Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  Within days, Fox had much bigger problems on its hands than some nasty reviews. After their hasty nuptials, Rockwell and Conger were immediately sent on a honeymoon cruise to Barbados. It was there, Rockwell later told the press, that Conger revealed she’d only wed him in order to go on the free trip.

  Back in the United States, Fleiss was busy putting together a follow-up special—Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire: A Television Phenomenon—that Darnell had ordered to capitalize on the water-cooler chatter. On February 20, the newlyweds flew back to California and filmed an interview for the special with Fox weatherman Mark Thompson—annulling their marriage shortly afterward. Following the interview, Rockwell and Fleiss hopped in a limo together, and that’s where all hell broke loose. During the ride, Fleiss got a call from Thompson, who was one of his closest friends. He informed Fleiss that The Smoking Gun had published an article called “Millionaire Groom’s Dirty Secret,” revealing that Rockwell had “slapped and hit” an ex-girlfriend, according to a 1991 restraining order. As a result of the incident, the Los Angeles court had ordered Rockwell to keep at least one hundred yards from his ex.

  Fleiss immediately began to lose it. He’d spent the past couple of months talking to Rockwell at least once a day, developing a nine-page questionnaire for Rockwell’s potential wives. As Fleiss later told Vanity Fair, he turned to Rockwell and began to plead: “That’s not true, right? That’s not true, right?” Rockwell acknowledged the report’s validity but tried to downplay it, insisting he’d never done anything to his ex other than let the air out of her car’s tires.

  “I was laying down,” Fleiss told the magazine. “I was so upset. I said, ‘Yeah, Rick is saying that it’s true.’”

  In the following days, it came to light that there appeared to be other holes in Rockwell’s story too. His 1,200-square-foot home had an old toilet in the backyard and hardly appeared to be the lush pad of a wealthy bachelor. It also seemed he’d long aspired to become a famous performer: In 1982, he’d earned a spot in The Guinness Book of Records for “longest continuous comedy routine” after telling jokes for thirty hours straight.

  “He struck me as totally honest,” Fleiss insisted to The New York Times as the fiasco was unfolding. “I had no questions about his sincerity. If that was a performance, he should have a couple of Emmy Awards already.”

  Sandy Grushow, then the chairman of Fox’s television entertainment group, immediately pulled the follow-up special, vowing that the network would conduct an internal investigation to figure out how Rockwell had made it on air. In the meantime, Fox had a clear scapegoat: Next Entertainment, Fleiss’s production company, which the network said failed to perform adequate background checks on the special’s participants. Next issued its own statement, arguing Rockwell had misled the producers.

  The news had ripple effects across the industry. In a conference call with reporters, CBS Television president Leslie Moonves said the incident had “made all of us very cautious about what we do. After this happened, I said, ‘Go back and do a triple and quadruple check on these people. I want grade-school diplomas.’”

  Rockwell, meanwhile, was busy trying to clear his own name, appearing on CNN’s Larry King Live to argue how sincere his intentions had been in searching for a wife. He told King that he had indeed been subjected to a background check, and he thought his criminal record had been “expunged, or whatever they call that, after seven years, so—I mean, that’s not the kind of person I am.”

  King informed Rockwell that a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll showed 66 percent of the people polled were unsympathetic to Conger, 71 percent were unsympathetic to Rockwell, and 62 percent said the show was harmful to the institution of marriage.

  “It was so uncomfortable,” Rockwell acknowledged. “I think it did challenge the sanctity of marriage. I think it did make a sham of relationships. I think it did make both genders look bad. I think it was a bad idea gone—worse.”

  “You wouldn’t have seen this twenty years ago on American television, no way,” King said, addressing Rockwell and his panel of guests, which included talk-show host Leeza Gibbons, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and news anchor Hugh Downs. “I don’t want to make a statement. That’s a question. Do you think you’d have seen this twenty years ago on American television?

  “No, I don’t,” Gibbons replied. “I mean, I don’t—you know, just like twenty years ago we weren’t showing navels and people in the same bed. I mean, there’s—it is evolving. It is harder to get noticed. There is inherent shock value. I still think there is a basic taste level, though, that if you cross that level, people will reject it.”

  “I think that this show has longevity,” countered Boteach. “Because it caters to all of our fantasies and stereotypes. This was a princess, you know, Cinderella meeting the big prince, and in an age where there is no romance, where guys and girls love each other for the wrong reasons, this thing, beyond the shock value, really bought into that fantasy, and that’s why people are so upset to see it unravel.”

  Of course, well over a decade later, viewers have come to expect far less from our reality-television couples. It’s almost a given at this point that couples on The Bachelor will break up within a year of their televised engagement, but that hasn’t stopped us from tuning in to watch them fall in (temporary) love.

  As for Fleiss, he never got in real legal trouble with Fox, because two months after Multi-Millionaire wrapped, an outside law firm hired by the network determined that neither Fox nor Next Entertainment had been negligent in casting Rockwell. Fleiss’s company, the review said, had hired a private investigator and a national search firm to perform Rockwell’s background check.

  “We’re proud of the work we did on the show, and we’re proud of the show,” Fleiss told the Los Angeles Times in April 2000. “It’s become a cultural icon and something the television business will always remember.”

  Behind closed doors, however, the ordeal was taking an emotional toll on the producer. He called his agent in a panic, fretting that his television career was over.

  “Fleiss called and said, ‘I’m never going to work. You’ve got to get rid of all your clients and focus on me,’” Ferriter remembered. The agent said he was still able to book Fleiss some big meetings, getting him in the room with the president of UPN. That apparently wasn’t enough for Fleiss, who fired Ferriter within the week and moved over to the Creative Artists Agency.

  “He said, ‘I want someone who’s just going to concentrate on me and nobody else,’” Ferriter said. “I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got fifty clients. If that’s the case, I’m not going to be that guy.’ He told me he was going to CAA and slammed down the phone. So we split. But I wanted to represent people that were controversial. You want to make a difference. Why be boring? Mike Fleiss was an incredibly creative guy. He was impatient. He was disrespectful. But he was a very creative producer.”

  Despite the agency swap, Fleiss went into hibernation. Scott Jeffress, who became friends with the producer while they were both working for special king Bruce Nash, went to visit him at his office and found a man dejected. Fleiss was sitting in a huge, empty office where the only furniture was a tiny desk in the corner. He was wearing his sunglasses inside. “It was just the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen,” Jeffress told me.

  “Even though he’s tall and burly and thick, he really is a sensitive guy,” recalled Ben Hatta, who began working as Fleiss’s assistant around this time. “He really got his feelings hurt when Fox put the blame all on him. He was like, ‘What the fuck? This is bullshit. Why am I getting all this heat?’”

  Fleiss tried to take solace in Multi-Millionaire’s commercial success. He tore out a page from The Hollywood Reporter touting the special’s strong ratings and had it framed. However controversial, he’d created something America couldn’t look away from, and the business wouldn’t ignore him for long. A few months after the scandal cooled off, Fleiss l
anded a seven-figure development deal with Warner Bros.’ Telepictures Productions.

  “That meant a lot to him,” said Hatta. “And then he started saying, ‘Dude. I got two strangers married in two hours. We can do whatever we want, man.’”

  Fleiss set up camp in Burbank, in a building whose bottom floor was occupied by one of those chain restaurants that serves burgers topped with onion rings, and huge slices of cake. He settled on an office that overlooked the Warner Bros. studio lot and had previously been occupied by Tom Selleck. The actor had filled the space with Detroit Tigers memorabilia, and Fleiss was a big baseball fan. It had a shower too, a tidbit he loved to share.

  Every day, the six-foot-four Fleiss would wear a version of the same thing to the office: a leather jacket, a black T-shirt, basketball shorts, flip-flops, and sunglasses—even inside. He was a huge fan of the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, and Jimi Hendrix. “Mike, be fuckin’ wild!” read an autographed album cover signed by Ozzy Osbourne on his wall.

  “We’d refer to him as ‘The Dude,’ because he was just like The Big Lebowski in his slippers and his sweats and his leather jacket, smoking and playing the guitar,” said Hatta. “He rode around in this old Mercedes. He’d surf in the morning. Sometimes he’d bring his dog to the office. Keeping a conversation with him in his office was a challenge, because he’s on the other side playing the guitar, feet up on the desk. He’d start staring off at his things, talking to them—he had all of this Grateful Dead stuff and Chargers jerseys and helmets. You’d have to call him back into reality like, ‘Hey, Mike, Mike, what about this?’”

  And in the weeks following the announcement of the Telepictures deal, focus was key. Fleiss needed to deliver a strong show pitch and told his team he was looking for big-picture ideas in the vein of CBS’s Big Brother. But despite endless brainstorming sessions with his staff—followed by sleepless nights—nothing was coming to him. He was so anxious that he came down with a 104-degree temperature, and in some sort of fever dream, the idea for The Bachelor emerged.

  “A dating show where you watch your relationship evolve,” he would tell Vanity Fair of the show’s genesis. “Within fifteen minutes I had the whole thing in my head: the roses, the house—everything. I swear to God, it all came in like one flash.”

  His plan was to pull from the elements that had resonated with Multi-Millionaire viewers but stretch the idea out over six episodes. He’d class up the premise by adding in romantic touches—hot tubs, sunsets, carriage rides. “He wanted to take the setting of Multi-Millionaire and put it on a hillside surrounded by palm trees, roses, a sunset and candlelight,” said Hatta. “The viewers for the special were primarily women, so he thought if he upped the romance, he could make it sell.”

  Of course, Fleiss immediately took the idea to his buddy Darnell over at Fox, but the executive wasn’t interested—and was about to have his own reality hit in Temptation Island. NBC’s Jeff Zucker also turned down the pitch. Even ABC—who eventually bought The Bachelor—rejected him at first.

  “Nobody was buying it,” said Jeffress, Fleiss’s old pal who was brought in to help run the show. “It wasn’t an immediate sell. Executives were hesitant over the endgame—like, how does the show end? They date and then what happens? Finally, Mike said, ‘At the end, the guy drops down on one knee and proposes. And boom! You have that big moment.’ And that format worked.”

  Andrea Wong, ABC’s then senior vice president of series and specials, was the one to ultimately buy into the concept. And so The Bachelor was born.

  Finding the perfect guy to attract twenty-five women, however, would prove difficult. Fleiss’s ideal Bachelor was the prototypical manly man—a sporty, smart guy with a good job and some money in the bank. But ABC’s Wong was adamant that the Bachelor be able to communicate well with the twenty-five women.

  “She’d ask things like ‘How will he handle himself? How does he look?’” remembered Jeffress. “You also needed someone who was well spoken and could interview well, speaking in concise sound bites. Somebody who could have multiple conversations and had multiple interests. We wanted him to look sharp in a suit when he showed up. First and foremost, he had to blow these girls away when they got up to the house. When those ladies pulled up in the limo, you wanted to hear: ‘Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!’”

  A casting call for “America’s Most Eligible Bachelor” went out nationwide.

  “THE SEARCH CONTINUES! THE MANHUNT IS STILL UNDERWAY!” the press release announced. “The Bachelor, an original one-hour primetime reality television series, which gives one lucky man the opportunity to meet the woman of his dreams, is hot on the trail of ‘America’s Most Eligible Bachelor.’ The series, which will air during the 2001–02 season on ABC, will give America’s most eligible single man a one-of-a-kind opportunity to find his true love, and, hopefully, his bride-to-be. . . . The bachelor will court the candidates, introduce some to family and friends and even take a few of them home to meet Mom! But the big question is: After all of this, when he pops the question, will she accept?”

  With reality television still in its infancy, however, there weren’t many handsome, financially successful men eager to appear on an untested program. Casting producers scattered across the country, scouring malls, bars, and nascent dating websites. The ideal candidate would be a Caucasian banker or a lawyer with a solid education whose parents were still married.

  “It was embarrassing,” said Hatta, who was sent to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to recruit potential candidates. “You’d walk up to someone with a clipboard and be like, ‘We’re doing this reality show that’s kind of like Big Brother but based on romantic relationships. We’re trying to find America’s most eligible bachelor, and we’re looking for people with careers who like having fun and are really interested in falling in love.’”

  After sifting through more than five hundred men, the casting department found Alex Michel. At thirty-one, Michel already had an impressive résumé: He’d graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he majored in history and literature and made both the varsity swimming and water polo teams. He went on to earn his MBA at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and then landed a job at Boston Consulting Group.

  Michel, who grew up in the affluent suburb of Darien, Connecticut, was about to take a slot on Survivor: Africa when he tossed his hat into the Bachelor ring. “We really wanted somebody who truly wanted to fall in love, but everyone who goes on TV has an agenda,” acknowledged Jeffress. “Alex wanted to travel. He wanted to get into film and television and media.”

  Fleiss told The New York Times that Michel seemed like “the kind of guy you lose a girl to—the guy with the good family and money and the handsome grin.” Michel’s friends backed up that assertion, describing his “level of charisma” as “Clintonesque.” “There isn’t a wedding I know of from Harvard or Stanford or any of the derivative feeder schools like St. Paul’s that Alex isn’t invited to,” Michel’s college buddy David DiDomenico said in that 2002 Times piece.

  But even after Michel was locked in, another manhunt continued—this time for the host of The Bachelor. The producers wanted a male to take the reins—a guy who was good-looking but not too good-looking—someone mature and married and safe. In Jeffress’s words: “He couldn’t be the guy who was all, ‘Hey, baby.’”

  Chris Harrison fit the bill. A twenty-nine-year-old Dallas native, he was married and had just had his first son when his agent suggested he take a meeting with Fleiss, who was described to him as “Heidi’s cousin.”

  It was November 2001, and Harrison had yet to become a sought-after host. He’d gotten his start in broadcasting while attending Oklahoma City University, where he played on the school soccer team. In his spare time, the communications major started giving play-by-play commentary of college basketball games on a local cable network. After graduating in 1993, he started working for KWTV, the CBS affilia
te in Oklahoma City, working his way up from intern to weekend sports anchor. He stayed there until 1999, when he moved to California with his family to take a job as a lead anchor on TVG, a horseracing network. When he got the call from The Bachelor, he was juggling the TVG gig with other freelance work, hosting Mall Masters, a game show that filmed at the Mall of America, and Designers’ Challenge, an HGTV program about designers competing to renovate homes.

  You’d think he’d jump at the opportunity to host a major network TV show, but Harrison had reservations about Fleiss—largely because of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, which he thought was a disaster. Still, Harrison agreed to meet the producer, but it was hardly love at first sight between the two men.

  “He looked like a guy barfed on by an eight-week-old,” Fleiss would later tell The Dallas Morning News. “There was just no energy in the room. I couldn’t wait for that meeting to end. It was incredibly painful. He was the dullest guy I’ve ever seen.”

  Network executives argued that Fleiss had gotten the wrong impression of the potential host and persuaded the men to meet up again three weeks later. This time, things went off without a hitch.

  “I guess he got a good night’s sleep, or at least a few hours, because he was terrific,” Fleiss said in the Dallas paper. “He’s articulate, funny, and incredibly gregarious. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy.”

  Slowly, The Bachelor was starting to come together. Filming would take place at a Malibu mansion right off the Pacific Coast Highway; the luxurious Spanish Revival–style home so commonly associated with the franchise now wasn’t even built then. Each episode would last one hour, and the whole season would be comprised of only six episodes. On the first night, Michel would meet twenty-five women and quickly narrow the pool down to fifteen. By episode two, he’d already be down to eight ladies. Third episode: four women. Fourth episode: three women. Fifth episode: two women. And then the finale.