaked ... that DeGeneres wanted to have the character she plays on Ellen, her three-year-old ABC sitcom, discover that she—the character, that is—is a lesbian ... For the public, the news was a sensation: a gay lead on TV—that would be a first, and to those who attach importance to these sorts of things, either a long time coming or another way station on the road to moral abandon ... Or maybe it was just something to gossip about.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
July 5, 1999
Photograph by Herb Ritts
The couple, who adopted two children together, had been the subject of many rumors because of his prominent role in the Church of Scientology. They divorced in 2001.
When Warner Bros. ... announced the project in 1995, it merely stated that [director Stanley] Kubrick was making “a story of sexual jealousy and obsession starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.” Officially, no one has added anything substantive to that press release in the years since—which is, of course, why the rumor that Cruise and Kidman play psychiatrists drawn into a web of sexual intrigue with their patients got started. And the one about the mad genius Kubrick making an NC-17-rated blue movie. And the one that has Cruise wearing a dress in one sequence. None of these are remotely true.
George Harrison
December 10, 2001
Photograph by Mark Seliger
Of the Fab Four, he was the most given to mysticism and spiritual seaching. After his death from lung cancer, the Beatle’s ashes were cast into the rivers that meet at the holy city of Benares in India.
He was the quiet Beatle only in that he was standing alongside two louder-than-life characters and in front of a guy playing drums. He held many strong opinions—on Beatlemania, on global want, on his right to privacy, on his God—and gave firm voice to most of them. But George Harrison was certainly the most reluctant Beatle, wanting out almost as soon as he was in. He often said that his luckiest break was joining the band and his second luckiest was leaving it ... “Being a Beatle was a nightmare, a horror story. I don’t even like to think about it.” He never really looked comfortable in his tight suit and pudding-basin haircut, not even in the fun-fest A Hard Day’s Night, and in this he was perhaps the most honest Beatle, the one least convincing when wearing the mask. The standard line is that George Harrison was an enigma, but perhaps he was transparent: a terrific guitarist, a fine songwriter, a wonderer, a seeker and, overriding all, a celebrity who hated and feared celebrity.
Michael Jackson
July 2009 (special issue)
Photograph by Herb Ritts
Four days after the superstar’s death from an overdose of the drug propofol, time published a special issue commemorating his life, his music and the way he changed the world of entertainment.
Even if he had succeeded in making it back to the top for a while, however, it would have always been difficult to imagine Jackson, the eternal child, in old age. It was hard not to picture him as ever more eccentric and secluded, like Howard Hughes, or Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. The Michael Jackson we prefer to keep in our memories is the man-child at the height of his phenomenal powers, the one with the saw-toothed yelps and the jackhammer moves, the one who flung thunderbolts from the stage. That’s the man whom the future, which has a way of putting uncomfortable questions to the side, will take to its heart.
The Kennedys are often called America’s royal family. But for most of the 20th century, the clan was more of a dynasty on the make than the coroneted one on the other side of the Atlantic. “The Kennedy clan is as handsome and spirited as a meadow full of Irish thoroughbreds, as tough as a blackthorn shillelagh, as ruthless as Cuchulain, the mythical hero who cast up on the hills of Ireland with his sword,” declared a TIME cover story on July 11, 1960. The patriarch was old Joe Kennedy, the diplomat and plutocrat who had been on the cover of TIME twice by the time he and 10 other members of the storied Irish-American clan were featured on that cover (including a cameo of his father-in-law, the influential Boston politician John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald). Front and center were the family’s two most luminous stars: Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. Jack and Jackie would occupy the White House for a brief presidency but a long love affair with America—enhanced by glamour, energized by youth and made legendary by tragedy. Jackie Kennedy’s life would be a barometer of American sentiment—stoic at the funeral of her husband; emotional as she recalled their life as “Camelot”; despondent when she abandoned the country after her brother-in-law’s 1968 murder to marry the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, transforming into Jackie O; and then mesmerized by anything that had touched her when, after her death in 1994, much of her estate was auctioned, setting off a frenzy. After JFK’s death, the family’s hopes moved to his brother Bobby, a crusade that ended with his assassination, then to Teddy, who would serve as one of the country’s most influential liberal Senators till his death in 2009. For a few moments, many looked upon young John Kennedy Jr., too, as a family standard bearer. A fatal plane accident in 1999 ended that dream.
Royalty has always been welcome in TIME, even if the appearance is sometimes an excuse to question the practical purpose served by crowned heads of state. The very first iteration of what would become the magazine’s People section cited two members of the British royal family: the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VIII, very briefly—and his brother Prince George, who would become King thereafter and, as father of Elizabeth II, the progenitor of the ruling line of Windsors. The American fascination with British royalty may be a tenacious holdover from the colonial era, but there is something about primogeniture (and the limits imposed even on Kings by the established church) that make such pomp and circumstance exotic and quaint and, indeed, simpler than the messy machinations of democratic political succession. Plus, scandal is much more palatable—and entertaining—when it does not have serious bureaucratic consequences. The Windsors, in this case, have been an epic fairy tale, well worth the distraction from the real world. While the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII was a crisis in the royal family, there was the less charismatic but much more suitable George waiting to become King. Diana Spencer’s entry into the Windsor fold was meant to give the old royal firm a new vigor, and with her vivacity and charm, it did. The world fell in love with her. Unfortunately, the Prince she was in love with did not feel the same way, and soon the world was falling out of love with Charles and the Windsors as well. The couple’s divorce and her sudden death in a 1997 car accident in Paris sent much of the globe into mourning even as all eyes turned in hope to her son William to try to finally bring the fairy tale to a happy ending. And so it continues.
