The article caused a furor, both nationally and within the Times. Editorial writers at other papers castigated its editors. At a meeting attended by more than 300 reporters, people filled the Times’s auditorium and lined the aisles. Up front, Times editor Max Frankel, who had been in favor of publishing the victim’s name even before NBC News broadcast it because he felt it unfair that Willie Smith’s reputation should be damaged while she remained anonymous, received the brunt of the attacks. One female reporter said, “We don’t understand why you’ve got New York Times reporters peeping in windows.” Another complained the paper had “crucified” Bowman. A third described the article as “tabloid journalism.” When nation section editor Soma Golden, who was standing with Frankel, said people who found fault with the article had “weird minds,” many in the audience hissed, and one reporter responded, “The people with the weird minds are the ones who thought this was journalism.”
Frankel defended his decision by pointing to NBC; one of the paper’s columnists asked why the Times would rely on the judgment of others and wondered where the line would be drawn—at Hard Copy or MTV? “We’ll know it when we see it,” Frankel replied. By the end of the day, however, Frankel was retreating. A few days later, the editors published an “editor’s note” regretting the article, but laying most of the blame for it on Butterfield. The editors of the New York Times appeared to have become completely disoriented. And indeed, Soma Golden told the Washington Post that the incident was “the most troubling time of my career.” Dan Schwartz, editor of the National Enquirer, which had thoroughly reported the story without naming Bowman, said of the New York Times, “I think we took a more ethical stand than they did.”
Willie Smith’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, and his cousin Patrick, the Senator’s son, had also been at the mansion the night the alleged rape took place but they could be expected to back up Willie’s story. The other two crucial witnesses were Anne Mercer, a friend of the victim’s who had gone with her to Au Bar, the nightclub where she met Willie Smith, and Michelle Cassone, a young off-duty waitress whom Patrick Kennedy had met at Au Bar that same night and had brought back to the family mansion. Among the journalists arriving in Palm Beach in the days after the report was filed, the competition to nail down the first exclusive from either of these witnesses, and from the victim herself, was intense.
At this time, not only were tabloid news organizations paying for interviews, they had vastly increased the amounts they could afford to pay by putting together consortiums—groups of news organizations from different parts of the world who would contribute to the payoff in exchange for exclusive rights to the interview in their geographical region. Hard Copy, having put together one such consortium with participating media from as far away as Australia, offered Bowman’s attorney, David Roth, $500,000 for an exclusive with the victim and was prepared to go as high as $1 million.
Roth made it clear that his client would talk to no one for any amount until the trial was over. But the paying media had better luck with Bowman’s two supporting witnesses. Less than a week into the story, the Post reportedly paid an undisclosed amount to Cassone for her account of the evening, including the claim that she had seen Ted Kennedy walking around the mansion late at night dressed only in a nightshirt—”pantless,” as the Post called him—and published it under the headline “TEDDY’S SEXY ROMP!”
Soon, any journalist with the inclination had interviewed Cassone, who was also invited to New York, where she made the rounds of talk radio, such as Curtis and Lisa Sliwa’s show, and appeared on Geraldo and Sally Jessy Raphael. Then, once her usefulness as a witness had been corrupted by overexposure and payoffs, she herself became a victim.
In late May, in exchange for £9,400, a former boyfriend of Michelle Cassone gave Balfour photos of her, naked, performing oral sex on him. Balfour passed them on to Dunleavy, who invited Cassone to New York to make a studio appearance on the show. After lunch at the 21 Club, they arrived at the Current Affair set. With the cameras rolling, Dunleavy asked Cassone about the rumors that she was going to pose nude for Penthouse. Cassone replied that she could never take her clothes off for a photographer. “It would kill my mother,” she told Dunleavy. At that point, Dunleavy pulled out the photographs of Cassone having sex that Balfour had purchased. Cassone, mortified and incensed, grabbed at the pictures and began hitting the man who had just taken her to lunch at 21. She kneed him in the groin and bit his hand—all while the cameras rolled. When the footage was aired that night, the show earned the highest ratings it would receive all year. Dunleavy treated the entire incident as a joke. “As a man you can’t run away,” he said of Cassone’s attack. “As a gentleman you can’t respond. So you just had to take it. And when she pulled up the knee, then suddenly I was in the Lutan Boys Choir, you know, singing my high C.”
It was A Current Affair that also got the first exclusive from Anne Mercer, the woman Patricia Bowman had called to come rescue her from the Kennedy mansion. The fee she finally received, $25,000, was far less than the $150,000 she had originally been offered because by the time she agreed to talk to the show, the police had released the transcripts of her statements, which significantly reduced the news value of what she would say on air.
By the time the trial started the following fall—”Gentlemen,” an article in the Palm Beach Post declared as it began, “to the sewers!”—A Current Affair and its staff had gone from covering the story to playing a crucial role in its outcome. It had produced some forty segments on the case, and a number of them were indeed pivotal, newsmaking “Exclusives!” In addition to the pieces on Mercer and Cassone, it had interviewed Tony Liott, the bartender whose testimony undermined Patricia Bowman’s credibility, and Ewell Tournquists, a waiter who’d provided an account of Senator Kennedy’s alleged drunkenness. During jury selection, Willie Smith’s attorney Roy Black mentioned the program and Dunleavy as often as once an hour while quizzing potential jurors about which segments they had seen. Overexposure to the show was grounds for disqualification.
Then on the opening day of the trial, prosecutor Moira Lasch, having decided not to call Michelle Cassone at all because she had been so tainted by her involvement with A Current Affair, called Anne Mercer as her first witness. Under cross-examination by Roy Black, Mercer, the thirty-year-old daughter of a wealthy real-estate developer with reported ties to organized crime, admitted that A Current Affair had paid her $25,000 for her first interview, which she had spent on a vacation to Mexico with her boyfriend, and another $15,000 for a second interview that very evening. The admission discredited her testimony. Dunleavy, together with Mercer’s attorney, Raoul Felder, escorted her from the courthouse. Later, Felder turned on Mercer, appearing on A Current Affair and saying she “once was a poor little rich girl who was used to getting her way with everything. She still had this air that she was rich, famous, and arrogant. There was this attitude, ‘Who are you to question me?’ It was that attitude that killed her on the stand.”
In the end, the trial damaged almost everyone it touched. Patricia Bowman was forever scarred. The Kennedy family’s reputation had received yet another serious blow. The editorial judgment of the New York Times had been denounced throughout the country. Cable television, however, had profited handsomely. The day the trial opened, CNN’s audience increased 57 percent. The following day it rose 71 percent. And on the day Patricia Bowman testified, it climbed 142 percent. But the biggest winners were the tabloid news shows. During the sweep-month ratings in November as the trial was getting under way, Hard Copy had a 6 Nielsen rating, up from the 4.6 of the previous year, and Inside Edition had a 6.8 rating, up from a 5.6. But the leader was A Current Affair, with an 8.8 rating, up from an 8.2 a year earlier.
Shortly after the verdict, in acknowledgment of the show’s moment of triumph, the New York Times, whom Dunleavy regularly excoriated as stuffy and stiff and boring, ran its affectionate profile of the reporter, calling him “the undisputed maharajah of tabloid television” and “t
he ringmaster” of “a media circus.” It was an ironic tribute coming from a. paper that had so publicly bungled its coverage of the story. But it was significant nonetheless. The media establishment seemed to be admitting that, in 1991, it had ceded the field—or at least the role of defining the news—to the tabloid press that one of its reigning members had once haughtily denounced as a “force of evil.”
16
the gatekeepers
Tom Cruise, the world’s biggest movie star, was coming to New York the first weekend in December 1996, and entertainment reporters from around the country flew in to interview him. TriStar was releasing Cruise’s Jerry Maguire and the elusive star was attending the glittering premiere onboard the luxury liner Galaxy, as well as the world premiere of Portrait of a Lady, starring his wife Nicole Kidman. “The couple that premieres together stays together,” declared Liz Smith.
In recent months, however, rumors were swirling that the couple’s marriage was troubled. There were reports of ugly arguments and talk that the couple was spending more and more time apart. When Kidman showed up at the black tie post-premiere party for her movie, she looked lovely in a shimmering green gown. She carefully fielded questions about her marriage. “Tom and I are heterosexuals,” the actress said in an even voice. “We have a great marriage. We have two wonderful children. It’s all just vicious, hurtful lies dreamed up to sell magazines and newspapers.” Tom Cruise didn’t have to deal with the prying reporters. He ditched the party and left his wife to fend for herself.
At the Regency Hotel that Saturday, journalists had been invited to interview the stars of Jerry Maguire. When they realized that Cruise was going to be a no-show, a halfhearted revolt erupted. “Show Me the Money!” the reporters chanted.
“I know it’s frustrating for you guys,” said director Cameron Crowe, himself a former journalist who had profiled Cruise for Interview magazine. Crowe explained that Cruise was just too busy with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut to meet with them. “Kubrick only let him loose for forty-eight hours,” Crowe said. “I’m grateful that he’s packing everything into that time.” In that time, Cruise gave interviews to the Today Show, Larry King Live, and avowed Cruise fan Rosie O’Donnell. He also gave a press conference to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
It wasn’t just that Tom was rushed for time, the reporters knew. The actor hated the American press. Journalists who showed up at the Regency with hopes of interviewing Cruise were left quoting the nice things his co-stars said about him. Some of the reporters felt used—they grumbled about the absurdity of gathering flattering comments about a celebrity who refused to speak to them. “Why don’t you guys lighten up on Tom?” said Bonnie Hunt, the actress who played the sister of Cruise’s love interest in Jerry Maguire. “He’s a bit press-shy but he’s a truly nice person. It’s not easy being a superstar.”
And no one was a bigger star than Tom Cruise. There’s a Hollywood axiom that on the way up, stars hire publicists to get them press, once they’ve arrived, they hire publicists to protect them from the press. Now, Tom Cruise was doing the seemingly impossible. He was getting good press without having to deal with reporters.
The journalists knew who had created this situation. It was Cruise’s publicist, Pat Kingsley. Among many reporters, Kingsley was the most feared, most loathed woman in Hollywood. In recent years, she had virtually denied print access to most of her bigger clients. Newspaper and magazine reporters, she complained, were always digging for information on stars. Facts, reporting, and real information were enemies of the Hollywood image machine. If Kingsley had her way, she once admitted, profiles of her clients would include almost no information about them. “I don’t like interesting stories,” Kingsley said. “Boring is good. Good reporting and good writing don’t help my client. New information is usually controversial. I don’t need that. People don’t read. The text doesn’t matter.” All she really cared about was getting her clients’ pictures on the covers of magazines. “Why do you always get to decide who’s on your cover?” she asked an editor in 1990. By 1997, Pat Kingsley sometimes got to decide.
It had all begun five years earlier, during the publicity campaign for Far and Away. The movie was imminently forgettable, but the junket had a major turning point in the world of entertainment journalism. It was then that Pat Kingsley first made journalists sign contracts, imposing terms on their interviews with Cruise. At the time, there was outrage over the then-unheard-of restrictions. With each of Cruise’s movies, however, the conditions had gotten increasingly prohibitive. By the time of the Jerry Maguire screening, the Far and Away junket seemed like the good old days.
Pat Kingsley arrived at the Four Seasons Hotel on the morning of May 9, 1992, and braced herself for a harrowing experience: protecting Tom Cruise from the media. Nearly one hundred reporters from around the country meandered around that Saturday, eager to interview Cruise. Kingsley eyed them suspiciously, interrogating people with a cutting Southern twang that softened into a soothing drawl when it was directed at her high-strung movie star clients. Kingsley was a tall, formidable woman whose blond hair fell in a blunt bob around her strong jaw; she had unflinching eyes and a determined gait that followed wherever her chin led. Pat Kingsley was the first and most powerful of the new breed of publicist: the gatekeeper. She did not subscribe to the theory that any publicity is good publicity; she spent more time squashing stories than she did peddling the celebrities she represented. “The people get used to you awfully fast,” Kingsley would warn her clients. “You never want them to get too much of you.”
Unfortunately, there were times when even stars as big as Tom Cruise had to deal with the media, and this weekend was one of those times. Cruise and Nicole Kidman were starring in Far and Away, a $62 million historic, romantic, comic epic directed by Ron Howard and distributed by Universal. The studio had an especially tough job with Far and Away. The movie was a clunker, and Universal knew it. It was one of Cruise’s few misfires, and only his star power—and a skillful manipulation of the press—could save it from being a box office bomb. Cruise was getting paid $12.5 million to appear in the movie, and under the terms of his contract, he was required to do a “reasonable amount” of publicity. Cruise’s contract also forced Universal to hire Kingsley and her firm, PMK, to promote Far and Away.
The arrangement rankled Universal, which already had its own promotion staff. Studio press agents complained that personal publicists like Kingsley were more interested in pacifying their temperamental stars than they were in promoting films. The criticism didn’t bother Kingsley. “That kind of rap has been around,” she said dismissively. Studio publicists had too many films to promote to give each one sufficient attention, Kingsley said. What’s more, “studio publicists don’t have the confidence” of stars like Tom Cruise, Kingsley said. “That’s why a publicist like myself is there—to act as a liaison and work on cooperation.”
There was nothing cooperative, some Universal executives grumbled, about Kingsley’s work on Far and Away. The studio was sponsoring a junket to promote the movie: at Universal’s expense, journalists from around the country were flown into Los Angeles and put up at the Four Seasons for the weekend. The print reporters were divided into groups of about ten and led into rooms where they would be granted short group “interviews” with the stars and principals of Far and Away. The drill with television journalists was similar: each would be escorted into a room for four-minute interviews that would be taped by the studio’s production team, so that the individual TV stations didn’t even have to send a camera crew to the junket.
Junkets were one of the studios’ favorite ways of promoting a film. For a weekend that cost about $100,000 to $200,000, they received literally millions of dollars worth of publicity. Studios would pay for the reporters to be flown—often first class—to top hotels in New York or Los Angeles or even overseas, where they were fed fine food and wine, given bags full of freebies, reimbursed for expenses like taxis, and sometimes even given $1
00 or so pocket money. Reporters were told what they could and couldn’t ask the stars: don’t quiz Bruce Willis about his family; Sean Young was a forbidden topic when interviewing James Woods; don’t interrogate Arnold Schwarzenegger about reports that his father was a Nazi; and don’t ask Tom Cruise anything personal. The resulting articles were almost invariably puff pieces. Journalists who wrote or broadcast anything negative would be blackballed on the junket circuit, losing precious access to top movie stars, as well as the cushy, all-expense-paid weekends that had become a cherished perk for some Hollywood reporters. Reporters who covered junkets—regulars are sometimes called “junketeers”—were bought and paid for, and they knew it. “There should be an editorial note at the top of the articles, like health warnings on cigarettes,” said one writer. “Danger: this is a puff piece that has been totally negotiated with the subject’s publicist and is worthless.” Nevertheless, most newspapers and TV stations loved junkets. While some insisted on reimbursing studios when they sent reporters on junkets, the interviews were a godsend for smaller newspapers and local TV stations that normally wouldn’t have the budget or the clout to get face time with a star like Tom Cruise.
Celebrities, for the most part, hated junkets. Some called them “gang bangs.” They were better than the multicity promotional tours that studios used to force celebrities to make, but junkets were grueling, two-or three-day performances for celebrities who had to appear enthusiastic, friendly, and spontaneous as ten or twenty gangs of reporters peppered them with inane questions like “How does it feel being so famous?” “What toothpaste do you use?” and “Is your mother proud of you?” Some stars, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, were so professional and cooperative during junkets that studio publicists held them in awe. The action hero has been known to give more than sixty interviews in one day—and make each seem like his first. “Arnold deserves the ironman endurance award in junkets,” according to one publicist, who said the actor surprised and flattered reporters by remembering their names and details from conversations he had had with them years earlier. “The only way you can tell that Arnold is getting tired is when his accent starts to get a little stronger,” said one reporter, or when his hostility toward journalists began to show through, like the time one asked him for an autograph—an unwritten taboo at junkets—for his mother. “Sure,” Schwarzenegger said genially. “We wouldn’t want you to disappoint your mother.” Then he added with a loud laugh, “I’m sure you’ve already disappointed her enough.”
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