Author: nymag.com: People

(Photo: Newscom; Patrick McMullan (inset))

It was Snooki who started it, releasing a picture of herself sans cosmetics via Twitter in January. Back came tweets saying she looked better au naturel, and soon other done-up stars were sharing their plain selves with the world. By the time Rihanna circulated a barefaced snapshot in April—and a few days later smiled as she was snapped (A1) without her red-carpet enhancements (A2)—a tabloid staple had been subverted. How the no-makeup photo, once a literal money shot for paparazzi, became positive PR:

(Photo: from top, London Entertainment/Splash News, Peter Kramer/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images, courtesy of AnnaLynne McCord)

1. The Pimple Premium

In the nineties, paparazzi find willing clients in the likes of The National Enquirer and The Star, whose editorial standards disfavor glamour. “The worse a star looked without makeup, the more money you could get for the shot then,” says Francois Navarre, co-owner of the X17 photo agency. (A shot of a bikinied Demi Moore, un-made-up and showing cellulite, fetches $15,000 in 1999.) They are “the pictures that Hollywood’s beauties don’t want you to see,” as another agency puts it while peddling a package of images including a makeupless Courteney Cox (B).

2. Us Ascends

US Weekly becomes one of America’s best-selling magazines thanks to saturation coverage of stars (“They’re just like us!”). The deluge dilutes the shock value of candid photos, which canny celebrities begin to stage when the unfiltered exposure suits them.

3. “Photoshop of Horrors”

A July 2007 Jezebel exposé of a grievously Photoshopped Redbook cover pic of singer Faith Hill raises the call for the media to show female celebs as they really are, not in gotcha moments but as a matter of principle.

4. Kathie Lee, Edgy Instigator

On May 13, 2010, Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford (C) do their hour of the Today show without makeup.

5. The Brand Experiment

In ­December 2010, Russell Brand attempts to show how celebrities can empower themselves while cutting out the paparazzi. He does this by tweeting a photo of his barely awake then-wife, Katy Perry, who is not ­in on the plan.

6. This Season’s Must-Have Look

Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Demi Lovato follow Snooki’s lead. In Rihanna’s case, the photo conveniently presents a more positive side to her won’t-be-tamed image.

7. Skin Rag

The 2012 edition of People’s “50 Most Beautiful” issue, turning the photos into something to be embraced, features actresses such as Zooey Deschanel and Paula Patton in “not a drop of makeup.”

8. More Effective Than a Wardrobe Malfunction

The selling point of no-makeup photos was that they showed A-list actresses looking ordinary. Now they’ve become a vehicle for up-and-comers seeking greater renown. On May 4, Anna­Lynne ­McCord of 90210 tweets a shot of herself mid-­breakout (D): “To all my girls (and boys) who have ever been embarrassed by their skin! I salute you! I’m not perfect—and that’s okay with me!” Earlier this year, ­a photo posted by McCord that accidentally (?) revealed her nipple generated 88,000 clicks on Twitpic.com. The photo of her pimples gets 140,000 views.

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Illustration by Kelsey Dake

When Jennifer Aniston separated from Brad Pitt in 2005, US Weekly rushed out a mass-market paperback about the couple’s divorce titled Brad & Jen: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Golden Couple. (Sample chapter title: “The Split Heard ’Round the World.”) It set the tone for the tabloid coverage of the only role she would play for the next seven years, a seemingly ceaseless stream of stories with headlines like OBSESSED WITH ANGIE!, I CAN’T STOP LOVING BRAD!, and JEN’S HEARTBREAK: DUMPED! Aniston appeared in more than a dozen movies during this period and added to the fortune she made on Friends, making an estimated $24.5 million in 2010 alone, according to Vanity Fair. She dated several handsome, notably tall actors and musicians—Vince Vaughn, John Mayer, Bradley Cooper—and, it seems safe to assume, had all sorts of expensive fun with them. But right until the news broke last week of her engagement to Justin Theroux, the celebrity-watching public knew her mostly as Sad Jen.

Cynics have suggested that Aniston played up her victimization, but aside from one ill-advised Vanity Fair interview (“Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes…”), there’s little to substantiate the charge. If anything, what Aniston was a victim of was bad timing. She had the misfortune to have Pitt leaving her for Angelina Jolie just as celebrity journalism was metastasizing. With stars’ every movement fair game for the paparazzi, every image could in turn feed the master narrative: She wasn’t looking glum in that photo of her leaving a yoga class because she’d just been photographed against her wishes while makeup-less and sweaty; it was because she was realizing she was unlovable. It matters, too, that the post-Brad interregnum began as blogs were discovering that online, snark sells. Web archives can be spotty, but I swear I recall one blogger calling her “Eeyore,” the girl-next-door cover girl reduced to dysthymic donkey.

Then there was Aniston’s age at the time of the breakup. By dumping her at 35, Pitt had, through the tabloid lens, robbed her of the thing she surely wanted, the thing every All-American woman wants: children. She was an earlier iteration of the woman who can’t, it turns out, have it all, missing out on her prime mothering years while building a home with a man who then abandoned her for an exotic seductress who had once worn a vial of her former beau’s blood around her neck—an irresistible horror story. As the Brangelina brood grew to Brady Bunch proportions, Sad Jen was relegated to the realm of mopey spinsterdom.

At it happens, the demise of Sad Jen (or, at least, the evolution into Jen Who Has a Fiancé Now But Is Probably Still Empty Inside Because She Doesn’t Have Babies, Poor Thing) is timed nicely to coincide with the next generation’s celebrity cuckold: Robert Pattinson, whose high-profile split from vamp-harlot Kristen Stewart seems primed to create a new sad tabloid icon. Running with the part, he drowned his sorrows in a pint of ice cream served up by Jon Stewart. The only question is whether Sad Rob will sell as well as Sad Jen did.

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(Photo: Courtesy of Fergus Greer)

On the day that she makes her official debut as a novelist, Molly Ringwald and I meet in St. Mark’s Bookshop, which doesn’t seem to have her book in stock. Possibly it’s still in a box somewhere, but neither of us really wants to ask. Instead, Ringwald—dressed in a crisp white shirt and red shorts, with a pair of matching red Ray-Bans—purchases a few postcards and tells the clerk that she’d like to make a donation to the crowd-funded campaign to save the beleaguered shop. “I hope you guys stick around,” she says, like she’s already planning on coming back.

Ringwald spent three years on When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories, a serious collection she describes as being “about betrayal.” (It centers on a couple whose settled lives are upended when the wife learns of the husband’s affair with their daughter’s violin teacher; “Your heart doesn’t think,” she writes at one point, “your heart is stupid.”) It’s an unlikely move for the woman who’s been a patron saint of adolescence to much of Gen X—even her publisher, she admits, “probably expected me to write something more sort of memoir-based.” Her previous book was an anecdotes-and-advice best seller, Getting the Pretty Back.

“I started acting when I was so young,” Ringwald, now 44, explains, “and even though I loved it, I do feel a bit like it sort of chose me. If I’d had to wait, I’m not sure I would have done it.” Acting, she tells me, “involves so much rejection, and is so much about image. I feel like I’m sort of a survivor, in a way. If you look at a lot of young actors, they don’t turn out very well. “Whereas writing,” she says, “was something that I had to seek out.”

But she’s always been attracted to books—and writers. “A therapist once told me I should stop dating writers and just be one. That was good advice.” She didn’t exactly take it: Her husband, Panio Gianopoulos, has a novella coming out in November.

It’s no knock on his stuff to say it’s unlikely that book will be received in quite the way this one was, with a nostalgia-soaked review in the Times, a Salon Q&A with A. M. Homes, and a Barnes & Noble talk with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker—and, one guesses, a devotee of John Hughes films. (At the beginning of the talk, a clerk warned that Ringwald would only be signing books, not movie memorabilia. “It’s not that Molly won’t sign,” insisted one semi-disgruntled fan, with a small pile of rolled-up posters under his seat, to another. “It’s that her publicist won’t let her!”)

Together with their kids, Ringwald and Gianopoulos live in L.A., where Ringwald films the TV drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager. (Her day job, so to speak.) But the couple met in New York, where she has lived on and off since she was 18. “When I first moved here, I lived in the American Felt building, on 13th, and everybody told me, ‘Don’t go east of Third Avenue.  I remember running to the deli on the corner and sort of looking around to see if there was anybody with a knife.” The neighborhood has changed—literary Brat Packer Bret Easton Ellis is trying to rent out his own Felt-building one-bedroom, via Twitter, for $5,000 a month—but she’s stuck it out, even moving East. When the owner of a vintage store we’ve ducked into asks if she lives nearby, Ringwald says, “I still have an apartment in the neighborhood,” not mentioning that it’s currently rented out.

And then they have the kind of interaction that Ringwald’s been having, in one form or another, for most of her life: “Are you …?”

“I am,” Ringwald confirms.

“That is so cool,” she says. “I’m 38, and I know every single thing you’ve ever done.” As we’re leaving, she adds, “You totally made my day!”

“Buy my book,” Ringwald answers cheerfully, and then, to me, adds, “Don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy now?” But just a few minutes later, after we’ve sat down at a no-frills Avenue B café, Ringwald admits that she can’t really relate to her devoted fans. “I can never have the same experience of those movies that other people have, because I was in them. So I don’t have the same touchstones. Sometimes I wish I did, because I think they’re the reason that people are so nice to me. They’re predisposed to like me, because, to them, I was the good part of growing up. There’s so much that’s awful about being that age, but those movies were like beacons. They were lighthouses,” she says. “It’s different than it is for other actors. Can you imagine being a soap-opera villain? They have people spitting in their faces!”