Kate’s guest editor gig reflects a weird affinity
So the Duchess of Cambridge — that’s Kate, née Middleton when she’s at home — will be guest-editor for a day at the Huffington Post. Not quite Queen for a Day, the old radio/ television giveaway-prize show. But, come the day, Kate will be real Queen for the rest of her life.
It’s all in aid of a philanthropic cause, as just about any royal undertaking beyond state functions must be to make the official engagements calendar. The Duchess, who is patron of several children’s charities, will be focusing on articles related to childhood mental illness when next month she swaps her tiara for an editor’s green eyeshade and shirtsleeve garters. (Nobody actually wears those anymore, sadly.) In swapping her yummy-mummy responsibilities for 24 hours, Kate won’t be slumming ’round with ink-stained wretches. The Huffington Post is an online website. There is no ink. (Sometimes I think I’m the only person who still takes handwritten notes. Even in court, reporters are now banging away on laptops and iPhones.)
Anyway, this isn’t new territory for royalty. Kate is following in the footsteps of Prince Charles, guest-hack of a Country Life issue a couple of years ago, which afforded him the opportunity to promote his personal agenda for un-ugly modern architecture. Another monarchist-inwaiting — clearly too much time on their hands — the Crown Prince of Denmark, likewise assumed the story and layout reins for the Danish edition of metroXpress in 2012.
While I don’t quite understand what draws journalism and celebrity towards each other, there’s quite a long history of this weird affinity, most recently and controversially Sean Penn donning his investigative sombrero, nailing down a face-toface interview with notorious drug kingpin Joaquin Guzman — which resulted, unwittingly, in the fugitive’s arrest last weekend.
(According to the latest reports, El Chapo had never even heard of Penn and was far more interested in nailing a face-to-face with the actor’s intermediary, Mexican soap star Kate del Castillo. Guzman is married to former beauty queen Emma Coronel — Miss Coffee and Guava 2007 — but has a mucho roving eye.)
Perhaps bold-face people are just flattered at being offered an editor-gig, thrilled that magazines and newspapers are appealing to their brainy bona fides. Bono, endless nag of social causes, has guest-edited The Independent. So did fellow activist George Clooney. In startling anti-typecasting, the sober New Statesman got comedian Russell Brand to sit in the story-slot. And no less a sophisticated publication than The New Yorker lured vulgarian Roseanne Barr to guest-boss one of its issues way back in 1996, though there may have been an inside joke in play.
Lady Gaga showed up for her editor turn at London’s Metro paper with a dazzling hunk of jewelry hanging from her right breast, leading a newsroom discussion about the Japanese earthquake and transgender issues. French Vogue had editions guest-edited by Salvador Dali and David Hockney.
More frequently and latterly it’s the lifestyle mags that tap into celebrity culture for a bit of freelance editor flair. Marie Claire has extended guest editorships to Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon and Ms. Pretentious Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s pronounced on everything from raw food diets (“I’d rather smoke crack than eat from a tin’’) to steam-cleaning one’s uterus.
The Star, no slouch in the celebrity-by-association department, has also dipped into the luminary bucket for hands-on newspaper-shaping, with guest-editorships accepted by the Dalai Lama, Ken Dryden and, er, William Shatner. I thought Ed Asner — who played an editor on TV — had ruled this newsroom for a day as well. I misremembered. It was the Toronto Sun where he wielded his blue pencil, and that tab sure needs blue-pencilling. (I ran into Asner at the old Toronto Press Club. We got into a shouting match over something or other; perchance he was still in editor character.) It was Asner’s co-star Mary Tyler Moore who did a movie shoot down here at One Yonge Street. Her photo ran in the Sunday Star with then-editor Lou Clancy, (caption: “Mary meets a real Lou,’’) picked up by a ton of U.S. supermarket tabloids. The Star newsroom also stood in for the Washington Post during filming of All the President’s Men.
But I digress. (That’s why you have editors, to slash out meandering.)
At the risk of further alienating my own mob of editors, I’m thinking this isn’t really a tough job because seemingly anybody can do it.
Perhaps we should start offering guest-reporting gigs too, no-pay outsourcing, a new business model for an industry in existential turmoil.
Columnist-for-a-day! No experience required.
Mea culpa: Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s funeral was in 2000, not last century. That was a helluva typo in my Friday column. Maybe a guest-editor would have caught it. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.