Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Hello! Magazine
HELLO! magazine celebrates its 1,000 issue. “HAPPY 1,000,” it says to itself a little self-indulgently.
We can forgive the magazine slapping itself on the back. When you reach 1,000 you are liable to talk to yourself and repeat things you’ve said 1,000 times before.
Anorak has been reading Hello! since the first issue and today brings you Ten Things You Never Knew about the magazine:
10: The 1,000th issue promises a retrospective on “UNFORGETTABLE COVERS” but fails to include the picture of Liza Minnelli and David Gest’s wedding in 2002. Anorak recalls the happy couple stood alongside Elizabeth Taylor, and best man Michael Jackson. Hello! forgets. But we cannot
9. The wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest was held at Madame Tussaud’s, and, indeed, it was only when Jackson sneezed that guessed realised they had been showering the wax look-alikes with rice and confetti and not the real flesh and bone persons. Mr Jackson’s noses are believed to have become switched in the confusion.
8. The Minnelli-Gest coupling was not to last. It was Gest who told us his wife had beat him. “You see I had terrible concussion from when I was in England and Liza was drunk. I’d picked her up and lifted her over my head, and because she’s so violent when she’s drunk, she hit the back of my head, bang, bang, 20 times. I pulled her down and she hit me again 20 times. Then four weeks later in Hawaii, my head exploded.”
7. Gest later told us: “Did you know I’m kind of an unofficial mascot at Arsenal? I love hearing the fans screaming, ‘Gesty! Go, Gesty!”
6. Gest was appearing in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. Minnelli was heard to utter: “I hope David Gest gets “f*****d by a kangaroo and eaten by crocs.” Ant ‘n’ Dec said it was too late for any news games and thanked Minnelli for her input.
5. The Minnelli-Gest uncoupling was not an isolated incident but part of the greater Curse of Hello!. One example was provided by the model Helena Christensen who offered: “Michael [Hutchence] and I love each other and, although we both have to travel a lot, we have a very steady relationship . . .” The statement of love was punctuated by an official missive: “Michael Hutchence and Helena Christensen have announced today they . . . will be spending time apart.”
Chris Hutchins, the gossip writer for the now defunct Today newspaper, opined: “It looks as if famous people who are about to split up first call their press agents and say `fix us a spread in Hello!’. It’s uncanny.”
4. 1,715 of the individuals featured on the cover have suffered “verifiable misfortunes” after appearing in Hello!. Footballers have had the worst luck (78%), followed by soap actresses (64%), reality TV stars (51%), boyband singers (41%) and marine biologists (1%).
3. No celebrity has ever burped, farted, sworn, or looked anything less than “stunning”. “It’s unbelievable,” says one former Hello! contributor. “Once, a reference to ‘light perspiration’ on the brow of a celebrity interviewee was deleted from a story and the entire print run pulped.
2. Says an insider: “In my day, if we had gone off to a celebrity interview and come back without a news story, we’d have been killed.”
1. When Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes is was declared the “Wedding of the Century”. There have been seven such weddings, five “weddings of the decade” (including two on the one day) and 23 “weddings of the year”.
* Anorak is aware that Minnelli and Gest sold the exclusive rights to their wedding to OK! magazine, just as Catherine Zeta- Jones and Michael Douglas had done…
Posted: 12th, December 2007 | In: Celebrities, Hello! Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
