Actress Carole Lombard from the cover of a 1938 issue of Picture Play
The Constance McCormick Collection of Hollywood fan magazines was recently featured in the USC Chronicle's From the USC Libraries series. Cinematic arts librarians selected materials from McCormick's unique collection for Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators and Gossip Mongers, on display in the Wolper Center through July.
Here's Dan Knapp's article from the USC Chronicle:
Stellar Scrapbooks
By Dan Knapp
For nearly a century, fan and gossip magazines have splashed the personal details of the Hollywood elite on their glossy covers.
Long before the Internet or the barrage of entertainment news television programs, publications like Screen Book, Movie Classic, and Screenland detailed celebrities’ professional and private triumphs or tragedies to a mass audience of ardent movie fans.
Constance McCormick-Van Wyck has been reading fan magazines and meticulously clipping and curating the articles for more than 75 years.
Van Wyck—the daughter of character actor Lucien Littlefield and entertainment journalist Constance Palmer Littlefield—began her hobby on an eastbound train in 1934 with a dollar’s worth of the most popular fan magazines of the day.
Through the years, Van Wyck has collected articles on most of Hollywood’s biggest stars and compiled the magazine articles and newspaper clippings into indexed scrapbooks. Donated to USC’s Cinematic Arts Library in 1966, the scrapbooks—known as the Constance McCormick Collection—have provided useful information to students and scholars of cinema history.
Authors such as Mark A. Vieira (Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy, 2005) and Anthony Slide (Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers, 2010) routinely utilize the collection as they prepare their books.
Although Van Wyck’s collection is extraordinary in its scope, fans around the globe have engaged in creating similar scrapbooks dedicated to their favorite actor or actress. Many have even presented celebrities with scrapbooks as a token of their appreciation for their work. The Cinematic Arts Library has many of these fan tributes in their possession, including ones presented by fans to Frank Sinatra and screen siren Norma Shearer.
USC also has numerous scrapbooks created by clipping services—commissioned by motion picture studios or by actors such as Irene Dunn, Cesar Romero, George Burns and Gracie Allen—to document the effectiveness of publicity efforts.
Several of these celebrity scrapbooks are part of the exhibition, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers located in USC’s David L. Wolper Center though the end of July.
For more information on the McCormick Collection, any of the other celebrity scrapbooks in the Cinematic Arts Library, or the fan magazine exhibition, please contact Steve Hanson at 213-740-7273 or shanson@usc.edu.