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‘FOR US, THE REWARD WAS THE EXPERIENCE. AND THEN ALL THIS STUFF IS LIKE THE HAPPY EXTRAS’—ROBERT DOWNEY JR., ON OPPENHEIMER’S BIG AWARDS SEASON FEBRUARY 22, 2024 AN EXTRAORDINARY 50 YEARS! Personal Interviews • Stars at Home • Rare Photos • Princess Diana’s Debut • The Best Celebrity Stories 1974-2024…
To create this anniversary edition of People, featuring excerpts from the first 50 years of the magazine’s celebrity coverage, we logged a lot of time in the archives. I’d like to tell you they exist in a catacombs below Manhattan, housing such items as the pearls Mia Farrow wore on People’s 1974 debut cover and a divining crystal that determines the sexiest man currently alive. In fact, it’s all digital now. But the virtual trove is no less filled with gems. There’s this one from 1975, when People confirmed with Elizabeth Taylor that she and Richard Burton had secretly reunited: “Liz curled like a cat in a mustard-colored velvet chair … ‘My former husband,’ she began. ‘I mean, my future husband. Oh!’ She clapped a hand over her mouth.…
CHARLIE’S ANGELS‘PEOPLE ARE READY FOR GLAMOUR ON TV. WOMEN LIKE WATCHING WOMEN. THE CHEMISTRY BETWEEN US WORKS’—FARRAH FAWCETT, DEC. 6, 1976…
I’m scared to death,” Cher says. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. No, it is. ‘Scared’ is the right word.” Sitting in her shower cap, a shivering 104 lbs., Cher looks as plain as Cherlynn Sarkisian, the name with which she came into the world 28 years ago. But then Cher reaches into a massive armoire whose drawers are labeled “Eyelashes,” “Blushes” and “Powder.” The face once again becomes a flawless moonstone. The tight bell-bottoms are buttoned, and a plumed vest half covers her scrawny poitrine. Off comes the shower cap, and the luxuriant black hair flows to her waist. Suddenly the metamorphosis is complete. There, in the place of a high school dropout called Pinky by her friends, stands the glamorous, insouciant Cher—tall, dark and provocative enough…
Cicely Tyson One afternoon in the mid-1950s, when she was an 18-year-old secretary in New York, Cicely Tyson got up and “announced to a vast roomful of my coworkers: ‘I’m just sure God didn’t put me on the face of this earth to bang on a typewriter the rest of my life.’ I got up and sashayed out. … Then I had to decide what to do instead.” Acting was hardly an obvious alternative for the Emmy winner honored this week for her CBS special The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, since at that point Cicely had never been to a play or a movie. Her religious mother forbade it when she was growing up. Entertainment for Cicely was singing in church “where we seemed to spend all our…
The coif still seems to be by Carvel, the makeup out of Wally Westmore. The clinging costume—well, if she sneezed, the exploding sequins could put a whole arena into the emergency room. The talent? She’s still the idol of better-known names like Linda Ronstadt, and says Emmylou Harris: “She’s one of the great writers—man or woman—and great singers of this generation.” Her old mentor and duet partner Porter Wagoner declares, “She’s as creative as anyone I’ve ever met, including Hank Williams.” But, in every other aspect, the old Dolly Parton act ain’t what it used to be. At 31, she has traumatically just fired her Travelin’ Family Band, which included four siblings, an uncle and a cousin. She’s split with Wagoner and replaced her manager with the hotshot Hollywood firm…
