Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Other celebrities tried to imitate this marketing strategy, but without similar success. When Karl Lagerfeld created a fragrance called Sun, Moon, Stars, Chen Sam was hired to do the publicity. “Karl Lagerfeld chose Daryl Hannah to be the face behind the fragrance because at the time she was dating John Kennedy Jr. and the Europeans are obsessed with anything Kennedy,” says a source who worked on the campaign. “Chen made up a list of the publications Daryl should talk to and the cities she should visit. Daryl refused to do any of the interviews or make any appearances. She told us, and I quote, ‘I am the next Jacqueline Kennedy. I have to be careful who I give myself to.’ Our jaws all dropped. We all called her the mute spokesperson.” Eventually, she did start talking, and some wished she had stayed mute. When asked if she wore Sun, Moon, Stars all the time, Hannah replied, “I don’t wear perfume.” The fragrance bombed.

  By the late eighties, celebrities had rediscovered the tremendous power of celebrity. Stars have long had a reputation for being spoiled and demanding, but by the late 1980s, they were making increasingly capricious demands for special treatment. Demi Moore asked that the studios foot the bill for her entourage of bodyguards, nannies, trainers, and makeup artists. Demi’s personal staff cost the producers of the clunker Scarlet Letter more than $877,000.

  As the years progressed, some of these demands became obscene. When John Travolta was negotiating to appear in The Double, Variety reported that producers agreed not only to his $17 million salary, but also agreed to foot the bill for more than a dozen assistants, trainers, makeup artists, stand-ins, security guards, and massage therapists. He wanted his personal cook as well as approval over the catering staff for the rest of the cast and crew. What’s more, he insisted that the studio had to rent his private plane from him for the Paris-based shoot and that the trailer he normally uses in Los Angeles be shipped to Europe. (By the time it arrived, Travolta had dropped out of the film.) During the shooting of Ace Ventura 2, Jim Carrey asked for a chef not only for himself but for his pet iguana as well. When producers balked at that expense, Carrey compromised: they shared the cost of the iguana chef.

  In the most notorious and capricious of all celebrity demands, the rock group Van Halen had it written into their contract that a large bowl of M&M’s had to await them in the dressing room of any place they played and that all brown M&M’s had to be removed before they arrived. If a brown M&M was found, the group would receive full pay and didn’t have to play. “Word got around that we really meant it,” lead singer David Lee Roth once said. If Roth found a brown M&M in his dressing room, he would throw a fit. He would hold the offending M&M in his hand and bellow “What is this?” The promoter would be called. “How could you do that to Dave?” his manager would bellow. The Rolling Stones mocked Van Halen’s demand by putting in their contracts that they wanted only brown M&M’s. (Once Mick Jagger bought a used Volkswagen, had it painted like a brown M&M and parked it in front of Van Halen.) But the Rolling Stones made their own outrageous demands as well, insisting on pool tables, a golf driving range, and imported caviar.

  “Celebrities love to play power games—to see how high people will jump for them,” says one Hollywood producer. When on the set of Star Trek Generations, William Shatner insisted that Volvic mineral water be delivered to his trailer, Patrick Stewart insisted on the same perk. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he reportedly explained. “I remember once Bruce Willis called all these [film] heavyweights to his ranch to discuss film projects,” said the producer. “There was about four feet of snow outside and Bruce suggested they go out for a stroll. They had shown up in these paper-thin, custom-made Gucci loafers and these lightweight Southern California coats, but they all swallowed hard and went out and traipsed in waist-high snow. Then Willis stops at a snowbank and says, ‘You know, last week I lost the rearview mirror in this very spot.’ Then he looks all wistful. ‘Sure do wish I could find it.’ Then he looks at the moguls expectantly. They all dived into the snow and Willis stood there with this big shit-eating grin watching them.”

  As celebrities became more coddled and more powerful, they expected gentler treatment from the publications that covered them—at a time when those publications were getting increasingly aggressive. Even People, that onetime celebrity-fawning magazine, was finding itself at loggerheads with the stars it covered. Jim Gaines, a former editor from Saturday Review and writer for the national affairs section of Newsweek, became managing editor of the magazine in 1987. Unlike Dick Stolley, who left People to head up a revived Life, or Pat Ryan, who succeeded Stolley, Gaines didn’t feel the need or desire to protect celebrities from themselves. He was an ex-reporter, with a taste for news, and felt that People was there to tell its readers the truth about the rich and famous. The different philosophy led to some nasty conflicts between People and its celebrity subjects. “They surrounded themselves with fire walls of P.R. people who began trying to manipulate the press,” Gaines said. “They became obnoxious, difficult barriers to the truth. It became very confrontational.” The most serious of those clashes, and the one that would for years affect the relationship between People and celebrities, was over a profile of Robin Williams.

  In early 1988, publicists for Good Morning, Vietnam pitched a story on Williams, but they didn’t want to give People access to the actor unless they were promised a cover. Gaines wasn’t sure he wanted to make the agreement. Comedians traditionally didn’t sell well on covers, and the once-hot actor was going through a lull in his career—films like Popeye and The World According to Garp were big box office disappointments. Then Williams’s publicist said the actor would discuss the affair he was having with his nanny. Gaines was thrilled. He agreed and assigned writer Brad Darrach to do the piece. Darrach spent five days with Williams, then, late one evening during a break in a photo shoot and while the actor’s P.R. agent was out of the room, the actor unburdened himself about his relationship with Marsha Garces, his son’s nanny. Not long after the interview, Williams started getting nervous about what he had told the reporter. He insisted that he had cooperated only after being assured that the article would focus on his professional, not his personal, life. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Disney, which was bringing out Good Morning, Vietnam, asked Jim Gaines to breakfast. Katzenberg warned Gaines not to publish anything that might upset Williams. He suggested that if People upset someone as popular in the Hollywood community as Williams was, other stars might retaliate. Gaines was furious at what he considered an attempt at coercion and refused to change the story.

  The February 22 cover was pure tabloid: “Public triumph, private anguish. Robin Williams. Good Morning, Vietnam has made the comic genius into a movie star at last, but his life is a minefield. Having beaten alcohol and drugs, he’s now entangled in a love affair with his son’s nanny that has left his wife embittered—and Zachary, four, in the middle. It’s the emotional challenge of his life. ‘I’ll do anything,’ he says, ‘to keep my son from harm.’ ”

  Williams was outraged. “It feels like psychic rape,” he said in an interview years later. “When you do these things, you get halfway through and you realize, my god, they’re sticking it to me. It’s like this feeling of violation. And what’s weird is they’re stabbing you with your own kitchen utensils.”

  After the appearance of the article, Hollywood, which had thought it could always depend on People for the sort of sympathetic treatment the magazine had given celebrities like Carol Burnett when the Enquirer threatened to expose her daughter’s drug use, now began to consider the magazine just another tabloid. And treated it as such, for the boycott threatened by Katzenberg did take place. Top stars refused to speak to Gaines’s staff. “You walk up to them looking for an item,” complained one writer, “and they turn on you: ‘How could you do that to Robin?’ ” Some celebrities might have been motivated less out of loyalty and more out of fear of the onetime celebrity-friendly magazine. Citing reasons they didn’t want to cooperate with the magazine, publicists would say,
“You might do a Robin Williams on us.”

  Richard Stolley, People’s founding editor, believed Gaines had made a fundamental mistake in antagonizing Williams and the Hollywood community. “The Robin Williams story was harsher than it needed to be,” he says. “When he began yelping, people automatically rallied to his side…. In a fight between an icon and the press, there’s no question who Hollywood will side with.”

  The press, so daunted by Williams’s awesome power to punish publications that printed stories he didn’t like, almost totally disregarded the news when shortly after the People flap a former cocktail waitress named Michelle Tish Carter filed a lawsuit alleging that the comedian had given her herpes. Williams countersued, saying that Carter had threatened to tell her story to the media unless he paid her. In July 1992, shortly before he was scheduled to testify, Williams and Carter reached an out of court settlement. Under the terms of the agreement, neither side was allowed to discuss the details of the settlement. “There was no way we were going to touch that story,” says a reporter for a competing magazine. “The word was out: If you take a shot at Robin Williams, you’re going to get hit yourself.”

  A year after the Robin Williams episode, after only two years at the helm of People, Gaines left the magazine to run Life. Sources at Time Inc. say that while profits were up 44 percent under Gaines, the company’s management felt the magazine had become, in its pursuit of controversy, too much like a tabloid. The new editor, Lanny Jones, set out to reestablish the trust of the Hollywood community. But by then, stars didn’t need People anymore. They had found a new celebrity-friendly magazine that gave them status and adulation that they had not dreamed possible. It was so upscale and glossy that it made People look like the National Enquirer.

  * For years afterward, celebrities took their cue from Carol Burnett. When they found out that the tabloids were sniffing around about a potentially damaging story, they would often turn to People, which they knew would be sympathetic. That was Drew Barrymore’s strategy when she found out that the tabloids had checked one of its reporters into rehab to get a story on the thirteen-year-old. That was also Michael J. Fox’s strategy in revealing his struggle with Parkinson’s in late 1998. The Enquirer had the story and Fox went to People to break it.

  † Collins was somewhat redeemed at the Post after she got hold of an advanced copy of H. R. Haldeman’s book, Ends of Power, which, despite what he had told Mike Wallace, was explosive.

  * The magazine was sold to Macfadden Company in 1980 and Jann Wenner. Wenner later bought it outright.

  * Ingels wasn’t eager to testify, according to some reports, because he had in the past been a source for the tabloid.

  * Carson’s wife later admitted that their marriage was, indeed, by this time on the rocks, exacerbated by a drinking problem. “When I did drink,” Carson admitted, “rather than a lot of people who become fun loving and gregarious and love everybody, I would go the opposite.”

  13

  tina brown

  Tina Brown, wearing a cleavage-baring blood red dress with lips and nails painted to match, vamped for a photographer as a crowd of spectators gathered around the Conde Nast conference room, clutching their bottles of Evian and watching in awe. The editor of Vanity Fair tossed back her head and smiled mischievously on that spring day in 1989, her blond hair and pearl choker shimmering under the bright lights while Annie Liebowitz, Vanity Fair’s star photographer, took pictures for a profile scheduled to run on the cover of Newsweek. There once was a time, only a few years earlier, when a news magazine would have balked at such a cozy arrangement, but in the five years since Tina Brown had taken over Vanity Fair, she had rewritten the rules of journalism. While most mainstream magazines at least had pretenses of journalistic integrity and concern for the good of society, Vanity Fair unapologetically pandered to the wealthy and powerful who controlled the magazine’s financial fate. Brown hired some of the world’s best-known writers and most talented photographers to chronicle the lives of movie stars, socialites, moguls, and Euro-trash; the magazine celebrated fame, power, and whatever it took to get there. “I’m bored with these suppressed style snobs who say it’s brave for an actress to play a bag lady,” Brown said. “Ravish and polish are what I’m aiming for.”

  There were still those who sneered at Vanity Fair as an upscale People—or worse. As one magazine critic quipped, “Look, Muffy, a National Enquirer for us.” Brown took gossip and celebrity journalism off the supermarket racks and put it on the coffee tables of the richest and most influential people in the country. In one issue, Patti Davis revealed her penchant for masturbation, Priscilla Presley discussed her thwarted romance with Julio Iglesias, and Mickey Rourke grimly recounted being “hit on” by transvestites when he worked as a bouncer in a crossdressers’ club. Gene Pope invented the supermarket tabloid, Dick Stolley took it mainstream, Rupert Murdoch made it mass market, and Tina Brown took it upscale.

  To get the cooperation of tabloid-shy celebrities, Vanity Fair made deals with subjects. Sometimes the deals were explicit, written agreements promising covers or photo and text approval; sometimes implicit, such as when Mick Jagger objected to a writer who was interviewing him because she kept asking questions about his past. Tina Brown assigned a different writer. Vanity Fair would go so far to make a celebrity happy that when Herb Ritts was shooting Warren Beatty for a cover, one of the photographer’s assistants reportedly bared her breasts to get a smile out of the sulky actor. There was almost nothing Vanity Fair wouldn’t do to get the cooperation of the rich and famous.

  Vanity Fair’s formula was such a hit with the public and advertisers that other publications were forced to follow or be left behind. Magazines had to put celebrities on their covers or die on the newsstands next to those that did. At Conde Nast, GQ took up the formula, then Details, then Vogue and the other women’s magazines. Soon, news magazines like Time and Newsweek regularly had celebrity covers. New arrivals like Premiere and Entertainment Weekly joined the fray. “Movie magazines used to be a category,” Gore Vidal lamented. “Now, everything is a movie magazine.” Some publications, like Esquire, for years tried to resist doing exclusively celebrity covers, but circulation and advertising suffered. Only about twenty-five stars were big enough to guarantee newsstand sales. To get those celebrities, editors had to offer arrangements as attractive as Vanity Fair’s. Big stars would agree to a cover photo with the publication that made the most attractive offer. It was usually Vanity Fair. Journalists in News-week’s San Francisco bureau were outraged by the way the rules were changing, and they suggested that the magazine do a tough profile of this British invader who was corrupting the values of the industry and packaging tabloid stories as upscale news.

  Brown wasn’t surprised when she heard about Newsweek’s plans. Although she had won over the readers, the subjects, and the advertisers, many in the press were still quite hard on her. There were some favorable articles—Adweek, for example, named Brown hottest editor of the year in 1986—but Brown was continually ridiculed in elite media circles.* Brown knew she had to change that. “I had to win the opinion of my peers,” she said. “I had to seduce the media.”

  When Brown sat down for an interview with Newsweek writer Tom Mathews, she turned on all of her considerable charm. She peppered her conversation with literary references, dismissing critics in a “silvery voice,” said Mathews, that was “rippling with London elegance above Manhattan’s barbaric yawp.” Mathews rhapsodized over “the beauty who married the rakish Harold Evans,” her “uptown élan and Front Page gusto,” and the way her ankles were “sculpted into her drop-dead stiletto high heels.”

  Tina Brown had a beguiling way of leaning over and “confiding” tidbits to interviewers. Explaining how she rescued Vanity Fair from the dreary staff she had inherited, Brown did her best Dynasty persona: “We had quite a little blood around here,” she laughed. “It was rather like Scarface.” As she chatted, Brown leaned so far forward that, according to people who spoke with
Mathews after the interview, her ample bosom escaped from her décolletage. Brown blushed as she adjusted her neckline and continued the interview. After Mathews left, Brown called a colleague and announced, “We have nothing to worry about.”

  When Mathews handed in his article, mayhem erupted at Newsweek. If anything, the Vanity Fair editor had worked her magic too well. There were screaming fights over whether the profile should run—much less as a cover story. “It was panting,” said assistant managing editor Dominique Browning. “There was way too much heavy breathing. It was sexist. It was embarrassing.” The alleged breast incident was a topic of much discussion around the office. “From the way Tom described it, she might have just been leaning way over,” according to a colleague. “I can’t absolutely say whether he saw any nipple, but he clearly saw more than he could handle. It obviously affected his thinking. The article gushed so much that it dripped.”

  After several heated meetings, the profile was taken off the cover. “It just didn’t belong there,” Browning said. “There was no substance to it.” The article was passed directly to executive editor Steve Smith—rather than the standard route of going to an assistant managing editor first—prompting outcries of favoritism because Vanity Fair had excerpted a book by Smith’s wife, Sally Bedell Smith. Even Steve Smith, however, was concerned about the tone of the profile. “Tom, one general observation on my third read,” Smith wrote in a memo to Mathews, “I think we’re being too friendly.” One phrase that bothered him, for example, was Mathews’s line: “To her presentations, Brown brought Jane Austen’s ironic sensibility and Ayn Rand’s will to power.”