Glamour's editor caught by the celebrity trap

When Bonnie Fuller decided to feature Catherine Zeta Jones without the actress's say-so, she broke all the rules and lost her job. David Usborne on a victim of control-freakery

Memo to aspiring magazine editors: don't even bother putting Hollywood celebrities on your cover if they haven't granted you explicit permission, approved the photograph you mean to use and ­ this bit may not be necessary, but would certainly be wise ­ similarly given their blessing to every syllable of the text.

This will disappoint you. Everyone knows that plastering the perfect features of a truly famous actor or actress on the front of your publication, preferably with blurb about orgasms, is the only sure-fire way to boost newsstand sales nowadays. But there are only so many of these creatures to go around. Worse, encouraged by their agents, they think they can control where their image appears and when.

None of this should really matter, of course. Famous people are public property, right? Delve into any picture library and you are certain to find a respectable portrait of the celebrity you have in mind. Then just find a decent reporter to spin the yarn you are looking for. They will have the cuts to mine. And if the star is not co-operating, talk to people who know something about them.

They used to call that journalism. Now, however, it is something akin to journalistic heresy. If you want to keep your job, don't mess around with the system. And the system says this ­ celebrities get profiled when they want to get profiled. Or when their agents and their studios want them to get profiled. It is a cosy sort of arrangement ­ unless you are an editor with a cover to fill and sagging sales.

That was the position of Bonnie Fuller, apparently, when she opted to put Catherine Zeta Jones on the cover of Glamour magazine. Ms Fuller, a Canadian native, was recruited to edit Glamour by its owners, Condé Nast, on the back of her performance at Cosmopolitan, which she had taken over from the retiring Helen Gurley Brown in 1997. She pushed Cosmo's sales up by 20 per cent. At Glamour, however, she has presided over a slow decline. Sales in the last six months of last year drooped by 11 per cent.

So a Zeta Jones cover for the June edition seemed just the ticket. Ms Fuller, however, had fallen into the trap of thinking like a journalist. She had no picture and settled on an old one. It was, sadly, a full two years old, which may have been stretching her luck a bit, particularly as the headline read "New Body, New Movie", referring to Zeta Jones's recent transition into motherhood. More like "Old Body", but never mind.

Then the editor ­ what foolishness ­ had a journalist do what they call a "write-around" on the Welsh-born actress and wife of Michael Douglas. "Write-arounds" mean that the reporter does whatever she or he can without the benefit of the subject's co-operation. How many of us in the business have not written around not just people, but even events? In these resource-strapped times, we simply have to from time to time. Can't actually be at the event you are covering? Do a write-around. In this context, however, writing around the radiant Zeta Jones was a serious sin. And Ms Fuller, who is 44, got the sack.

Well, that may not be all the story, of course. No doubt Ms Fuller's employers ­ the Condé Nasties ­ were becoming disenchanted with the failing fortunes of Glamour anyway. And, by pulling her Zeta Jones trick, Ms Fuller had also made a terrible political blunder by crossing Anna Wintour, the infamously spiky editor of another Condé Nast publication, Vogue. Because Vogue had set up its own ­ authorised ­ cover of Zeta Jones for its July issue. Vogue had followed all the rules, however wretched they may be, and its sister, Glamour, had wrecked everything with its cowboy profile of Zeta Jones.

While Ms Fuller looks for alternative employment ­ it surely won't take her long ­ at least some debate may be spurred about the nonsense that the magazine industry, and increasingly newspaper editors too, have allowed themselves to get sucked into with the celebrity deals and handshakes. How to break that chain, however, is the question few can answer. The magazines cannot hide their desperate dependence on the stars. The stars have the power; they know it and will continue to exploit it, setting ever more absurd conditions before anything can be printed about them.

If you find yourself applauding Ms Fuller and Glamour for trying to short-circuit the rules, you may appreciate the work of Tom Junod, a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine. So frustrated by all the rules and requirements of the game, he recently wrote a profile of Michael Stipe of the rock band REM, and set about making half of it up. References to Stipe drinking granulated sugar from a dispenser in a Los Angeles eatery and going on a road trip to the Hoover Dam were totally fictitious. He told readers at the start that some of the passages sprung from his imagination. The piece was meant as a protest.

"It's really hard," Junod told Daily Variety as he pondered the impossibility of writing anything original or terribly honest about any of the big stars. "There is always an element of ritual to celebrity journalism. To break out of the box is quite a challenge."