Greta Garbo just wanted to be left alone.

For decades, she gave no interviews, pulled no publicity stunts and hid from the relentless pursuit of the paparazzi.

Yet the mystique of the elusive screen legend only intensified the longer she guarded her silence.

As Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “Today’s democracy of technology would, of course, conspire to put a fast and brutal end to the tantalizing demi-invisibility that Garbo sustained so well.”

Indeed, a vast network of 24-hour gossip sites, fan blogs, tabloids and tweets from the stars themselves feeds a ravenous worldwide hunger for celebrity news, rumors and halftruths. As The Times reported, the revenue stream from the gossip industry exceeds $3 billion annually.

The focus is not on do-gooders like Bono and Bill Gates . The real fascination lies in aberrant actors, salacious politicians and drug-fueled celebrity crackups. Last month, rival gossip sites, Radar and TMZ, engaged in an all-out bidding war following the revelation that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with his housekeeper. The sites were in a frenzy to pay top dollar for almost anything related to the scandal.

Some people even fan the flames of their own negative publicity. Michael Lohan, father of the actress Lindsay Lohan, has practically turned commenting on his daughter’s troubles into a full-time job. And as The Times reported, when he was charged last year in Southampton, New York, for with harassing his fiancee, he appeared to exploit his own scandal.

An associate of Mr. Lohan told The Times that Mr. Lohan was determined to spark a bidding war between TMZ and Radar.

“What you want to do is monetize this,” the associate said. “What you want to do is to make them pay for that exclusivity.”

As Mr. Brantley wrote about celebrities, “The theory appears to be that if you never shut up, no one can forget you.”

Which does not make life easy for their press agents, or, as one Hollywood publicist likes to call them, “suppress agents.”

This year, the long-suffering publicists of the singer Chris Brown and the actor Charlie Sheen parted ways with their clients. In Mr. Brown’s case, it was after a widely reported temper tantrum. Mr. Sheen’s drunken rants, unfiltered tweets and surreal behavior ? which got him fired from the hit television show “Two and a Half Men” - would have defied the spin of the most silver-tongued publicist.

“If somebody does not understand the value of a public image that has to be managed or considered, there is nothing you can do,” Terry Press, a Hollywood marketing executive, told The Times.

Meanwhile, some stars are betting that the voyeuristic obsession with their lives will extend to their deaths.

The NBC network bid $1.5 million for a film documenting the actress Farrah Fawcett’s battle with terminal colon cancer. The show was broadcast in 2009. But as The Times recently reported, warring factions battled for creative control of the film once Ms. Fawcett became too weak to approve a final version, and lawsuits raged into this year.

It was a far cry from the evermysterious Garbo, who was secretly cremated in 1990. Although her ashes were not interred in her native Sweden until 1999, and only after a protracted battle to settle on a final resting place drew global attention.

Even in death, the reclusive star wasn’t left alone.


KEVIN DELANEY