publicising private lives: celebrities, image control and the reconfiguration of public space
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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
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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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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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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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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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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.
Publicising private lives 23
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