From press junkets to gossip blogs to the Forbes list, celebrity culture seeps into every corner of the modern film business. Star worship, like almost everything else in Hollywood, was born as a studio boss’s cynical wheeze. It all began in 1910 when the name of the Biograph Girl was released to the public. The Independent Moving Pictures studio boss, Carl Laemmle, went so far as to spread a rumour that the Girl had been killed in a traffic accident, before taking out adverts in newspapers calling the story a lie and announcing that she was, in fact, alive and about to play the lead in a film made by his company, which had lured her away from its rival, Biograph. And by the way, her name was Florence Lawrence.

A few years later, the job of rumours and newspaper adverts was taken up by fan magazines, which fed details of the movie business and of stars’ private lives to eager readers once a month. The first film magazines, such as Moving Picture World, established in 1907, were written for exhibitors – reviewing new releases with an eye on which would sell the most tickets and advising on cinema management. Fan magazines came later, and they were aimed at the ticket-buying public, acknowledging they had a relationship with the actors on screen that lasted longer than an afternoon at the nickelodeon.

In 1911, J Stuart Blackton, the head of Vitagraph Studios, established the first fan title, The Motion Picture Story Magazine, which combined short-story adaptations of popular films with advice on how to break into the film business and profiles of stars. With its name shortened to Motion Picture Magazine in 1914, it proved to be a hit, and was published monthly until 1977.

The king of all the fan magazines, though, was Photoplay, founded in the same year as Motion Picture. While Motion Picture initially had the edge over its rival, and the greater circulation in the early days, Photoplay reigned supreme in the 1920s and 1930s, with a canny mix of studio tie-ins and an “independent” editorial voice. While co-operation from the industry allowed Photoplay access to stars and sets, campaigning editorials claimed to speak for the fans. Like Motion Picture, it soon shifted its focus to the stars and their private lives. As the majority of film-goers were women, Photoplay addressed them directly with fashion and beauty hints, plus relationship advice. Beginning in 1920, the Photoplay Medal of Honor (a “solid gold” Tiffany medallion) was handed out every year to a film voted for by readers – one of the first major movie awards.

The “gossip” in Photoplay was discreet and mostly innocent: indeed, the magazine often did its best to dial down scandal. When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1920, a double-page spread in Photoplay presented the couple’s story as “filmdom’s greatest real-life romance”. It was the perfect sop to any delicate readers who were upset by the thought of divorce and the whiff of infidelity. Photoplay made it OK to carry on liking Mary and Doug, and buying tickets to their films.

Photoplay positioned itself as an insider in the movie business, with privileged access to the stars, but still a fan at heart. It was expert at having its celebrity cake and eating it, too. Theda Bara offered the perfect test case. Photoplay readily admitted the truth the fans already knew, that she was really plain old Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati, but they capitalised on the mystique just as much as her films did. In a 1918 issue, an interview cheekily titled “Does Theda Bara believe her own press agent?” allowed the actor to sidestep the crucial question of whether she was really wicked, or just photographed that way. In later years, Sidney Skolsky’s “From a stool at Schwab’s” gossip column was the birthplace of many a studio-planted Hollywood myth, and helped to make the drugstore it referenced a tourist destination.

The cover of each issue of Photoplay featured a painted portrait of a film star, and before the reader reached the articles, the first few pages were devoted to expensive studio photographs – the essence of Hollywood big-screen glamour, downsized into pinups for fans. Inside, photo spreads appeared to show the stars in private: relaxing with their famous friends or in snapshots of domestic bliss – think Joan Crawford hosting a dinner party.

On the pages of Photoplay, stars could appear to speak directly to their fans, either in “authored” pieces or in profiles and biographies. In the February 1922 edition, Gloria Swanson offered “The Confessions of a Modern Woman”, for example, and in April 1924, vamp star Nita Naldi shared “What Men Have Told Me About Other Women – A Story That Every Wife Should Read”. Photoplay’s secret weapon was Adela Rogers St Johns, whose “sob sister” interviews with movie stars appeared to be so emotionally revealing as to create an entirely illusory sense of intimacy between reader and celebrity – although the “confessions” were mostly sanitised and scandal-free. Sexy sirens disclosed that all they wanted was a husband and family, screen lovers that they were just looking for the right girl.

One exception was the extended interview that Clara Bow gave to St Johns in 1928, which the “mother confessor of Hollywood” decided to run as a first-person narrative. The idea of Bow telling her painful life story in her own words was meant to evoke sympathy for the Brooklyn-born flapper. But instead, readers and Hollywood colleagues alike were horrified by the revelations in the piece entitled “My Life” . What really offended her peers was that while so many of them were trying to hide their pasts, Bow was prepared to put hers on display – and they didn’t like this trend for honesty.

Another of St Johns’ interviews had became controversial, when in a 1921 article titled “Love Confessions of a Fat Man”, Roscoe Arbuckle joked: “It is very hard to murder or be murdered by a fat man.” While that issue of Photoplay was on the newsstands, the actor Virginia Rappe died in a San Francisco hotel room where Arbuckle was hosting a party, and the quip took on a sinister tone. Arbuckle was charged with rape and manslaughter and endured three trials and the attendant publicity. Although he was eventually acquitted, the scandal reverberated through the industry, blackening Arbuckle’s name. The comedian was ostracised by Hollywood and banned from working in the business.

Photoplay had another intervention to make, though, and this time deliberately. A 1925 editorial in Photoplay argued that Arbuckle should be let back into the fold (“My plea is for fair play”) and encouraged readers to write to Will Hays at the Production Office if they agreed. They did, in their thousands. It was smart move from Photoplay’s editor James R Quirk: minimising the disgrace attached to Arbuckle, and by association, Hollywood, while giving the appearance of standing in opposition to the studio machine, and shoulder-to-shoulder with the fans.

Quirk was one of the founders of the magazine. He was the editor of Popular Mechanics when Photoplay was first launched, but took over the editorship in time for the January 1916 issue. He was a well-connected, well-liked man, known to some as “the father of the fans”, with close friends in Hollywood and the world of publishing. His tactful, not to say corporate, editorship of Photoplay ensured that popularity, but his relationships with celebrities were often just as intimate as the magazine made out: he was a pallbearer at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral, for example. He died in 1932, aged just 47, when Photoplay was at the height of its powers. The magazine’s influence dissipated with the decline of the studio system in the 1950s, but Photoplay struggled on until 1980.

Today, although many of the names featured in Photoplay have become obscure, we can recognise the origins of our 24-hour celebrity culture in its pages. And for devotees of early Hollywood, much of the Photoplay archive, as well as that of its rivals, has been scanned and uploaded to a website called the Media History Project. Turning the pages click by click is a fascinating way to tour Hollywood in the silent era. And it’s more than an excuse to wallow in old-fashioned glamour. Even the myths that the studios and stars want to tell about themselves reveal hidden truths, about what women in another time wished for, and the dreams Hollywood sold them with each ticket.