One of my million part time jobs when I was in grad school in NYC was at the old movie magazine Photoplay. It had been around a long time ("photoplay" was the early term for a silent movie). I was a temp there while they were frantically trying to revive it.
So they commissioned me to write a trivia booklet using their files. It was going to be a free premium for people who renewed a subscription but the magazine folded before the booklet got to press.
Nobody ever went near those old paper files: that mag worked by phoned in stories.
It was an eye-opener. Photoplay kept files on everyone--just like Hoover's FBI. They had the real testimony in the Fatty Arbuckle case, the goods on Clara Bow and the USC football team, etc. A long folder on Richard Nixon, The wildest celebrities (openly wild, that is) lived in the 1920s, the silent movie era, from the evidence of those files. The studio system that grew up around the "talkies" in the 1930s sanitized the stars--changed their names and often falsified their sexual preferences--and hired publicists to promote them and sell them as role models. (A few were: Marlene Dietrich was staunchly anti-Hitler from the earliest days of his political career.)
Photoplay was in the gossip business and collected gossip on all political and celebrity figures. Most of it was unpublishable because it was libellous, and probably a majority of the material was malicious and/or untrue.
Nonetheless, public officials and celebrities (I learned from reading through those files) are just people. People make a lot of mistakes, and people have a lot of flaws. Moreover, people in the public eye seldom tell the whole truth and nothing but.
A person in the public eye is just like anyone else--except there are telephoto lenses following them everywhere. They do try to cover up anything shady. They do reinvent themselves.
It's not modern times so much as human nature.
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