You can’t really blame Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart for the unvaryingly annoying magazine and newspaper feature stories (tied in to today’s opening of “New Moon”) that have been burying all of us the past few weeks.
The gist of every story I scanned — from Harper’s Bazaar to The New York Times to Vanity Fair (I didn’t see anything in the current AARP Magazine) — was the exquisite agony suffered by these two young actors in the wake of last fall’s debut of “Twilight.”
One might think that Pattinson and Stewart knew what they were getting into after the who-knows-how-long-and-grueling audition process for the two leads in a series of movies based on some of the most popular novels of our time, but they and their journalistic profilers act as if the teen girl hysteria was a surprise.
Pattinson and Stewart (or their handlers) agreed to a tour of Middle 
American malls last fall designed specifically to whip the fans into a pre-release frenzy (and generate photos that would be printed all over the world).
Signing on to “Twilight” was not like agreeing to be in a new Gus Van Sant film or joining the ensemble of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic. It was a lead pipe cinch move to become love objects to every teen girl (and everyone with the sensibility of a teen girl) in the nation.
This time last year, the stories about Pattinson and Stewart were much more upbeat – stars-are-born charm pieces about these two winning and natural young actors achieving fame in a profession where 90 percent of the practitioners are out of work at any given time.
What a difference 12 months makes! To hear Pattinson and Stewart tell it, fame is, at best, a drag (you can’t frequent that old grocery store anymore) and, at worst, a personal violation (strangers want to know who you’re sleeping with).
As a result of post-“Twilight” traumas, most of the interviews for “New Moon” were conducted in bunker-like, high-floor, hotel rooms — in New York and Vancouver (where the third film in the vampire series is being shot) — because of the dangers the actors (and their chroniclers) might face if they ventured out into a lobby or city street.
“I’m trying not to drown…I guess I’m not cut out to do a franchise…I’m not a crowd person,” Pattinson tells Vanity Fair scribe Evgenia Peretz in the December cover story that comes with more than a dozen glamour shots of the actor lounging in Montauk with the photographer Bruce Weber (several dozen more of the pictures from the shoot are available on the VF.com Website).
It might have been instructive for Pattinson to have visited the Vanity Fair archives and looked up the July, 1992, cover story on Luke Perry before he sat down with Peretz. 
