The Celebrity Relationship Industrial Complex
Every celebrity relationship is calculated (even the real ones)
There is always skepticism when PRomances or fauxmances are discussed, usually coming from people who don’t see the point, who don’t care about who celebrities are dating and who can’t imagine the why behind it. But just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others don’t. There is an entire gossip ecosystem feeding into this, after all. I find playing to the crowd with relationships tacky, and it’s a massive turn-off, but I recognize that I’m an anomaly.
Last year, the UK’s Channel 4 released an episode of their UNTOLD docuseries on celebrity relationships. Hosted by former Love Island UK participant, Chloe Burrows, the big teaser for the special was that she “faked a relationship for the press” for the documentary.
But that’s a small part of the doc, which you can watch on YouTube if you’re in the UK. The section where she sets up paparazzi shots and lays out the strategy is familiar to anyone who follows celebrity gossip and has seen the videos accompanying paparazzi shoots where the celebrity is instructed on where to go, or where they retake the photos, or simply banter with the photographer. The “reveal” that multiple photo sets can be taken on the same day to tell a story and be released over a couple of weeks shouldn’t be surprising to anyone paying attention, either. So often these photo shoots are misdated—intentionally.
The more interesting part, to me, was Burrows convening with other reality show alumni to discuss how they navigate publicizing their relationship, as well as meeting with celebrity agent Dave Read, who laid down the law about how beneficial it was for celebrities to use romance as a way to remain in the public eye.
Burrows: How valuable would you say being in a relationship in the public eye is?
Read: I honestly think it’s paramount. Yeah, it is everything, especially in this country, the viewers, the readers, even the journalists. They just want to know everything: they want to know the relationship, then they want to know if you ever break up, and then if you’re walking down the street, and you put some mascara into your eyes and hold your phone crying and look a bit sad.
Perhaps more revealing is his insistence that even if, “you want to stay together, have a pretend break-up and take the money and then get back together,” and that he has clients that followed through on that advice. There’s up to a quarter of a million pounds to be made in a year if his strategy is adhered to, according to him. And it can climb into the millions if you take it all the way to marriage and having children.
The documentary primarily centred around reality couples rather than high profile celebrities, but this infrastructure of agents, publicists, managers, press and brands willing to hire on someone who has eyeballs on them exists for all celebrities. I’d argue the stakes are much, much greater the higher up you get on the totem pole, and the more people you have in your employ managing your image and making a living off of your brand.
We saw this with the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce break up “media plan” —which to me was never proof that it was a fake relationship but rather that it is being managed, regardless of veracity.1
But even she has played the game. Most of her fans, even the ones that believe in her multiple love stories, will tell you they believe Hiddleswift was a publicity stunt. She has crafted the Taylor Swift Universe, as
so aptly explained in a recent piece on Matty Healy’s newfound role in the TSU. The maintenance of such a universe requires a lot of content, it’s a beast that needs to be fed.“To her brand, getting Swifties to compare the new songs with the old is the more strategic move—to have old and new fans alike follow the clues. And to do that, she has to leave obvious nods to past work. Because that’s the allure of the TSU. If you’re in it, you’re in it for the lore, and the lore is in the music. Business-wise, it’s also a surefire way to get her more plays and to ensure her past work continues to be relevant.”
- Matty Healy vs. the Taylor Swift Universe
I would personally point to “Haylor” as another blatantly obvious publicity stunt that has been milked for years and illustrates the way timelines can be rewritten in the press. I’ve had an actual argument with a friend about “I Knew You Were Trouble” — which the lore, and the press, will tell you, was written about Harry Styles.
In the sense that it was always intended to be attached to their two-month public fling, yes, it was about him. But was it written about him in the sense that she was down and out after being ditched for hot tubbing with Richard Branson and took to her pen and her guitar to let out her frustration and decided to show him what’s what? No. Because the song was already written, and she was in the middle of promoting the album it was on when they were paired up.
His fans will say that she used Styles and has made him look terrible for years, but he is the one who very early on in One Direction’s career pointed out that if Adele wrote a song about you, it’d hit number one, as if this were a good thing. He’s not some innocent victim, but a willing participant who knows the value of publicity and remaining in the public eye. It’s how he ascended to the levels that he has, after all. He even sang, “If you’re looking for someone to write your break-up songs about, baby, I’m perfect.”
I recently watched the docuseries on Irish boy band Boyzone, which seemed to have been the 1D blueprint, and has the benefit of being over 30 years old at this point, which means more things can be revealed because the rumour mill has ground to a halt. Louis Walsh, the creator of the band, was heavily featured and was very happy to share the stories he made up and fed the press—plenty of them related to relationships, including those with since-outed Stephen Gately who was branded the womanizer of the group. Reporter Paul Martin called him a “master puppeteer” and said, “You can’t underestimate how he rewrote the rulebook about engagement with the press.”
But it goes beyond feeding romance rumours to the press: the most egregious lie being that he “had them in a plane crash, once,” and forgot to tell their families that it was a fabricated story.
Walsh isn’t the first on the record for having faked accidents: publicist Alan Edwards revealed in his autobiography, I Was There,2 that he faked a car crash at one point, and set up photos to go with the story.
It’s perhaps impossible to fully construct that type of story these days, but if you have willing participants, it’s not difficult to stage public interpersonal events.
We have a more recent confirmed example in the form of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney leaning into the showmance angle to promote their rom-com Anyone But You. At the time, they both seemed to play coy and suggested that the audience was reading into it. But a New York Times piece had them bragging about the methodology behind the publicity. Powell for his part, said, “sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit — and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart.”
He credits Sweeney because she was happy to take credit and lead the charge:
“I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas. […] I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”
I was reminded of the Powell/Sweeney fauxmance recently because Powell’s ex, Gigi Paris just spoke up about the experience of being the third-wheel to their stunt. According to her, she was advised not to visit the set and Powell saw it as a non-negotiable aspect of his job to feed the rumours. To this day, she expressed hope that he and Sweeney would fall in love, because at least it would make the sacrifice of their relationship mean something in the bigger picture.
And who knows, they might end up together, because humans are complicated. It’s what makes discussions of real vs fake difficult to parse and somewhat pointless to engage in. People like to stick to one side as if they are absolutes, but humans are messy. Something could start out fake and staged and become real. Something could start out real but end, resulting in appearances being kept up for the public. The duo Alex and Sierra faked being together for over a year before splitting the band, because they knew it’s what their audience expected and wanted from them.
Again: humans are really fucking complicated, so I’m not saying that all the relationship milestones we see played out in the press are fabricated. But the likelihood of them being managed publicly to some degree and triangulated for best outcomes is very high. And today’s feedback loops that include social media posts and interactions mean there’s a lot more involved in keeping up appearances. If today’s teenagers are mimicking the celebrity “soft launch” and essentially operating as image managers for themselves, why is it strange to imagine that people with million dollar brands on their backs are putting at least an equal amount of effort into public management?
That’s not even accounting for the superfan economy that relies on keeping engaged through these types of stories. The investment that is made into relationships we observe by proxy— the way observing couples interacting with one another is itself a form of entertainment. This is something I’ve covered multiple times, from a few different angles:
I remain agnostic on the veracity of most celebrity couples, and I find it serves me well. The cases where I have opinions—well, I’m not sure my opinion is relevant. And as I said earlier: people are messy. What is real today could be fake tomorrow, what is fake today could be real tomorrow. As agent Dave Read said when summarizing the results of Burrows’ mini-stunt, “People are talking about it, whether they like you, don’t like you, whether they believe it or don’t believe it--with the greatest respect to them, doesn’t matter. They’re talking about you, which is job done.”
And yes, the document leak has been called fake by their representatives, but the existence of such a document shouldn’t be a surprise in the first place. It would be the PR teams doing their due diligence and setting up contingency plans, which is what they’re paid for.
I recommend the whole book, really, as it goes in depth on what his profession entailed in the Blondie and Bowie days.
I was thinking about this today, because I am in the minority - I don't care about celebrity relationships, real or fake, or their kids or anything. I am not invested in celebrities beyond their careers. (This is why I found the fixation on Rachel Zegler from the right super annoying; and even people still upset over famous people during covid. Famous people are annoying! Ignore them!).
So when I saw this post in my Notes, I was hoping you would dive into why people are so interested in celebrity relationships. I have never understood it. But it is interesting to know that many celebrity relationships serve duel purposes.
After reading this, I had to revisit Jerry Saltz's comments on the [in]famous music video for Kanye West's "Bound 2" (https://www.vulture.com/2013/11/jerry-saltz-on-kanye-west-kim-kardashian-bound-2.html):
>When performers like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, and, yes, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic try so hard to showcase and communicate how sincere they are, instead they reveal how out-of-touch they are — from each other, from themselves, from us. These are not just famous performers; they are performers of fame. In their grandiose sincerity, their attempt to keep it real (West says his “passion is for humanity” and that his art is totally about “beauty, truth, awesomeness”), these stars become alien things, automata, odd gods before our eyes. By some bizarre alchemy, they then toggle back into demented sincerity while simultaneously remaining alien, other, apart. They become psychological quantum particles, in two states at once.