Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has been remaking herself in recent years as a food expert with strong ties to celebrity chef Mario Batali — and now, according to a reliable source, she is trying to expand her empire outside of the Hollywood realm with a magazine project.
One source insisted Hearst — which has a hit on its hands with the Food Network Magazine and which helped turn Oprah Winfrey‘s celebrity buzz into O, the Oprah Magazine, now the second most profitable magazine in the entire company after Cosmopolitan, is intrigued.
“It’s a super-secret project,” said one source. Hearst is insisting speculation is not true.
“Beyond her occasionally appearing on our magazine covers, we don’t have any other projects in the works with Gwyneth Paltrow,” said a spokeswoman.
Still, she was most recently on last month’s cover of Hearst’s Good Housekeeping, in part to promote her movie “Country Strong.”
But in that article and others, she never misses a chance to promote her cooking. Paltrow’s Vogue cover story in August 2010 was entitled “Beauty and the Feast” and was written by Vogue’s food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten.
And Paltrow is releasing a cookbook, “My Father’s Daughter,” next month. It has already gone back for a second printing pre-publication. If it soars to bestseller status — as Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing imprint thinks it will — her food bona fides will be further burnished.
The book carries an introduction from Batali. Paltrow has already teamed up with Batali for a PBS cooking series.
Liz e-book
Vanity Fair is doing its first ever e-book on Elizabeth Taylor. The e-book, which hits later this week, possibly as early as tomorrow, will sell for $4.99 through Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and other e-readers.
It will be a compilation of previously published VF articles on Taylor with a new introduction by VF Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter.
“How to explain Taylor to younger readers,” muses Carter. “For comparison’s sake, there is really no one on today’s screens who comes close. Try to imagine a star who combines the talent of a Meryl Streep with the beauty of Nicole Kidman, the sensuality of a Penélope Cruz, and the notoriety of a Lindsay Lohan (although in a much higher-class way, and without the public displays of private parts and vomiting). Magnify that a hundredfold, and you’re still only halfway to Elizabeth Taylor.”
The writers include: Dominick Dunne; George Hamilton and William Stadiem and Nancy Collins, Nancy Schoenberger and Sam Kashner.
Although Taylor’s March 23 death missed the deadlines for the celebrity mags, some are making up for it this week. Time was actually the first weekly with a Taylor cover mention, inserting a postage-stamp-sized Taylor in the upper right-hand corner of the issue that hit last Friday, with a 10-page feature inside.
People editor Larry Hackett pushed up the normal Tuesday deadline by four days and closed the issue last Friday so it could rush copies with a Taylor cover story to newsstands ahead of competitors.
American Media also went to press with a Collector’s Issue of Elizabeth Taylor, putting 500,000 copies on newsstands with a cover price of $5.99 on sale for 75 days. AMI’s National Enquirer, which has had Taylor dying for years, is running with a cover, not too surprisingly, on “The Medical Mistake that Killed Taylor,” while Star skips it entirely to go with a “Dancing With the Stars” cover.
Us Weekly is also going the contrarian route, putting Reese Witherspoon‘s wedding on the cover, although it features Taylor amply inside its pages.
Reduction
Once Hearst Chairman and CEO Frank Bennack formally signs the check to Lagardére‘s Lagardére Group — estimated to be just over $900 million — sources say they expect the newly acquired US subsidiary Hachette Filipacchi Media will move its fashion flagship, Elle, and sidekick Elle Décor into the Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue overlooking Central Park.
Some of the other operations from HFM could move into the Sheffield office building space that Hearst purchased for $95 million several years earlier.
It turns out Hachette Filipacchi headcount has drifted downward to 633, according to a spokeswoman. Hearst is said to be expecting only about 350 to move under its umbrella, once the agreement inked earlier this week is finalized. The final deal is awaiting various European regulatory ap provals. It is expected sometime before July 1.
If that 350 number holds, it would mean a downsizing of about 45 percent of the current Ha chette Filipacchi Media workforce.
Advertising, marketing and editorial are expected to be largely untouched in the post-merger, but the HFM back-shop operations will be largely duplicative and are expected to be eliminated.