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The Kim Kardashian wedding photo on the cover of this week’s issue of OK! is a Photoshopped fake.
OK! Editor-in-Chief Richard Spencer, hoping to preempt the coverage of better financed rival People created the shot by using the violet-colored dress she wore to her engagement party and bleaching it white to create the appearance of a wedding dress.
They apparently made Kardashian a little tanner and gave her a little more cleavage, too, in the “wedding” photo.
Calls to Kardashian’s people were not returned.
Spencer didn’t get back to us either, but an OK! spokeswoman said in an e-mail, “We feel strongly that our coverage is an exciting lead-up to the big event.”
The actual wedding between Kardashian and New Jersey Nets player Kris Humphries isn’t scheduled to take place until tomorrow. That is one clear giveaway that the shot is fake.
People reportedly spent $1 million for exclusive rights to photograph the wedding. Said a People spokeswoman of the OK! cover: “It shows a shocking contempt for the reader that OK! chose to fake a wedding that has not occurred yet.”
Not for sale
Wenner Media insists the company is not for sale following the bombshell disclosure by Page Six on Wednesday that Jane Wenner is suing estranged husband Jann Wenner for divorce — some 16 years after Jann left her to move in with lover Matt Nye.
A Wenner spokesman said yesterday, “Wenner Media is not for sale.”
Jann Wenner has six children, three with Jane and three born via a surrogate while with Nye.
Nobody is quite sure why the Wenners are divorcing now. And speculation is swirling, as it did 16 years ago when the separation was first revealed, about what will happen to the media empire that includes Us Weekly, Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal.
Jane has been a 40-percent owner of the company throughout its existence. It was her Brooklyn dentist dad who loaned the couple money to start Rolling Stone in San Francisco in the late 1960s.
The divorce proceedings are being handled in-house by Timothy Walsh, a Wenner Media vice president in the finance department, who is in charge of overseeing many of the trusts that the Wenners have set up.
Walsh did not return calls. Neither did Ben Needell, the lawyer from Skadden Arps who many said convinced the Wenners that selling the company when they first separated would be detrimental to their financial interests.
The split, for all intents and purposes, seems to have been handled amicably. Jane remained a vice president with the company all through the years.
Her lawyer, Adria Hillman, did not return several calls for comment on the divorce proceedings initiated by Jane in New York State Supreme Court back in June.
Whatever the outcome, the Wenners may be regretting that they did not sell four years ago. At that time, there was a deal on the table to sell Us Weekly to Hearst Corp. for $750 million. Hearst was ready to plunk down the money for the weekly, which was cranking out profits of around $70 million a year.
Jann Wenner insisted, however, that Hearst assume the obligation to pay off a $300 million loan that he had taken out to buy out Walt Disney Co.’s 50 percent stake in the celeb weekly several years earlier. Hearst balked at the debt, and the two sides walked away.
Us Weekly’s profits have dropped since then, along with newsstand sales across the celeb category.
AMI cuts
After the recent collapse of talks to sell American Media Inc. to Apollo Capital Management, AMI CEO David Pecker is apparently mulling a drastic 20-percent pay cut for staffers, according to several sources close to the company.
He laid out the doomsday scenario in a rare full-staff meeting in Florida this week. “In the worst case scenario, he said that salaries could be cut by up to 20 percent,” said one former staffer.
National Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Tony Frost said, “I would not discuss any meetings down here with David Pecker. Meetings here are confidential.”
Nevertheless Frost insisted: “There are no plans to cut staff salaries by 20 percent. That’s incorrect.”
One source said that Pecker, who has been known to go on screaming binges, was calm and collected as he laid out the tough economic times in the meeting on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Pecker had a tougher audience to placate: his board, composed of representatives of hedge funds that now own the company, including Angelo Gordon, Avenue Capital, Capital Research and Oppenheimer.
The reason Pecker is contemplating a salary cut: he is telling the owners that he expects to deliver cash flow of $118 million to $123 million in the current fiscal year ending March 31 — the same numbers he promised to deliver in the just concluded fiscal year — even as he is predicting that overall revenues will decline 5 percent to 7 percent on the year.
While the flagship Enquirer’s newsstand sales are down between 7 percent and 8 percent in the first half — better than most celebrity-oriented titles — Star magazine saw a dizzying 22 percent decline in newsstand sales.
If that erosion continues, it could mean the evaporation of about $20 million or more in cash flow.
Daly jumps
Daily News columnist Michael Daly is jumping ship to join Tina Brown’s Newsweek Daily Beast.
Asked what he will be doing, Daly said, “I will be writing.”
Daly said it is with mixed emotions that he is leaving the Mort Zuckerman-owned paper where he has been a high-profile columnist for more than 20 years.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I love the Daily News.” He said he is not getting a big pay boost.
Daly’s stay at the paper was not without controversy. In 1981, he was recalled from Belfast, Northern Ireland, because it appeared that portions of his columns filed after the death hunger striker Bobby Sands relied on composite characters.
Daly insisted he was using composites just as he had back in New York. But the News fired him. He went to work for New York mag before returning to the News some years later.
After his return, Daly became one of the most prolific notebook savers on the staff.