While the world attempted to make sense out of the senseless death of Canadian heartthrob Cory Monteith, a troubled kid from Vancouver who sought and found fortune and fame on the set of Glee, Elaine “Lainey” Lui, a.k.a. Lainey Gossip, separated fiction from fact.
Lui, the country’s keeper of celebrity scorecards — a witty, acerbic Bayview-bred entrepreneur who turned a hobby into a corporation — knew Monteith and liked him. They worked together for Covenant House, which helps at-risk teens. It’s a non-profit organization near and dear to both of their hearts.
“The fact that it happened at home in Vancouver — so close to the people he spent so much time with — is devastating,” says Lui, as she takes a break from her reporting and helping CTV break the story to Monteith’s heartbroken fans to spend a few moments promoting The Social, her anticipated new afternoon talk show.
“It’s been a busy night and day and I have another buzzy night ahead and a very full day tomorrow, but tragedy strikes from time to time. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with that now.”
Lui’s appeal is unique, undeniable and also somehow refreshing. Her website, Lainey Gossip, attracts more than a million unique visitors each month and, what’s inspiring, especially in the dirty, often muckraking world of celebrity scandal, is that Lui appears to actually like the boldfaced names that she covers.
She doesn’t fawn, but she’s also not vicious. She’s thoughtful. And although her site is not above talking showbiz and shoes, she often uses the power of celebrity to discuss difficult, important issues: parenting, fidelity, drug abuse, power.
“Entertainment news seems materialistic and shallow, but you can attach deeper meaning,” says Lui, who often discusses the intricacies of human behavior, in part, based on the relationship between, say, Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj on American Idol or race and sexuality when discussing the linkage of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
“Celebrities, to me, are conduits. They’re vessels to larger discussions — racism, feminism, the motherhood-industrial complex — the vehicle is celebrity, but the story is much more complex.”
Shinan Govani, who covers entertainment in all of its complexities for the National Post, is a Lainey Gossip fan. He says Lui is a master of drawing narratives.
“She’s a true campfire storyteller in the way she weaves gossip. Particularly canny in creating good and evil and inspiring people to either root for someone or take a schadenfreude approach,” Govani says.
“Regular readers of her know, for instance, she’s a Gwyneth apologist, unabashedly so. She takes sides, has a fresh point of view on things — which is actually rarer than you might think in this everyone’s-a-blogger age we live in.”
That side-taking approach began revealing itself to Lui in Bayview, where she began analyzing hierarchies and social strata as she made her way on the Bayview 11 bus in high school. Lui, who attended the Toronto French School and graduated from Lawrence Park Collegiate, recalls her teenaged years as happy, and she still maintains a close relationship with her parents, who live in Hong Kong, then moved to Toronto in 1971. “That bus was eventful because the Crescent [School] boys would get on, and we’d be in our uniforms, and they’d be in their uniforms, and we’d all go and hang out at Bayview Village,” says Lui, who adds that she spent a lot of high school dreaming of one day purchasing an outfit from Robin Kaye. There was Mac’s Milk and Avenue Road and the Yonge Street strip north of Eglinton Avenue where the budding journalist took in the world. “I also used to hang out at the Pickle Barrel mall, at Leslie and McNicoll where my dad used to take me to eat,” she says. “I’d assess the kids on their skateboards.”
In 2000, Lainey moved to Vancouver, but left a fundraising job at the University of British Columbia to return to Toronto in 2002 to care for her mother, who needed a kidney transplant. Not long after this, Lainey returned to Vancouver and worked as a development officer at Covenant House. It was during this time (2005-ish) when Lui began sending e-mails to her friends back home in Toronto, ostensibly soft launching Lainey Gossip in the process.
“I was writing about mother and then just, you know, ‘Oh, did you hear what happened to Christina Aguilera?’ They started sending it to their friends,” says Lui, who began blogging in the web’s nascent days before Gawker, Huffington Post or Perez.
“Pretty soon, there were thousands of people on my distribution list. and it was shocking, but I was always interested in gossip. Growing up in a Chinese household, I was obsessed with Chinese movie stars — then boy bands, Madonna and Michael Jackson. It just didn’t occur to me it could be a job.”
That job has grown by leaps and bounds from the launch of the website to a CTV reporting gig to its newest, biggest incarnation to date: as one of four hosts of an upcoming afternoon talk show called The Social. The show is premiering September 2nd on CTV (just in time for TIFF), and features Lui alongside news anchor Melissa Grelo, relationship expert Cynthia Loyst and entertainment reporter Traci Melchor, discussing the celebrity dish of the day. It’s been called the Canadian version of The View, and Lui says the show is long overdo.
“The tone’s going to be fun, first and foremost, but provocative as readers of my blog know I always say what I want to say,” she says. “It’s like we’re going to be hanging out on a Friday night after work with a glass of wine.”
Of course, the one-hour series, which will be filmed live before a studio audience and rely heavily on social media to attract input from fans, will cover the orbit of the rich and beautiful. However, Lui says that the movie stars and fashion models, the professional athletes and the millionaires are sometimes like Trojan horses. There will be discussions about who’s dating whom and who wore what to the black carpets of TIFF, whom Clooney’s dating and why Justin Bieber can’t shut up, but Lui envisions a program with substantive, in-depth discussions. Celebrities are just like us, goes the Us Weekly tag line, and when we spoke with Lui, unfortunately, one of us — Cory Monteith — had died too soon.
“I knew him a bit socially, being Canadian and being in the industry, and his death is a shock. Devastating,” Lui says. “In understanding celebrity, you can detect common human behaviour and synthesize, about larger topics, how we feel.”