Mailbag for October 27, 2023

Kim K and Ivanka Trump image rehab, why the change on Beyoncé, gossip time machine, paparazzi and the celebrity ecosystem, and is Taylor Swift playing Dazzler?

Photos: Alex Edelman/UPI/ London Entertainment/ Frank Micelotta/ PictureGroup/ Chelsea Lauren/ Shutterstock

Dear Squawkers,

Halloween is on Tuesday which means this weekend we’ll be getting a lot of celebrity Halloween content. The costume I always wait on, of course, obviously, is Beyoncé and where Beyoncé is concerned, you can never be sure that she’ll actually share her costume on Halloween or even the day after. It’s another reason Beyoncé will always be one of one, number one, the only one; while everyone else can’t wait to show off what they were for Halloween, Beyoncé will just casually include her Halloween costume in a photo dump like months later for no particular reason.

Every year at Halloween, inevitably there’s a celebrity who will fuck it up, wear something offensive, write something offensive. You think we can get through Halloween 2023 without a controversy? Or will it be strike related? Is that going to be the costume drama this year?

I hate Halloween, which is what I say every year at Halloween, and you’ve been hearing this from me if you’ve been visiting LaineyGossip. I am Halloween Grinch. It’s so much fucking work, especially if you work on television. Turn on the TV that day and Halloween will vomit all over your screen. And if there was an actual payoff, fine, I’d be less annoyed. But is there a payoff, seriously? Do you say to yourself that morning…OMG I can’t wait to turn on the TV and watch whatever show you watch because you just HAVE to see what they’re wearing? Please answer this question in the comments because I’m not convinced.

My Halloween costume for ETALK this year was chosen for one qualification: what can I wear that requires the least amount of time in hair, makeup, and wardrobe? So I’ve ended up in a costume that literally only needs about ten minutes of makeup, tops, ten minutes of hair time, and the most comfortable outfit possible. This way I can focus on writing more posts for LaineyGossip.

One last housekeeping item before we get into the mailbag – last week I asked you about the Britney memoir live chat and mentioned we’d try to get Duana to join us since she has a PhD in celebrity memoirs. Duana is available after November 3, so the live chat will happen the week of November 6. Exact timing will come soon.

And now to your questions.

Question from Whitney:

I've been absolutely buried at work over the last 2 weeks, so apologies if I missed a more fulsome discussion, but WHAT was with the Kim K.-Ivanka image rehab assist at her birthday? I know money/celebrity circles often overlap in weird ways, but really? Should we see this as a one-off, or are we going to be subjected to more of this as the tastemakers decide it's time to (publicly) welcome her back into polite society? Was Wendi Deng behind this?

Lainey’s Answer:

So I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone that this isn’t Kim’s first round with the Trumps. She connected with that piece of shit when he was in office – and even though she was widely criticised, some would argue that she had good intentions, as her meetings with him resulted in Alice Marie Johnson’s sentence getting commuted. The gossip takeaway for me out of that situation was that it was a stress test of Kim’s fame. And she passed. Dealing with Trump had no impact, ZERO, on Kim’s influence and celebrity power. Don’t think for a second that she wouldn’t know this.

Jared Kushner, Kim Kardashian and Ivanka Trump listen as Donald Trump delivers remarks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on June 13, 2019 (Photo: Alex Edelman/UPI/Shutterstock)

So now it’s the Ivanka question. Kim is the first major celebrity willing to associate with Ivanka in two years. As has been widely reported, Ivanka no longer has the clout that she used to have. New York was her dominion, and she did not return to New York when his administration ended, choosing instead to move to Florida. Still, as the New York Times just noted in a piece about Kim and Ivanka yesterday:

“… the high-profile birthday party in deep-blue California two years later serves as a reminder that the rich and powerful are never fully exiled, never beyond repair — and that for the politically reviled and reputationally ruined, there’s always some path back with enough time, money and influence.”

But what’s in it for Kim? Well, for Kim, she would want to be at the forefront of this…rehabilitation movement… or whatever you want to call it. If, after two years, the conditions are in place for Ivanka to make a comeback, Kim of course – and Kris – would want to be seen as the first. Because then it makes Kim look like she has the power. It would be a flex of her power, the same power that was stress tested several years ago when she made a deal with the devil and got away with it, and my theory is that she’s experimenting with the exponential growth of that power.

Taylor Swift has recently shown us that she’s a kingmaker; she made a king of Travis Kelce, turning an athlete who was successful in his limited corner of the ecosystem into a global obsession. But for Kim, deep inside the Kardashian war room, wouldn’t they consider it an even higher degree of difficulty to recrown an exiled queen?

We’ll have to wait and see if this actually works. But even if it doesn’t, even if Kim’s endorsement isn’t enough to start a tidal wave of doors opening for Ivanka, it won’t cost Kim anything anyway. I think we can all agree at this point that she can just about weather any scandal, any bad decision.

Again, this is just my personal theory. But I have more angles to it. Because in a response about Kim, I just invoked Taylor. These are two of the most formidable adversaries, blood rivals, in recent gossip history. A few weeks ago in my Squawk newsletter, I wrote about the Sliding Doors of Taylor Swift and how Ivanka actually could have, in an alternate universe, been a member of the squad.

Kim taking in one of Taylor’s potential rejects is the kind shit we live for, isn’t it? And the timing…

Six weeks ago, Kris Jenner was dominating the gossip romantic landscape. Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet hard-launched their relationship at Beyoncé’s Renaissance. And then they kissed all over the US Open and NY Fashion Week. It was a big story. This was on top of Kendall and Bad Bunny getting more and public with their situation. That was late summer, early fall, and the Kardashian-Jenner machine was purring smoothly on all cylinders. You forgot about that, though, and you forgot because…

The Taylor-Travis Takeover. T&T have blown everyone else out of the water. She crushed them, the minute she showed up at that first game in Kansas City, nobody was fucking talking about any Kardashian or Jenner storylines.

And then! And then!

Beyoncé, the Almighty, showed up at Taylor’s premiere. Not only showed up but posed, willingly, on the carpet and inside the theatre…which… is a GIFT. I don’t have to go over how rare this is, how few people have the honour.

What did B do for Kim on her birthday? Some flowers, and a card, that she didn’t even bother to handwrite herself. Hardly the same amount of effort.

Don’t you think the Kardashians are keeping score here? They would deny it, but I would never believe it. But on my scorecard, Taylor is wayyyyyy ahead.

Question from Sherry:

I have a question about your coverage of Beyoncé. I started reading the blog in 2006-ish, and very likely consumed a lot of your posts from before that too. I remember when you covered Beyoncé as just another pop star--making fun of her double-spanxing and the House of Dereon, etc. There was even a post about how she might have neglected her dog, which you later clarified as not accurate, a bad tip. And then one day I was like, hmm, the tone of your writing has changed a great deal when it came to her, and the reverence took me aback. When did that change happen? How did it happen? Was it simply a part of the general cultural attitude shift toward her from merely another pop star to an icon, a figure of generational and political as well as artistic importance or was there something personal also?

Lainey’s Answer:

The short answer to this is… I was a stupid asshole. There are many things I wrote, many opinions I held, during the early days of LaineyGossip that were very wrong and very harmful. And I appreciate that some of you have stuck with me through my learning and my growth and my continued attempts at both.

Where Beyoncé is concerned, specifically, my awakening happened with “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”. There is no debate about the cultural impact of this song and its video – and if you’re one of those people who wants to debate it, you are wrong and you should stop, because you will never be right. Of course, of course, the music that came before “Single Ladies” was amazing, but it was “Single Ladies” where I finally truly understood, deep in my soul, what people meant when they said that Beyoncé would be peerless, that we were witnessing the ascent of an artist who would shape the artform in her mold. And that what was to come would be a cultural disruption we couldn’t possibly imagine. Again, I admit, I was late to this, but to borrow the words of Sansa Stark, “I’m a slow learner, it’s true. But I learn.”

“Single Ladies” was my Beyoncé baptism. And it just so happened that my spiritual cleansing and enlightenment came at a turning point in her career. “Single Ladies” was off Beyoncé’s third album, I Am… Sasha Fierce. It was also the last album she would make with her father, Mathew Knowles, as her manager. Freed from professional connection to her father, Beyoncé released her next album, 4. And this is when I became a Beyoncé evangelist.

Beyoncé’s 4 album cover

When 4 came out, it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors, but most if not all Beyoncé scholars will tell you not only that it’s underrated, but that it is much more significant in her catalogue than Sasha Fierce because it was on this album that Beyoncé decided that she wasn’t going to just do what worked before, that she wasn’t going to just make radio pop music because that’s what was trending, but that she would make the music that would set the trend, even if it took people a while to catch on. 4 is an album that showcases her vocals, on tracks that were not, at the time, mainstream hummable – like “Countdown”, a song I’m obsessed with, like the rest of the Beyhive, but a song I have never bothered to sing out loud when I’m alone in the shower, LOL.

When we talk about 4, though, we have to talk about “Love on Top”. And we can’t talk about “Love on Top” without talking about the MTV VMAs. That performance is branded so deeply on my brain I think I’ll probably think about it on my deathbed. First of all, she was flawless – her voice, the choreo, the ENERGY! Even if the performance didn’t end the way it did, it would have been an all-time great VMA stage. But that ending… the mic drop. Literally the mic drop. The way she dropped that mic and opened up her jacket and rubbed her belly. I was staying in a hotel that night, on the phone with Sasha who was my ETALK producer at the time, and the way we screamed, and I could hear screaming from other people in the hotel. And it’s not like I care about celebrity pregnancies but with Beyoncé, seriously, it was just so fucking HYPE the way she did it, the way she created that iconic event – it was an EVENT! – as she has so many times in her career…

For me, as a student of pop culture, to go back to your question, how could I not get on my knees and pledge my eternal devotion?!

To go back to the study of Beyoncé (my favourite subject), as just mentioned, in the time of its release, 4 wasn’t as popular as what Beyoncé had put out before. But as she told Edward Enninful in an interview nine years later, in 2020, for British Vogue: 

“You can decide what success looks like for yourself. Being number one does not mean better quality. And commercial success certainly doesn’t equate to being impactful. Cultural currency is invaluable.”

The album 4 was, in my opinion, Beyoncé’s coming into the spirit of this statement; it was the genesis of her eventually living up to this statement. And 4, of course, would lead to Beyoncé, the self-titled album, released two years later in the middle of the night on December 13, 2013, WHEN SHE WAS ON TOUR, without any warning, nobody fucking knew what she was up to…

It was an earthquake of a move, she took the planet off its axis. Because look what has happened since. Look at what she started. As Sam Sanders said on the Into It podcast, Self-Titled “established Beyoncé as the most daring and innovative executive in the music industry”.

Question from Cassandra:

I got into Lainey around the same time as You Must Remember This and I’m fascinated by the trajectory of celebrity gossip and how much it says about the mores and beliefs of the culture at large. If you could go back in your gossip time machine, what events or era would you like to have been gossiping through?

Sarah’s answer:

I would like to go back to and see who committed some famous Hollywood murders, like the (very suspicious) death of Thelma Todd and the murder of Elizabeth Short. That’s not really gossip, per se, but I’d like to know the answers to those questions.

And to go back to the 1910s and 1920s and see how the silent era was covered in person. That’s basically the birth of celebrity gossip as we know it, and a lot of newspapers and trade papers survive from that era, but we’ve lost the context. What were people talking about in the shops and speakeasies? How did the public really react to the Fatty Arbuckle trial? (Just because the legal system acquitted him, doesn’t mean everyone believed he was innocent.)

There were some WILD parties back then, what did people really know about what went on in the enclaves of Los Feliz and Bel Air? What survives is largely the biggest and most sensational stuff, but what was the day-in, day-out environment of celebrity gossip back then? We’ve lost the mundane context for that era, and I would like to go back and get a better feel for how regular people were digesting celebrity news and gossip back then.

Question from Caitlin M:

For Sarah: anything on A Simple Favour 2? I feel like it was supposed to start filming this fall? BL’s hair & wardrobe in that movie has been saved in my phone ever since; can’t wait for another movie of styling.

Sarah’s answer:

A Simple Favor 2 was supposed to start filming this fall, but obviously, it is delayed by the strikes. There’s been no word on when it will go into production, but at this point, I would say next year, for a 2025 release, assuming nothing else goes wrong.

Question from Steph Slack:

Just finished Britney's memoir. My heart breaks for her and everything she went through. I feel like with that, plus Prince Harry's Spare, they paint a terrible picture of paparazzi. I can't believe it's legal for them to harass celebrities like that! Like, they deserve some privacy. Is it possible, do you think, that things could improve in the future?

Lainey’s Answer:

There’s a responsible way to do paparazzi and an irresponsible way. We subscribe to photo agencies. Every day LaineyGossip publishes photos that we license through these agencies. Mainstream publications and news sites do the same. Over time, we have become much more discerning about which photos we will run. I can’t say that we were as ethical about it during the early years of our site though – and that was across the board on the internet in those days. TMZ basically became TMZ because of their footage of Britney during those dark years. Like, of course, those paps were heinous to Britney, but their actions were rewarded, handsomely. TMZ was often the first to run them, they had the budget, and they had the budget because… we gave them the traffic. That applies over the last few years to the Daily Mail, too. They have the money for exclusives, they often get the most highly sought photos first. This is why I always talk about the ecosystem of gossip – because you have to consider it as a whole system made up of different parts that all work together with the celebrities at the center, and the paps and the media outlets and the fans and the public and the entourage etc etc etc all orbiting the star. Blaming one component of the ecosystem, in my opinion, is incomplete.  

Britney Spears pursued by paps at the Westfield shopping complex in North Hollywood on January 13, 2008 (Photo: London Entertainment/Shutterstock)

Could things improve? Yes. But all sectors of the ecosystem have to meaningfully move in the same direction. If you think about Prince Harry and what he said about the paparazzi and his lawsuits against the British tabloids, consider also how those tabloids have shaped public perception. I know I’m always ragging on the Daily Mail and the Sun in the UK for their fuckshit but, like, on a daily basis, I’m getting so many messages from people citing those outlets as a source for why they don’t like Meghan Markle or whoever their Most Targeted Woman of the Week happens to be, and you can’t put that culpability entirely at the feet of the paparazzi. Part of it is that so many people are just so ignorant to how insidious these narratives are and how entangled these publications are with the photographers and the specific angles of misinformation they’re trying to spin.  

And by the way, celebrities themselves are also participants here. In the case of the British royal family, we’ve extensively covered how the Firm and its courtiers actively work with the British tabloids, the same publications that have published harassing pap photos of them over the years. And in the case of Hollywood, while many, many celebrities do not want anything to do with the paps, there are those, and we all know who they are, who call the paparazzi on themselves. So internally, if some celebrities are like, cancel the paps, and others are texting the paps from their burner phones, how is there any consensus? On top of that, there are times when celebrities post pap shots of themselves on their social media accounts. So they’re bringing attention to pap photos on their own platforms.

And we haven’t even gotten to the rise of the citizen paparazzi – all of us with our camera phones and we’re out one day, at the grocery store or the movies or at dinner and someone famous happens to be there and… what do we do, LOL? Nowadays people send it to DeuxMoi.

So maybe I change my mind about my answer. Will there be improvement? No.

Question from Vishla:

@amaeelmoreMarvel would be so lucky to have blondie 💜#tstheerastourfilm #taylorswift #traviskelce #marvelstudios

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Sarah’s answer:

This is the “less of a question, more of a comment” version of the mailbag. Sorry to this TikTok lady’s “clowning husband”, but this isn’t his theory, or even a particularly secret theory/thought. There have been rumors about Taylor Swift playing Dazzler—a pop singer by day/superhero by night—for YEARS. Deadpool 3 is the first time it’s looking like it might actually happen. That movie is going to have a TON of cameos of characters new and old, because it’s basically the Big Bang for launching the X-Men into the MCU. Taylor as Dazzler would be like the icing on the cake for that situation.

My question, though, is if Taylor is hanging out with Shawn Levy—director of Deadpool 3—because she’s already signed to play Dazzler, or is it just because Levy is hanging out with Ryan Reynolds, waiting to restart production?

Taylor Swift and Shawn Levy in New York City on October 26, 2023 (Photo: RW/MediaPunch/Shutterstock)

Levy has been spending a lot of time with Reynolds during the production shutdown brought on by the strikes, but now that the WGA strike is over, I am SURE they are tinkering with the script (they’re credited co-writers along with several others). Hugh Jackman has also been hanging around, no doubt they’re getting ready to resume production as soon as possible, though they’ve already lost their May 2024 release date to the delays.

So it’s a question of possibility. Is Taylor already Dazzler? Could she become Dazzler, might spending some time with Shawn Levy convince her to join up? Or is it just a coincidence because Shawn Levy is spending his time with Ryan Reynolds, doing what they can on their stalled movie, and he wanted to go to a football game that night?

I haven’t heard anything conclusive about Taylor Swift playing Dazzler in this or any other movie, but her name keeps coming up as wishful thinking for this character, in a way that suggests it might actually happen someday. Given how things are going for Marvel, though, now is the time to lock Taylor down. She’s having fun, she’s on top of the world, she’s being generous with her spotlight. She’d be a welcome shot in the arm for Marvel right now.

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That’s it for the mailbag this week and THANK YOU, for the support, always, but also for the inspiration! These last few weeks, answering these questions, it’s really been the best writing exercise. I feel so creatively jacked lately and it’s because of this space, this community. So please know how much we appreciate it.

Keep squawking, keep gossiping,

Lainey and Sarah