By Steve Penhollow

The Journal Gazette

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My favorite photos from the Golden Age of Hollywood are of Cary Grant barfing in an alley behind the Brown Derby, Marlene Dietrich lancing a boil in Corsica, and Betty Grable in a beach bungalow at Cannes rubbing ointment into her toenail fungus.

Most historians cite the aforementioned Cary Grant photo as the reason beef bourguignon fell out of favor.

I am joking, of course.

None of the photos I described actually exist, as far as I know.

And no one has sufficiently explained why exactly beef bourguignon fell out of favor.

The Beef Bourguignon Institute is working on the problem, though.

The so-called Golden Age of Hollywood (which ended in 1960 when Sandra Dee declined to reprise the title role in the sequel “Gidget Goes Hawaiian”) was also apparently an unenlightened age where celebrity photography was concerned.

Celebrity photographers back then were wimps, as far as I can tell.

They seem to have had qualms about trespassing on private property, contributing to traffic accidents, walling in celebrities’ cars with their own autos, waiting hawk-like for stars’ moments of greatest vulnerability, shouting obscenities to elicit certain lucrative facial expressions, using telephoto lenses designed to zero in on cellulite, terrorizing children and utilizing whatever spy equipment was available to them at the time.

They were also, I am guessing, averse to banging on ambulances.

You read about this, right?

According to The Associated Press, paparazzi greeting an ambulance carrying Britney Spears to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in early January banged on the doors of the vehicle.

“They were just doing their job,” some bloggers wrote afterward.

I know it has become fashionable to find something admirable in every occupation or vocation, from being a stripper to being a mortgage rescue scammer. But I think it’s safe to say that if your job involves banging on the doors of an emergency vehicle carrying a sick person to the hospital, you have squandered whatever potential was gifted to you at birth.

If these celebrity photographers are in fact “just doing their job,” how did that become their job?

Defenders of the extreme tactics of the paparazzi claim they take the sort of photos they do because we want the sort of photos they take.

Perhaps that’s true.

I guess most of us go to see an Angelina Jolie movie these days and think, “Now that I have purchased a ticket to ‘A Mighty Heart,’ I am entitled to a photo of Jolie’s son Maddox sitting on a potty chair, and I prefer that the photo be taken by a man flying over the Pitt/Jolie residence in an ultralight aircraft.”

Maybe it’s not as conscious as all that.

We do seem to have an insatiable appetite for photographs of celebrities doing anything and everything, from the mundane to the ridiculous to the criminal and all points in between and among.

Hostility and resentment underlie many photographs of celebs, and that probably isreflective of something in us.

Allow me to play pop psychologist for a moment, which is preferable (trust me) to allowing me to play a French maid.

We worship celebrities; we want to be famous ourselves; we resent the fame of celebrities; and we want photographers to cut celebrities down to size (and, if possible, lower and smaller than that).

Photographers oblige and yet our worship only increases and, by extension, so does our resentment and, by further extension, so does the outrageousness of the photographers’ tactics.

Persistently antagonistic coverage of celebrities destroys the mystique of being a celebrity, it seems to me.

But that belief puts me in the minority, if what I’m seeing in the tubes of the Interwebs is any indication.

I am over 40, after all.

Fame seems to retain its allure for a lot of young folks even after anything resembling glamour (not to mention basic human dignity) has long ago been stripped away.

It makes me nostalgic for the aforementioned Golden Age, but one prominent 40-plus guy doesn’t agree with me: Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

Thompson prefers full disclosure over decorum any day.

“It might not be so bad,” he said in a phone interview. “When you think of the glamour-era of Hollywood – the ’20s through the ’40s – part of the reason they were able to maintain that glamour was that the studios so totally controlled the images of the stars.

“They made up bogus bios, paid off legal authorities when necessary,” Thompson said. “It was completely artificial, and our culture in general has become more intolerant of that sort of thing.”

Thompson said journalistic complicity and a hollow sense of politesse is the reason President Kennedy’s “sexual peccadilloes” weren’t reported at the time.

Thompson does deride “toxic waste product” like the recent mania for photos of celebrities sans panties.

But he says there are benefits to moving beyond the era when “something is not reported because

someone didn’t think it was seemly.”

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