The rich and famous are used to living in the public eye, so now their ultimate power play is being able to keep secrets.
In an age of TMZ and seemingly instant knowledge about everything, some stars are able to guard their lives closely
The announcement of David Bowie’s death on Jan 11 dealt a double blow. First was its finality. Then came the realisation that barely anybody knew he had been sick, including an old ally like Brian Eno, with whom he had traded emails a week before.
The secret of Bowie’s illness countered the received wisdom that it’s nearly impossible for public figures to hold information about themselves close in an age of 24/7 social media, email leaks and TMZ.
Yet, it seems, an increasing number of stars are managing to do just that. In the past year, Sandra Bullock kept the adoption of her second child from the world before trumpeting it with an exclusive People magazine cover story. Actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler shielded a 15-year-old multiple sclerosis diagnosis from all but her closest confidants before granting interviews on the subject in January. And last summer, Caitlyn Jenner not only protected a splashy Vanity Fair cover shoot from ravenous packs of stalkerazzi, she also didn’t let slip her very name.
Earlier, Angelina Jolie kept to a tight circle her double-mastectomy operation until she announced it in an article she wrote for The New York Times. Kerry Washington got married without anyone noticing, and Nora Ephron held news of her cancer from not only the media but also many of her closest friends.
It’s not just pivotal matters of illness, birth and transformation that suggest some stars can, indeed, keep mum in the age of blab. Certain album releases still come as surprises even two years after Beyonce pioneered the insta-release with her self-titled work. To wit: Miley Cyrus kept her collaboration with the Flaming Lips covert until she was ready to abracadabra it into computers after an announcement at the end of the MTV Video Music Awards in August. Then, Queen Bey repeated her feat the day before Super Bowl 50 by flashing us with her new single Formation.
Details of major plot-heavy movies can remain cloaked as well. (See Star Wars: The Force Awakens or 10 Cloverfield Lane.) Likewise, the author who uses the pseudonym Elena Ferrante has sold millions of books without ever revealing her real name, granting an in-person interview or allowing a single photograph to be snapped.
In the same vein, Louis CK emailed his fans a message linking them to a never-announced new web series titled Horace and Pete. And the humour website Funny or Die created a 50-minute fake biopic, starring Johnny Depp as Donald Trump in The Art of the Deal without anyone getting advance notice of Depp’s take on the world’s scariest combover.
Ever-attuned to pop culture trends, film director John Waters has begun writing Mr Know It All, a book that will contain a chapter about stars keeping secrets. In order to do that himself, Waters declined to talk about the subject. “If writers give away all our material in quips to the press, we won’t have any material left!” he wrote in an email.
Liz Rosenberg, a longtime publicist for Madonna and other lightning-rod stars like Cher and Stevie Nicks, said, “Stars can definitely still keep secrets, though it’s harder these days. You just need to be clever, and the people around have to be trustworthy.”
It also helps to pass out confidentiality agreements as if they were candy on Halloween. “Whenever we have a high-profile client, we train them that everybody signs an agreement — the maids, the guy who comes in to water the plants, the people who pick up the trash,” said Dina LaPolt, a lawyer for Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and other stars. “We put in a liquidated damages clause which says, ‘If you breach this, you have pay us a prenegotiated fee of X dollars.’ It’s scary.”
While entertainment lawyers admit these contracts aren’t necessarily enforceable, the threat alone generally makes them effective. As a result, the number of people pressed to sign forms is increasing. George Gilbert, an entertainment lawyer, said non-disclosure agreements have also increased the length of their enforcement periods to protect information not just during the individual’s time in the star’s employ but also “in perpetuity”.
Newly restrictive language has likewise served to temporarily muzzle music critics. Before the release of Taylor Swift’s most recent album, 1989, reviewers were invited to the star’s TriBeCa apartment. But they could hear the music only if they signed a paper that went far beyond the industry’s common demand not to run a review until a certain date. They also had to agree not to describe, through any medium, the subject of any lyric (let alone quote one) or the general sound of any song in advance of release.
“It was an absurd escalation of something set in motion when critics started having to come to specific places to review albums, rather than in their offices, so the music wouldn’t be let out,” said Alan Light, a veteran music critic and author, who signed the Swift paper.
Nondisclosure agreements can even extend to friends. Justin Bieber made his guests at a party he held in November sign a paper (later turned up by TMZ) that stated that if they revealed any information about the affair, they would have to pay US$3 million, or 107 million baht.
Such legal entanglements can actually determine friendships. “A lot of the celebrities make their stylists and personal assistants their closest friends, because they’re not legally able to say anything,” said Kathleen Feeley, co-editor of a scholarly study of celebrity gossip, When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History.
According to Marianne Garvey, a former gossip writer for Page Six of the New York Post and Confidential columnist for the Daily News, it’s crucial to keep your social circle small. The tightness of confidants of Beyonce helped her pull off the ultimate stealth album release. “I know someone high up at Columbia,” Garvey said, referring to the singer’s record label. “Even they didn’t know.”
The privilege of wealth also insulates the stars. “If you have a beautiful house — it has a bar in it, it has a pool, it has security, you have surround sound and a movie theatre — why go out?” Garvey asked. “You only invite in people you trust.”
Sometimes the cauterisation of sensitive information can rest on something far flimsier. “When it comes to matters of illness, I think the star who keeps it private might just have gotten lucky,” said Jess Cagle, the editor-in-chief of People magazine. “It’s with hospital staff that leaks often occur.”
Cagle also said the stars have gained an extra advantage lately because the financially challenged tabloids have less money these days to pay sources.
Meanwhile, the stars get to both circumvent the media and to float an image of utter transparency through their promiscuous use of social media. In fact, that may only obscure them further. “Digital media creates this notion that we can know everything,” Feeley said. “But it’s still a performance. It just creates a false intimacy.”
The audience’s belief in social media as the most direct route to a star exacerbates “the expectation that everyone will tell everything,” said Daniel Herwitz, a professor at the University of Michigan who wrote The Star as Icon. “Against all that, it becomes totally extraordinary when somebody doesn’t tell. On one hand, the public is in awe of the fact that the star, for the moment, resisted the system. But they’re also disappointed, as if somebody let them down. ‘Why didn’t I know this? The media dropped the ball!’ ”
At the same time, that view undermines one of stardom’s most powerful lures — mystery.
“I wish lots of artists would keep more secrets,” Rosenberg said. “Once you get too close, it takes away the thrill. When you find out they had the same lunch you did, who wants that?”