Can You Judge a Fan Mag by Its Cover? A Visual Tour

From their beginnings in 1911, fan magazines were designed to construct “an audience of spectators and, by extension, consumers” (Sally Stein, Heresies 5:2), that is, to channel readers’ “fantasy and envy into practical consumption” of both movies and merchandise (Jane Gaines, Heresies 5:2). Despite the reams of text, accomplishing this end required fan mags to be first and foremost a visual medium, and their evolution can be charted via their cover designs.

Mimicking the success of others, early fan mags aimed for the relatively lofty look and feel of the day’s most popular general interest magazines. Covers featured the work of artist-illustrators whose images also graced publications like Vanity Fair, Smart Set, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, including such notables as James Montgomery Flagg, of Uncle Sam’s “I Want You” fame. Elegantly illustrated covers matched bylines from writers prominent outside the movie industry. Novelists Theodore Dreiser and Eleanor Glyn, for example, produced articles for Photoplay, Dreiser an interview with Mack Sennett in August 1928, and Glyn several features, including one titled “In Filmdom’s Boudoir” (March 1921): “In no other [industry] are there collected so many lovely young women. But why, why do they have the weird blobs of hair sticking out from the sides of their pretty heads?” Other famous contributors included famed New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner, Somerset Maugham, Archibald MacLeish and Katherine Anne Porter (Anthony Slide, They Also Wrote for the Fan Magazines, 1992.)

Just as fan mags’ priorities swiftly transitioned from the movies themselves to those who starred in them, the covers’ “focus on the face of the star materialise[d] quickly, as [did] the emphasis on the female” (Network of Research: Movies, Magazines and Audiences, May 11, 2016). With the shift, cover images became consistently more realistic and more intimate, a response to a largely female readership and to the understanding that those readers wanted to see the stars they dreamed of becoming even more than those who populated their fantasies of love. Photographs began to replace illustrations, a move that also saved money. Most illustrators worked not from life — stars who made up to six movies a year had little time to sit for portraits — but from high quality, studio-produced photographs, so why not simply save time and money and use the photo?

Male stars experienced a resurgence on fan mag covers in the 1940s, perhaps due to the scarcity of men during and after World War II (Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 2010). And, in 1944, Motion Picture magazine made a bold move, for the first time putting an African American performer — singer-actor Lena Horne — on the cover. Both reader response and the fan mags’ retreat were swift and brutal; Motion Picture’s sales slumped (Slide, 2010), and it would be nearly two decades before another Black actor made the cover of a major fan magazine — and even then, only in the company of white performers.

By the ‘50s you could find dozens of fan mags on the newsstands, many of them short-lived; I’ve never seen a second issue, for example, of Revealing Close-ups of the Teenage Idols. To survive, many of the mags used their cover designs to separate themselves from the pack. Some, like Silver Screen, went with distinctive formats. Even the leading fan mags experimented with design elements here and there, with apparent influences from Mondrian and other modernist artists.

With the collapse of studios’ rigid control over star stories, and the rise of scandal rags like Confidential and Inside Story, fan mags were increasingly pushed to chronicle the messier sides of stardom. By the late ‘50s not only the headlines but cover images as well were trilling trouble and heartbreak. After Liz Taylor broke up Debbie and Eddie’s supposedly fairytale marriage, for example, poignant images of Debbie’s once-happy family and her now-“abandoned” children proliferated.

By the late 1960s most fan mags were dust. The few that remained continued trying to adapt to the public’s ever-growing demand for scandal; the last vestiges of elegance and artful design disappeared — and, by the end of the ‘70s, so did the last of the fan magazines. Something of their spirit, though, made its way into their successors, starting with People, which debuted as People Weekly in March 1974 with Mia Farrow on the cover.

Image credits (clockwise, from upper left in each collage):

Set 1: (1) Evelyn Brent, “painted from life” by Charles Sheldon, Photoplay, Oct 1928; (2) Alma Rubens by an unnamed artist, Motion Picture, Sep 1925; (3) Helen Twelvetrees by Rolf Armstrong, The New Movie Magazine, Aug 1931; (4) Joan Crawford by James Montgomery Flagg, Photoplay, Feb 1937.

Set 2: (1) Carole Lombard, Motion Picture, Nov 1931; (2) Bette Davis, Photoplay, Oct 1938.

Set 3: (1) Robert Mitchum, Movie Stars Parade, Nov 1948; (2) Lena Horne, Motion Picture, Oct 1944; (3) Katharine Hepburn, Movie Show, Sep 1947; (4) Dana Andrews, Screen Romances, July 1946; (5) James Stewart, Movie-Radio Guide, June 14-20, 1941.

Set 4: (1) Natalie Wood, Motion Picture, Apr 1958; (2) Nat and Bob, Elvis, Doris Day and Marty Melcher, Silver Screen, June 1962.

Set 5: (1) Debbie, Eddie, Carrie and infant Todd, just before the whirlwind, Motion Picture, Aug 1958; (2) tormented Liz, Motion Picture, June 1961; (3) Debbie with her kids, Modern Screen, Aug 1960.

Set 6: (1) Liz & Burton, Photoplay, Aug 1970; (2) Jackie & Onassis, Photoplay, Dec 1970; (3) Mia Farrow, People Weekly’s inaugural issue, March 4, 1974; (4) Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, Priscilla Presley with Elvis inset, TV & Movie Gossip, March 1978.