Susan Sontag, a passionate cineaste, would see almost anything projected onto the big screen, no matter the brow level, true to her earliest celebrations of popular culture. And, just as Against Interpretation dictated, she could respond with emotion. Christopher Hitchens recounts an evening spent with Sontag discoursing at great length on the emotional power of E.T., so strong that it brought her to tears. “If you go to Mr. Spielberg’s movie and you are a mammal, you will cry,” she told Hitchens. “Something in this ridiculous rubber-duck figure brings out the mammalian in you.” But Sontag’s passion for popular culture has been somewhat exaggerated in retrospective accounts of her work. She didn’t own a television. Aside from early essays on science-fiction movies and pop music, she wasn’t anything remotely like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, the generation of critics who followed her, constantly applying their highbrow minds to the explanation of Hollywood pleasures. Mostly, she celebrated experimental foreign auteurs—Godard, Ozu, Bresson—not exactly generators of the images regularly consumed by most Americans.

But it’s right to think of her as connected to pop culture. That’s because her visage, and her salt streak of hair, became a part of that culture. Over her career, she sat for portraits by Irving Penn, Philippe Halsman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Peter Hujar. In the mid-sixties, Joseph Cornell couldn’t resist arraying her face in one of his boxes, The Ellipsian. Sontag’s long (sometimes stormy) relationship with the camera fittingly culminated in an actual romance with Annie Leibovitz, the ultimate celebrity portraitist.

Photography obsessed Sontag and became the subject for two of her best books. Her preoccupation with photography is the single clearest example of her shifting a previously disregarded mass medium into the realm of acceptable highbrow discussion. The photograph, in her view, had changed the mechanics of memory. Our minds, she argued, no longer stored narrative; they stockpiled images. “The problem,” she wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, “is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only photographs.” And in a way, that sentence anticipated her obituaries, which dwelled at length on the many photographs of Sontag.

Reviews of her books also cited her media image, and not often kindly. In an essay on her novel Death Kit, Ted Solotaroff wrote, “Like the celebrity that Miss Sontag appears to court with her left hand and disclaim with her right, her critical stance somehow managed to be both matter-of-fact and outrageous: a tone that gets under the skin in much the same way that those dust-jacket photographs of her—poised, striking, vaguely sinister—either seduce or repel.” As the Solotaroff review reveals, quite a large number of New York intellectuals were repelled. Even her friend William Phillips lamented, “A popular conception of her had been rigged before a natural one could develop.”

Sontag was hardly the first American intellectual to receive this attention. Time had devoted pages to the work of fifties sociologists like David Riesman, packaging their images and writing for the magazine’s massive postwar readership. But they were portrayed in bow ties, fusty caricatures without the movie-star qualities that photos of Sontag projected. (Not surprisingly, writings about Sontag endlessly invoked the ghost of Marilyn Monroe.) And the New York intellectuals had a rather stringent set of mores about their self-image that flowed from their hatred of masscult. As Howe put it in his 1969 essay, his generation had worried that publication in The New Yorker or Esquire was a “sure ticket to Satan.” They lived in a cloistered world. Howe wrote: “[P]recisely the buzz of gossip attending the one or two sometimes invited to a party beyond the well-surveyed limits of the West Side showed how confined their life still was.”

By the time photos of Sontag began to grace Vogue and Mademoiselle, the old taboos had started to fall away. Norman Mailer had published Advertisements for Myself in 1959, and ten years later ran for mayor of the city as a gonzo gesture in the same unabashedly self-aggrandizing mode. In his 1967 memoir, Making It, Norman Podhoretz exposed the intelligentsia to be fraudulent when it pronounced its disinterest in power, money, and fame. “Every morning a stock-market report on reputation comes out in New York,” Podhoretz wrote. “It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. . . . Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. . . . Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two.” Sontag could be self-conscious about her image. At a PEN dinner in the late eighties, she once sat next to an editor from Doubleday who turned to her and asked, “So, how long have you been in New York?” She replied, “You don’t know who I am?” A few minutes later she angrily left the dinner. The writer Edmund White, with whom she had a bitter falling-out, wrote a thinly veiled historical novel about Sontag, Caracole (1985), in which he nastily portrayed her as needy for this sort of public recognition. But she could be as disdainful of ambition as any old-time New York intellectual. While Podhoretz admitted to caring about money, Sontag sincerely showed no such concern. When cancer first struck her in the seventies, she didn’t have health insurance. New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers organized a fund-raising campaign that scraped together $150,000 to cover the bills. Hitchens remembers that when a fire left her apartment open to the weather, she didn’t have enough money in her bank account to check into a hotel. Only in the eighties did friends push her to obtain a literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who could prod editors into forking over amounts closer to Sontag’s market value.

Even those who champion her exegetical and critical brilliance concede that her mainstream celebrity could be traced back to a combination of good looks and glamorous avant-garde flair. Credit also gets meted out to the public-relations genius of Roger Straus. It’s not a coincidence that Tom Wolfe—another celebrity writer with a trademark dust-jacket look—was another Straus author. (“PR stands for something other than Partisan Review,” Hitchens says.) And there’s another reason Sontag became so famous: She had boosters in the middlebrow institutions that Macdonald and Clement Greenberg so disdained. Time wrote about “Notes on Camp” upon its appearance in Partisan Review; The New Yorker profiled her. Given recent debates over the demise of the public intellectual, this coverage shouldn’t be quickly dismissed. They brought Sontag a much wider readership than anyone of Howe’s generation had known. On Photography sold 40,000 copies in hardcover, reaching best-seller lists; Illness As Metaphor did at least as well. Not too shabby for works of criticism.