How Hollywood's stars came down to earth

In the hours after Philip Seymour Hoffman's death earlier this week, it seemed surprising - confusing, even - that so much detail should have emerged about the circumstances. A needle in his arm; the contents of his apartment: surely this was the sort of thing that would normally be blanketed in a respectful silence?

What you expect to be conveyed, as news of such a high-profile death is made public, is that it was sudden, or even that it was the result of a suspected overdose. But what you don't expect is an immediate, detailed account of a man's final tragic hours.

Had he died in a public place? Had he made his death a performance? No. Did he have three young children whose mother is entitled to decide what the family knows of his end? Yes. So how did the forensics come to be seen as being in the public interest? Of course we can blame the press; we could certainly try to blame the police; but perhaps we have, somehow, created the demand ourselves. He was a movie star, after all - and movie stars, we think, belong to us.

These acts of appropriation have a history. As the internet encourages them, our appetites have become grotesquely exaggerated, yet our desire to own people we have only seen on screen is also a direct result of Hollywood's original design.

In The Love of the Last Tycoon, his last and unfinished novel, F Scott Fitzgerald evoked the life of Monroe Stahr, a movie mogul loosely based on Irving Thalberg, MGM's "boy wonder" of the late Twenties and early Thirties. One of the book's most famous lines accompanies Stahr's viewing of a rough cut in his projection room: "Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed - to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded."

To be dreamed in crowds: Hollywood was known as "the dream factory" because its founders - more often than not emigres from the Old World - explicitly set out to prove Freud wrong. Fantasy was no longer the province of the individual unconscious. It was a collective matter, and could be fed.

"Hollywood has always been like this," someone said this week with a shrug, "Look at Marilyn Monroe." It's true that there have always been scandals. It's true that the misinformation surrounding Monroe's death was handled so shabbily, and by so many nefarious parties, that it became another form of assault. But as it happens, the case of Monroe is also instructive, and proof that things were not always this way. Because she was, at the time of her death, the product of the immediate post-studio system.

You might say she was unique: that no one could compete with her as a sex symbol; that the tragedies of her personal life made her especially vulnerable; that had she not been linked to the president the damage limitation would not have been so brutal.

But look at the year she died: 1962. The studios, who had controlled everything, and who had manufactured Marilyn out of Norma Jeane Mortenson, had collapsed at the end of the Fifties. The old orchestrators of official stories had been deposed, and a scene that would once have been carefully re-scripted became a free-for-all.

There were, instantly, lurid reports - even now, 62 years after her death, it remains one of the most raked-over episodes in Hollywood history. The time and cause of death have never been properly proven; her sheets were thought to have been changed before police arrived; autopsy photos were released; several parties claimed to have visited her bedroom and removed evidence.

Her housekeeper, psychiatrist, press agent and lovers were all implicated. And although Monroe wasn't the first star to have been abandoned by the Hollywood system, she was certainly the biggest.

This is how it used to work in Hollywood: when something bad happened, you didn't call the police; you called Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity. MGM studios had its own chief of police, Whitey Hendry, and the Beverly Hills police chief was so corrupt that he claimed to have solved more crimes than were ever reported. There were plenty of people to keep you safe.

When John Gilbert drank himself to death in 1936, it was reported as a heart attack, and no on knew until years later that he'd been found by Marlene Dietrich. When Loretta Young was pregnant and the father turned out to be Clark Gable, the studio got superstitious about their usual secret abortions, and arranged for Young to have the child in secret, later claiming she had "adopted" the daughter, who happened to be her own child. There were wilder stories, of course - grander scandals and greater mysteries - but the point is that the studio silencing system worked, but only for as long as the studios survived.

Who's in the business of protecting stars now? Ironically, on an official level, control is draconian. Hollywood actors can barely move for managers, publicists and agents. But unofficially, it's impossible to stem the tide of gossip. It's all online all the time.

Before her retirement in 2009, I interviewed Pat Kingsley, the Hollywood PR who, as a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter put it, "defined modern publicity". She represented Doris Day, Natalie Wood, Al Pacino. She told me she was often required to be more of a "suppress agent" than a press agent. Fighting fires was part of her job. "I don't like interesting stories," was Kingsley's motto. "Boring is good."

Of course, she was both respected and reviled by magazine editors. ("Why do you get to decide who goes on your cover?" she allegedly said to one of them.) But when she retired, her clients were bereft. Jodie Foster said: "I never had anybody who made me think everything would be OK like her."

What was significant about Kingsley, and the way in which she sculpted her times, is that she was the bridge between the old method and the one we are left with now. Kingsley arrived in Hollywood in 1959, when she was 27 and already familiar with Tinseltown's publicity machine. Working at a newly opened hotel in Miami, she planted an item in the daily newsletter drawn up for guests: "Marlon Brando visits hotel". What did it matter if it was untrue? People were sorry to have missed him; it gave the place kudos; and it wasn't totally improbable. The next day, on hearing two ladies shake their heads in disappointment at not having spotted Brando, a man tapped one of them on the shoulder and said: "Would I do?" It turned out to be Gary Cooper.

Kingsley knew then that people just wanted a story - that the publicists in the old system were not that different from the scriptwriters. But later, as the studio system dissolved and it became difficult to control what emerged, she chose to tell no stories at all. Every gossip item we know now is a bubble popping out from under that practice of suppression.

What can we do to protect our privacy today? A few months ago, Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark, published a book called Dot Complicated, in which she reclassified information in three brackets: public, private and something in the middle marked "personal". This grey middle ground is what has erupted as a result of social media, and she suggests that it requires a new code of etiquette. "Repost unto others as you would have reposted unto you", she says.

The instances she refers to are family photographs that end up being shared beyond your immediate circle - the kind of thing that got David Cameron's sister-in-law into trouble on her wedding day.

But I would say that's now true even for areas of life we've previously taken to be acceptable, such as gossip about movie stars. The internet has changed the way we digest everything; and even if we accept that privacy is obsolete, we can still take back the personal - reclassify it and keep it safe. We can be careful about we share, and more mindful of that information's digital future. We shouldn't assume every stranger is a friend. This is something every parent tells young children, yet adults now operate in a world in which they are professionally required to behave otherwise.

If we are worried enough to think about our own children online, then we should also be thinking of Philip Seymour Hoffman's children, and what our desire for knowledge about their father will do to them. Information about his death belongs to them - wishing to know it and retaining control of it is, if anything, their civil right. The effect of our own enthusiasms - easily curbed - is personal, without a doubt.

We don't have to mourn the days when the world was ruled by the mob and the movie moguls, but we can give "the personal is political" a new meaning for our times.