And so does she; since Fuller took over five months ago, a celebrity can’t push a stroller on a sidewalk or parallel park without being immortalized in a fuzzy photo on the pages of Us. Poring over a table of several hundred paparazzi photographs, Fuller is in her element, scoffing at P. Diddy for wearing a suit on the beach, admiring Ben Affleck test-driving a Bentley. Fuller’s obsessive attention to the lifestyles of the extremely famous–from their hookups and heartbreaks right down to their hair plugs and panty lines–has breathed new life into the money-losing weekly. With one-paragraph-long articles and pages of curvy eye candy, Fuller has completed the evolution of the celebrity magazine, from the comparatively high-minded People, to the frothy InStyle, to something whose closest relative isn’t a publication at all, but the gossipy razzle-dazzle of “Entertainment Tonight.”
But Fuller’s real gift is for exploiting the desire of ordinary mortals to see movie idols at their most human–in sweat pants, for instance, tugging at a thong strap. “Readers want to lionize celebrities,” explains Fuller. “But they also want them humanized. We want to know they’re just like us, except richer and better-looking.” The quintessential Us photograph is of a movie star feeding a parking meter, talking on a mobile phone or schlepping groceries from the supermarket to the car. Fuller has doubled the magazine’s celebrated coverage of stars’ bad hair, makeup and fashion. One recent feature investigated whether movie stars’ heads are unusually big–not swollen by praise, just big.
The tawdry layouts and cheesy headlines make Us a guilty indulgence for many otherwise sophisticated women. The magazine has struggled almost since its founding in 1977, and has lost $30 million since co-owner Jann Wenner took it weekly two years ago. But Wenner’s spokesman claims a 40 percent increase in single-copy sales under Fuller, bumping up newsstand and subscription sales to just over a million (compared with People’s 3.7 million). Canadian-born Fuller, 45, has long had a golden touch at the newsstand. She held the top job at teen magazine YM and Marie Claire, and is credited with updating Cosmo after founding editor Helen Gurley Brown retired. Her secret was to put in even more sex, a formula that she also used to reinvigorate Glamour, which she edited from 1998 until last year. Actually, she overinvigorated it, to the point where advertisers balked. Fuller’s popularity with her staff is less certain. On closing days Fuller, who has four children, ranging in age from 1 1/2 to 15, stays at her desk until dawn and expects her staff to do the same. “I don’t think that’s unusual for a news organization,” sniffs Fuller–even one whose definition of news is a Hollywood starlet’s new hairdo. “We have breaking stories that can’t wait.”
So far, the reaction from the advertising community has been mixed. Us claims a 9 percent increase in ad pages, but some major advertisers fret that Us is simply “too tabloidy,” and one mainstay has withdrawn. At least some celebrity gatekeepers are enraged by Fuller’s relentless quest for candid shots of stars. Stephen Huvane, who represents Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow, says Fuller pays photographers to conduct intrusive, high-tech surveillance. “It disgusts my clients to see those photographs printed in Us magazine every week,” says Huvane. Fuller protests that they use only “friendly” shots taken in public places. Some stars don’t seem bothered; in a major coup, Angelina Jolie poured out her heart to Us before she and Billy Bob Thornton called it quits. And some are just worn down by Fuller’s relentlessness. Two weeks ago J. Lo and Ben Affleck allowed Us to snap a cover shot of them stealing a kiss. Says J. Lo handler Alan Nierob, “I said no to Bonnie Fuller 11 times, and the 12th time I said, ‘Yes. But only if you’ll stop calling!’ " Note to Nierob: check your voice mail.
