On June 23, 1933, Variety reported on a disturbing new trend. Photographs of Claudette Colbert and Fredric March taken illicitly on the Paramount backlot had found their way onto the pages of a fan magazine. “With small candid cameras it is possible to grab pictures without the subjects or bystanders wise to the proximity of a photog[rapher],” the paper noted. Unofficial cameras were promptly banned from studio lots – they still are – but the dynamic was set. If fans want to see stars on screen, they also want to see them off duty. Those Paramount snaps differ from pictures of Gossip Girl actors dining in Greenwich Village, taken on camera phones and posted on Gawker, only in the speed of publication.

As Anthony Slide’s new study Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers shows, these publications didn’t just cater to a celebrity economy but helped create it. “The movies presented the star to the viewer,” Slide notes, “but the fan magazine could reach beyond the visual image and examine and reveal the ‘real’ personality.” Slide doesn’t dwell on this development as much as he might. This notion of identity as performance in itself – and the consequent relegation of work to something done in the service of the persona – arguably defined modern celebrity, then metastatised into a vehicle for navigating atomised, digitised late-capitalist society itself.

Fan magazines were part of movieland scenery from the start. The Motion Picture Story Magazine was established in 1911 and more than 260 titles – Photoplay, Picture-Play Weekly and Modern Screen prominent among them – followed, the form’s aggregate circulation reaching the hundreds of millions before its demise at the end of the century. Incidents like the one at Paramount notwithstanding, unauthorised publications were the exception: most early fan magazines were willingly under the industry’s thumb, submitting to studio influence and copy approval even before the introduction, in 1934, of a formal accreditation system that assured compliance on pain of excommunication and lasted for two decades.

Such a set-up stemmed partly from a sense of professional self-preservation – as well as needing access to the stars, many magazine writers and editors also worked for studios as press agents or screenwriters – but it was also a function of the market. “People don’t want their movie stars torn down,” one fan journalist observed in 1947. “The public wants to believe in Santa Claus and the movie stars.”

To an overwhelmingly female readership, stars were objects of aspiration as much as idolisation – tellingly, fan magazines without a woman on the cover didn’t sell. The stars, as they appeared in print, were humble and clean-living as well as glamorous, their stable, contented private lives merely glanced at to illustrate gracious advice on grooming or homemaking. Not that it was all roses: there were stories about the perils of ‘reduceomania’ (‘Starving Back to Stardom’, Photoplay, 1928; ‘Taking the Die Out of Diet’, Motion Picture Magazine, 1930) and news of on-set mishaps.

One gossip column’s tally of upsets for May 1925 alone included sprained shoulders and ankles, influenza, a bruised nose, serious burns, a throat operation, dislocated vertebrae and the news that a starlet had retired “because of a lingering illness and is sad and broken in spirit.” (Perversely, the column was titled “Hollywood High Lights”.) These, though, were the sorts of problem an enterprising young woman could be expected to face down.

Edification wasn’t out of the question either. The fan magazine archives contain some surprisingly prestigious contributors, including Somerset Maugham, H.L. Mencken, Eleanor Roosevelt, even Archduke Leopold of Austria. Theodor Dreiser interviewed Mack Sennett for Photoplay, declaring his “interpretive burlesque…no different from that of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Shaw or Dickens”, and, in 1930, e.e. cummings wrote a piece for Cinema Arts praising Mickey Mouse and comparing Krazy Kat to Lady Chatterley’s lover. (Describing MGM as a studio run by “a kike named Irving Thalberg” did him no favours.)

There was also room for innuendo. “An ‘engagement’ between two players generally implied that sexual intercourse had taken place,” Slide notes. “An actress having ‘her appendix removed’ usually meant that she was having an abortion.” And hints of homosexuality were rife: an interview with Eugene O’Brien in 1918 noted that ‘a faint scent of lilac floated on the air’, for instance, while a 1953 Picture Play photo spread, ‘Calling All Girls’, found Roddy McDowall and Tab Hunter discussing their bachelor status while brandishing wieners and wearing nothing but cut-off denim.

Unlike the newspapers, fan magazines offered minimal coverage of genuine scandals – such as the string of drug-related deaths and serious criminal charges involving major stars like ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle that hit Hollywood in the 1920s – and little engagement with the effects of prohibition or anti-communism on the industry. Santa Claus clung on, even after the success of the flagrantly sensationalist Confidential magazine, launched in 1952, demonstrated a strong market for salacious dirt. ‘They tell the truth about [stars] to hurt them,’ one fan magazine editor said of Confidential and its ilk. ‘We tell lies about them to help them.’ There were sizeable, presumably overlapping, readerships for both.

The form was also able to wether the challenges brought by the rise of television and teen culture. But the rot set in with Jacqueline Kennedy. As the first superstar not created by the entertainment industry, Kennedy established the potential for a celebrity economy indifferent to the classical stardom of the studio system, which by the mid-1960s found itself in both economic and cultural decline, kicked on the way down by Kenneth Anger’s wickedly scurrilous gossip compilation Hollywood Babylon (curiously unmentioned by Slide). Fan magazines adapted and survived, running more negative stories and covering personalities from TV (especially soap opera), pop and sports as well as the movies.

The establishment of People magazine by Time-Life Corp in 1974 and Us Weekly by the New York Times Company in 1977 confirmed the transformation of fandom from a Hollywood-centric niche to a mass market for ‘human interest’ at its broadest. Us Weekly’s absorption of Photoplay in 1980 marked the death knell for conventional fan magazines as a lively part of pop culture, though they maintained a sizeable rump market until the end of the century, when they were decisively eclipsed by the gratifying immediacy of the internet and the conclusive decoupling of fame from glamour and talent represented by reality television. At this point Slide, never a determinedly objective guide, throws up his hands. “Personalities are no longer the end result of hard work in the movies or on television,” he huffs, “but rather the pathetic choices of a public obsessed with celebrity.”

Yet the lure of celebrity was always as crucial to the appeal of fan magazines as any appreciation of performers’ talents, as Slide’s own research makes plain, had he more interest in interrogating it. But rather than arguments about the position of its subject in twentieth-century culture and society, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine mainly offers lists of titles, facts and figures punctuated with potted biographies of prominent contributors. (Slide seems to assume his readers will be as interested in their personalities and peccadilloes as theirs were in the stars’.)

Absent is any sustained consideration of the nature of these publications’ appeal to their enormous readership. Slide quotes without comment the intriguing conclusions of a 1939 study that fan magazines ‘make it possible for the worshiper to identify herself with the glamorous star as she can do with no other character in fiction’; and an unnamed fan magazine editor who, in 1948, described her industry’s products as ‘inverse statements of frustration’.

Should we, then, imagine the fan magazine readership as an ocean of Emma Bovarys, romantically projecting themselves into escapist fantasy? If so, the fantasy wasn’t entirely futile: major stars like Mary Astor and Clara Bow owed their careers to public competitions in fan magazines. There’s surely more at work here than whimsy. During the twentieth century, western women were presented with more and more hypothetically accessible images of glamour and independence; far harder to come by were practical opportunities to attain them through, say, the kind of steady, well-paid employment and high social status that middle-class white men could take for granted.

Stardom offered a route to such things, a glorious short cut in which your self itself was a passport to success, if only you could get it out there for enough people to see. No surprise that so many were drawn to the star game. No surprise either that today, with material and social stability so thin on the ground even for white, middle-class men, celebrity is a way of being. Millions act as star, photographer, editor, publisher and reader every day, establishing an online identity, cultivating the self as a brand, each of us her own Santa Claus.