Mailbag for November 1, 2024
Mailbag for November 1, 2024
Is Katy Perry cursed, Martha Stewart is pissed (or is she?), Meghan and Harry know to stand down, and our favourite celeb couples, past and present
Dear Gossips,
A week ago, the Washington Post announced that it would break with a 50-year tradition and not endorse a presidential candidate in this year’s election, resulting in accusations that Jeff Bezos was protecting profit for his other industries over people and journalistic integrity. The blowback has been monumental – the last report is that the publication has lost as many as 250,000 subscribers, apparently 10% of its total base. Jeff’s letter, trying to explain his position, published on Tuesday, didn’t seem to reverse the exodus.
Media coverage about WaPo and the ensuing mess has, quite rightly, been focused on Jeff Bezos and whether or not he was interfering in the paper’s editorial process. And of course it should remain there.
But… there is a celebrity angle to this that’s been overshadowed by that much more important conversation. Very few people, if any, are really talking about it. I actually didn’t even know until I read a report that included a relatively small detail sort of glossed over in a longer piece at Puck that came out yesterday about Jeff, WaPo, and what the future might be for the publication. Since we do, however, focus on celebrities and pop culture here, this is my focus, at least for the purposes of this column. Here’s the opening paragraph of that Puck article, reported by Dylan Byers. Pretty sure you’ll be able to spot the celebrity angle right away:
“Last Friday, as Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis announced the paper’s controversial decision to forgo a presidential endorsement in the waning days before the election, the paper’s proprietor, Jeff Bezos, was in Switzerland with his fiancée and friends of the haut monde, embarking on a multiday, Orient Express-style rail tour from Geneva to Amsterdam in celebration of Katy Perry’s 40th birthday. While Bezos & Co. spent the weekend celebrating the pop star, drinking Moët and donning thematic attire for each event, the Post ignited into yet another open revolt.”
Um, is Katy Perry cursed?
Jeff Bezos hangs out with stars all the time. But she happened to be the star he was with when this scandal broke out. And I hope it’s obvious that I’m not trying to say she caused this. Just that when he was under fire and being accused of being a billionaire compromising democracy, he happened to be doing rich people things, and she was part of it…
After months and months of bad press already – for both of them! – but in Katy’s case in particular, like her new album is considered one of the worst of the year, nobody is fucking with her music right now, 2024 has basically been one long flop for her, and now this.
My ma would probably say she needs a feng shui cleanse. Because, right now, this cannot be what Katy had envisioned for herself ten months ago.
Let’s get to the mailbag.
Question from Jessica sent via email:
Have you seen the Martha Stewart doc yet? What do you think? I really loved it but she hates it so I’m not sure how to feel, I know you’ve said in the past that celebrity documentaries aren’t objective (Taylor Swift, Beyonce etc) but does this go too far in the other direction?
Lainey’s Answer:
I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve been saving it for either my flight this weekend or, if Jacek is down, to watch it with him tonight. Given what Martha has said about it, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be obsessed with it. And not necessarily because she hates it, but because the filmmaker, RJ Cutler, clearly did not take her “suggestions” about what to include and what not to include.
Did you read her interview with Brooks Barnes in the New York Times this week? The article is hilarious, I screamed throughout the entire read. Starting with her critique of the music – she really pushed for him to use hip-hop, perhaps ask Dr Dre to score it, and instead he chose what she says is “some lousy classical score” and right away, in my head, I’m picturing Martha as That White Girl who knows all the lyrics in a rap song, performs them at the top of her lungs, and does not pause for the n-word.
Martha, by the way, has a lot of Mimi in her. Because she was also bitching about the unflattering camera angles. And she’s pissed because the film does not include mentions of all the men who wanted to fuck her.
Seriously, it’s a glorious interview, so revealing, and probably a wonderful companion to the documentary so to answer your question, whether or not it’s a problem that Martha is so disappointed with it…
In my opinion, no, it’s not a problem. Because it’s not a documentarian’s obligation to make sure his subject is happy with their portrayal. Should there be respect? Of course, and by all accounts, he respected the access he was given and hasn’t manipulated any of the information he was accessing, or manufacturing anything out of her life that wasn’t there. But clearly his vision for the story and her vision for her story are different. This, then, is creative dispute, an artistic conflict, and not a compromise of narrative integrity. Organic tension between reporter/journalist/filmmaker is not necessarily a bad thing – in many cases it can result in deeper understand of the subject.
I’m pretty sure you all know how much I love Beyoncé, but when Beyoncé writes, produces, and directs a doc about Beyoncé, this is Beyoncé adding to her own mythology. Documentaries should be about deconstructing mythology and, through profile, excavating the humanity obscured by the fame of its subjects.
In agreeing to this process, was Martha trying to further expand her own mythology? It seems like it. She actually sounds, in that NYT interview, like an influencer – but of course she does. Martha Stewart is the godmother of influencers, right? What I’m getting at, specifically, is that all the things she’s moaning about that were left out of the film? It’s all shit that she probably thinks will go viral:
Hip-hop that plays over scenes of her being fabulous;
Beauty shots;
Martha climbing Kilimanjaro;
Martha listing off all the men who had boners for her;
Martha wanted to stage her documentary the way she staged photo shoots for her magazine. At one point in the NYT interview, she boasts that:
“My magazine, my Martha Stewart magazine, which you might say is traditional, was the most modern home magazine ever created. We had avant-garde photography. Nobody ever showed puff pastry the way I showed it.
Basically, Martha wanted to be the puff pastry in her own documentary. I’m not mad at her for trying, but I’m also not mad that the filmmaker pushed back. You will note, though, that in that NYT article, Brooks Barnes refers to her as a “media savant”. Something tells me that she’s not as mad at the doc as she claims to be.
One more thing…
Earlier this week at LaineyGossip, I opened the site with an observation about how seniors have returned to the center of pop culture in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. Add Martha Stewart to that list!
Question from LP via private message:
Meghan and Harry have been pretty quiet. Will they get involved in the election, what do you predict, what do you think they’re planning, what happened with her orchard?!?
Lainey’s Answer:
“Her orchard”, haha. But also, fair. We’ll come back to American Riviera Orchard in a minute and address the Sussexes and the American election first. My prediction is that we will not hear from them. I think it’s pretty obvious who they’d be supporting and, right now, an H&M distraction is not needed. Even if they offered themselves to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, I feel like the answer would be “stand down”. Beyoncé pulled up last week. The other big name people are waiting for now, really, is Taylor Swift.
And, please, for those of you who love H&M, I don’t mean this is as shade but pragmatism. And they would and should know this. When the Daily Mail is out here every day trying to undermine VP Harris with their usual dog whistle fuckery, Harry and Meghan jumping into this thing right now would only be the best gift to them and the haters and then the bots on the home stretch.
So…the orchard. Will 2024 end without a proper launch of Meghan Markle’s lifestyle brand… that was announced back in March? It seems very likely, considering how much time has passed, that there have been unforeseen business issues that have come up. The British tabloids have been reporting that there are patent and copyright disputes. Nothing has been officially confirmed or denied.
That said, maybe it’ll be a surprise drop just in time for the holiday season? Busiest shopping period of the year, it would be a perfect opportunity to grab the spotlight when people are typically looking to spend (depending on, you know, what democracy looks like in a few weeks).
Still, from a marketing perspective, the most ideal time for ARO to kick off would be in coordination with the Netflix series. The show is currently in post, having wrapped in the summer. And there’s been some indication that it will premiere in the early part of 2025. First, though, will be Prince Harry’s polo show. That’s coming in December. Presumably they’ll want to give Polo time to breathe and then come in with Meghan Markle’s Country Goop Garden Goddess Living a few weeks later.
If that is indeed the plan, then staying quiet now is the right move. Something tells me that when and if Meghan is ready to move ahead, the strategy might be … a little more creative than what we’ve seen from the Sussexes in a while. Put a pin in that and remind me to elaborate later.
Question from Fernanda:
For some reason, I’m really invested in Tom Holland and Zendaya as a couple, and I hope they live long and happy lives together. I’ve felt that way (and was devasted) when Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams broke up, and John Mulaney and Anna Tendler broke up (yeah, I know, but I swear I wasn’t weird about his relationship with Olivia Munn!). So I was wondering, do you feel particularly invested in any celebrity couple now, or have you felt in the past? Which ones?
Lainey’s Answer:
If you’ve been reading LaineyGossip from early days, I don’t have to tell you how obsessed I was with Brange. Fan fiction, I wrote fan fiction about them, that’s how cringe I was. Brad Pitt is gross to me NOW, but back then, come on, let’s not pretend they weren’t the best thing that happened to gossip. The whole love triangle with Jennifer Aniston. The photos of them in the early years travelling from LA to Alberta (The Assassination of Jesse James was filmed there) to London to Vietnam to Ethiopia. The pregnancy news. The Cannes pregnancy red carpets. The baby magazine photos. The PDA. The global fascination…
And it started before social media took over on such a huge scale. So you could say they were one of the last celebrity couples of monoculture. I don’t know that we’ll ever see a couple like Brange ever again. So I’ll never forget September 20, 2016, around 10am ET. That’s when the news broke, it was a gossip asteroid crashing into the ecosystem. It was panic in the newsrooms all over the place, the gossip board was being reset. And the end of that relationship, in many ways, marked the end of so much of how celebrity gossip is covered. Brange ended the same month that TikTok was created. A year later in October 2017 the New York Times published Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s exposé of Harvey Weinstein. TikTok exploded in 2018. It was already crazy the way the Brange split was covered in its time. But it would have been a nuclear nightmare if people were on TikTok then the way they are now.
The couples that I’m super invested in who are still together?
Same, same, Zendaya and Tom Holland. I love their love so much. But also, in the back of mind, I am also very aware of how young they are and how young they were when they fell in love. Our 20s are a turbulent time, we change so much at that age; it’s even more pronounced when you’re famous. So I want to be realistic. And I also want to live in the fantasy!
Others:
If something ever happened to Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, someone would have to carry me to bed, and I’d say there for a week.
And then, of course, there’s the Beckhams! The gossip that Victoria and David have given us over the years! I’ve already written a whole ass newsletter at The Squawk about them so we don’t have to rehash. But after all they’ve been through? All the times they’ve triumphed over the tabloids? I feel like we’d have to declare a day of mourning at LaineyGossip.
Finally, Rihanna and A$AP Rocky. There’s a large majority of the gossip public that adores Rihanna. And we’ve never seen her this down bad. She’s in love but she hasn’t lost herself either. They seem so compatible, they seem so connected. And he seems to understand that it will not get any better for him. If it were to go south, the heartbreak for me would be FOR HER. I’d be devastated for her.
Sarah’s answer
Tom and Zendaya SAAAAAAAAME. And I am also aware of how young they are and how hard it is to stay together through your twenties, let alone when you’re famous. But I am rooting for them.
Besides them? Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsome, lowkey eccentrics who keep their family life off the radar completely. I love that for them, but I do enjoy whenever they pop up somewhere together, they’re a lot of fun on red carpets (her sense of style is very cool). If they ever broke up, I would definitely be “love is dead” about it.
Keeping on an SNL theme, Seth Meyers and Alexi Ashe Meyers. He’s such a wife guy, I’d be SHOCKED if they split. John Mulaney and Anna Marie Tendler didn’t shock me, I know too many of his friends and heard too much shit that never made it into the press, their split was only shocking to the public. But Seth and Alexi? That would be a comedy world meltdown of the first order.
My 90s throwback is Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr. I love that they’re the teen beat couple that thrived. And my silver fox couple is Pierce Brosnan and Keely Shaye Smith. The media has been fucking VILE to her for daring to age in public, but Pierce’s affection has never wavered, publicly at least. I’m always glad to see them turn up places.
Thanks as always for keeping the chats and threads all week even amidst the stress. We get the sense that even celebrities are kinda lying low, bracing for impact. In the coming days, we hope that in this space we can amuse each other with distractions alongside the very informative discussions that are taking place. It’s an honour that so many of you are choosing to do that here.
Keep squawking and keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
It gets a little sticky gossiping about John Mulaney because we have some friends in common. But I will say he was an addict who relapsed and they got divorced and it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. But if you want it to be more complicated than that, things were not going well long before he relapsed, which is not blaming the relapse on her or their relationship, but their relationship just wasn't what he made it seem to be in his comedy.
I'll also add that I take everything his friends say about her with a grain of salt because they never liked her. But there was enough discussion about what was going on with them that by the time the divorce became public, no one was surprised except for her (and she probably wasn't surprised behind the scenes).
Honestly, my current favourite celeb couple is probably Paul Scheer and June Diane Raphael. They make none of the sense and yet perfect sense with how perfectly mismatched they are. His story of proposing to her in his memoir is hilarious.