The PHOTOPLAYERS

Hollywood during the studio era had an ironclad grip on the public image of its contracted players. Rumour held that if you were a star, you called the MGM publicity head before you called the police, the hospital or your lawyer. It took a phalanx of studio fixers, publicity stooges and reporters on the payroll to make scandals disappear – or at least minimise them in the public eye.

With strict censors in control of American movies and a socially conservative nation to please, the fan magazine became a cog in the wheel of that star-making machinery – and an important and worked in tandem with the major studios, and if something was not ‘fit to print’, the magazines in question would demur, or resort to innuendo, to deal with the issue.