Glossed Over

Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase, The Merciful End

So, this Jean Godfrey-June book ?  It goes on for an awful long time about lunches.  Sometimes companies serve lavish midday meals at fancy restaurants in order to garner good press!  Real shocker there.  And there are about forty-seven explanations of why she hates having her picture taken.  And then there are a billion pages—approximately—describing various levels of intrigue she faced during her tenure at Elle, which might have been interesting, except that every player is saddled with a cumbersome code name like “Above the Fray.”  The French execs at the magazine try to use European photo shoots in the American edition, and Above the Fray tussles with Eminence Grise and the Playboy and the Fashionista, and, well, there’s a reason we don’t watch daytime soap operas.

We can barely get through the one page she pens in Lucky, so it was clearly expecting too much that we’d be entertained all the way through a 271-page book that consists entirely of poorly organized personal anecdotes and impossible-to-execute beauty tips.  (We tried that concealer stripe, by the way.  No dice.)

All we really wanted out of this book was dirt about Lucky and/or Kim France. And now that we've read every single page, some of them twice because they were so incomprehensible, we’ve compiled a list, based mostly on the book’s final chapter, of the details we gleaned.  We hope that these small morsels of information will be enough to prevent all of you from undertaking the onerous task of reading Free Gift with Purchase.

1. Jean’s office at the magazine is “private-but-not-exactly-private.”  We don’t know what that means either!  Apparently, Jean is so confident in her descriptive abilities that she doesn’t feel the need to expound on this.

2. Speaking of nebulous descriptions:

If Kim uses the word perfect to describe someone, it’s not a good sign.  “She’s overperfect!” Kim once said of an impeccable, extremely fashiony [agh!] staff member, who, incidentally, ejected herself early on.  (There are plenty of superhot gals at Lucky, don’t get me wrong, by perfect I mean that smug, overly groomed, tucked-and-folded-scarf thing that some pretty girls feel enhances their attractiveness.)

3. In a departure from the magazine world’s status quo, the fashion department is “not mean.”  What a ringing endorsement!

4. Kim France has banned the use of certain words in the magazine, which explains why they feel the need to make up new ones!

…we ripped through “bohemian” in the first year; “glamorous” and “amazing” are currently on the endangered list.  “Fashionista” has been banned from the start.

5. Flattery will get you everywhere at Lucky.

Kim is smart smart smart and beautiful and successful (I know, it’s kissing up to the boss, but it’s true)...

6. We believe this claim is a blatant lie:

My test for any piece of writing I’m involved with is known around the office as the “Say this aloud to your smartest friend” test.  Would the friend look at you as if you were crazy?  Don’t write it that way, then.

Really?  Really?  Either Jean doesn’t know anyone who’s very smart, or her friends have a high tolerance for insanity.

7. Finally, Jean once attempted to wear a pair of mold-encrusted shoes to party.  Which, presumably, is why she’s writing about makeup and not about fashion.

Next up in the Glossed Over book club? Falling Out of Fashion, written by Jane Pratt’s former assistant Karen Yampolsky, is the almost-true tale of the editor-in-chief of Sassy and Jane magazines.  We don’t want to give too much away, but we can tell you this much: editorial wunderkind Jill White has an absolutely stellar assistant! 

Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase, Chapters Two-Four

Chapter Two:  This is the chapter that made us almost—almost—like Jean Godfrey-June.  (Don’t worry—the feeling quickly faded.)  Her tale of sneaking into the bathroom to apply makeup before her boyfriend woke up struck a chord with us.  Her recollection of a science teacher who turned slaughterhouse remnants into Viking helmets did not.  There was an actual point to the story, something trite about how beauty rituals allow people to have control in a chaotic world, but we aren’t sure how the science teacher anecdote related to it, and we refuse to read those paragraphs again.  Ew.

Chapter Three: Jean’s father eats tuna covered in ketchup and molasses every morning.  We’re sure there was more substance (or at least more text) to this chapter, but that disgusting concoction is pretty much all we remember.  Oh!  And she’s always had the obnoxious habit of adding suffixes to extant words to create, well, non-extant ones.  As a child, she added “-ington” to people’s names—Jeanington, etc.  And, in a stunning display of naivete or stupidity, she chose to attend the University of Colorado because the subscription cards in her favorite magazines were addressed to Boulder, and she therefore assumed that the city was a hotbed of periodical publishing.  Sure, we’ve made life choices based on false information too, but you don’t see us writing about them for the world to see, do you?

Chapter Four: In what is surely its first appearance ever, the phrase “nasolabial-fold-emphasizing” appears in a story about getting a pedicure with a porn star.  (And we’re not sure what this says about our reading material, but we’ve seen that  “nasolabial” everywhere lately, usually followed by the admonition that it’s not dirty.  Enough!  We know!)  There are multiple tales of beauty rivalries with friends that are neither interesting nor vicious nor revelatory.  Beauty tip: Lauren Hutton suggests drawing a concealer stripe down the center of your nose  to make it look smaller.  And news flash!  Models endorsing beauty products are just there to collect a paycheck.  One unnamed model floundered when it was her turn to present the products to Jean; another anonymous mannequin admitted publicly that she had never smelled the fragance she was touting.

Next up: Jean continues her series of stories that are probably charming if you know her personally but are inexorably dull to the those of us who don’t.  Also, she goes out to lunch!  A lot!

Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase

Last week, we celebrated our birthday.  And now we’re old!  Awesome!  One of our gifts was a copy of Jean Godfrey-June’s book, Free Gift with Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup.  We didn’t open it for a few days because, well, we were busy studying the bags under our eyes.  But last night, we put on our glasses and succumbed to the siren call of the paperback.  We couldn’t hold off any longer. Godfrey-June’s column is the second thing we read in Lucky every month, right after Kim France’s letter from the editor.  And we had so many questions! 

• Would Godfrey-June’s aversion to plastic surgery somehow make us feel better about our aging face?  Not so far!

• Were the descriptors inside as shamelessly fabricated as the words in her monthly column?  Sure, if you count the use of “tint-y.”

• Would the book be crammed with lengthy go-nowhere personal anecdotes?  Well, yeah.  Like the book would even exist without boring tales from her childhood?

• And would she spill any insider dirt about Lucky?  Sort of.  But we’re only on the first chapter.  Hope abounds!

After the jump, the highlights from Chapter One.