You Don't Say.

It was with this show, which Murrow hosted from 1953 until 1959, that cameras first went into the stars' homes, where Murrow would interview them from his own "home," his studio. "It was a really astounding innovation," says Bernard Timberg, associate professor of communications at East Carolina University and author of the book "Television Talk.""No one had taken a camera into people's homes. It got to be a shtick where Murrow would say, 'Is that a picture you have on the wall?' And [the star] would get up and say, 'Oh yes, that's a very lovely Degas we just picked up.' He was the precursor to Barbara Walters and all the celebrity interviewers who came after her. He basically invented the form."

Murrow famously hated doing celebrity interviews (thus ushering in another tradition of the serious journalist grumbling over having to do fluff). But with the 15-minute chat format of "Person to Person," Murrow dovetailed perfectly with the needs of an entertainment culture that in the 1950s was undergoing a seismic shift, as political and economic forces converged to weaken the once all-powerful studios and strengthen the hands of individual celebrities. As the studio system gave way to the star system, it became incumbent on the stars and their publicists to generate interest in their ongoing stories, rather than individual projects. "The personal is the political," goes the feminist saying; in Hollywood's version, the personal is the promotable.

"World War II was the watershed," says Leo Braudy, author of "The Frenzy of Renown." "After the war, when stars start getting more powerful, there's an effort to personalize them. It's not like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's saying, 'All the Stars in Heaven.' It's about individual stars and experiments in ways of creating a greater intimacy between the public and the star."

From an actress showing Murrow her Degas, it doesn't take long to get to Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch. But one must stop along the way to thank Johnny Carson for institutionalizing The Couch, the chief signifier of yet another pivotal point in the Celebrity Interview's morphology: the late night talk show. Others came before him -- Jack Paar, Steve Allen and Arlene Francis to name just a few. But it was Carson -- and later such innovators as David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the recently departed Tom Snyder-- who perfected the art of what Timberg calls "structured spontaneity" that was the aim of every interview.

A team of talent coordinators interviews celebrity guests before the show, with anecdotes and leading questions written out on green cards -- they're always green cards -- for the host. From the set's design to the height of the host's chair, the show is a meticulously controlled environment within which, with luck, just the right amount of daffy anarchy will slip through. The monkey will smack Johnny. Drew Barrymore will flash Dave. Danny DeVito will show up drunk on "The View." Too much structure, and it's all canned candor and "I'll be in Las Vegas all weekend!" Too much spontaneity, and Bobcat Goldthwait sets The Couch on fire.

Does anyone buy this stuff? Can anyone believe that what they're getting is the truth? "I wouldn't put it in terms of truth," Timberg says. "I'd put it in terms of a spectrum of most private to most public. We'll never see them at home like we are, at the depths of despair, fighting with our significant others. But we're going to see some moments, some revelations. That private-public tension is one of the interesting things about talk shows."

Structured Profiles

If structured spontaneity is the coin of the realm of TV, then ersatz rapport is the folding money of print. "I write for a lot of women's magazines, and I'm always encouraged to make my subjects 'relate-able,' " says Jancee Dunn, whose memoir "But Enough About Me" chronicles her career writing celebrity profiles for such publications as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and GQ. "It's a word I hear over and over. That and 'likable.' And apparently that's due to reader demand. It's all very structured. They want to relate, they want to think of the celebrity as their best friend, or at least someone they could be friends with."

In 1996 former Washington Post reporter Martha Sherrill, on assignment for Esquire, wrote a profile of a fictional actress named Allegra Coleman, after vowing that her most recent celebrity profile for the magazine, of Steve Martin, would be her last. (For his part, Martin has called doing movie publicity "the worst day of your life." In 2001 he wrote of celebrity in the New York Times, "A slip of the tongue in an interview and it's easy for me to feel I've sold out some private part of my life in exchange for publicity.")

Sherrill's interview with the 22-year-old starlet comprised several thousand words of note-perfect overwriting, hyperbole, pathetic license and over-identification. She sent it to her editor as a goof, and he printed it as November's cover story. Then the magazine started getting calls from agents looking for Allegra.

"I just couldn't buy into it anymore," Sherrill says, explaining her creation (who was played on the cover by actress Ali Larter, herself celebrity interview fodder since starring on "Heroes"). "After Sinatra, it became okay for talented feature writers, people who are reasonably educated and erudite, to waste their time following the likes of movie stars and other celebrities around and writing these furrowed-brow thoughtful think pieces about what it means to be X."

By "Sinatra," Sherrill is referring to the ur-text of Celebrity Journalism, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," which Gay Talese wrote for Esquire in 1966, and which changed the course of celebrity profiles forever. The story -- a masterpiece of empirical observation, psychological projection, shoe leather and diamantine prose -- is the one writers have been trying to imitate ever since, opening with cinematic "scenes," establishing the writer's personal proximity to the subject, then with novelistic sweep somehow miniaturizing him to human size while making profound, grandiose pronouncements on his cultural, social, political and historical importance.

But what Talese originated -- as a piece of literary nonfiction, it bears noting, not celebrity journalism -- has over 40 years turned into a kind of mannered, overwrought style that few have tried harder to shake up than the editors of Esquire itself.