Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Kingsley’s power was such that at times, she could almost manufacture a star out of whole cloth. In 1997, she teamed up with director Joel Schumacher to perform such sleight of hand on the virtually unknown Matthew McConaughey, a twenty-six-year-old Texas law school student whose biggest role had been in The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Schumacher cast him as an idealistic lawyer in A Time to Kill and Kingsley got the publicity machine rolling, and before long, McConaughey was profiled by 48 Hours, Liz Smith praised him in her syndicated column, and he was the first virtually unknown actor to have the cover of Vanity Fair to himself. Articles in Newsweek, the New York Times, and Us magazine followed. Even before A Time to Kill was released, McConaughey was turning down multimillion-dollar offers, including the role opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Schumacher jokingly called McConaughey “my Frankenstein,” but some in Hollywood say the creation was equally Pat Kingsley’s. “This guy’s salary is being built on buzz alone,” noted one observer. “It’s what’s wrong with Hollywood.” Kingsley dismissed talk that she “made” McConaughey. “He was made a star because of his startling debut in A Time to Kill,” she said. “He delivered the goods.”

  By the time of the Far and Away junket, Pat Kingsley was succeeding in reversing the power relationship between the press and the publicists that existed since the days of Sweet Smell of Success. It was now the journalists who did the groveling. “Publicists control every word, every picture, every caption and if anybody says they don’t, they don’t know what time it is,” said Koral. “They have enormous power. If you want their stars, you’ve got to play by their rules.” With journalists feeling increasingly strong-armed by publicists, the relationship became incredibly antagonistic. Horror stories abounded about Kingsley. “I used to be a war correspondent, but entertainment journalism is much nastier,” said one reporter. “Hollywood has made me very, very tough. War might be hell, but the people you have to deal with are nicer.”

  Even Pat Kingsley, however, had her failures. Julia Roberts was one of them. The actress was notoriously prickly. Once, when she moved into a very upscale apartment complex while her house was being renovated, she reportedly had notices sent to the other well-to-do tenants that if they ran into her in the hallways, they were not to speak with her or even look at her. She was also very demanding about her publicity. When a People magazine photographer snapped photos of Roberts onstage with Lyle Lovett the day after the two got married, she had police confiscate the film. People sued and a judge sided with the magazine, so Roberts’s publicist gave People flattering, authorized wedding photos instead. But later, when Roberts was trying to get some good press as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in Haiti, she recognized the People photographer and became so beligerent that UNICEF officials had to apologize to the members of the media for her outburst.

  In 1991, the actress was being represented by publicist Susan Geller when she learned that Vanity Fair had wanted to do a cover story on her, but Geller turned down the magazine. Tina Brown had reneged on an agreement, according to Geller, to put her client Ellen Barkin on the cover. Geller insisted that she simply didn’t want to deal with a magazine whose editor didn’t keep her word, but the buzz was that Geller was also punishing Tina Brown. Julia Roberts was furious; she thought she was being used and so she dropped Geller and signed up with PMK. It was a big coup for Kingsley, but shortly after the deal was done, Roberts’s life became tabloid fodder. The actress canceled a lavish Hollywood wedding to Keifer Sutherland less than a week before it was scheduled to happen. Within days, she was spotted nuzzling with Jason Patric. There were reports of erratic behavior on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Hook. There were rumors of drug abuse. The actress became the butt of jokes. Jay Leno said he was taking the toaster he had bought for Julia and Keifer and giving it to Maria and Donald.

  “Why can’t you make it stop?” Roberts sobbed on the phone to Kingsley. The publicist called some of the reporters who had written unkind things about Roberts. She insulted and threatened them, but she had no leverage with the tabloids because they would never be given access to Roberts anyway. So Kingsley sought out friendly reporters—like her good friend Liz Smith—to deny a story about friction between Roberts and Steven Spielberg on the set of Hook. “The only way it was finally stopped was that Steven Spielberg got on the phone with Liz Smith,” said Kingsley. That finally quieted everyone down, but the damage was done. “It was one thing after another, and it was all about her personal life,” Kingsley said. “It seemed like any time I would talk to her, I was the bearer of bad news, I was the messenger.” By the end of the year, Roberts dumped Kingsley. “I don’t blame her,” said Kingsley. “I was sorry to lose her, but I don’t fault her for what she did.”

  Shortly after Kingsley lost Roberts, she got an even bigger star. Tom Cruise had been represented by publicist Andrea Jaffe since 1981, but when Fox hired Jaffe to do publicity in 1992, she had to drop all her clients. Cruise was by then perhaps the most image-conscious, controlling star in Hollywood. He bought up the rights to photos of himself and made people who worked with him sign confidentiality agreements. The crews on the sets of movies were often given long lists of do’s and don’ts—mostly don’ts: don’t talk to him unless he speaks first, don’t ask for his autograph. Cruise surrounded himself with a small circle of close friends, family, and co-workers.* Andrea Jaffe knew how important control and privacy were to the powerful, somewhat prickly star; when she moved to Fox, she recommended Cruise consider Kingsley.

  Kingsley became fiercely protective of Cruise. The brighter Cruise’s star became, the more control he wanted over his career. When Columbia released A Few Good Men in 1992, Cruise forced the studio to bring Kingsley on board, and again she insisted that the journalists who interviewed Cruise sign a consent agreement. Under the conditions of the agreement, the interviews from the Few Good Men junket could be “printed and/or broadcast only once during or in connection with the initial domestic theatrical release” of the movie. “The one-time airing defies all knowledge of what it takes to promote a movie,” complained one person close to the film. “Columbia wants the interviews to air as much as possible and promote the movie. That’s the point of having a junket.”

  But the second restriction was even more shocking: PMK demanded approval of wording of the on-air “teasers” that television stations used to announce any Cruise interviews. “Teasers are fine, but sometimes they’re very misleading,” Kingsley said. “We have no problem if they announce that they have an exclusive interview with Tom Cruise, but if it gets into a lengthy description of what the interview is about, we want approval.” An embarrassed Columbia told irate reporters that other stars from A Few Good Men—including Kevin Bacon and Kevin Pollack, as well as director Rob Reiner—would be happy to chat with journalists who didn’t sign the consent forms. “That would be like doing a story on U2 and not getting Bono,” grumbled one broadcaster, who reluctantly signed the agreement. “We’re signing it because our station was already expecting the interview. It’s Tom Cruise and it’s a big movie.”

  Pat Kingsley could have her choice of covers, and with the release of A Few Good Men, a men’s magazine like GQ seemed a good place for a cover story on Cruise. Writer Stephanie Mansfield interviewed the actor at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles; Pat Kingsley was sitting in the next room.

  “The interview lasted probably the requisite hour and a half,” Mansfield recalled. “He seemed very congenial if somewhat—I would say—aloof. He’s not a real easy person to get to know—certainly in that situation.” But, according to Mansfield, she felt she and Cruise had “bonded in a mutually self-serving way” that journalists and their subjects often do.

  Shortly after the interview, Mansfield mentioned to a friend that she was profiling Cruise. “My friend said ‘This is such a coincidence. You should call my cousin who grew up with him,’ ” said Mansfield. “So I called this young girl who went to Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey with Tom Mapother
… As it turned out, she was very positive about Tom. She thought he was a really nice guy.”

  When Cruise telephoned Mansfield for a scheduled follow-up interview, she casually mentioned the conversation with Cruise’s old classmate. “He went ballistic,” Mansfield recalled. “He started yelling into the phone: How dare I talk to someone he went to school with. What is this, a profile or a biography? He accused me of conducting a ‘covert operation.’ He was so irrational. He didn’t make any sense. I tried to explain that the former friend didn’t say anything negative, but it didn’t matter. He was obviously very upset that I had done any reporting, that I hadn’t just taken the interview with him and printed it verbatim.”

  Cruise slammed down the phone, and Mansfield just sat there, somewhat stunned. In a few minutes, the phone rang again. It was Pat Kingsley. “She basically threatened me,” said Mansfield.

  “I’ve been in the business too long to threaten someone,” said Kingsley. “What I did say is that it would be a long time before I would subject a client to be interviewed by her.”

  But Mansfield has a different recollection. “She said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Tom is going to be around for a long time and I’m sure that you want to be around in your business for a long time.’ I said, ‘Pat, I don’t know what you’re driving at.’ She made it very clear that if I used any of this interview from this young girl, I would be blacklisted from her clients.”

  Mansfield decided to use the material anyway, and when the piece was published, it was one of the most revealing portraits ever written about Cruise. Kingsley decreed that Mansfield would never interview another one of her clients. “Am I stupid?” she said of such blackballing tactics. “If they burn me once, won’t they burn me twice? I will absolutely not work with them again. I’ll tell a magazine, ‘Listen, this writer has a bad history with my clients so give us another writer.’ The same with a photographer. If a client doesn’t wish a particular photographer to shoot him, why should we allow it?”

  “I guess I’m perceived in the industry as a junkyard dog by making a phone call and doing some reporting,” Mansfield said. “If you want to stay in the business of interviewing celebrities, you better write the sort of piece that is fawning and adoring and has no facts.”

  After the junket for A Few Good Men, a few editors grumbled that it was high time to take action against publicists like Kingsley. The cause was taken up by Lanny Jones, the top editor at People. Pat Kingsley had been battling with People for some time, ever since she claimed that the magazine reneged on a promise to give Mary Tyler Moore photo approval in the early eighties. The feud intensified when, according to Kingsley, the magazine used some pictures of Goldie Hawn without her permission. “The photographs made her look heavy,” Kingsley says. The accompanying article—a “write around” done without the cooperation of the subject—further infuriated Kingsley, who accused the magazine of “subterfuge” and “misrepresentation” by using quotes that had appeared elsewhere. Kingsley started withholding her clients from People. That July, Jones invited a group of top journalists from Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Time, El, Premiere, and TV Guide to a meeting at the Regency Club in Westwood, California. Jones urged them to establish a written set of rules that every publication and television show—except “the bottom feeders like the tabloids”—would follow when dealing with press agents. “He’s just mad because People has lost the monopoly it used to have on celebrity interviews,” according to another journalist, who said that People still hadn’t recovered from the backlash to its 1988 Robin Williams interview. “People used to be able to call the shots. Now it’s finding it hard to find any big stars who’ll sit down for an interview.” The problem wasn’t just the fallout from the Robin Williams debacle. People had to compete for interviews with mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek, upscale newcomers like Premiere and Vanity Fair, and men’s and women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and Esquire that almost never used to put celebrities on their covers. People magazine was still hugely successful, but by the time of the junket for A Few Good Men, celebrities were no longer coming to it. In its early years, virtually all of People’s covers were done with the celebrities’ cooperation, ten years later that number was closer to 75 percent, by the mid-1990s, it was down to about 20 percent. “One problem we at People face in a seller’s market is that, while we can stand on principle and say, ‘No, we won’t allow you photo approval,’ or whatever, someone like a Pat Kingsley can always go to another magazine who will,” Jones complained.

  “Jones said that if we bond together and agree to stop making deals with publicists,” one attendee recalled, “they will lose their grip over us.”

  Kingsley wasn’t worried. “The media is incapable of sticking to any code,” she said. “All you have to do to break one of those alliances is offer someone an exclusive interview.”

  The alliance crumbled.

  After the Mansfield fiasco and the failed People rebellion, Kingsley decided to deny most of the print media access to her bigger stars. “The articles are just too tough, have too much of an edge,” she said. “It’s easier to do television. The public sees what you have to say, rather than some writer’s interpretation of what you said…. Besides, people don’t read anymore.”

  At junkets for Cruise’s next film, The Firm, TV reporters were given interviews but print reporters were greeted with a note from Cruise, explaining that he had to leave town. “I look forward to the opportunity to speak with you again in the future.” That opportunity did not come. Even Kingsley’s ally Liz Smith was told that Cruise didn’t want to speak with her. The actor was, it seems, upset by an extraordinarily gentle barb that less sensitive types would have taken as a compliment. Smith had written that Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn’s characters in The Firm “are wildly good-looking, have fabulous bodies and a fantastic sex life [so] don’t be surprised if the real-life Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, appears on the set with Tom’s lunch once in a while.”*

  “Tom was hurt by your item,” Kingsley told Smith, “he may not want to do an interview with you.” The gossip columnist was flabbergasted. “Here is a guy I’ve praised to the skies—his looks, his talent, his obvious adoration of Nicole Kidman. I even loved “Far and Away”!† … I suppose I should be used to this irrational supersensitivity. But it’s always a surprise. And always a disappointment.’

  Pat Kingsley and other celebrity protectors argued that Tom Cruise’s personal life—his religion, his romances—were nobody’s business. “Where is it written that stars are public figures? That the press has a right to know?” Kingsley said. “If they were elected officials, I could see it…. But where is it written that the star’s life is news?” Cruise’s life was news, some journalists countered, because he used his tremendous clout behind the scenes to advance his agenda. There was the issue of his religion, which, on the face of it, would certainly seem to be Cruise’s private business. It was, however, a factor in the film industry; Cruise reportedly put pressure on studios he was working with to use ClearSound—a sound system developed by the Church of Scientology. While some, including non-Scientologists, swear by ClearSound, others are less taken with the system. Cruise tried to get producer Don Simpson to use ClearSound in Days of Thunder, but Simpson refused. When the producer, after having spent $25,000 on Scientology classes at Cruise’s urging, called the church “a con,” Cruise reportedly retaliated by having Simpson eased out of directing a Top Gun sequel. Cruise did succeed in persuading director Ron Howard to use the system in Far and Away—although it cost $120,000, when most sound systems cost about $5,000. Cruise, who also got Reiner to use ClearSound in A Few Good Men, was angered by reports that ClearSound was a “squeak-suppressing system” designed to lower the actor’s sometimes high-pitched voice. “Bullshit!” he said. “Alls it is, is a recording system, designed to capture the voice—not to enhance or change it.”

  Given PMK’s demonstrated willingness to retaliate, few journalists dug into the story of Cruise’s i
nvolvement in Scientology, a subject he went to great lengths to keep out of the press. “He didn’t want people to know he belonged to the church, and they had promised him anonymity,” said Star gossip columnist Janet Charlton, who broke the story of Cruise’s membership. “It created a big stir. They went insane and they tried to track down my source.” Someone claiming to be from the phone company tried to get her phone records, she said. A man who said he was the Star’s lawyer tried to get Charlton to tell him the name of her source. Charlton said she later found out he was working for the church. “Reporting on Scientology can by very intimidating,” Charlton said. “But I deeply believe it’s an important, newsworthy story. Tom Cruise is a very powerful guy.”

  In Germany, an anti-Scientology movement was led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who said that the religion bore a resemblance to organized crime and posed a threat to democracy. When some Germans organized a boycott of Mission Impossible, thirty-four non-Scientologist celebrities—including Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone, and Goldie Hawn—signed a letter to Chancellor Kohl, comparing Germany’s persecution of Scientologists to the oppression of the Jews during the Holocaust. “In the 1930s, it was the Jews,” said the ad. “Today it is the Scientologists.” The letter, which ran as an ad in the International Herald Tribune, turned out to have been placed by Bert Fields, the Los Angeles lawyer who represented Cruise as well as fellow Scientologist John Travolta. When asked if he had attached his name to the letter for moral or more pragmatic reasons, one signer replied, “Do we all want to be in business with Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and would we sign a letter just to make them happy, make them like us? What do you think?”