The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity Industrial Complex - Hardcover

Maureen Orth's first book, Vulgar Favors, appeared for three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. One of the first women to write for Newsweek, she has reported for many magazines and was a network correspondent for NBC News. She began at Vanity Fair in 1988. Her late husband was Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News and moderator of Meet the Press. She lives in Washington D.C.

From The Importance of Being Famous:
I tell these stories to illustrate the differences between then and now and maybe to point out a little of what has been lost. In my earlier days, stories about famous people were still mostly about their achievements, the content of their work, and how it got done. Michael Jackson dangling his baby from a hotel balcony would have been considered a tragedy or an oddity, but the scene would not have been replayed hundreds of times a day on TV at a moment when the country was preparing for war. But now, with so much entertainment just pap and politician's insights boiled down to trite sound bites, we tend to hone in on the drama of our stars' and politicians' real lives. Their reality has become the soap opera, the big show. Even if it's clearly a rigged-up carnival. (Would Nicole Kidman, who has now proven herself as a serious actress, be getting all the terrific parts she does if she hadn't also made herself into mass-marketable tabloid fodder as Mrs. Ex-Tom Cruise?) But what parts of these well-crafted little dramas are actually real and which are invented for public consumption?