publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

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This article was downloaded by: [Cornell University Library] On: 12 November 2014, At: 08:56 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Social & Cultural Geography Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20 Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space Kim McNamara a a Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney , Level 6, 34 Charles Street, Parramatta, NSW, 2150, Australia E-mail: Published online: 02 Dec 2008. To cite this article: Kim McNamara (2009) Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space, Social & Cultural Geography, 10:1, 9-23, DOI: 10.1080/14649360802553178 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802553178 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

This article was downloaded by: [Cornell University Library]On: 12 November 2014, At: 08:56Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Social & Cultural GeographyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20

Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control andthe reconfiguration of public spaceKim McNamara aa Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney , Level 6, 34 Charles Street,Parramatta, NSW, 2150, Australia E-mail:Published online: 02 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Kim McNamara (2009) Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration ofpublic space, Social & Cultural Geography, 10:1, 9-23, DOI: 10.1080/14649360802553178

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802553178

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

Publicising private lives: celebrities, image controland the reconfiguration of public space

Kim McNamaraUrban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney, Level 6, 34 Charles Street, Parramatta,

NSW 2150, Australia, [email protected]

The nature of contemporary celebrity demands the negotiation of publicness and privacy.Given the increasingly intrusive presence of the paparazzi, entertainment media, and fans(from obsessed ‘stalkers’ to well-wishers), celebrities need to regulate but also publicisetheir ‘front stage’ public persona. While this is usually achieved with a degree of comfort,at certain times their space is threatened. Through a case study of the 2003 court caseconcerning unsolicited photographs of the wedding of Catherine Zeta-Jones and MichaelDouglas, published in Hello! magazine, this paper examines the policing, staging andlegislative defence of celebrity privacy. It is suggested that celebrities’ role in public iscompromised by their extreme recognisability.

Key words: celebrity, publicity, privacy, publicness, paparazzi.

Introduction

One of the major social forces driving voyeurism is

our changing conception of what information should

remain closed and private, and concomitantly, what

information should be made open and available to

the public. As our expectations of privacy decrease,

our expectations for receiving more information—

our expectations about what is public—

increase. Everything becomes fair game for our

voyeuristic viewing pleasure. (Calvert 2000: 78)

Nobody can stage a wedding, sell the publicity

rights for £1m and then claim that they were trying

to remain private. Managed publicity is not privacy.

(Jenkins 2007)

In 2000, Hollywood actors Catherine Zeta-

Jones and Michael Douglas held a lavish

wedding in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. To

moderate excessive media interest, the couple

auctioned the rights to their wedding pictures

to a celebrity magazine called OK!—chosen

over rival Hello!—for £1 million pounds. The

two magazines have become major players in

global media markets in recent years. Both are

similar in content and design, and are UK-

based, internationally distributed weekly

tabloids. OK! has eighteen national editions,

including the USA, Australia, China and

Germany; Hello!, which started as a Spanish

publication, ¡Hola!, distributes national edi-

tions in twelve countries, which include the

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2009

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/09/010009-15 q 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360802553178

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United Arab Emirates, Russia, Thailand and

Serbia. The magazines have built their success

on the personal stories and pictures of

celebrities and royals in co-operation with

the publications. As such, they are often

favoured by celebrities who are attracted by

the freedom they are given to edit their own

photographs prior to publication. Bidding

wars for the rights to publish the photographs

often break out between publications, based

on the large amounts of copies the magazines

will sell due to the celebrities’ popularity.

Zeta-Jones and Douglas reasoned that if they

made a deal with a tabloid magazine, ‘a limited

number of “authorised” pictures . . . would

reduce the price that illicitly-obtained photo-

graphs of the wedding could command and

therefore reduce the incentive of any photo-

grapher to take such photographs’ (UK Court

Service 2003: paragraph 51). The Hello! camp,

annoyed by losing the scoop, employed an

undercover photographer (a representative of

Phil Ramey’s paparazzi agency, which was

already infamous for photographing the corpse

of Rock Hudson) to covertly gatecrash the

wedding and take unsolicited pictures of the

famous bride and groom with a tiny surveil-

lance camera. In total there were six ‘grainy

shots’ (Lyall 2003: A4) which were rushed to a

special issue of Hello!, published before the

official OK! edition appeared.

Although the wedding was held in the USA,

the photographs appeared in the UK edition

of Hello! Zeta-Jones and Douglas (joined by

OK!) took the publishers—Northern &

Shell—to the UK High Court in 2003. The

couple won the case, and were awarded

£14,600 for ‘aggravated damages for distress’

(UK Court Service 2003: paragraph 275), plus

£3 million of the £4 million they spent suing

Hello! OK!, who were also involved in suing

Hello! for the breach of the exclusive, were

awarded £1,033,156. However, this award

was overturned in the London Court of

Appeal in 2005, on the basis that while

Hello! ‘had breached the Douglas’ confidenti-

ality . . . that confidentiality did not extend to

OK!’ (Forbes 2005). In May 2007, the House

of Lords reversed the original decision, ruling

in favour of Hello! magazine, and forcing OK!

to ‘pay back damages, costs and interest

amounting to nearly £2m’ (Tryhorn 2007).

This case is important, I suggest, because

celebrities must, by definition, have a strong

public identity. They are recognised, in public,

by many more people than they know

personally. This recognisability, Richard

Schickel writes, can elicit an ‘illusion of

intimacy’, causing people to imagine celebrities

as close friends (2000: 4). Furthermore, the

presence of the paparazzi, entertainment media,

and fans (from obsessed ‘stalkers’ to well-

wishers), is increasingly intrusive, at times

bordering on voyeurism (Calvert 2000: 78).

Thus, celebrities are—at times—required to

define and defend their privacy from the eyes of

the general public. Of particular concern to

most celebrities is the degree to which their

images are reproduced, distributed and policed.

Celebrities’ private lives have always been

fodder for mainstream and entertainment

news, an issue which has been taken

up within the scholarly literature on celeb-

rity (Holmes 2005; Holmes and Jermyn

2004; Holmes and Redmond 2006; Marshall

2006; Turner 2004; Turner, Bonner and

Marshall 2000). There is an increasing

emphasis on conceptualising the celebrity

simultaneously as a commodity with publicity

responsibilities (Kotler, Rein and Stoller 1997;

Turner 2004), and as a private individual

with citizenship rights, despite their extraordi-

nary recognisability (Turner 2004). The

idea of ‘managed publicity’ (Jenkins 2007)

is an attempt to reconcile these rights and

responsibilities.

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The paper provides an example of how

celebrities seek to prevent or manage the visual

penetration of their domestic lives, how this

process is implicated with a staged publicness,

and the extent to which they try to demarcate

personal space amidst these mediated pro-

cesses. It explores the nature of publicness in

the context of celebrities’ defence of both

spatial and informational privacy (Squires

1994). Three key aspects of the legal battle are

examined: first, attempts to regulate celebrity

images; second, the way in which the wedding

was staged, with physical exclusion of

unauthorised camera technology and mem-

bers of the general public; third, the legal

context within which control over their

wedding pictures was regulated. As evidence,

I draw on the Approved Judgment of Mr

Justice Lindsay (UK Court Service 2003), a

ninety-page summary of the circumstances

surrounding the wedding and its aftermath.

The celebrity and publicness

Contemporary audiences know everything about

the ‘backstage-ness’ of celebrity production, that

the private self is no longer the ultimate truth—

now it is performing the public self. (Gamson

1994: 54)

The star phenomenon orchestrates a whole set of

problems inherent in the commonplace metaphor

of life-as-theatre, role playing, etc., and stars do

thisbecause theyareknownas performers, since what

is interesting is not the character they have

constructed (the traditional role of the actor) but

rather the business of constructing/performing/being

(depending on the particular star involved) a

‘character’. (Dyer 1998: 21)

Analyses of the production of celebrity have

largely been focused in terms of the material

processes of creating, or manufacturing, an

individual’s image. As Gamson and Dyer both

note above, it is the processes of celebrity that

can be seen as the most ‘interesting’ or ‘true’.

The mechanics of such processes point to the

individual as a product of the celebrity

industry, which, according to Joshua Gamson,

can be viewed in the same way as any

commercial industry (1994: 58). Contrary to

notions that celebrity is configured through

chance, discovery, or is ‘God-given and fixed’

(1994: 67), Gamson suggests that the industry

is based on a systematic and controlled

structure, ranging from agents and publicists

to lawyers, acting coaches and stylists (Kotler,

Rein and Stoller 1997).

The division between public and private

space, surveillance, and privacy has been

charted from a number of disciplinary

standpoints (e.g. Calvert 2005; Crisci 2002;

Froomkin 2000; Graham 2001; Mitchell

2005). These, and other studies, focus on

issues such as the geopolitics of space,

voyeurism and the law—mostly connected

with the ordinary individual. The dichotomy

between the public and private spheres that

has long been a mainstay of political theory

has been challenged by critical geographers,

particularly in terms of how gender and sexual

identities are negotiated between formalised

public citizenship rights and private beha-

viours (e.g. Brown 1999; Staeheli 1996).

However, I suggest here that the

relationship between the famous individual

and publicness is particularly complex. For

Judith Squires, a common understanding of

privacy is, on the one hand, a spatialised right

to solitude, and on the other, an informational

right to confidentiality. Both of these under-

standings of privacy are ‘being eroded as a

result of the . . . exploitation of new technolo-

gies of communication and observation’

(1994: 388). This is magnified in the context

of the celebrity, concerned about media

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Page 5: Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

intrusion into their private lives in both a

spatial sense (stalkers, obsessive fans, papar-

azzi), but also in an informational sense in

terms of the capturing and distribution of

images of their private lives. There are four

key points to consider here, I suggest.

First, celebrities must be aware of fans and

others who recognise them when out in public.

The ‘celebrity sighting’ (Ferris 2004) juxtaposes

‘ordinary and extraordinary frames of meaning

in the everyday routine of the seer (and) highlight

distinctive ways of knowing others, throwing

conventional definitions of stranger and intimate

into new, mass-mediated light’ (2004: 237).

So, the sighted celebrity must be aware of

‘the moral order of the street’ (Ferris 2004: 238),

and negotiate public space with more awareness

of their public identity, compared to a non-

famous individual. For Ferris, this moral order

serves ‘to maintain and police various status

boundaries: ordinary versus extraordinary,

obscurity versus fame, stranger versus intimate’

(2004: 260). For Richard Schickel, celebrities

maintain an order for themselves in the form

of distance and indifference:

With the experience of public life, the ability to

maintain distance is developed . . . You . . . learn to

avoid eye contact, and that if you must give an

autograph a simple hasty signature will suffice—no

need to add some personal touch. Ideally, the

autograph should be granted indifferently, while

you continue to carry on a conversation with

someone else—which is one of the many uses of an

entourage. When photographers are present, an

almost imperceptible slowing of pace, a quick,

smiling glance in their direction will oblige them

without putting the celebrity into the vulnerable

full-stop position, where the goons can surround

him. (Schickel 2000: 5)

We can see evidence of the vexed publicness of

celebrities in the proliferation of tabloid

celebrity magazines such as heat (UK), Us

Weekly, People (USA) and Famous (Australia).

The content of these magazines include

numerous pictures that are ‘clearly saturated

with the rhetoric of expose, particularly in terms

of penetrating the celebrity image by capturing

them “off-guard”’ (Holmes 2005: 27). In heat,

for example, there is a strong emphasis on the

verbal disclosure of celebrity sightings—

‘printed in continuous bullet-point form with

minimal explication’—which highlights the

importance of ‘the recollection of the moment

of public visibility’ (Holmes 2005: 26).

Thus the negotiation of intimacy between

celebrity and fan is a key theme of celebrity

theory. As Gamson has demonstrated, sighting

celebrities has now become a tourist activity, a

‘hunt for rare game . . . As in a hunt, the

relationship between chaser and chased is both

structured and mediated: audiences, who want

as much as they can get, pursue celebrities in a

controlled environment, but if they are too

widely available and easily gotten, the

celebrities are not worth having’ (1994: 132).

As is evident by celebrity coverage in tabloid

newspapers, reality TV shows and even

mainstream news programmes, there has

been a transformation of the nature of public

appearances, both formal and informal

(Penfold 2004: 294; Urry 2000: 180). Thus,

celebrities have to balance ‘the amount of

energy invested in generating an audience

against the reward that can be reaped from

that audience’ (Kotler, Rein and Stoller 1997:

312). In doing so, they often need to maintain

continuity of character of their on and off

stage/screen images, and should perform so as

to make people ‘believe that the character they

see actually possesses the attributes he appears

to possess, that the task he performs will have

consequences that are explicitly claimed for it,

and that, in general, matters are what they

appear to be’ (Goffman 1962: 17).

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Page 6: Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

Secondly, celebrities’ grooming and beha-

viour at public on-stage events is crucial to the

maintenance of their professional and personal

images. However, while this form of public

exposure is controllable through performance,

celebrities are sometimes caught in uncontrol-

lable situations when they are off-duty. So, to

maintain a senseof privacyamidst intensemedia

interest, they often employ different strategies to

block, avoid or divert the media, and try to

create their own ‘intimate public stage’ (Penfold

2004: 294), which forces celebrities to negotiate

vexed boundaries between fantasy and reality,

as a regular part of their everyday lives. As Evans

and Wilson note:

Performers may go ‘into role’ for a stage act,

adopting particular clothes, another image, even

another name. Off-stage they can be confronted by

fans or simply ordinary people who still see them ‘in

role’ rather than as themselves. Sometimes the ‘roles’

are some way away from their real selves. (1999: 69)

Third, in this sense public space inhabited by

celebrities can be seen in dramaturgical terms,

as a type of stage, where the celebrity is aware

of performing for an audience. It has been

argued that contemporary audiences now see a

‘middle stage’ to the celebrity’s persona, which

is a result of the increasing awareness of

audiences to the processes of celebrity market-

ing (Gamson 1994). As Goffman notes, ‘the

performer may be moved to guide the

conviction of his audience only as a means to

other ends, having no ultimate concern in the

conception that they have of him or of the

situation’ (1962: 17–18). Goffman refers to

this as a ‘cynical’ performance. However, not

all cynical performances are intended to

mislead: ‘a cynical individual may delude his

audience for what he considers to be for their

own good, or for the good of the community,

etc’ (1962: 18). So, some celebrities who are

often considered to be role models and have a

well-established commercial identity, will

undertake the role of cynical performer on a

public stage, even when they consider them-

selves to be ‘off stage’, so as to maintain their

established image.

Fourth, this performance dilemma is not

only a matter of privacy, but also potentially a

problem for the definition of famous individ-

uals’ rights and privileges in public space. As

Don Mitchell notes on the issue of homeless

people in public space: ‘Public spaces of

spectacle, theatre, and consumption create

images that define the public, and these images

exclude as ‘undesirable’ the homeless and the

political activist’ (Mitchell 1995: 120). Of

course, in relation to celebrity, the idea of

‘desirability’ of the individual in public is at

the opposite end of the spectrum, with high

demand (and hefty fees) for celebrities to

appear at public events. Professional and

amateur celebrity image gatherers, such as

paparazzi photographers and the general

public armed with camera phones, also have

a stake in celebrity sightings. Candid images

are the staple for many entertainment publi-

cations and programmes that cater to a

‘seemingly unending fascination with celeb-

rity’, and can procure high sums of money for

the clever photographer (Howe 2005: 128).

These image gatherers have ‘elasticized’ the

flow of celebrity imaging (Marshall 2006:

634), and help to transform the spaces

celebrities occupy in their private lives into

zones of media frenzies (Sutter 2001).

With the technology kit of a paparazzi

photographer becoming increasingly smaller,

lighter, more accurate and more mobile, these

actors now have an unprecedented ability to

capture the ‘sacred space’ occupied by

celebrities. In this context ‘the off-guard

photo symbolizes the human-ness of the

stars’ (Giles 2000: 98–99).

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‘Star power’: the right to regulatephotographic images

I had a lesson in Britain of the way in which poor

publicity can stunt your career prospects. I have

always been determined not to allow this to happen

to me in the United States, where I do virtually all

my work. For this reason, there is a clause in every

performance contract I sign giving me full photo

approval. This means that no still photographs of

the movie may be published or distributed without

my prior consent. This is not a right that all actors

manage to obtain and is only granted to those with

sufficient ‘star power’. It is a right that I have had to

work hard to obtain and I work hard to enforce and

control it. I spend a great deal of time sifting

through the hundreds of photographs that are taken

of me during a film shoot and selecting those which

I know will benefit my career. (Catherine Zeta-

Jones, UK Court Service 2003: paragraph 195)

The Zeta-Jones case has interesting repercus-

sions in what constitutes public space, and when

or if public figures can be separated from their

celebrity images. As Zeta-Jones testified, in her

professional life she has earned the right to

dictate what type of image is distributed of her.

The key issue here is the degree of control that

stars have over the selection and circulation of

the photographs that help construct both their

professional and personal images. As David

Marshall explains, film stars weave the traits of

the characters they play in particular films that

they appear in within their public appearances

in talk shows, magazine interviews, and so on.

He uses Tom Cruise as an example:

His ‘real’ persona is, at this stage, very much connected

to that portrayed on the screen. Thus, the elaborate

extratextual discourse on Cruise that appears in

newspapers and magazines works to bolster the new

screen personality. Cruise’s own publicists also guard

the integrity of the screen persona in an effort to

maintain Cruise as a significant and marketable

commodity. His commodity status is dependent still

on screen presentation, or what the character on the

screen embodies. (Marshall 1997: 101)

Part of Zeta-Jones and Douglas’ ‘extratextual’

discourse was their wedding, and a large part

of their image relies on keeping the boundary

between public and private separate enough

for audiences, their fans, to have a controlled

image of their domesticity. During the wed-

ding, OK! were permitted access to all areas,

which resulted in fifty pages over two editions

of the magazine. Many of these pictures

worked in the spirit of good manners of the

camera culture, that is, to quote Susan Sontag:

when one is supposed to pretend not to notice when

one is being photographed by a stranger in a public

place as long as the photographer stays at a discreet

distance—that is, one is supposed neither to forbid

the picture-taking nor to start posing. (2001: 171)

Zeta-Jones was not only upset by the so-called

breach of privacy by Hello!’s stolen photo-

graphs, but also about their poor aesthetic

quality. One image, of her being fed wedding

cake by Douglas with a fork, particularly

appalled the actress, who stated: ‘I did not

want my husband shoving a spoon down my

throat to be photographed . . . it is offensive’

(Tait 2003: 7). Alongside the personal embar-

rassment caused by an unflattering photo-

graph, Zeta-Jones took professional offence,

and wanted to ensure her fans would only see

‘beautiful photos and to hear the real story’

(UK Court Service 2003: paragraph 50). In his

judgment, Justice Lindsay asserted that pro-

tection be afforded ‘to those who seek to

manage their publicity as part of their trade

or profession and whose private life is a

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Page 8: Publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space

valuable commodity’ (UK Court Service 2003:

paragraph 196).

Increasingly, entertainment media try to

take advantage of unfavourable imagery,

requiring that publicists ‘deal with the press

when a client misbehaves and attracts negative

publicity—hoping to cash in on their ongoing

relationship with the press to minimise any fall

out’ (Turner 2004). At times, this ‘fall out’

may not be so easily minimised, and it can also

jeopardise established public conceptions of

the star. As Joshua Gamson explains, ‘Enter-

tainment-industry publicists and celebrities,

eager for coverage for promotional purposes,

provide easy but controlled [my emphasis]

access to celebrity images. The operation is

mechanical, designed, routine’ (1994: 61). So

how was this control achieved during the

Zeta-Jones and Douglas wedding?

Staging the wedding: the hotel as publicspace?

Thesuccessof ahotel lobbydependsonthe separation

of public from private areas . . . Symbols demarcate

the outside world from the hotel world, creating

specialplacesandallowingpatronsandcasual visitors

to feel comfortable and secure . . . Traditional center-

city buildings hotel entrances relate directly to their

surroundings. The building is easily identifiable;

doorsopenrightonto the street, under canopies raised

in greeting. The lobby is just inside, often in direct

view. This is clearly demonstrated in New York’s

Plaza hotel. (Berens 1997: 7–8)

During the year 2000, high-profile Hollywood

celebrity couples had chosen highly secured,

difficult to access, locations for their wedding

ceremonies. For example, the wedding of

Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt was held in a

private Malibu mansion, under the cover of an

array of marquees. The nuptials of Madonna

to Guy Ritchie in a Scottish castle took the

security of the wedding’s privacy to a literal

extreme. Both ensured the unambiguous

exclusivity of the events. The Douglas–Zeta-

Jones wedding differed from the norm in the

couple’s choice of the Plaza Hotel, in the heart

of Manhattan adjacent to Central Park. As

Carole Berens indicates, the Plaza is iconic in

the history of grand ‘palace’ hotels, which

transported European aristocratic ideals into

the heart of the modern city. The Plaza is

famed for its place in the civic life of New York

(Brown 1967), associated with an older

‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood. This perhaps

reflected the couple’s desire to pay homage to

an era embodied by the father of the groom,

Kirk Douglas, when celebrity image pro-

duction was less ambiguous, embedded within

the studio ‘star system’ (Dyer 1998).

A key pivot of the court case was the degree

to which the Plaza could be considered public.

According to Zeta-Jones’ legal counsel, the

hotel was chosen so that the bride ‘could

procure that her arrival at the wedding would

not (as she put it) be turned into a media

circus’ (UK Court Service 2003: paragraph 28).

Justice Lindsay deemed that ‘on the day and in

the surrounding circumstances, parts of the

Plaza Hotel in New York where the wedding

ceremony and reception took place were

private places in the sense that they were

places in respect of which there was a

reasonable expectation of privacy’ (UK Court

Service 2003: paragraph 205).

However, as Staeheli and Mitchell (2008)

observe in relation to a similar hotel, the Palmer

House in Chicago, ‘publicness’ is gradated in

different areas of the hotel premises. For

example, the lobby is a space filled with a

diverse set of publics, some of whom are guests,

but some of whom are city residents using cafes

or restrooms as part of their everyday routine

(see Cocks 2001: 70–105). In a sense, the lobby

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is an extension of the city street, yet this might

better be called a ‘publicly accessible space’

(Staeheli and Mitchell 2008: xvi) where for a

number of reasons—the visual grandeur of the

lobby, the high prices for foodand drink, and the

watchful eyes of hotel service workers—not

everyone is welcome. Instead, it is a ‘highly

controlled space of interaction, wherein a

different kind of public, and a different segment

of the people, can form and be seen’. The

legitimate right to be in the lobby is at the

discretion of the hotel’s owners (2008: xvii–

xviii). Other parts of the hotel, such as guest and

conference rooms, have stronger security in

place, where only those with the requisite attire

(conference badges, style of clothing, hair and

ornamentation) are permitted to go.

The challenge the couple faced was to secure

the semi-public space of the hotel as a private

space for their own use, a way in which to

achieve a ‘refined public’ of their own

choosing (Cocks 2001: 71). They took

significant measures to physically secure the

privacy of their wedding from media other

than OK! They spent US$66,000 on security

for the day, keeping the wedding areas of the

hotel sealed off to non-guests:

Three private security companies were employed

and there was consultation with the New York

Police Department and the Fire Department.

The Plaza’s own security staff had the task of

ensuring that other guests staying at the hotel did

not stray from the public areas of the Hotel into

those reserved for the wedding. The rooms used

for the wedding were regularly ‘swept’ until an hour

before the ceremony to ensure there were no hidden

sound or video devices. Special arrangements were

made for exclusive use of the lifts in the hotel.

Guests arriving by car were required to enter a

special car tent where the invisible ink on the

entry card could be inspected. The car tent was

secured at all access points by police. Barriers were

erected so that the Press could take photographs

of guests entering the hotel but could not get too

near the entrance. (UK Court Service 2003:

paragraph 63)

These measures were put in place to keep the

live event a private activity. It was rigorously

secured so as to keep the boundaries between

the public and private as impermeable as

possible (Staeheli 1996: 605). The main

concern was to keep visual images of the

event private until the publication of OK!

Thus, there were particularly stringent regu-

lations on photography:

Arrangements were made so that if it was found at

entry that any guest had brought a camera, it would

be required to be checked-in at the cloakroom and

the guest would be reminded that there was to be no

photography. If the camera was discovered inside

the wedding, security staff were to remove the film,

develop it at the Douglas’ expense and return

all photographs save for any of the wedding.

A computer was on hand so that digital films could

be processed so as to obliterate any shots of the

wedding but not any other pictures on the film. In

some 6 or 8 cases a guest or other person present,

without having tried to conceal it, had been found

to have a camera or video with him or her and

the arrangements I have described were then

implemented. In one of the cases the camera had

been held quite openly by a member of the Welsh

Choir which was to entertain the guests and that led

to the whole Choir being ‘frisked’. No other camera

was found on them. Comprehensive arrangements

were also made to ensure that the copyright in the

photographs taken by the official photographers

(selected and paid for by the Douglas’) belonged to

the bride and groom and that no unauthorised

copies could be made from their films, which were

taken off for processing and processed under the

eyes of security staff. (UK Court Service 2003:

paragraph 65)

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Although the couple also went to lengths to

‘lock down’ the corridors on the relevant floor

so as ‘to ensure that other hotel guests could

not stray into the wedding’ (UK Court Service

2003: paragraph 66), the use of the hotel,

particularly the hotel lobby, an ostensibly

semi-public forum, could be considered a

contentious choice of backdrop from which to

‘publicise’ their ‘private’ festivities.

Most significantly, it highlighted the finan-

cial ability of celebrities to fight for unusually

demanding privileges in public space, captured

by a comment made by Zeta-Jones in court:

‘It’s not about the money, it’s absolutely not

about the money . . . One million pounds is not

that much to us’ (Cheston 2003). Subsequently,

the actress endured harsh criticism from the

press, who saw it as underlining the privileged

nature of celebrity use of public space.

Legislating celebrity space

The loss of privacy is most often cited in

conjunction with the intrusive behaviour of the

press . . . the single most problematic aspect of fame

is the continuous attention that never abates, even

in one’s most intimate moments. (Giles 2000: 97)

In 1998, in the USA, a year after the death of

Princess Diana, actors Michael J. Fox and Paul

Reiser went to the US House Committee on

the Judiciary to explain ‘the horrors of the so-

called paparazzi’ (Calvert 2000: 192). Their

aim was to champion bills that would ‘create

new criminal and civil penalties for commer-

cially motivated invasions of privacy that

results from persistent chases or other invasive

methods used by photographers, videogra-

phers and audio recorders’ (Mauro 1998: 26).

The bill targeted the producers of the imagery

rather than the actual broadcasting of that

imagery, and also sought to obstruct all forms

of invasive image procurement, even going

so far as

to look to the technological future by penalising the

use of as-yet unknown as well as familiar ‘visual or

auditory enhancement devices’ that produce visual

images or sound that could not otherwise have been

obtained without trespassing on private property.

(Mauro 1998: 26)

The bill did not make it on to the statute book

at the federal level, but in California similar

legislation went into effect on 1 January 1999

(CNN 1998), and was ratified in 2005 by

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It provides

privacy protection for the specific cause of

‘Paparazzi Behaviour’. As such, the legislation

created a Commission of Inquiry into Papar-

azzi Behaviour (News Media Update 1997),

which identified five points that needed to be

addressed:

(a) The impact of new technology and

methods such as long-range camera lenses

and hearing devices and the use of

helicopters, motorcycles and powerboats

on traditional legal doctrines such as

reasonable expectation of privacy, trespass

and harassment laws and related matters.

(b) The growth, behaviour, structure, funding

and ethics of the paparazzi and tabloid

journalism.

(c) Issues regarding libel laws, privacy and

freedom of the press.

(d) Issues regarding bounty hunting, or com-

mercially based photography cartels tar-

geting public figures.

(e) What reforms if any are needed by private

and public parties to preserve and enhance

freedom of the press while curbing

abusive practices that threaten legitimate

privacy and safety rights. (State of

California 1998)

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Not surprisingly, celebrities, including those

from the Screen Actors Guild and the

Directors Guild of America, strongly sup-

ported the Bill (CNN 1998). The statute was

divided into four distinct torts, which would

provide a model for California’s anti-papar-

azzi legislation, citing ‘unreasonable intrusion

upon a person’s seclusion; public disclosure of

private facts; publicity that places a person in a

false light; and appropriation of a person’s

name or likeness’ (Harvard Law Review

1999).

In the UK, where Zeta-Jones and Douglas

had their case heard, there is no such ‘anti-

paparazzi’ law. Instead, privacy rights rest on a

definition set up by the Press Complaints

Commission’s Code of Practice, which deems

a private space to be ‘public or private

property where there is reasonable expectation

of privacy’ (Mayes 2002: 25). However, in

terms of celebrities, things get complicated.

Two ostensibly competing rights, taken from

the Human Rights Act, are thus:

Article 8, the Right to Respect for Private and

Family Life states that: ‘Everyone has a right to

respect for his private and family life, his home and

his correspondence’ . . . Article 10, the Right to

Freedom of Expression, states that: ‘Everyone has a

right to freedom of expression. This right shall

include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and

impart information and ideas without interference

by public authority and regardless of frontiers’.

(Mayes 2002: 3)

This set of conflicting rights is further

complicated by the fact that ‘public discourse

becomes increasingly shaped around private,

personal matters’ (Mayes 2002: 3), and

celebrities frequently voluntarily give maga-

zine interviews and photo shoots where they

confess personal stories and show off their

private estates (Mayes 2002: 4). As Giles

notes at the beginning of this section, ‘the

intrusive behaviour of the press’ (2000: 97) is

an ongoing concern. However, it is arguably

one which is perpetuated by celebrities

themselves.

For the ‘civilian’ individual, as opposed to

the ‘celebrity’ individual, it has been argued

that the rules of behaviour in public space are

relative to the level of recognisability of the

individual:

The association of public anonymity with privacy is

not new . . . anonymity occurs when the individual

is in public places or performing public acts but still

seeks, and finds, freedom from identification and

surveillance . . . He may be riding a subway,

attending a ball game, or walking the streets; he is

among people and knows that he is being observed;

but unless he is a well-known celebrity, he does not

expect to be personally identified and held to the

full rules of behavior and role that would operate

if he were known to those observing him. In this

state the individual is able to merge into the

‘situational landscape’. (Westin 1967, cited in

Slobogin 2002: 235)

The power to grant the right to privacy lies

with the attending judge on each particular

case. Despite that the couple concerned—as

well as the groom’s father and a large

percentage of the guests1—are some of the

most recognisable people in the world, Judge

Lindsay claimed to be sufficiently satisfied that

‘the wedding was not a celebrity event . . .

(and was) not intended to be one’ (Dodd

2003). This apparent paradox could be

explained by Staeheli’s exploration of the

distinction between public/private spaces and

public/private acts. The wedding was an

example of how ‘expressing personal relations

in public is a way of exposing the political

nature of personal relations—of demonstrat-

ing that they are not inherently private and

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that the construction of them as private can be

changed’ (Staeheli 1996: 611). The wedding

was considered as private, but was recon-

structed as public for the benefit of the

magazine’s audience.

This discussion suggests that we might see

the privacy of celebrities as being situational,

dependent on the type of space occupied by the

celebrity at particular moments. Along with

the privatisation of urban public space, as

in gated communities (Low 2006: 82); and

‘bubble laws’ such as that introduced by

Colorado to protect female individuals from

being harassed by anti-abortionists (Mitchell

2005: 78), US privacy legislation can be seen

to be at the forefront of creating a type of

buffer zone in public space, where celebrities

would be legally protected from celebrity news

and image gatherers (see Blankstein 2008;

Serjeant 2008).

Conclusions

Celebrities have adopted a number of strat-

egies to control their self-image, and have

sought to navigate this complex state of being,

mobilising ‘star power’ to try to control the

scopic regimes that surround their on-stage

and off-stage appearance. They are faced with

what Joshua Gamson calls the ‘middle region’

(Gamson 1994: 143), where audiences are

all too aware of the ‘backstage’ nature of

celebrity. Thus, the star must abdicate the

traditional role of performance, and ‘convert

the backstage into an onstage performance,

[and] control their images by appearing not to

control them’ (Gamson 1994: 143, my

emphasis). In this sense, celebrities are in a

double bind. They need publicity, but demand

privacy. In assessing the ability of celebrities to

maintain a balance between privacy and

publicity, I draw three conclusions.

First, there is the importance of preventing

image capture. Despite admitting in the

witness box that she and her husband ‘accept

that as celebrities we have an obligation not to

ignore those people who make us celebrities’

(UK Court Service 2003: paragraph 48), Zeta-

Jones expresses gratitude in a post-verdict

press statement, in their not being categorised

as celebrities, stating:

We deeply appreciate that the court has recognised

the principle that every individual has the right to

be protected from excessive and unwarranted

media intrusion into their private lives. (in Tait

2003: 7)

The ramifications of such judgment also

resound in other cases involving public

figures. For example, after many previous

attempts, Princess Caroline of Monaco finally

won a German court ruling in 1999,

disallowing anyone from photographing her

in the street without her consent. This

unprecedented ruling now potentially allows

courts to ‘clamp down on the publication of

photographs featuring people in public

streets’ (Mayes 2002). While this directly

concerns the media, it also sets a paradigm of

the type of behaviour that is acceptable in

public spaces. It would seem that, in the UK at

least, the clampdown on people taking

photographs in public places—not just papar-

azzi, and not just of celebrities—has reached

an almost hysterical point, with photogra-

phers ‘being told (wrongly) that they can’t

photograph groups of people and scenes in

public places by child protection officers,

security guards, London Eye officials and

police officers. Sometimes photographers

have been told to delete their photographs’

(Mayes 2002: 7).

Second, celebrities are involved in a

constant struggle to retain control of the

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hybridisation of their identities that accom-

pany the public narratives of their lives. As

Gamson (1994) has suggested, audiences are

already aware of celebrities’ on-screen roles

and identities, and there has been a shift in

the way in which audiences perceive celeb-

rities in terms of their public and private lives.

The trend in mainstream news towards the

prioritisation of celebrities’ private lives—at

the expense of ‘significant issues and events of

international consequence’ (Franklin 1997, in

Holmes 2005: 22)—as well as the entertain-

ment news media’s ‘appetite to reveal the

ordinary self’ (Holmes 2005: 30) may help to

explain the commercial success of magazines

such as heat in the UK (Holmes 2005).

Furthermore, this is part of a broader reversal

of the idealisation of celebrities that was

common for much of the twentieth century:

‘the iconography of celebrity photography

has begun to move away from the contrived

gloss of the “ideal” towards the more

mundane territory of “the real”’ (Lai 2006:

215). This explains why Hello! was so keen to

procure the candid wedding pictures, and

shows that preventing distribution of ‘off-

stage’ shots is almost certainly beyond their

control.

Third, to ensure physical control over the

scopic regimes that govern the distribution of

their images, celebrities are involved in the

claiming of space. For critical geographers,

this is a significant extension to debates about

class and social power, particularly in the

context of ‘geographies of the super-rich’

(Beaverstock, Hubbard and Short 2004). It

also highlights the importance of visuality in

terms of who has the right to be seen in public.

As Iveson (2007) argues, drawing on Arendt

(1958), discussions of publicness are domi-

nated by visual metaphors, such as ‘appearing’

in public, and being ‘exposed’ to the ‘harsher

light’ of publicity. And so:

To be ‘in public’ is to have one’s conduct exposed to

the normative gaze of others, and exposure to this

gaze is one of the technologies of governance

which incite us to regulate our own conduct with

regard to what is ‘appropriate’ when in public.

(Iveson 2007: 214)

The publicness of the celebrity is situational,

‘actively made through actions across a range

of spaces and media’ (2007: 214). In this sense,

the public spaces in which celebrities are seen

in their different guises—at formal appear-

ances, or out walking the dog—are reconfi-

gured in terms of the actions performed. As

Iveson suggests, some actions are more visible

than others and ‘visibility and invisibility are

associated with different spaces at different

times’ (Iveson 2007: 216). As noted, Staeheli’s

work also underlines this notion of different

definitions of privacy at specific locations

(1996: 602). This was the distinction that

Justice Lindsay’s judgment finally rested upon:

the wedding ceremony itself was private, but

its publication and reporting was public. This

would explain why Zeta-Jones and Douglas

won damages, but the battle between OK! and

Hello! went on to two further appeals.

Celebrities can secure various public and

semi-public locations such as hotels, as con-

trolled stages for events to play out. These stages

are important for the construction and exposure

of the celebrity image. Ironically, the measures

undertaken by celebrities to control their images

reinforces their scarcity: the harder the picture

is to obtain, the more valuable it will be for

paparazzi agencies and entertainment news

media, despite the high risk of legal challenge

and premium prices paid to secure the images.

As weddings are quintessentially public events,

celebrity couples have to concede a certain loss

of privacy while recognising that the commer-

cial demands of their professional lives require a

degree of visualisation of their domestic privacy.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Gill Valentine, Michael Brown and

the three anonymous referees for their helpful

comments.

Note

1 Guests reportedly included: Martha Stewart, Art

Garfunkel, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, Oliver

Stone, Christopher Reeve, Sharon Stone, Goldie Hawn,

Meg Ryan, Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston,

Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson and Steven Spielberg

(Armstrong 2000).

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10–14th February 2003, 17–21st February 2003;

22 Kim McNamara

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24–26th February 2003, 3–7th March-2003, ,www.

courtservice.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j1700/douglas_v_

hello.htm . (accessed May 2008).

Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies. New York:

Routledge.

Westin, A.F. (1967) Privacy and Freedom. New York:

Atheneum.

Abstract translations

Publiciser les vies privees: les celebrites, le controlede l’image et la reconfiguration de l’espace public

Le systeme du vedettariat exige aujourd’hui lanegociation entre la vie publique et la vie privee.L’intrusion des paparazzis, des medias de divertisse-ment et des admirateurs (autant les obsedes qui les«traquent» que les sympathisants) dans la vie descelebrites obligent ceux-ci a mettre en place desregles et afficher ouvertement leur personnagepublic «d’avant-scene». En temps normal ils yarrivent sans trop de peine, mais a certains momentsleur espace subit la menace. A partir d’une etude decas menee sur des poursuites judiciaires engagees en2003 contre la revue Hello! pour avoir publie desphotos non sollicitees du mariage entre CatherineZeta-Jones et Michael Douglas, cet article explorela surveillance policiere, la mise en scene et lesmoyens de defense legaux de la vie privee descelebrites. Il laisse entendre que le fait que les

celebrites sont immediatement reconnaissablesporte prejudice au role qu’ils jouent en public.

Mots-clefs: vedettariat, publicite, vie privee, viepublique, paparazzi.

Publicitando las vidas privadas: los famosos,control de imagen y la reconfiguracion del espaciopublico

La naturaleza de la celebridad de hoy en dıa exige lanegociacion de lo publico y lo privado. Dado lapresencia cada vez mas indiscreta de los medios deentretenimiento y los fanaticos (desde los acosa-dores obsesionados hasta las personas que le deseansuerte y fortuna) para los famosos es necesariocontrolar, pero a la vez hacer publico, su imagenpublica. Aunque esto normalmente se hace con uncierto grado de comodidad, a veces su espacio seencuentra amenazado. Mediante un estudio de casodel juicio del ano 2003 sobre las fotos no solicitadasde la boda de Catherine Zeta-Jones y MichaelDouglas, publicadas en la revista Hello!, este papelexamina el control, el montaje y la defensalegislativa de la privacidad de los famosos. Sugiereque el papel jugado por los famosos en el ambitopublico esta puesto en peligro por su extremareconocibilidad.

Palabras claves: celebridad, publicidad, privacidad,lo publico, paparazzi.

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