Vanity fare.

• Author: Boo, Katherine
• Position: Magazines feature stories on celebrities to increase readership

In the April issue of Esquire, journalist Philip Weiss records, with a director's distance, his interview with actress Ellen Barkin. At the fade-in, Phil and Ellen are tete a tete in a New York restaurant, downing cafe con leche and wrestling over what this celebrity profile will be. Ellen wants to talk about sexism and cowardice in Hollywood and other, realer places. Phil wants to talk about Ellen's body.

When she resists--criticizing the studios, speculating on the emotional life of the waitress--Weiss can't control his impatience. He wants to know her secrets, not her politics. "While lots of things you say are long paragraphs--they're Ellen Barkin, social critic--I have to break this up for the reader," he advises her at one point. "I want a little narrative. I wanted you to tell me the story about what it was like wearing falsies."

Weiss's struggle to get the boob scoop from the actress makes a funny read about the mechanics of the celebrity interview. But it also illustrates a troubling relationship between substance and celebrity in today's general interest magazines. In pursuit of the reader in a cable-ready world, these magazines are increasingly the handmaiden to the very forms of media--TV and movies--that threaten to supplant them.

It's not that mythraking was invented by Vanity Fair's Tina Brown. Photoplay, Silver Screen, and Movie Mirror were mesmerizing housewives and teenagers as soon as there were movies to hype. What is new is the celebrity encroachment on more earnest publishing ventures. In 1988, a "reformatted" Time added a "Critic's Choice" section on movies, TV, and music and doubled the size of a column called "People." The New Yorker, that redoubtable franchise, began adding mini-profiles of theater, music, and dance personalities to the squint-print nightlife listings at the front of the book. Even The Washington Monthly managed to devise a, uh, perfectly good reason for featuring Julia Roberts on its cover this spring. But no transformation has been quite as pronounced as that of the general interest magazine, a barometer, like phone surveys and focus groups, of American middle-class taste. "It's nutty," marvels Jesse Kornbluth, until recently one of Vanity Fair's leading celebrity profilers, "but people today take their values from the media, and they relate to celebrities like their friends. When I talked to Kevin Costner, our conversation was about how to live. With Jodie Foster, it was the same deal. . . . Celebrity profiles carry a subtext, a code about morality." Celebrities, in other words, are the new lodestars of American values. Trouble is, journalistic values are paying the price.

In 1950, fewer than a quarter of Life's 52 weekly covers were devoted to Hollywood types. The others vivified such stuff as atomic warfare, the Korean front, Texas football, and children of poverty to an audience of 10 million people. Tinier Esquire hawked three celebrities on its cover in 1961, one--Joe Namath--in 1971, and none a decade later. What it did have were Mailer's politics, Talese's sociology, Gailbraith's economics, and Nabokov's memoirs. While magazine covers are, first and foremost, a way to sell magazines, they're also a window into an editor's soul, a gauge of what point he's trying to make with his product. By the mid-eighties, the point most of the general interest covers were making was celebrity--minimal spin, maximum starpower. In the last year, Esquire's gone 8 for 12 in the all-star game; Vanity Fair, the standard-bearer, is batting 1.000. When asked why so many celebrities, Esquire editor Terry McDonell protests, "I just came from a meeting where they told me I'm not doing enough."

Of course, you can't judge a general interest magazine by its cover. Buried in almost every issue of the slicks are pieces blessedly remote from the Hollywood ethic: In Esquire, Denis Johnson's powerful dispatch from Liberia; Ron Rosenbaum on the ethics of euthanasia in Vanity Fair. "We don't do that sappy profile stuff," says McDonell. "We use celebrities as fronts"--recognizable symbols employed to draw readers into more substantive pieces. This month, for example, he's hoping David Letterman will lure you into an essay on sentimentality in the nineties. Yet despite editors' protestations, the Variety virus has an uncanny way of infecting even noble endeavors. In August's Vanity Fair, the writer of a story on Daryl Gates, the L.A. police chief, manages to squeeze John Candy, Robert Stack, and Robocop Peter Weller into the second paragraph, Bob Hope into the fourth, and Tom Berenger into the seventh. (Rodney King, the victim, appears somewhere between Bob and Tom.)

What could be harmful about something as innocuous as celebrity? In an age when more young people "followed closely" the breakup of Donald and Ivana than the breakup of Drexel Burnham Lambert, more space spent on stars means less on everything else. And getting those celebrities sometimes requires the ceding of editorial independence, from dulling the hatchet to performing out-and-out PR. But even more disturbing than occasional ethical violations is the creeping tendency to level editorial aspirations, transforming even the esoteric into the easy. In a recent Vanity Fair interview with Vaclav Havel--a philosopher trying to erect a democracy on the ashes of a totalitarian state--writer Stephen Schiff pauses to press the leader about his thoughts on . . . celebrity.

"But wait a minute," says a skeptical Schiff at one point, driving for the truth. "Isn't Havel a little more celebrity crazy than he's willing to admit?" After much disclaimer, Havel finally breaks down. He likes celebrities. He wouldn't turn Mick Jagger away at the door.

Sure, most of us are susceptible to the celebrity...