For months there's been rumors that Vanity Fair magazine was planning to publish an "epic takedown" piece on actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The rumored expose would supposedly blow the lid off her alleged affair, nasty breakups with friends and more.
The feud between Paltrow and Vanity Fair took off on the Internet. There were stories claiming that the "Iron Man 3" star emailed all her Hollywood friends begging them not to talk to the magazine about her and she had plans to ruin their annual Oscars party.
Publicly, Vanity Fair has not addressed the rumors until now. Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter opened up about the supposed "takedown expose" in the Editor's Letter for the magazine's March issue. He explained that he had assigned contributing editor Vanessa Grigoriadis to write an essay on Paltrow's polarizing personality.
According to E! News, Carter said the whole thing started innocently. He thought it would be an interesting piece after he noticed how "people tend to have passionate opinions on the actress."
"Vanessa turned in her story at the end of the summer," Carter said in the Editor's Letter. "And it was just what had been assigned - a reasoned, reported essay on the hate/love-fest that encircles Gwyneth Paltrow. I thought it perfectly explained the whole phenomenon. But it was such a far cry from the almost mythical story that people were by now expecting - the 'epic takedown,' filled with 'bombshell' revelations - that it was bound to be a disappointment."
Not sure what to do, Carter said he decided the best thing was to hold off on publishing the story. The story, still gaining steam on the Internet, prompted the actress to call Carter in October.
"We talked for about 20 minutes about the story and her reaction, or over-reaction, to it. At one point, she asked my advice as to what to do to get the 'haters' on her side. I suggested putting on 15 pounds," he wrote. "I joked that it works for me. She replied I had put on much more than that. Which I thought was fair and funny."
He said a few months after that phone call stories started popping up saying that Paltrow and Carter had buried the hatchet and called truce. The EIC said the magazine then started to get hate mail because people felt they were "caving."
"We were in uncharted waters. At Vanity Fair, we tend to keep stories we are working on under our hats. It's not easy being a monthly magazine in an internet age, and since most of the publications we compete with are weeklies or dailies, when it comes to the stories still in train, a certain amount of institutional secrecy is required," Carter said. "The Gwyneth Paltrow saga had clearly just gotten away from us. My instinct was to continue to let it sit until people had forgotten about it, or at least until expectations had diminished."
Carter went on to explain that he wasn't sure what to do with the already-written Paltrow piece because it was completely different than what "anti-Gwynethites" were expecting.
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