FROM HUISGENOOT to HEAT by Joey
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Wits Institutional Repository on DSPACE CHANGING UNDERSTANDINGS OF FAME IN SA WEEKLY MAGAZINES OVER THE 20TH CENTURY: FROM HUISGENOOT TO HEAT By Joey Kok A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy by dissertation of the University of the Witwatersrand in Journalism and Media Studies. Johannesburg, October 2018 1 2 3 Dedication To Berno and Sebastian. You are my stars. 4 Acknowledgements I could not have embarked on or completed this project without the support and guidance from my supervisor, Professor Susan van Zyl. A big thank you also to each and every person – family, friends, colleagues current and former, the library and support staff at Wits – who has helped me search, think and question, freed up time, offered advice, extra reading material, pointers, a willing ear, a shoulder to lean (or sometimes cry) on and the odd cup of coffee or glass of wine. You all really pulled me through, and I will forever be grateful for such a community. 5 Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 7 Chapter 1: The Epic Hero in Huisgenoot in the early 20th century ........................................ 21 1.1 Early Huisgenoot’s Epic Heroes ..................................................................................... 23 1.2 Paul Kruger: Afrikaner Epic Hero ................................................................................... 40 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 50 Chapter 2: The Star rises in South Africa: Drum magazine in the 1950s ................................ 56 2.1 Stardom the Drum way ................................................................................................. 60 2.2 Dolly Rathebe: “Just about Africa’s most famous and exciting woman” ..................... 75 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 82 Chapter 3: Emerging Celebrity: Star, Celebrity and the space between: People SA in the late 1980s ....................................................................................................................................... 85 3.1 Emerging Celebrity unpacked ....................................................................................... 95 3.2 Barbra Streisand does Emerging Celebrity .................................................................. 116 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 120 Chapter 4: Celebrity Proper: heat SA in the early 21st century ............................................. 122 4.1 Uncovering the Celebrity Proper ................................................................................. 129 4.2 Producing the Celebrity Proper ................................................................................... 140 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 157 Chapter 5: The Figure Now ................................................................................................... 161 5.1 Dispersal and hybridity in The Figure Now .................................................................. 162 5.2 Drawing the line at ‘real’ illness .................................................................................. 174 5.3 The Hero returns, but not in epic form ....................................................................... 183 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 187 Concluding reflection ............................................................................................................ 189 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 199 6 Introduction The South African version of weekly British ‘celebrity’ magazine heat was launched in May 2004, and I joined the team in December of that year, as the chief copy editor. I was a full- time heat SA staff member for the title for three years, and also worked there in a regular freelance capacity thereafter. I held a number of senior positions, including acting deputy editor and managing editor. In the process I became familiar with the news-selection, or ‘copy-tasting’ process, amongst other things, and ultimately became interested in what appeared to me to be a growing focus on scandal and what were portrayed as physical flaws. The scandals included photographic exposés of entertainers, mostly from the Hollywood film industry, behaving outrageously in their private capacity but often in public too, in many cases because they had apparently been drinking too much or taking ‘illegal substances’. The ‘defects’ the magazine regularly revealed, again through photographic evidence, were most often physical ones, including cellulite and ‘bad skin’, as well as questionable judgment, especially in terms of fashion. Moreover, heat had a very specific and unique editorial voice, an ironic, tongue-in-cheek, irreverent tone that, crucially, appeared to celebrate its own focus on scandal and personal imperfection in representing the entertainer. It was also the only local magazine that had a 100-percent entertainment-personality focus; from its advertising and promotional pages to staple magazine features such as news, fashion, beauty and even horoscopes: every section or element of the magazine had some form of entertainment-personality coverage as its hook. With its idiosyncratic approach, and the distinctive entertainer figure that emerged in the coverage, the magazine did extremely well in its fledgling years, selling more than 100 000 copies in a week on occasion, a significant number for the local market. heat SA’s entry also caused a considerable frisson in the local weekly-magazine market. People SA, arguably heat’s closest competitor, switched its frequency from bi-monthly to weekly to coincide with the launch of heat SA. In addition, following the heat launch, two new local weekly magazines with entertainment content were established: Move!, in 2005, and Mense, an Afrikaans-language edition of People SA, in 2006. 7 Moreover, like its parent brand in the United Kingdom, heat SA also appeared to be a trendsetter among the weekly magazines in terms of its strong focus on scandal and imperfection. Besides the already-mentioned Move!, People and Mense, the other weeklies included the almost century-year-old brand Huisgenoot and its two English-language stable- mates, YOU and Drum. Badly behaved entertainers started appearing more frequently and in more prominent positions within these titles. In keeping with international trends at the time, scandal could be argued to have considerably boosted the sales of South African weeklies in the early years of the 21st century. All these apparent shifts in entertainment news, both on the local and international print-media landscape, were interesting, and could be read as providing an indication of the way in which magazines approached or represented fame was changing. Yet, despite a general shift in the weekly magazine industry in the first decade of the 21st century towards greater inclusion of notions of scandal and physical imperfection in its coverage of entertainment personalities, clear distinctions could still be drawn between the nature of the content produced by the main competing titles or brands on the local landscape. As heat SA staff members, we critically examined and analysed our local competition on a weekly basis in an attempt to accurately predict how these titles would be covering the week’s entertainment-personality news, in order to distinguish ourselves by means of unique coverage, thereby piquing reader interest and, hopefully, sales. As we compared titles, we started noticing how they set themselves apart by following distinctive formulas. Huisgenoot (the title can loosely be translated as ‘home companion’), the oldest and also biggest of the brands in terms of circulation, for instance, always seemed to honour its family-magazine heritage by treating scandalous content with restraint. Its English-medium stable-mates, YOU and Drum, aimed at middle-class white and black readerships respectively, followed suit. People SA and its Afrikaans edition, Mense, appeared to mimic heat in some ways by distinguishing themselves from the exclusively positive entertainment-personality news formula of the eponymous American brand by including elements of scandal and also increasingly exposing physical ‘imperfection’ in the supposedly beautiful. Aimed at an aspiring middle-class black readership, Move!’s entertainment news section also had a preference for scandal stories. As we analysed the various magazines’ distinct editorial offerings and witnessed what appeared to be readers’ growing appetite for entertainment-personality scandal, I became curious as to how it had all emerged and changed to culminate in heat’s specific 8 representation of fame. And so the idea for this PhD topic was ignited, a project focused on tracing back what, in weekly magazines, came before the type of figure that emerged in heat SA’s