Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers

Introduction

3 INTRODUCTION The fan magazine is such a seemingly worthless object, and yet it is of interest and value to both the film scholar and the sociologist. On the surface, the fan magazine had its place in the history of popular entertainment simply as a publicity tool, a relatively pointless exercise in self-promotion by the film industry . One week it would eagerly be read by millions of American moviegoers and the next week consigned to the trash. The fan magazine was a transient publication offering dubious information on the equally transient world of the Hollywood movie star. Its rise paralleled that of the star system, and as the contractual studio stars began to disappear in the 1950s and 1960s, so did the fan magazine cease to have a prominent place with America’s general readership. For instance, the lesser of the major periodicals Silver Screen sold 441,000 copies per month in 1933, dropping to a mere 151,000 three decades later. While the heyday of the fan magazines was the 1920s and 1930s, as a phenomenon they lasted far longer. In the late 1940s, one might find as many as twenty fan magazines for sale at the local newsstand, ranging from the biggest and best, Modern Screen, Photoplay, and Silver Screen, to such smaller publications as Movie Show, Screen Album, and Screenland. Between 1931 and 1946 sales of fan magazines rose dramatically, and in the 1940s and 1950s it was not unusual for the best known of the fan magazines to boast sales in excess of one million copies and a readership of three times that number. The importance of the fan magazine in American society as an arbiter of (not always good) taste, a source of knowledge, and a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its people cannot be denied. As one contemporary observer , Carl F. Cotter, wrote, “These fans, who spent their five cents (for Hollywood ) to a quarter (for Photoplay) on their cinematic scriptures, literally govern their lives by them. Not only do they pattern their hair styles, their INTRODUCTION 4 clothes, their cookery, and their behavior after those of their favorite actors and actresses as interpreted by the sob-sisters; most of them also base their most profound thinking on the words of the same authorities.”1 The reach of the fan magazine extended far beyond America’s shores, as similar periodicals, sometimes with the same American name, began publication throughout the Western world. In her hiding place in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the city, Anne Frank pasted photographs of Deanna Durbin and others, clipped from the fan magazines, on her bedroom wall. The fan magazine might not eclipse the tragedy of real life, but it could offer at the least a temporary shield against it. The fan magazine was as much an escape from reality as was Hollywood itself. After a handful of early years in which the emphasis was on publishing the synopses of current film releases in short-story form, the standard format of the fan magazine was established in the mid 1910s and remained little changed through the 1940s. There were news stories, articles, and lavish photo spreads on the established stars, the up-and-coming new arrivals on the scene, and the major films in production, as well as reviews, which at least through the first two decades of fan magazine history were surprisingly intelligent and thoughtful . The emphasis was on glamour, and the magazines were generally directed at a female readership. “There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t like to be some other woman. That’s why pictures are now setting styles in clothing, in hair dress, in dancing—in fact, in everything that affects womanhood,” commented Daily Variety.2 In small towns across America, there could be found the many equivalents of Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and even Garbo—or at least women who believed they were such. As late as the 1950s, the Associated Press noted that male stars did not sell magazines.3 As Daily Variety explained it, the female readers were attracted to male villains and male heroes. They wanted to be grabbed around the neck by Jack La Rue as much as they wished to be held in the arms of Clark Gable or Franchot Tone. But they did not care to read about character actors, and even Will Rogers got little attention until his untimely death. What the readership needed were stories of female...