Exploring the Lost Art of Celebrity Profiles

Words: Claire Mooney

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For a while now, my preferred product of the celebrity industrial complex has been long read profiles. Longer and more literary than transcribed interviews, more voyeuristic than an editorial shoot, the form can orchestrate some unreplicable interactions. How often does someone with a Chanel contract fit someone with J-school debt into their schedule? The artist/critic/comet Cookie Mueller once defined art as the “spirit [captured] in matter.” To me, a good profile is an artist’s persona captured in digital media. It’s eulogy, tennis volley, socratic seminar, and becoming more and more watered down.

In 2018, the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica announced the death of the profile. Causes of death included: journalists’ limited time with and access to celebrities, pivot to video, publicists’ fear of losing narrative control, social media (generally), and decreased respect for traditional media outlets among younger, social media based stars (cue that scene from "The Idol").

The existence of these variables has created a landscape where magazines that are not Interview Magazine are starting to look a helluva lot like Interview Magazine, minus 55 years of experimenting with the format. Celebrities have started interviewing themselves. This practice can either come off as curated (Beyonce for Vogue) or deranged (Donald Glover for Interview). But mostly, the precarity of digital media and aloofness of celebrities has yielded milquetoast renderings of a potentially enthralling form. Creating a world where Jia Tolentino, a writer known for her impressively readable reporting on neoliberalism and the feminine ideal, can interview two women at this precise intersection for a magazine at this precise intersection to little critical end. 
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Part of the issue is scope. What an impossible challenge for a person to reconcile their personhood with the funhouse mirror of image™? What an impossible assignment to encapsulate that gap in the written word after a single, three hour, lunch with the subject at Chateau Marmont? We call them stars, but, in considering what makes a great profile, celebrities often have more in common with black holes.

The thing about black holes is they cannot be observed directly. Black holes are discovered by tracking all the matter surrounding it, that's drawn to it. The black hole’s gravitational pull tells scientists where it is. Those of us in the wake of a phenomenon help determine its shape. It is incredibly rare to meet a person who is attuned to the margin from the centre, so journalists become our astronomers, tasked with learning the unknowable (a person’s interiority) and accounting for the atmosphere it has shaped (pop culture). A good profile plays in this dissonance. 

“What an impossible challenge for a person to reconcile their personhood with the funhouse mirror of image? What an impossible assignment to encapsulate that gap in the written word after a single, three hour, lunch with the subject at Chateau Marmont?”

Ultimately, the individual idiosyncratic scenes make the profile: an “inconspicuous little grey-haired lady” following Frank Sinatra with a baggy of his wigs, Robert Pattinson “alternating pulls of Coca-Cola with pieces of Nicorette gum,” Lena Dunham sending reporter Allison P. Davis, seemingly unsolicited, post-surgery photos from her hospital bed, a 19-year-old Taylor Swift baking cookies in Faith Hill’s mansion and fighting her disappointment when there’s no eggnog in the fridge. The spontaneity of these moments is what endears me to the form and, probably, what alienates publicists. 

The writers I consider big names in contemporary profiles - Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Allison P. Davis, E. Alex Jung, and Caity Weaver - all incorporate humour into their profiles, often breaking the fourth wall to “tell the story of the story.” This technique can be seen throughout Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Gwyneth Paltrow. Brodesser-Akner reports back from Paltrow’s home and the Goop summit with the perspective of a relative every-woman. She is sceptical about Goop’s promise of optimisation until about two-thirds through the article, post summit, when she feels refreshed for the first time in ages. She acquiesces to Goop’s healing powers, but only briefly. Her moment of peace is overwhelmed by the stress of trying to catch her flight home. An hour on a Hertz bus, paired with a desperate need to pee and the threat of gate doors closing, undoes thousands of dollars worth of wellness workshops, leaving Brodesser-Akner deflated. Her take away from the experience - “aspiration is suffering.”

The discrepancy between what Paltrow takes for granted and Brodesser-Akner’s worldly stresses are the guts of the piece. Although celebrities are, in my opinion, entitled to more privacy than current legislation grants, they are not just like us, and they are, hopefully, not just like their interviewers. They have teams and power and priority the populace does not have. 

I’m becoming less and less interested in life made to look simple, in movie magic. I love work that shows the how, the base supporting the superstructure. No one does it alone, so I appreciate when an assistant, hairdresser, or nanny gets included in the narrative of a profile. Honestly, I want profiles to come with a data set explaining the number of people on a celebrity's payroll. 

In library school, we’re taught about information literacy and given frameworks to conceptualise it. The ones I return to most often are from the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL). They have six frameworks, all pragmatic and poetic, but the one I will highlight here is “Authority Is Constructed and Contextual.” An important reminder in the age of clout economics. When celebrities have direct lines to senators and a major influence on the behaviours of the masses, what responsibility does the 4th Estate have when covering them? I believe part of the answer lies in a critical approach to celebrity profiles. 

I’m intrigued by profiles because of my interest in the seams of persona. What’s holding it together, typically, is a collective effort posturing as an individual one. People are people. Persona is the shared effort of an untold number of people. Persona is what shows up to the Met, chats on late night shows, and shoots magazine covers. That “inconspicuous little grey-haired lady,” caretaker of Sinatra’s “remarkably convincing” hairpieces - she made $400 a week (in 1966 money) - where’s her profile?