Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  Lilly also flirted shamelessly with Walter Winchell, who regularly put her in his column. She became quite friendly with Truman Capote, who used her as an inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.† Capote urged Lilly to write a book based on her adventures. It was good advice. How to Meet a Millionaire was such a smash that it was made into the movie How to Marry a Millionaire, inspired a line of clothing, and made Lilly a household name. In 1952, she was hired to write a society column for the New York Mirror, and in 1958, she was hired by Dorothy Schiff, the politically liberal owner of the New York Post, to write a three-times-a-week column. The column was a success but it struck many journalists as dated and oddly apolitical in a paper with a strong progressive agenda. “Miss Lilly puts together, often at 4 A.M., a bubbly gossip column which gets high readership in a town where society page writers have little real social news and concentrate on the foolish irrelevancies of that curious breed: Cafe Society,” Newsweek noted in 1960. “While many of the militantly liberal New York Post’s writers are fretting about civil rights and civic wrongs, columnist Doris Lilly concerns herself with the civilities and incivilities of the Colony, at charity balls, and on the zebra-striped banquettes at El Morocco.”

  Even so, by the mid-1960s, Doris Lilly had emerged as one of the most likely successors to Hedda and Louella. She had become a regular on Merv Griffin’s talk show. She was feuding with rival Aileen “Suzy” Mehle, whose column also appeared in the Post and who was actually dating media-hater Frank Sinatra. She had also become friendly with Roy Cohn, who was a good source of items for her—especially regarding the Kennedys. On one occasion, Cohn invited her to the Bahamas with him.* On her return she wrote an item about the trip. “I got a memo from Mrs. Schiff saying that she’d rather not see Roy Cohn’s name mentioned in the newspaper,” Doris said. “When I saw Dorothy, whom I knew quite well—we used to go to the theater together, have lunch together, things like that—I said ‘Dorothy, I thought that being liberal meant that you were liberal with everybody. What is wrong with Roy Cohn? Why can’t I mention Roy Cohn’s name?’ ”

  “He’s controversial,” Schiff said obliquely.

  “We had our first big disagreement over that,” Lilly said, “because I didn’t think it was fair. Mrs. Schiff’s bottom line was ‘It’s my newspaper and I can put whatever I want in it.’ ” Doris, however, continued to rely on sources like Cohn while attacking icons like the Kennedys—much to the anger of Schiff, a big Kennedy supporter. Doris also became somewhat obsessed with Jackie Kennedy. But she was not a fan of the former First Lady, considering her a hypocrite who was in truth a darker, more complicated person than the saintly widow the public saw. For example, Doris tried to report that in August 1962 while Jackie was visiting Fiat mogul Gianni Agnelli she sent a Secret Service plane back to Washington to pick up her diaphragm. Schiff, however, killed the story. Doris knew a lot of tidbits about Jacqueline Kennedy—that the former First Lady, who so assiduously protected her own privacy, was herself an incorrigible snoop and gossip. When she moved into her Fifth Avenue apartment, she put a telescope in her living room and used it to spy on her neighbors. But every time Lilly tried to put something like that into an article, it got killed. Truman Capote had told her that Jackie read everything that was written about her. “If she sees a photograph of herself in a book or an article she will write a note to the author and request the original ‘for her scrapbook,’ ” according to Lilly. “During her White House days, the walls of her bedroom were lined with pictures of herself.”

  In 1968, Doris Lilly heard from her friend Truman Capote that Jackie was going to marry Aristotle Onassis.* She was ecstatic about getting the story. The world’s most glamorous woman marrying the world’s richest man was the gossip item of the decade. Tabloids had been speculating about the former First Lady’s love life, and getting the scoop on it was, Doris figured, the best thing that could happen to her career. Doris wrote about Jackie’s engagement to Onassis in her New York Post column and—just to be sure that she got credit for breaking the story—she also went on Merv Griffin’s show with the news.

  The Griffin show had a live studio audience, and Lilly wasn’t prepared for the crowd’s reaction. “There were loud boos and catcalls,” she recalled. “People couldn’t believe that Jackie—Caesar’s wife, their saint, their Virgin Mary—was marrying a short, fat old Greek.” Lilly was quickly ushered off the stage. But as she tried to leave Griffin’s studio, she was met by a throng of angry Jackie lovers who had already gathered outside. As Doris tried to pass through the crowd, they attacked her. She was hit, her hair was pulled. One woman dug her nails into her arm, drawing blood. “Jackie would never marry anyone like that!” Doris heard a particularly distraught woman cry out. Doris went back into the studio and got a police escort to help her to the car.

  Despite landing the “scoop of the decade,” Lilly was fired from the New York Post a few months later. Dorothy Schiff had decided that in 1968—a year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the upheaval at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the intensified bombing campaign against North Vietnam—Doris’s kind of journalism didn’t belong in a paper like the Post, even though it was a tabloid. Gossip, many editors and publishers had come to believe, disgraced the serious news it was supposed to offset. Nothing illustrated this more clearly than the outraged reaction of journalists and critics that same year to the television appearances of Rona Barrett in Los Angeles.

  People who had tuned into KABC-TV in Los Angeles one evening in December 1966 couldn’t believe what they were seeing. There, on the nightly local news, was the station’s newest hire. Standing at just over five feet tall, with elaborately coifed hair resembling a platinum-frosted artichoke, heavily-lined eyes conjuring images of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, and an obviously sculpted nose shaped into a pert little stump, Rona Barrett looked, one critic later noted, like a “human Kewpie doll.” That, like so many of the comments about Rona, was unkind in the extreme. One thing she certainly didn’t look like was a newscaster, however. But then she wasn’t being billed as one. She was a gossip reporter. And there she was interviewing her good friend Tina Sinatra.

  “What movie star is it,” Barrett asked in a slightly Betty Boopish voice that still honked with traces of Queens, New York, “that you would model yourself after in your aspiring career?”

  “Oh, no one,” Tina replied. “I’m told my beauty is so unique and my acting ability so fantastic, I won’t remind anyone of anyone!”

  The Sinatra family was outraged. After the show, Tina’s mother Nancy called up Rona, practically hysterical. “Tina has never said any of those things!” Rona recalled Mrs. Sinatra screaming. “You’ve dubbed her voice! It’s someone else’s voice on the track! All you’re looking to do is use the Sinatra name to further your own career. You’re like everyone else!” Although Rona considered herself to be close to the Sinatras—”a third daughter” as Frank had once put it—the family refused to speak with her after the disastrous interview.

  Undeterred, Barrett produced one scoop after another in the weeks and months that followed. She was the first to tell the world that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were breaking up. She broke the news that Cary Grant was divorcing his wife, actress Dyan Cannon—a case that went on to become the sensation of Hollywood when Grant, the epitome of cinematic charm and sophistication, was accused by Cannon of beating her and was also revealed to be a devoted user of LSD.* When Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra were having marital problems, Rona reported that Mia danced with Robert Kennedy until the early-morning hours. Rona’s biggest scoop, she always maintained, was the news, in 1967, that Elvis Presley was going to marry Priscilla Beaulieu. “That was the story,” Rona boasted, “that really ‘made’ me.”

  The city of Los Angeles was riveted. There on the television news—amid the grim dispatches about body counts in Vietnam, race riots in the big cities, unrest on college campuses, and poverty in Appalachia—was s
omething that the viewers enjoyed hearing. Almost instantly, Rona became one of the best-known personalities in Los Angeles. Her face was plastered on billboards and full-page newspaper ads. “Rona Barrett—First to put Hollywood’s private secrets on public record.” Watching Rona became an event, not only for movie fans, but for Hollywood executives and even the celebrities she covered. “All over Los Angeles, people sit back to play the campiest after dinner game since charades: watching Rona Barrett, or ‘Miss Rona’ as she is called, deliver the Hollywood news,” one reviewer noted. “Elegant hostesses stop their dinner parties dead; weary studio executives make themselves stay up for The Event; and even the stars who curse her existence most furtively tune in.”

  When KABC-TV hired Rona Barrett, it was the third-rated station in Los Angeles. Within months, its ratings nearly doubled and it had become number one. Competitors sneered that it had climbed to the top by the cheapest, easiest way possible: pandering to viewers’ basest instincts with gossip. It was a charge the station’s executives didn’t bother to deny. “I don’t care how we did it,” KABC-TV’s station manager said. “We did it.”

  With Walter Winchell jobless and begging for work, Hedda Hopper dead, Louella Parsons in a nursing home, and Doris Lilly fired from the New York Post, the consensus was that gossip was dead. “Newspapers were dying around the country. Editors were cutting back,” Barrett said of those days. “No one believed the era of Hollywood would continue.” But within little more than a year after arriving at KABC, Barrett had reconfigured the calling for television, and by 1968 no less a voice than the New York Times had anointed her the official successor to Hedda and Louella. “A lot of locals have been fighting for the empty throne,” the Times wrote. “As of right now, Rona Barrett has it. She is the queen of the gossips, and she sits, if a little uneasily, on that tarnished throne, clutching her silver screen orb and waving her Oscar-gold scepter at all those wicked subjects.”

  Like so many gossip columnists, Rona Barrett was first and foremost a fan—a fan with dreams of becoming a star herself. She was born Rona Burstein in the working class neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a housewife. Young Rona was not a beautiful child: She had a huge nose and was overweight. She was terribly self-conscious—a problem compounded by a form of muscular dystrophy that gave her problems walking. Hoping to correct the problem, Rona’s mother had her fitted with a heavy leg brace, but when Rona showed up to school the next day, her classmates taunted her mercilessly. “Someday, so help me,” she recalled thinking, “I’ll be so important, so famous, not one of you will ever be able to touch me again.”

  Rona retreated into the fantasy world of celebrity. In high school she began signing her name “Rona Starr Barrett.” She idolized Elizabeth Taylor and had a big crush on Eddie Fisher. While she read Louella Parsons religiously, she thought the column covered too many has-beens like Clark Gable and Joan Crawford; Rona and her friends hungered for news about the new breed of stars that were emerging, actors like Paul Newman and Tony Perkins, and singers like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and particularly, Eddie Fisher. When Rona was thirteen, she became chief coordinator of the Eddie Fisher Fan Club, taking the subway into Manhattan and working at the Blackstone publicity office answering the young singer’s fan mail. By then, Rona had her leg brace removed and was more confident about her looks, and one day she coyly flirted with her idol, asking him why he didn’t date Jewish women. “Jewish girls are no good for fucking” he said, as she recalled in her autobiography Miss Rona. Rona, stunned and disillusioned, asked the singer what he meant. “They think they’re doing you a big favor when it comes to the sex department,” he said. “Before you know it, you’ve got a depleted bank account because this Jewish broad has bribed you into buying every goddamned newfangled goody in the world just to get a piece of ass.”

  The next day, Rona Barrett resigned as chief coordinator of the Eddie Fisher Fan Club, and went to work instead for the Steve Lawrence Fan Club. She attended New York University but dropped out when she was eighteen to work for a fanzine. She gravitated toward a group of aspiring actors, including Michael Landon, and in 1958, she got a call from Landon—who had not yet achieved fame from the TV series Bonanza—and went to Los Angeles to live with him and his wife, Dodie.

  Once there, she became friendly with producer Bob Evans, Warren Beatty, and Frankie Avalon.* By 1960, she had a column in a fanzine called Motion Picture, and a year later, the North American Newspaper Alliance began distributing her column, seven days a week, to more than one hundred newspapers. Although they were small, local papers, and paid her only $75 a week apiece, not many reporters were writing about celebrities, and Rona, aggressive and eager to please the stars, acquired remarkable access. As writer Jacqueline Susann noted, “In this business, you’ve got to have the guts of a burglar. Rona has them.”

  She also set out to transform herself physically. She dyed her brunette hair platinum blond and had her nose bobbed. Her low forehead gave her a dull-witted appearance, and she corrected this by having her hairline raised through electrolysis, just as Rita Hayworth had done. She hired Kim Novak’s masseuse to help her lose weight, and she visited a speech therapist who helped turn down her nasal Queens accent. By the time of her debut on KABC, dark, roly-poly Rona Burstein had become svelte blonde Rona Barrett.

  Her appearances proved so popular with the public that within a year Rona’s reports were being picked up by all eight of ABC’s owned and operated stations, including KGO in San Francisco, WBKB in Chicago, WXYZ in Detroit, and WABC in New York, where she appeared nightly on The 11 O’clock News with Roger Grimsby. “Which gives me forty percent of the American public,” Rona boasted. “Like New Jersey and Connecticut watch me from my New York outlet. I’ve got the centers, baby.”

  Rona’s segment usually appeared toward the end of the news show; some said it was because it wasn’t real news, but others whispered it was really because producers knew that people would stay tuned for it. When Barrett’s reports were on, ratings went up. “Greetings everyone!” Rona would open her segment, occasionally delivering her scoops in a dramatic stage whisper. “Her shrill little yentalike voice is swept along on gushes of scandalous innuendo,” observed one critic. “Like Hedda and Louella before her, Rona is genuinely fascinated, titillated, and alarmed by who was seen where with whom, why so-and-so was signed, and which star isn’t speaking to which director.”

  From the beginning, she faced resistance from the regular anchors and reporters at those stations, and as her success grew, their disapproval turned to contempt. Although Rona raised ratings at WABC in New York, anchorman Roger Grimsby introduced the gossip columnist with comments such as “Here’s Rona Barrett, Hollywood’s tripe caster” or “Here’s Rona Barrett, keyhole ferret.” One night, Grimsby introduced Barrett after a segment on the sanitation strike by saying, “and speaking of garbage …”

  “They don’t like the fact that I’m a ratings-getter, the news guys,” Barrett said. “Tough! Now they have to acknowledge me—reluctantly.” She tried to be a trouper about it all and one night even poked fun at herself by saying: “This is Rona Rumor.” For the next four nights she was blacked out on the WABC-TV screen.

  Serious news people weren’t the only ones who hated Rona. Celebrities made a sport of ridiculing her. “Rona doesn’t need a knife,” Johnny Carson said. “She cuts her steak with her tongue.” Rona impersonations became a fixture on comedy shows. Ruth Buzzi mimicked her as “Mona Blarit” on Laugh In. Frank Sinatra took to calling her a “bow wow.” Comedienne Carol Burnett did a wickedly funny takeoff called “Rona Rumor,” though when she had a movie to promote, she happily sat for an interview with the woman she regularly impersonated.*

  Some celebrities were not content merely to make fun of Barrett. At one Hollywood party, Mia Farrow dumped champagne over her head. Ryan O’Neal sent her a live tarantula in the mail. Rona didn’t mind—or at least she said she didn’t. She understood t
he publicity game. “Carol Burnett’s show helped me more than any one thing,” she said. “People remembered it.” The public knew her name—that’s what mattered. “Any publicity helps. And you know what? People remember the bad.”

  By the early 1970s, Rona Barrett had, as she vowed to do when her classmates mocked her leg brace, became a genuine star. In 1973 she married William Trowbridge, a former radio disc jockey turned Hollywood producer. Her 1974 dishy autobiography, Miss Rona, was a best-seller, and she wrote a follow-up, How You Can Look Rich and Achieve Sexual Fantasy, in which she advised her female readers to “mold chocolate fudge around his toes and dine on it before the rest of him.” She recorded an album of Hollywood’s greatest hits, including “Over the Rainbow” and “As Time Goes By.” She bought Hoagy Carmichael’s former house for the then-exorbitant price of $1.5 million and spent another $400,000 fixing it up. She bought a Rolls Royce with the license plate MS RONA. She launched several fanzines. “Most any star will return my call in a matter of seconds,” she said in 1974. “When you are on television, being seen by a minimum of thirty or forty million people a day, well that’s a lot of influence.” Once, when asked to name her favorite stars, Barrett replied, “Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Burt Lancaster—and me!”