Abstract
In January 1950, a Photoplay cover showed teenager Elizabeth Taylor wearing dropped pearl earrings and a coral dress with a plunging V-neckline that was in the same shade as her lipstick. Against a light blue background, the sell-line, printed in black letters to match her dark hair and eyebrows, exclaimed, “The Most Exciting Girl in Hollywood.” A fast forward to the magazine cover in July 1963 revealed a candid shot of her and Richard Burton as lovers exchanging rapt gazes at a formal event. She was wearing the pear-shaped emerald earrings edged with round diamonds that he bought her at Bulgari’s. White sell-lines against a maroon background that included Photoplay in pink letters tempted readers: “Eddie Fisher Paralyzed! When… How… Why!” and “Love’s Most Costly Gown—In Full Color! Liz’s Wedding Dress/Dare She Wear It?” Another provocative sell-line printed in between the couple blared, “A New Baby for Debbie/ The Medical Risks.” Certainly, Liz Taylor remained a most compelling subject and object on both covers in terms of voyeuristic relations of looking. But what accounted for such a dramatic change in her image in such a short period of time? And what did this transformation signify about the fan magazine readers themselves? A scrutiny of postwar Photoplay covers (1948–1963) reveals rich visual sources, reinforced with heady sell-lines, that attest to changes in the representation of both stars and fans.
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Notes
Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 15, 26, 38. See also Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975).
Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987), 12.
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), chap. 5, 150–151.
Quoted in Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 155; Peter K. Lunt and Sonia M. Livingstone, Mass Consumption and Personal Identity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), 9.
Schudson, Advertising, 52, 58, 72, 111, 155; T. J. Jackson Lears, “Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising,” Prospects 9 (1984): 349–405; John Philip Jones, Advertising and the Concept of Brands (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1986), 20–34; Janet Wolff, What Makes Women Buy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 264. See also T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 170–171; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), introduction.
Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) 128; Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York: Routledge, 1987), 185.
Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 57–83.
On blondeness and race, see Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 12–15; Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film and Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 42–45; Lois Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema Journal 47 (Summer 2008): 4–29.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 18–22.
Schudson, Advertising, 109; Wolff, Women Buy, 238; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1984), chap. 2; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumption (London: Alcuin Academics, 2005), 8.
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© 2014 Sumiko Higashi
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Higashi, S. (2014). Advertisements for Movie Star Glamour and Romance. In: Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431899_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431899_12
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