The field of celebrity journalism -- the fact of it, really, existing as a legitimate subset of journalism, like business or sports coverage -- is a sorry embarrassment to good writing and thoughtful analysis most of the time. This is a given, and the reason we ignore Us Weekly and Jules Asner as a rule. But occasionally we do run across some instance of celebrity journalism gone egregiously wrong, and we must comment for posterity's sake. This month, we found two such instances: Plum Sykes's "Gwyneth: The Power of a Fashion Icon," a Gwyneth Paltrow profile in the March 2002 issue of Vogue, and Scott Raab's "What's Not to Like?," a Larry David profile in the March 2002 issue of Esquire. In fact, the profiles could stand as extremes along a continuum of celebrity profiles; they're both painful to read, but for diametrically opposed reasons.

Let's start with Sykes. It's clear in her case exactly how the story will go astray even before it starts -- specifically, in Sykes's blurb in the Contributors section, where she is quoted as saying, "The big test with celebrity interviews, as they say, is Would you want to have her at your slumber party? Well, I would so want Gwyneth to come to my slumber party." Oh, that's the test is it? Is that what James Wolcott is secretly asking himself when he profiles Darren Star for Vanity Fair? And who are "they"? And what is that a "test" of, exactly -- how to ensure that you sufficiently kiss your subject's ass that her publicist will return your calls after the story is published? I mean, okay, fine, obviously the whole reason celebrity journalism exists is to promote the celebrity by making her appear interesting and fun and smart and attractive and to justify all the fantasies her fans might have about her based on the parts she's played or what-have-you, so gushingly positive and flattering celebrity profiles are pretty much par for the course. But at least Sykes might have some sense that placing her subject and herself in the context of a fictional slumber party might seem to compromise her...okay, even I can't finish that sentence, because clearly the notion of "objectivity" has no place in a discussion of celebrity profiles, so never mind.

The profile itself proceeds much as one might expect from Sykes's contributor-page preview -- which is to say, an overly chummy affair in which Sykes practically breaks her neck trying to convince the reader that "Gwyneth" (never the more detached "Paltrow" or "Ms. Paltrow") is, like, Plum Sykes's rilly rilly good friend and totally cool, okay? The story is necessarily superficial, since it focuses less on Paltrow's character or any current project with which she's involved, and more on her status as a "fashion icon." (The rather dubious claim that Paltrow has never employed a professional stylist is hammered home so hard, you'd think that being a self-styled celebrity -- in other words, a woman who selects her own clothing and arranges her own outfits, in other words, a normal person -- were an achievement on par with being a self-taught violinist or a self-made billionaire.) When Paltrow complains that she hates her hair, Sykes comments parenthetically, "It looks drop-dead unhateful if you ask me, but it's marvelous to know that even the flawless Gwyneth has imaginary bad-hair days." It's "marvelous"? Really? That Paltrow is media-savvy enough to fake insecurity about her looks to a reporter from Vogue? Or, if she isn't faking it, why should it make a difference to anyone's lives if Gwyneth Paltrow hates her hair? Is it "marvelous" because women bond over their real or put-on physical imperfections, so that our reading about Paltrow's should make us feel closer to her? Either way, "marvelous"? It's really not.

Sykes fellates Paltrow further by telling us, "Twenty-nine-year-old Gwyneth is as wickedly pretty as she is naughtily nice, with a goody-gumdrops exterior that's a pleasing foil to her sharp intelligence and charming modesty." Now, I am that rare person who is actually predisposed to like Paltrow -- I think she's a talented actor, and I actually buy that she is a fashion icon, whatever that means -- but...that's just gratuitous. Even if every part of Sykes's sentence is true, it's so meaningless in its effusiveness -- "naughtily nice"? "goody-gumdrops exterior"? WHAT? -- that judging its truthfulness or lack thereof is a pointless exercise anyway. Paltrow confesses to Sykes that, after her father famously bought her the Harry Winston diamond necklace she'd borrowed to wear for the Academy Awards in 1999, the year she won Best Actress, she sometimes wore the necklace around the house, with her pyjamas. Sykes somehow spins this admission into a touchstone of Paltrow's fashion philosophy: "Underneath the easy beauty, the unbelievable casualness of an idea like diamonds-and-pajamas, Gwyneth is a fashion perfectionist." Sykes then goes on to tell us in the same paragraph that Paltrow's "easy beauty" is maintained in part by a highly paid hair colorist in London, England, and that when Paltrow is in Paris, she pays this colorist to visit her there and touch up her highlights. Which is fine -- obviously, Paltrow can afford it, and more power to her if that's what she wants to spend her money on -- but for that bit of news to come out in the same mouthful that breathlessly extols her "easy beauty" kind of undermines the assessment.

The reason Sykes's celebrity profile is so annoying, in short, is that she likes her subject too much, so she works too hard trying to make us like her as much, instead of writing about her in a less flattering, more compelling way. I mean, if everything Paltrow does is perfect and laudable and right -- as we're browbeaten into accepting -- she's barely human, and thus barely interesting as a profile subject.

Raab's story fails for the opposite reason: he uses the profile to launch an attack on his subject. Or, rather, he uses the finished profile to launch a passive-agressive attach on his subject by airing all the grievances he couldn't when he and David were actually together, since to have done so then would have prematurely ended their allotted face time.

Raab sets the wussy-ass attack in motion with a related celebrity-profile annoyance: namely, making himself too obtrusive a character in the story. "I've got two days here. Two days to uphold the celebrity-profile convention -- dating back to when stone-eyed Homer accompanied ox-pronged Achilles to a Thracian brothel -- requiring the subject and the writer to do something quirky and pseudo-revealing together." One's first question is obviously why Raab would plan to "do something quirky and pseudo-revealing" with his subject if he thinks it's such clichéd bullshit. The answer, of course, is that he doesn't think it's clichéd bullshit -- he thinks it's cool, or he wouldn't do it -- but he thinks it's even cooler to make a point of making us think he thinks it's clichéd bullshit, and that he is so much better than the conventions of the celebrity profile. It's all just so much postmodern self-referential metatextual navel-gazing and in Raab's ham hands, it's an embarrassing spectacle. So anyway, he's got two days to make David do some kind of lame-ass stunt, but David doesn't want to.

Look, I tell him, Sean Penn does very little press, and he took me out on his boat.

"That's one place you would never get me to go. I can't stand boats. I would never get on a boat. God, do I hate them."

Drew Carey and I went bowling.

"Uh-huh."

Hey, Albert Brooks went with me to the Universal Studios theme park. We went on two rides.

"He did that? I can't believe it."

He did. So, Disneyland?

David declines the Disneyland trip, despite Raab's tiresome namedropping, so Raab later suggests a trip to the Museum of Tolerance.

"You're not serious. The Museum of Tolerance?"

Come on. Five minutes.

"What's in the Museum of Tolerance?"

I'm not sure. It's some kind of Holocaust memorial.

"Oh, God. You want me to go to the museum and mock the Holocaust. You want to end my career."

He's not even half joking now; maybe he's not joking at all.

Well...uh, why should David be joking? He's right! Using the Museum of Tolerance as the setting for a celebrity-profile clichéd bullshit field trip? It's abhorrent! And inappropriate! And lame! Of course Larry David would be disdainful of Raab after that!

Raab, though, gets the last word, in the form of the profile itself, calling David a narcissist, getting in various transparently jealous digs about David's prodigious Seinfeld revenues, and complaining that David isn't open enough to Raab's overtures, bitching that David won't let Raab join him on a trip to the dentist. (Raab wants to accompany David to the dentist? That's just creepy.) As the story winds up, David apologizes for not being more malleable, reminding Raab that David had warned him he wasn't an especially warm interviewee. To us, Raab whines, "Warned me? You invited me to come. I flew out of here during wartime for this. Out of Newark, for pity's sake." David goes on to add that he'd prefer it if Raab didn't write the profile at all. Raab bitches, "But you might not like the part where I leave my wife and son back at ground zero and you won't go anywhere with me. How it was too much of a favor to ask of the big-shot comic genius to go to Disneyland." Using "ground zero" and his family's proximity to it to guilt-trip Larry David into being a more receptive subject? I'm sure Raab's wife and son were just delighted to be used as non-speaking extras in Raab's psychodrama.

Fortunately, David doesn't give a shit and just wants Raab to get out of his face. So do I.