Bennifer - Celebrity

Celebrity

The media often focuses on celebrity pairings. Celebrity couples who are viewed as fascinating or create a power coupling due to finances are singled out as supercouples. Sofeminine.co.uk defines a celebrity supercouple by the level of media and public obsession combined with profit, saying, "Media and public interest in the super-rich, famous and beautiful, and their equally beautiful offspring, is at an all-time high, and mono-monikers are just one sign that the supercouple is becoming a virtual phenomenon of the society we live in." The site opined that magazines "are prepared to pay millions of dollars just for the first baby pics" of certain celebrity couples and that this combined with the paparazzi's intent to obtain such pictures may be a sign that the pairing has reached A-list supercouple status.

Since the term was coined, classic Hollywood couples have been regarded as supercouples. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford married in 1920, and were the "King and Queen of Hollywood" lasting well into the 1930s. Their home, Pickfair, an estate on 56 acres in Beverly Hills, which hosted famous and powerful guests, including President Franklin D. and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Charles Lindbergh, was considered as "a gathering place only slightly less important than the White House, and much more fun". Fairbanks died in 1939, and was deposed as the "King of Hollywood" title by Clark Gable, who was by that time, along with Carole Lombard, the "it" couple. Gable and Lombard were titled "The King of Hollywood and the Queen of Screwball Comedy", respectively, and eloped during a break in production on Gable's Gone with the Wind in 1939. Lombard died three years later in a plane crash on her way home from a war bond rally. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn appeared in nine films together, and are regarded as a supercouple. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were the stars and producers of I Love Lucy, and have since been credited as an onscreen and offscreen supercouple. They divorced in 1960 after 20 years of marriage. Other classic supercouples have been Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, Gracie Allen and George Burns, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, June Carter and Johnny Cash, and Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.

The supercouple title has been similarly prolific with modern celebrity pairings. In 1997, rapper/actor Will Smith married actress Jada Pinkett. The couple were titled a supercouple due to their combined film star allure and physical attractiveness. In 2003 and 2008, People magazine categorized them as a supercouple due to the pairing's long marriage and widespread celebrity status. Smith spoke of the power of love as a connective force to Essence magazine. "The truth about life is that we're all alone," he said. "But when somebody loves you, that experience is shared. Love is the only real connective tissue that allows you to not live and die by yourself."

Additionally, in 1997, Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche began dating and were described as "the world's first gay supercouple". Their relationship lasted three years. In 1998, Brad Pitt met Friends actress Jennifer Aniston, and married her in a private wedding ceremony in Malibu on July 29, 2000. They were titled a supercouple, regarded as one of the film industry’s most powerful, and their marriage was considered a rare Hollywood success. In January 2005, Pitt and Aniston announced they decided to formally separate after seven years together. Two months later, Aniston filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. In 2000, Michael Douglas married Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones on November 18, 2000, and the pairing has since been considered a supercouple; they were born on September 25, though 25 years apart. Zeta-Jones says that when they met in Deauville, Douglas used the line "I want to father your children".

Former pairing Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez incited unprecedented media attention for an American modern-day supercouple during their 2002-2004 courtship. The two were referred to as the first superstar couple of the Internet age, and the pairing's popularity resulted in their being known by the portmanteau "Bennifer" (for Ben and Jennifer) to the media, as well as to fans using the name combination. The term Bennifer itself became popular, and was eventually entered into urban dictionaries or neologism dictionaries as notable, and the name blend started the trend of other celebrity couples being referred to by the combination of each other's first names. The pairing eventually succumbed to overexposure, however, which caused public interest in their romance to result in less admiration and negatively affected their careers. In 2007, Affleck stated:

was probably bad for my career. What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. I ended up in an unfortunate crosshair position where I was in a relationship and mostly lied and inflated a bunch of salacious stuff for the sake of selling magazines. And I paid a certain price for that. Then, in concert with some movies that didn’t work…

"Bennifer's" decline in popularity did not deter public interest in American celebrity pairings; a prominent celebrity supercouple to emerge after "Bennifer" was "TomKat" (the coupling of celebrity stars Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), and other countries had already adopted the supercouple term. The United Kingdom had Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley (Grant 'n' Hurley) and Posh and Becks (Victoria and David Beckham), who still dominate today. Japan had Jinnai Tomonori and Fujiwara Norika; Jinnai established himself as a television regular and a "pin-geinin" or solo comedian while Fujiwara, a former Miss Japan, became known as a successful actress and "one of the business's biggest earners with a string of commercial contracts, regular TV and stage roles, and also active in charitable causes". They were titled "one of the 'super couples' of Japanese showbiz" and "held their elaborate traditional wedding on February 17, 2007 at the Ikutajinja shrine in Fujiwara's hometown of Kobe, with hundreds of reporters and thousands of fans craning for a glimpse outside" and "invited 600 guests to the Hotel Okura the following April for a wedding reception that cost over ¥500 million. The event was broadcast live on TV and had a high audience rating of 40% in the Kansai region".

Another American couple regularly titled a supercouple are rapper Jay-Z and R&B singer Beyoncé Knowles. Their marriage in New York City in early 2008, was reported by People. Knowles and Jay-Z were listed as the most powerful couple for Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2006. In January 2009, Forbes ranked them as Hollywood's top-earning couple, with a combined total of $162 million. They also made it to the top of the list the following year, with a combined total of $122 million between June 2008 and June 2009.

The spotlight and attention given to American celebrity supercouples seemed to have been at its height in 2006, when the celebrity phenomenon dubbed "Brangelina" triggered media obsession surrounding screen stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The two emerged as a prominent supercouple, and the mania that followed was described as having "reached the point of insanity, far overshadowing the hoopla that attended such couples as 'Bennifer' and 'TomKat'". The obsessive media attention surrounding Pitt and Jolie's union was initially the result of rumors regarding Pitt's involvement with Jolie during the shooting of their 2005 film Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Speculation that Pitt had been romantically involved with Jolie while still married to Jennifer Aniston was daily gossip and thought to be the reason for Pitt and Aniston's divorce. Jolie, however, stated that there was no romance between her and Pitt during filming and that she would never be intimate with a married man.

An official item soon following Pitt's divorce from Aniston, Pitt and Jolie became even more of a media fascination for their social activism and ever-growing family, with the couple adopting from foreign countries. The anticipated birth of Pitt and Jolie's first biological child together, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, was cited as the most influential celebrity baby, as the public pondered what the combined physical features of two people cited as the world's most beautiful would produce in a child. The first baby pictures for Shiloh set a world record. People paid more than $4.1 million for the North American rights, while British magazine Hello! obtained the international rights for roughly $3.5 million; the total rights sale earned up to $10 million worldwide, and was the most expensive celebrity image of all time. All profits were donated to an undisclosed charity by Jolie and Pitt. On July 26, 2006, Madame Tussauds in New York unveiled a wax figure of two-month-old Shiloh; it was the first infant re-created in wax by Madame Tussauds. In 2008, the Shiloh Hello! image was eventually "topped" by images of her siblings, twins Knox Léon Jolie-Pitt (a boy) and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt (a girl). The rights for the first images of Knox and Vivienne were jointly sold to People and Hello! for $14 million, making the images the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken. The money went to the Jolie/Pitt Foundation.

Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television, said the coupling of A-list stars like Pitt and Jolie, or in years gone by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was "a paparazzi's dream come true". He further relayed that "as silly as it sounds, this new tendency to make up single names for two people, like 'Bennifer' (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) and 'TomKat' (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), is an insightful idea'. 'Brangelina' has more cultural equity than their two star parts."

Polly Vernon of British newspaper The Guardian summed up her analysis of what makes a celebrity supercouple in her May 25, 2000 article:

The basic appeal of the accomplished supercouple can be reduced to this: by hooking up with another, carefully selected celeb, you can eliminate your bad points, compensate for your own shortcomings, and hint at a softer, more vulnerable side. Attach yourself to someone smarter, prettier, more fashionable, hipper, funnier than you are, and you will automatically acquire these missing qualities by osmosis. They, equally, will benefit from your particular brand of star quality. Your public perception will become more complete, more exciting. Together, you are quite literally, the ultimate individual.