What it's like to write a celebrity profile

Part one in maybe a series

For a while in the 90s, I made some of my living writing profiles for glossy magazines. This may sound like a pretty glamorous way to earn a dime, and in some ways, it definitely was. But in others, it it was meaningfully not.

This is largely because, for reasons I could never completely understand, the writer occupied the lowest level of the celebrity profile totem pole back then, and probably still does today. Photographers were at the tippy-top, followed by wardrobe stylists and the rest of the glam squad. Even the catering team seemed to be more deeply valued than us writers, who were often treated as though we were afterthoughts, or interchangeable, or just deeply uncool. This seemed wrong to me, because we were at least theoretically just as responsible as photographers for how a subject came off, and I thought they should be shown just even a modicum of courtesy, given that. The truth is, though, that publicists had become so powerful by then that a writer didn’t dare share anything even remotely ungenerous about her subject, for fear of losing access to all of said publicist’s stable of talent in the future.

And that is why, if you manage to dig up a particular fashion magazine’s cover story from back in the late 90s, you will find a profile written by me in which I share not one unkind word about my subject, a rising actress who was releasing her first pop album. This was just months before I was hired to create prototype pages for what would eventually become Lucky, so it turns out to be the last celebrity interview I ever did. It has the distinction of being was my least favorite too.