Word: tabloidization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writers faced in this issue was not simply telling a story but also bringing special insight. Playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick (In & Out, Addams Family Values) stirred up a refreshing appraisal of the iconic appeal of Marilyn Monroe, focusing on the legacy of her celluloid image instead of the tabloid conspiracies that crowd her persona. The jazz singer Diane Schuur made poignant connections between her own blindness and that of Helen Keller. Rita Dove, America's former poet laureate, produced a tightly woven mini-epic in prose of the moment of Rosa Parks' apotheosis from unprepossessing Montgomery, Ala., matron...
Marilyn's tabloid appeal is infinite but ultimately beside the point. Whatever destroyed her--be it Hollywood economics or rabid sexism or her own tormented psyche--pales beside the delight she continues to provide. At her peak, Marilyn was very much like Coca-Cola or Levi's--she was something wonderfully and irrepressibly American...
...never actually appeared in a movie; in a sense her whole life was a movie, a serial melodrama acted out in public, with every twist and turn of the plot reported to a world audience. Diana was astute enough to understand the power of television and the voracious British tabloid newspapers. And she consistently tried to use the mass media as a stage for projecting her image--as the wronged spouse, as the radiant society beauty, as the compassionate princess hugging AIDS patients and land-mine victims, and as the mourning princess crying at celebrity funerals...
...victim of her own fame: pursued by paparazzi, she became a twisted and battered body in a limousine. It was a fittingly tawdry end to what had become an increasingly tawdry melodrama. But it is in the nature of religion that forms change to fit the times. Diana--celebrity, tabloid princess, mater dolorosa of the pop and fashion scene--was, if nothing else, the perfect idol for our times...
...world's smallest countries, but the Monegasque ruling family generates more tabloid fodder per square mile than the Windsors. The saga of Caroline and her younger sister Stephanie is low rent compared with the Brits', but their celebrity and notoriety help attract tourists--as did their father Rainier III's 1956 marriage to the actress Grace Kelly, who died in a 1982 crash. If only brother Albert could find a bride like dear old Mom--and sire an heir. Otherwise, France has the right to gobble up Monaco...