IN TODAY'S celebrity-obsessed world, nothing is off-limits and everything, it seems, has a price. Top of the list these days are celebrity baby pictures. They have inspired spiralling bidding wars that end in millions of dollars being paid out.
Latest of which are the photos of the Brangelina twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, who were born in France on July 12. Proud parents Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt set a record by selling pictures of their newborn twins for a reported US$14 million (S$19 million).
American magazine People and London-based tabloid Hello! bagged rights to use the pictures, and are said to have split the bill. Hello! has rights to use the pictures internationally. Others who have reaped millions of dollars are Jennifer Lopez for twins Max and Emme, Christina Aguilera for baby Max, and Nicole Richie for Harlow (see box below).
Pitt and Jolie have savvily turned such sales to their advantage. For their first-born Shiloh in 2006, the couple offered the pictures through the distributor Getty Images, rather than allowing paparazzi to profit from them.
Those pictures went to People and Hello!, which paid US$4.1 million and US$3 million respectively.
Money went to the couple's charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. The deal with the new twins is similar. It's a win-win situation - the press benefits from magazine sales, and the couple is seen as being philanthropic.
But there are exceptions.
Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, for instance, have rebuffed several multi-million-dollar offers to publish pictures of their daughter, Sunday Rose, who was born last month in Tennesee.
But Urban and Kidman are having trouble keeping pesky photographers at bay.
On a Sydney morning show on radio station 2DAY FM, they implored the media and the public to respect their space as they took the baby around Sydney.
"Just (don't photograph) right in her face or in our faces because it's scary for her," said Kidman.
Some celebrities also deal with media attention by graciously letting photographers take pictures of their babies in a controlled setting. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, for example, allowed world-class photographer Annie Lebowitz to photograph them and baby Suri, born in 2006, for a lush spread in Vanity Fair.
In 2002, the press was also hungry for shots of Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Matthew Broderick's first son, James Wilke. Instead, Parker walked out of the hospital and posed for the masses, turning what would have brought in US$1 million as an exclusive into a discounted also-ran, said Forbes.com.
