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When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time standing in line at the checkout of our local Albertson’s grocery store with my mom. Sometimes I’d flit away to go look at the new VHS releases and scare myself by looking at the cover of Friday the 13th, but most of the time I’d stare at check-out magazines: People, of course, but also the pulpy, vibrant spectacle of The Globe, The Star, The Sun, The National Inquirer, and of course Weekly World News, printed using the National Enquirer’s old black & white presses and trying its best to convince me that Elvis was in fact alive.
Back then, People mostly concentrated its attention on celebrities that even tween me knew and understood as stars: Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Michael Jackson. But the tabloids were filled with the drama of celebrities whose source of fame was shadowy or straight up illegible, at least to me: Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins, Richard Burton, Natalie Wood (also back from the dead), Debbie Reynolds…..and Loni Anderson. Always, always Loni Anderson.
Loni Anderson was famous, as far as I could tell, because she had been married to Burt Reynolds, and then she wasn’t married to Burt Reynolds, and they both were very mad about it. What people older than twelve years old knew was that she was on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, and then became very popular, and then thought she should get paid more for being very popular, and then left the show, became even more popular, and eventually married Burt Reynolds (her third husband) in 1988.
They stayed married until 1994, which was around when I started really paying attention to these headlines. I couldn’t understand why she was so important to so many people — she wasn’t even on TV anymore! Burt Reynolds was weird! His sitcom about being an ex-professional football player who comes home to coach a high school football team wasn’t even that funny! (Although I certainly did watch it, like I watched every popular sitcom on primetime in the early ‘90s)
What I didn’t understand then was that the source of Anderson’s stardom had shifted. Before, she was a television actress whose body and demeanor reflected the “bimbo” ideal of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s era. (See also: Suzanne Somers). But over the course of the ‘80s, her on-screen fame was eclipsed by the off-screen melodrama of her personal life. She had become a recurring character in the soap opera of the tabloids: one week, she was the hero; the next, the villain. One week she was a horrible mother; the next week, a saint.
When someone becomes a tabloid star, there’s a sense that their fame has been cheapened in some way — an argument rooted in the notion that “real” art disassociates from the private sphere. But Anderson in her post-divorce era meant just as much, if not far, far more, than at the peak of her time on WKRP. She straddled the line between money-hungry bitch and screwed-over airhead. She refused to cower to her much more famous (and beloved) husband. Her fight for child custody and alimony was either aspirational or an object lesson in how a “bad” woman handles divorce. What people talked about when they talked about Anderson was never Loni, herself, but how you felt about how a woman should behave in and outside of marriage.
And that’s why she stayed in the tabloids: not because her divorce was messy, although it was, and not because she was even that interesting, although her memoir indicates that she was that, too. It’s because a lot of people needed a way to think through what it meant to have a big sloppy divorce in the early ‘90s, because a lot of people — Loni’s age and younger — were going through them too.
That’s one of the foundational truths of celebrity gossip: it’s ostensibly about a star, but it’s always actually about establishing, challenging, and policing norms about what it is to be a person in the world. Talking about Rock Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis was a way of talking about AIDS and homosexuality when most people still didn’t know how to talk about either. Gossiping about Elizabeth Taylor’s weight in the 1980s was just the latest (and most desperate) attempt to police her brazen appetites (for men, for self-determination). And the ongoing drama of Anderson’s tabloid life was a way for women to internalize that asking too much — from a spouse, from your employer, from a divorce settlement — would always make you a villain.
That’s a very long preamble to the breaking news of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s imminent divorce after nineteen years of marriage. Kidman and Urban were the sort of whimsical couple that fans love: two people who find themselves together mostly because they’re famous and were, at some point, in proximity to one another. Some stars (like, say, Matt Damon) like to date non-famous people. Other stars (like, say, Ben Affleck) almost exclusively find themselves with other stars. That was Kidman and Urban: two Australians who would always be recognized when they went out in public. Natural affinity! It didn’t make sense, but it also absolutely did.
Kidman always seemed to be very game supporting her husband’s (very successful) country career: she’d show up to the CMAs and bop her head and somehow never advised Urban to cut his bob. Together, they had two daughters (now teens) and lived seemingly low-key lives in Nashville. For those of us who lived through Kidman’s press tour for Moulin Rouge after enduring a miscarriage and subsequent divorce from Tom Cruise, the marriage felt like a gleeful comeuppance. There was Tom, jumping on Oprah’s couch and getting publicly shit-talked by the head of his studio and grinding with Katie Holmes (ew)…..and here was Nicole, winning an Academy Award and landing a guy who was not a member of a deeply oppressive religious sect. Yes, Cruise had alienated their children from their mother. But who was the real winner here?
Kidman’s marriage to Urban, coupled with the accumulated understanding of her as a real actress, was the happy ending to a sad divorce. Its endurance was a testimony to second loves: getting married to the biggest star in the world won’t bring you happiness, but an Australian country star can! Like Taylor Swift, Nicole Kidman loves to work — but Urban did, too. And because they worked in profoundly different circles, it seemed like their egos didn’t collide. A successful woman in her 50s with a husband who adores her: what a novelty.
In recent years, Kidman had become known for a series of performances as miserable rich white ladies of a certain age grappling with their philandering, inept, and/or violent husbands. Some of the performances were exquisite, but others bordered on camp: there’s a sense, watching her turn in The Perfect Couple, that the only way she knows how to play a woman that resentful of her piece-of-shit husband is as caricature.
Then the news of Kidman and Urban’s pending divorce hit. Allie Jones and Hunter Harris both have good rundowns of how the PR forces are working on this one, but the general gist is that Urban seems to have instigated the separation, “blindsighting” Kidman, and is now…..changing the words in a song he wrote about Kidman to be about his guitarist, Maggie Baugh?? Ew, truly.
One of my friends messaged the group chat on Monday morning after hearing the news: Why am I sad about this? She’s not a huge fan of either. But like me, she was a consumer of celebrity over the last thirty years, acquainted with the peaks and valleys of Kidman’s public life. As it became clear that this wasn’t a “conscious uncoupling”-style divorce, its meaning was enunciated: this is about Nicole Kidman’s divorce, sure, but it’s also about relationships, particularly for motivated, successful, menopausal women. You can do everything right, make so much money, shepherd all your resources to keep yourself looking as young as possible, and your husband will still leave you for his 25-year-old coworker.
To be clear: the relationship is not confirmed. (Baugh reposted the clip of Urban changing the lyrics with the caption: “Did he just say that 👀”). But at this point in the meaning-making process, it doesn’t need to be. Kidman’s PR messaging, paired with Urban’s actions, have made it very easy to understand the story of their divorce in a particular way, and at this point, it’s very difficult to see a way for Urban to substantially shift it. One of these star’s reps clearly understands how to work People Magazine and its gossip watershed. The other does not.
I’m ultimately less interested in who’s the villain in this particular narrative and more invested in how the story underscores so many women’s fears and anger about aging. Put differently, we feel sad about this story because we feel sad about how our society understands, devalues, and invisibilizes women as we age. We feel sad about this story for the same reason we might feel sad about Kidman’s famously immobile forehead, and the forces that would drive one of the most talented actresses of her generation to purposefully break one of her most valuable tools.
You can do so much good, introspective, personal work on valuing yourself, no matter your age or appearance, but you’re still doing that work within a political and cultural reality whose governing logic both explicitly and implicitly devalues women. Not just devalues, but degrades — especially when women fail to conform to societal norms of behavior, which somehow remain: be beautiful, be seen, be silent….then disappear.
I know that’s not Nicole Kidman’s fate. But this part of her story reminds me just how much work she’s had to do, and how much work she’ll continue to do, to make sure it isn’t. Can you imagine how tired she is? If you’re of an age where you read those Loni Anderson headlines in real-time, as I did: of course you can. ●
If you have memories of Loni Anderson in the gossip press — and how your own thinking was shaped on her/her star image — I’d love to hear them. And, of course, all your Nicole thoughts.
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