THE BABY BRIGADE

(From top) Gwyneth Paltrow, Courteney Cox and Kate Hudson

Los Angeles, July 11: It’s a typical movie plot: Smart-mouthed swinging single comes in contact with winsome child and goes suddenly soulful and soft. Only this time, it’s the Hollywood media who are mooning amid the baby bottles.

With the recent deliveries of a string of A-list stars, celebrity scribes — historically the gleeful chroniclers of Tinseltown’s love triangles, court appearances and rehab relapses — have ditched the wasp-tongued, dirt-digging persona for one of doting godparent.

“Oh, Baby!” “Getting Ready for Baby!” and, of course, “Twins for Julia!” have been the headlines at grocery checkouts and newsstands as, in the span of a few months, Gwyneth Paltrow, Courteney Cox, Helen Hunt, Kate Hudson, Debra Messing and Heidi Klum all gave birth, Julia Roberts announced she was pregnant with twins and Jennifer Lopez got married very quickly, privately leading to much speculation. (“Is She Pregnant?” ran a less-than-subtle headline in People.)

And no sooner had Britney Spears said she’d become engaged to dancer Kevin Federline than an online betting service set odds on her first-born’s gender (10-to-11 on either) and whether she’d have twins or triplets (20-to-1).

Even George Clooney’s recent star-studded Lake Como party — a Rat-Packish respite amid all the baby talk — wasn’t completely safe, including as it did Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who are the subjects of the most intense baby watch since Japanese Crown Princess Masako produced an heir.

The telephoto lenses of paparazzi, which once scanned for illicit embraces or bad behaviour, are now glued to Aniston’s abdomen in hopes of getting the first glimpse of a hoped-for “bump” or parked in front of Paltrow’s home for the latest “money shot” for fan magazines — the celebrity newborn. Hard-core fans who previously gobbled up news of public debauchery and spats on the set are now cooing over Cox’s baby, Coco, and applauding Hudson’s once-again trim figure like a bunch of besotted aunts and uncles.

UNDER BABY WATCH

(From top) Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez and Julia Roberts

The shift is an indication of changing attitudes toward celebrity and motherhood — and good business sense. Following the trail blazed belly-first by Demi Moore and Sarah Jessica Parker, today’s new celebrity moms are taking their pregnancies public mere weeks after conception and showcasing their growing “bumps” — the preferred description in celebrity magazines.

Thanks to Parker (with a nod to Reese Witherspoon), they have realised that far from dimming the glamour, an actor’s tips on surviving morning sickness and sleepless nights only endear her to fans by providing common ground and a sort of surrogate kinship. “There’s only two sets of pictures that the public wants to see,” says Gary Morgan, co-owner of Splash News and Picture Agency, which supplies celebrity photos to magazines and newspapers worldwide. “That’s weddings and babies.”

Fans have always awaited the birth of celebrity children. These babies not only provided stars with even more perfect lives but were also themselves genetic gold mines, the imagined repositories of beauty and talent beyond the proletariat’s wildest dreams.

At People, editor Martha Nelson cautions against reading too much into this or any perceived trend in the celebrity media. “It all depends on what the story is now. If you have the first picture of Jennifer Aniston and Marc Anthony, then that’s the ‘get,’ that’s the story,” she says, quickly catching herself and adding: “I mean Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony.”

Aniston and Anthony, now there’s a juicy story. And didn’t we hear she was pregnant?