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Models Are Smarter Than ActressesThe price of celebrity bootlicking.

By Virginia Heffernan
Posted Friday, Feb. 9, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET
Vogue

Blond, blissful Karolina Kurkova is on the cover of February's Vogue, wearing white leather, a rose-camouflage mosquito net, and a look of ethereal jubilation. She has good reason to smile; with any luck, the cover model is coming back.

For years, at least since the unwritten Editrices' Decree of 1994, celebrities have replaced models on the covers of beauty, fashion, and even some general interest magazines. (Here's a quick tour of current newsstands. Elle: Madonna. Allure: Catherine Zeta-Jones. InStyle: Jennifer Lopez. Cosmo: Debra Messing. Vanity Fair: Julianne Moore. Talk: Heather Graham.) That shift has dramatically and unexpectedly altered the line economics of running a magazine. Hachette, Condé Nast, and Hearst used to have to pay top dollar for cover models. Now—in theory at least—cover celebrities cost them nothing. Unlike models, movie stars with a New Project will sweat out costume changes and the ministrations of Kevyn Aucoin for little more than mango slices and the satisfaction of doing their contractual part to increase a movie studio's bottom line.

Elle

For publishers of magazines like Vogue and Elle, this must have seemed at first like an elegant fix—a square, moneyless deal. And celebrities now seem to regard free covers as part of their star compact; no celebrity has yet echoed Linda Evangelista, whose Bartlett's-quality declaration—"I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000"—must be the only epigram ever attributed to a supermodel.

Still, as New York's tireless celebrity wranglers can attest, the new deal has become a Faustian bargain. Magazines are still paying for their covers; they're just using a different, more expensive currency. Evangelista rates might have been exorbitant, but deals with models were clean payment for professional services. When the model was done, so was the deal. Now the costs are all hidden, and the steepest of them are often paid by readers.

Talk

Without good covers, magazines risk low newsstand sales, and the pool of celebrities who qualify for those covers—ones with movies or records coming out—is not, month to month, inexhaustible. The struggle to get the right one is therefore always fierce, requiring foresight about the caprices of stardom, corporate espionage with other magazines, and an often weeks-long compatibility check among the celebrity and the photographer, stylists, and profile writer—not to mention the Versailleslike crossing and double-crossing of PR people.

All that finesse takes finessers: The '80s institution of the special projects editor has been augmented on many mastheads by entertainment editors, credit and location coordinators, and bookings directors, many of whom spend the better part of the production cycle chasing covers. One editor has said that, at times, as much as 30 percent of her magazine's resources have been devoted to getting covers. And that figure doesn't include the editing, writing, and shooting of actual magazine stories—the ones that represent payola to PR agencies for covers (an inside story on a TV teen, for example, in exchange for a titan movie star on a future cover; a small profile of a singer as apology to an agency for an earlier cancelled cover). At worst, the content of magazines becomes a refracted record of cover deals laboriously done or botched.

Cosmopolitan

When mastheads get out of balance, when too much of a magazine's budget is being spent on a single page, when content is in danger of being driven by PR extortion, what counts as a "story" changes, and writers and editors suffer. Because magazines compete for stories and staff, this affects the whole ecosystem of magazines.

But the appearance of Kurkova on the cover of Vogue may be a good sign. She's got the smile of someone who is cashing a check. Let's hope that work for hire is a clean new look for spring.

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Virginia Heffernan is a television critic for The New York Times. Her book, The Underminer, which she wrote with Mike Albo, comes out in February.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:





No! It can't be true! I just can't believe that Cosmo would sacrifice its journalistic integrity and alter their stories just to get Debra Messing on the cover. To think that an institution like Talk would stray from it commitment to hard-hitting journalism and be victimized in a shakedown by an unscrupulous celebrity flack. My head swims at the thought that the stories covered in Elle aren't the "real" stories, but simply the products of a Faustian bargain with Madonna's agent.



How could I have been so naive?



--Al Vernon



(To reply, click here.)





Can we change the name of "Culturebox" to Lowculturebox? Or Popculturebox?



[This week's articles were on Survivor, the Simpsons and Vogue.] Does any of this stuff matter to anybody? Hey, I'm a pop culture junkie as much as the next GenX-er. But if I want to keep tabs on Linda Evangelista's career, I'll bookmark Salon. I'm not necessarily bothered by Slate writers earning their salaries writing about the fashion industry: I just don't know why the only topic worth writing on is about who gets to be on the cover. I don't mean to sound like a crank; I really like Slate a lot, and hate to see otherwise solid opinion journalism sullied by such Fox News-like fare.



--Daniel Horne



(To reply, or to read this post in full, click here.)





An excellently written article, that just scratches the surface of the use of star names for magazine covers, stories and worst of all, on late night entertainment talk TV shows.



In the "old days", such as during the Jack Parr or Steve Allan periods, interesting people with real stories to tell--writers, scientists, explorers, creative people of all stripes--were featured. They gave us an entertaining view of the interesting real world out there with both intellectual and physical challenges.



Now Leno and Letterman give us hollow movie stars and wannabes, with little more than puff pieces for their next movie. Very uninteresting fodder and quite boring after a few repeat performances. Let's get the shallow stars off the TV screen talk shows and bring real interesting people back to the front.



--Steve Somerstein



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