Kate’s great date
Haven’t yet decided whether to attend the royal wedding or stay home and trim the hedges? These magazines offer info that could help you make up your mind.
Which celebs have received coveted invites to the big day? The scuttlebutt from Royalty Monthly is scant, going little further than the Beckhams and Elton John. “What is known is that gentlemen are required to wear uniform, morning coat or lounge suit.” And who will design Kate Middleton’s dress? Bruce Oldfield is “the leading contender,” the mag says on page 26. On page 78, however, we’re told that Phillipa Lepley is “the favorite.” In any case, better to be one of those two than Jasper Conran, who is “on the shortlist of possible designers,” and who can be found on page 55, obsequiously shaking hands with Prince Charles.
Exactly how old is the readership of Majesty? Searching for clues, one mustn’t overlook the fact that oil paintings, in addition to black-and-white photographs, comprise a significant fraction of the illustrations. “On 17 March the title ‘King of Italy’ was created,” begins one article. “On 16 March 1861, the Duchess of Kent died,” teases another. But for positive confirmation that core readers, on average, remember the beheading of Anne Boleyn like it was yesterday, look no further than the letters to the editor. “I was horrified when I learned on the BBC Web site that Miss Middleton is going to travel by car to Westminster Abbey on her wedding day,” one reader fulminates. “Miss Middleton should travel by carriage.”
Candace Trunzo’s Star magazine offers up high-gloss treatment of the upcoming royal nuptials set for April 29 in a collector’s edition titled “Wedding of the Century.” The celebrity rag’s special edition is chock full of snapshots of Prince William and his-soon-to-be royal wife that might come off as a bit canned to some readers. Star tries to let the text take a backseat to the litany of photos of Kate and William taken over the past 20 years or so. At times, the pics offer raw footage of a tomboy-ish, sometimes rather dowdy Kate and William in their awkward years as well as of their budding romance, and later painful and short-lived breakup that sent Diana’s eldest son on a bit of bender in 2007.
Royal Scandals & Shockers from National Enquirer is thankfully free of all the squeaky clean wedding hoopla surrounding William and Kate. Instead, this 82-page magazine digs up the most scurrilous of rumors about every branch of the royal family, ranging from the intriguing history of Queen Elizabeth’s coziness with actor Richard Burton to speculation about Diana Spencer’s real father being businessman James Goldsmith. It is a right royal romp through every affair and unfortunate association of the queen and her kin. For those of us who even now can’t get enough of photos of Diana, there’s plenty of shots of her with a string of men friends from James Gilbey to Dodi Fayed. The title has enough juice on the British aristocracy to put the Borgias to shame, but in lathering up the more unlikely gossip, “Charles’ Gay Sex Bombshell,” the magazine hurts the credence of the rest of its coverage.
The business of this issue of New York is business, beginning with the cover headlines “Wall Street Won” and “So Why Is It So Worried?” Neither snoozer can match the profile of Lynn Tilton, a female tycoon making it in a man’s world. It tells, among other things, of the time Tilton grabbed a CEO by the knot of his tie and shoved him against the wall. Another article wonders whether US Attorney Preet Bharara, despite collecting 30 insider-trading guilty pleas, is fighting the right battles. “. . . unlike [Rudolph] Giuliani or [Eliot] Spitzer,” the article says, “he doesn’t seem to be hauling in the biggest bad guys of his time.”
Did David Foster Wallace die from being overly self-involved? A year after the suicide of the literary virtuoso, his friend and fellow luminary Jonathan Franzen writes a piece for the New Yorker that compares Wallace to Robinson Crusoe, whose descent into madness on a desert island “showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is.” We find this pretty interesting, given that Wallace was held up to be among the brightest literary lights of our age. “David had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels,” Franzen writes. Despite Wallace’s “belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude,” he came to view suicide as “a sort of present to himself.”
Amid all the sesquicentennial Civil War retrospectives, Time seizes on one of the most compelling themes we’ve seen yet: the fact that most of us still parrot what we were taught in school — that the North and South were fighting over the issue of states’ rights. “There is still this need to deny that slavery was the cause of the war,” a Yale historian laments. But slavery was “not incidental to America’s origins; it was central,” the magazine says, noting that there were slaves at Jamestown and that slaves built the White House. Elsewhere, columnist Joe Klein does a good job of depicting the exuberance and confusion that has engulfed Cairo since the fall of President Mubarak.
Newsweek‘s cover story takes us “Inside the Gabby Giffords Drama,” only to let the air out of it. Amid breathless media reports of a possible Senate bid, the Arizona congresswoman’s recovery from a Jan. 8 assassination attempt has left her with brain injuries, and she is “never going to be the exact same person,” her doctor says. Elsewhere, there’s a piece that skewers House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Leading the GOP’s budget-slashing efforts, Ryan is “an Ayn Rand nut,” according to the mag, who requires his staff “to digest her creepy tracts,” which “view the poor as parasites — and the rich as our rightful rulers.”