American Journalism and the Culture of Celebrity

Charles L. Ponce de Leon. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 352 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The news media of the early twenty-first century are saturated with images of wars, natural disasters, and celebrities. Of the three, it is the celebrities' presence that expresses a defining characteristic of our time: the continual manufacture and exploitation of fame by swarms of publicists and journalists. Together, they have turned Michael Jackson into a reference point for discussions of childrearing, Martha Stewart into an arbiter of domestic life, and prime time television into a constellation of shows that revel in the lives of the rich, the famous, and the desperate seekers of fame.

All of these contemporary media hallmarks have a history. As Charles Ponce de Leon shows in Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940, our contemporary fascination with celebrity has roots in journalistic practices and cultural transformations that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. In reporting that elevated and exploited the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the baseball player Babe Ruth, and the movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Ponce de Leon argues, Americans developed new ways of measuring character, happiness, and importance. Like other Americans, celebrities left the culture of Victorianism, with its emphasis on character and self-control, and entered into a modern American culture that emphasized self-expression and growth. There, in the emerging world of celebrity journalism, they were chronicled by reporters who concluded, as Ponce de Leon argues, that their mission was to illuminate and expose "the subject's 'real self'" (p. 7). In this world, the truly successful person was one who maintained happiness and self-realization, typically in private, despite living in a glare of publicity.

Paradoxically, Self-Exposure suggests, such reporting inundated public life with images of celebrities but validated private struggles for happiness. Human-interest journalism made people aware that even millionaires can have unhappy love lives, but it also advanced the tendency to judge the rich less by their power to sway public events than by their lives at home. Writing about these events with a broad interpretive sweep that echoes Warren Sussman's work on the culture of personality and T.J. Jackson Lears's writings on both hegemony and the snares and seductions of consumer culture, Ponce de Leon has produced a valuable book that raises important questions about celebrity, politics, and journalism in America.

Self-Exposure's discussions of celebrity are grounded in Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, which famously observed,"The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness." ¹ Ponce de Leon builds on Boorstin's caustic criticisms to see fame—once reserved for the rare person of heroic achievement—rendered modern and democratic. Fame rested on social distance, deference, and adoration. But in the long march from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, fame was transformed. A contentious public sphere, the pressure of the market revolution, the rise of political democracy, an increasingly visual culture, a more intrusive media, and a growing belief that "a person's real self could only be viewed in private" produced fame's bumptious grandchild—celebrity (p. 41). If fame was accessible only to the great, anyone could—with the right marketing—become a celebrity. (Think of the contrast between the relative of reticence of Queen Elizabeth II and the omnipresent media image of Princess Diana.)

The growth of fame was accompanied by the rise of a new definition of achievement, one better suited to the age of celebrity and the consumer culture that surrounded it: "true success." ² In Ponce de Leon's analysis, true success was "the master plot of celebrity journalism"—a way of validating private life and leisure, criticizing materialism...