Apparently, sexy nerd comedian Tina Fey has a scar on her face that she keeps covered up. How'd she get what the NY Post classily calls the "Fey-mous" mark? Somebody slashed her face. When she was five. For no reason. That's what her husband told Maureen Dowd for Vanity Fair, which profiles Fey and features her on the cover as a scantily clad Uncle Sam. Tina herself won't discuss the matter because she doesn't want to "exploit" it.
The odd mini-profile on Prince that ran in the most recent New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section made a big splash, mostly because of Prince's religious pronouncements of going door-to-door as a Jehovah's witness and remarks concluding that being gay was wrong. However, his flack went to Perez Hilton and said that Prince had been "grossly misquoted" and accused the writer of the piece, Claire Hoffman, of not using a tape recorder. ("How unprofessional!" Perez squealed.) The New Yorker stood by their story in a confirmation to Wired. But turns out there was a very good reason the interview wasn't recorded: Hoffman explains in an interview that Prince "wouldn’t let me use a tape recorder or my notepad."The quote that got Prince in trouble was, in response to a question about gay marriage and abortion, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out." So, how did Hoffman get that? She explains, "I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don’t have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff." Forbidding a writer of making any record of an interview is a pretty canny move for a celebrity—he can claim to be "misquoted" on anything he didn't like. It's her recollection against his. And given that the Prince version (via Perez) — "What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment." — sounds like P.R. puffery, we're going with Hoffman here and Prince is, as usual, DOING IT RONG. [Via Emdashes]
Oh we see how it is. First we make Republican ski bum and national bailout chief Neel Kashkari a total object of desire by showing you how Ferrari-tastic he was in high school. Then People magazine goes and names him one of the sexiest guys in the world. And now, Details has named Neel #2 on their "Power List," if you can imagine "Details" and "Power" together in the same sentence. Kashkari kopykats are going krazy! We saw him first. That means we're first in line for some of that sweet bailout money in 09, baby. [Details; pic by ineffable.me]
Gina Duclayan's Facebook album of behind-the-scenes Spy magazine staff photos shows the soft, human side of the carefully-calibrated snark book of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As such it's both a supplement and antidote to "Spy: The Funny Years," 2006's "lush, coffee-table format book" launched at an insidery party that reminded everyone how important (and establishment) the magazine's staff had since become. Somehow seeing the power clique in dorky 1980s duds and chairless apartments is much more comforting. At left, Kurt Andersen, a very young Daniel Radosh and Duclayan (clockwise from left). One more shot after the jump.
Wild-haired and possibly murderous publisher Felix Dennis sold Alpha Media—home of Maxim and Blender—to a private equity group last year for about $250 million. Now, hey look, Alpha Media may have to be turned over to its creditors because, you know, advertising revenues are down thanks to the economy. The company is currently "in restructuring talks." So Felix Dennis has a quarter of a billion dollars, and the finance whizzes who paid him have cornered the market on Tila Tequila covers. Felix Dennis is smart. [Folio]
Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore shamed all of the United States of America by ceding hegemony over House Of Windsor gossip to filthy British tabloids. People is flying the white flag of surrender over its London bureau and shutting it down, two tipsters inform us, sending its handful of staffers, like writers Courtney Rubin and Pete Norman, packing. Former bureau chief Simon Perry was purportedly told to work from home after a demotion to "correspondent," but there's skepticism he'll comply. Good luck trying to crack the Brits' white-glove treatment of their silly "royal" family now, People! Meanwhile, a reckoning is coming in the U.S.
♦ ABC has ordered up new episodes of Life on Mars, but it has no plans to shoot new ones of Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money, or Eli Stone. [THR]
♦ Penguin's Ann Godoff will be publishing pollster Nate Silver's two books as part of the deal he signed for $700,000. [NYO]
♦ Michael Phelps has signed on as a pitchman for Subway. [AdAge]
♦ Ted Turner's autobiography will make its debut on the New York Times bestseller list this week at No. 8. Also: Artie Lang, Howard Stern's sidekick, has landed a six-figure book deal. [NYP]
Yesterday New York magazine laid off Gael Greene, a food critic there for the past 40 years. Apparently the recession is hurting New York like everyone else—not as drastically as everyone else, of course, but enough to have to pare down their fat roster of restaurant reviewers. So is this just a longtime employee being pushed out, or a sign of something worse under the surface?
New York is owned by billionaire Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO of investment bank Lazard. Does he have money problems? Well, let's see:
In this paranoid media climate, you can't even write an salient tongue-in-cheek piece about "desperate drinking" in a desperate media landscape without people assuming that you're sending some message that you've lost your job. Foster, author of a piece for BlackBook called "Desperate Drinking in Desperate Times," says that ever since he and co-writer Ben published the piece, "I've had at least 20 calls and/or emails asking if [editor] Chris Mohney laid me off via [Blackberry message] last night."
Media layoffs are becoming so frequent, and our email inboxes are getting so overloaded with tips about firings, that we figure that we might as well start a daily liveblog on the topic. Know about layoffs hitting a media company? Post it in the comments below. We'll be updating this post as new reports come in. So far today, we've heard the Life&Style marketing staff got whacked yesterday and that Source Interlink, publisher of Motor Trend and Soap Opera Digest is rumored to be cutting 150 jobs ... Sadly, we're expecting more to come. [For the squeamish you can always email us at tips@gawker.com (but not from your work account, kids!) or call our tip line at 646-214-8138.]
Prepare to die, entitled Conde Nasties! Conde has always had a well-deserved reputation as the most opulent and self-important of all magazine publishing companies. Those days are coming to an end. The (gender-neutral!) diva culture that spawned The Devil Wears Prada and a million young aspiring media people who thought that a magazine employee could live the lifestyle of an investment banker—it's all on the way out. We come to bury you, Conde Nast culture, not to mourn you. Contemplate this, special ones: you may soon be forced to travel in (and pay for) common taxi cabs, like the poors! And it gets worse:
Hey ladies: how'd you like to meet a guy with $700 billion in his pocket, a gleaming bald pate, and a memory full of Bernie Kosar quotes? Sexy is spelled N-E-E-L! Last name Kashkari! Our favorite steely-eyed Treasury Dept. appointee and Congressional chew toy is on People's list of Sexiest Men Alive—actually he's on the backup list, "Sexy A-Z." Even People couldn't get anything other than the same fucking straight-ahead staring pose that he's been using forever. Neel, how about frolicking merrily on a pile of $100 bills instead? Is our Republican financial overlord really as sexy as dance studio owner Maksim Chmerkovskiy? Click through for Neel's close-up and decide for yourself!
Former Time Inc. drones tired of their company's massive layoffs are fighting back. In email form! Susan Haynes, a former editor at Coastal Living, struck back at the parent company for slashing jobs at all of the titles in its Southern Progress division (which sounds like the name some 1965 white civil rights group, but that is not pertinent). We're willing to bet Haynes' "scathing memo" was laughed off by the bosses, right up until it landed in the New York Post this morning [UPDATE: the full emails are now pasted below]: Besides saying that Sylvia Auton, the head of Time Inc.'s lifestyle group, is horrible at her job, Haynes said this in an email to the top Time Inc. bosses:
As a member of the vaunted Time Inc. magazine empire, People has always stood a cut or two above most celebrity magazines, ethically speaking. But Angelina Jolie is "scary smart," in the words of celeb-mag editor Bonnie Fuller, and the actress seems to have had little trouble corrupting People's soul. Set aside the now-common practice of paying for baby pictures. Judging from a Times exposé, Jolie also banished the word "Brangelina" from People's pages, dictated coverage of her charitable work in Cambodia and won from People the "positive" tone she demanded. She seems to have pulled this off with a little editor-source dance that gave People plausible deniability.
Conde Nast is folding DNR, the men's fashion trade magazine. It's also shuttering its website, DNRNews.com. The feeble spin is that WWD will pick up the slack by launching "comprehensive, round-the-clock men’s fashion and retail coverage." [#2 of the ">four ways to kill a magazine, for those keeping track]. Points to the PR department for attempting to create an upside. But it's clear that this is evidence of weakness in the fashion category specifically, and more momentum for the scary Great Magazine Die-off in general. The company hasn't announced how many layoffs will go along with DNR's death, but departing staffers with more details can email us.
More on yesterday's gutting of Time's European bureau: threats are involved! We hear that Time Inc. stuffed suits told the Time London office "that if news and details of the layoffs were leaked, they might have their severance reduced." Whoever made that threat is an asshole, and one whose threat failed to accomplish its purpose. So there. We also hear the company is "axing the London art, imaging, and copy-editing departments," and firing two staffers in the photo department. And all of this is causing staffers to be pissed—predictably—at Time editor Richard Stengel [UPDATE: and more clarity on the layoffs below]: A tipster writes:
We've heard from two sources that the London headquarters of Time Europe laid off just under 20 of the nearly 30 editorial staff, including, one said, Time Europe editor William Green and writer senior editor James Graff. Elsewhere, bureau chiefs Andrew Purvis in Berlin and Tim McGirk in Jerusalem are said to be gone after their contracts expire. This has stoked more speculation that the magazine might mimic Newsweek and consolidate to a single international edition — and that London is merely the first in a rolling series of global Thursday layoffs:
Just because we're in the midst of a Great Magazine Die-Off, you may be under the impression that all magazines die equally. Not true! We Leading magazine scientists have identified four distinct varieties of magazine death. Each has its own special flavor of despair for all those connected with the deceased publication. Here they are, from most common to least:
