Vicarious passions: the private life of Hollywood stars in 1950s Portuguese magazines

Abstract

ABSTRACT Life in Hollywood in the 1950s seemed completely at odds with the moral foundations of authoritarian Portugal. By looking at the coverage of the lives of Hollywood stars in Portuguese magazines, however, it is possible to imagine how a conservative society could be exposed to changing values. Readers became acquainted with the period’s most famous cases of divorce. Divorce was at first seen as unacceptable, but the continuous news on the lives of famous people produced a strange impact on the Portuguese public sphere: the end of marriage became familiar and even acceptable in some circumstances. The article disentangles this paradox, by treating magazines as a mediated social actor. The foreign origin of the news may have led readers to assume that divorce was a distant phenomenon. Simultaneously, the social circulation of magazines permeated the everyday with subversive ideas. Magazines thus constitute a decisive source for exploring how North American cultural forms work through the fabric of foreign societies. Imagining the impact of Hollywood in Portugal through the mediation of magazines allows us to identify forms of social change evolving in an apparently uneventful decade, and to grasp the contribution of feelings and attitudes in historical transformation.