> OFF THE RACK
US
Cover: Meghan Markle meets the monarch! The Suits star apparently was introduced to Queen Liz and “it went well,” so nobody got beheaded or anything. This comes after Megs and Harry holidayed in Botswana and Zambia — one of those little tests you put a future wife through to make sure she’s not a typical Hollywood actress. Sick flick picks: The mag’s fall movie preview seems to concentrate on the underwhelming-sounding projects (a Justin Long love story, A Bad Moms Christmas). Go ahead and cocoon yourself with Netflix until spring. Mother load: A bit of relief for gossip readers: a two-page spread dedicated to Heidi Montag’s baby shower, attended by Perez Hilton, is a nice peek into a life you’re not one bit jealous of.
IN TOUCH
Cover: The kids get to decorate their rooms at the Jolie house in L.A. and so it looks like “a cross between a trashed frat house and a DayGlocovered rave club.” I’m not sure any house with six kids would be wildly different, and these six — Flummox, Humidex, Rolodex, Kalahari, Dix and Mugler — have been raised without rules. Maybe a visit from grandpa Jon Voight would scare them straight? It’d work on me, anyhow. Split disturber: A piece on Mel (Scary Spice) Brown is billed as “Hollywood’s dirtiest divorce ever” and for once it doesn’t disappoint! Drugs, booze, blackmail, theft of millions and a nanny who sleeps with both of them. (And whose photo looks like a ghost of a murder victim staring at you from a haunted painting.)
STAR
Cover: I missed the cut again in Best Beach Bodies, but there was only so much room in a photo spread that included the backsides of both Amber Rose and Kim Kardashian. The latter in particular looks suspiciously like a flotation device, but the mag’s real scorn is reserved for dudes who dared to get old: Kurt Russell, Banderas, Hasselhoff. Walk into the ocean, guys — you’re blocking the view of Scott Eastwood. Expecting/projecting: A piece on Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani’s wedding plans insists, via an aside, that she’s pregnant, in the manner of a conspiracy-minded uncle who still sneaks it in (“Nice to see the Queen — one of the alien lizards, by the way — meet with that TV actress”). Garnet Fraser