She’s Back! Kimberly Guilfoyle Lends Her Ex a Helping Hand
Yes, politics indeed makes strange bedfellows — in Gavin Newsom‘s case, his ex-wife. Turns out Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was married to the governor when he was mayor of San Francisco in the early 2000s — and who after the divorce became a Fox News star and then, for a time, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend as well as a major MAGA player — has been helping Newsom with his recent political pivot. According to various reports, Guilfoyle, 56, was the one who persuaded right-wingers Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk to appear on her ex-husband’s new extremist-friendly podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, where the potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate is, in his own words, “exploring the other side” to figure out why Republicans are “kicking our ass.” Not surprisingly, Newsom has been taking some serious heat over the dialogues and for his apparent about-face on issues like trans women in sports (“Deeply unfair,” Newsom called it during his chat with Kirk), and not just from his indigo-blue base. “What the hell is going on with Gavin Newsom?” CNN anchor Erin Burnett wondered out loud during a recent segment about the podcasts. According to insiders, though, the least shocking part of Newsom’s seeming right turn is Guilfoyle’s participation. Newsom, who has been married since 2008 to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, has been friendly with Guilfoyle for years despite her palling around with a president who frequently refers to her ex-husband as “Newscum.” Says one insider: “This doesn’t surprise me at all. Gavin has had a decent professional connection — or maybe transactional is the word — with Kimberly before she started dating Donald Trump Jr. He wasn’t fazed by her political transformation, and he’d talk to her every once in a while. As far as I know, there wasn’t a year that they didn’t talk.” — ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY PETER KIEFER
Ghost Busted! Graydon Carter’s Co-Writer Got Paid How Much?
Graydon Carter became a rich and famous magazine editor by publishing juicy gossip about the rich and famous — so, in honor of his just-published memoir, When the Going Was Good, let’s do some of that for a while. Rumor has it Penguin Press ponied up something close to $900,000 for Carter’s book, in which he details his rise from a Canadian railroad lineman (no joke) to a Time Inc. staff writer to a founding co-editor of the late, great Spy magazine and, finally, to his long tenure as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, the pinnacle of glossy publishing during the late 20th century. Nearly a million dollars may sound like a lot by today’s standards, but back during VF‘s heyday in the late 1990s, Carter, now 75, would sometimes offer mere magazine writers $500,000 contracts to pen a measly three articles a year. More intriguing is how little Carter’s ghostwriter — if ghost is even the term that applies — got paid for the memoir. Sources say James Fox, author of the 1984 best-seller White Mischief as well as Keith Richards’ 2010 memoir, Life, was given a stipend of $10,000 a month over the course of a year, earning about $120,000. Aside from the unusual monthly arrangement — ghostwriters are typically paid an advance upfront and the rest of their pay upon delivery and publication — Fox’s fee seems notably anemic. “U.K. writers tend to be paid less, but I’d be surprised if Fox were only paid that much,” offers a well-placed source in the ghostwriting industry. “Also, we don’t know if Fox did a complete write or whether he just edited what Graydon had written.” No, we don’t, and neither Carter’s publishers nor Fox responded to Rambling’s request for clarification. But Carter recently hinted at how critical Fox had been in getting his memoir between covers. “I’m a writer, so it wasn’t the same as when he worked with Keith Richards,” Carter told The Guardian. “But he was instrumental, showing me how to shape it. Not everything happens in a linear fashion. Nobody wants to read a book that begins in Toronto General Hospital.”
Marvel’s Super Weird Musical Chair Event Draws Record-Breaking Crowd
What were you doing between 8 a.m. and 1:27 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26? Because several million otherwise rational people were glued to their computer screens — for five hours and 27 minutes — watching a camera panning slowly, so very slowly, across a stage filled only with empty director chairs. This was how Marvel Studios unveiled the cast of its next superhero tentpole, Avengers: Doomsday, with a livestream that played out more like an experimental Andy Warhol movie than a pumped-up marketing stunt. While the names inscribed on the 27 director chairs shown on the feed were certainly impressive — Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, plus a bunch of old-timey X-Men (Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Rebecca Romijn) and assorted other MCU regulars (Chris Hemsworth, Paul Rudd and Anthony Mackie) — none of these stars turned up for the event. Or at least almost none. If you stuck around for the full 316 minutes of chair viewing (sometimes accompanied by a trippy, humming, ambient soundtack), you were treated at the end to a very brief appearance by Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr., who sat in his chair and silently mugged for the camera for a moment. The weirdest, most inexplicable part of the bizarre spectacle? Viewers loved it. Marvel’s chair-a-palooza racked up an astonishing 275 million views, making it the biggest livestream in Marvel history. “It was a roaring success,” crows a Marvel source. “Like, very roaring.”
This story appeared in the April 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.