The Imaginary World Inside Bonnie Fuller's Mind

By Brian Moylan, 2:39 PM on Mon Oct 26 2009, 6,072 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Copy this whole post to another site

Slurp cancel

select site advertising consumerist deadspin defamer fleshbot gay fleshbot gawker gizmodo idolator io9 jalopnik jezebel kotaku lifehacker valleywag artists gawkershop sploid gawkertv

Former Star overlord, Bonnie Fuller, has put up the first previews of her upcoming gossip website Hollywood Life. What do they say about her? In her mind, she is really a 14-year-old princess. Oh, and a liar.

From what we've heard, Fuller's redesign looks like what would happen if In Touch and Life & Style got wasted on cosmos and then barfed all over the internet. We can't wait to see what she's come up with when it launches.

But let's give credit where credit's due. In 2003 Fuller essentially invented the celebrity weekly as we know it at Us Weekly. Her editorial vision spawned a newsstand full of imitators — including Star which she took over after Us owner Jann Wenner didn't give her a pay raise — making her perhaps the most influential magazine editor of the last decade. Even more influential than Vogue editrix Anna Wintour, with whom Fuller's has always had a bizarre obsession. But the only category that Fuller has ever topped her idol in has been as the magazine world's scariest boss.

Most baffling to Fuller's put-upon ex-employees, though, is the strange way she imagines herself as Glinda the Good Witch. The full Fuller fantasy is brought to light in these promos, which were illsustrated by Donald Robertson, her former creative director at Glamour and Cosmo: on the inside, she's a little girl who only wears pink dresses, carries a magic wand, and is one with the people. It's a fascinating peek inside her psyche — and almost entirely at odds with reality.