Some stars were notoriously terrible at junkets. Once, when asked what she thought of the assembly-line interviews, Carrie Fisher threw herself on the ground and started pounding the floor. Meryl Streep practically refused to do them; she was just no good at censoring herself. At the Postcards from the Edge junket, Streep blurted out that she was upset that Madonna would edge her out from Evita, declaring “I can sing better than she can!” Once, when promoting Navy Seals, Charlie Sheen showed up slurring his words and looking like a gangster with a yellow fedora and a pin-striped suit. When a reporter asked Sheen to describe his character, the actor got belligerent. “You saw the movie,” Sheen snapped, “so why should I describe the character?” Then he started “buying” drinks for reporters—even though it was an open bar. None of the junketeers reported on Sheen’s peculiar behavior.
Perhaps no major star is as bad on junkets as Julia Roberts. When promoting Hook, the actress was asked how she had prepared for the role of Tinkerbell. “I don’t know,” Roberts said, then with some irritation added, “she’s just sort of this thing that happens. Who wants to know how Tinkerbell comes about?”
Asked if recent press reports about her erratic behavior had upset her, Roberts replied: “I just wish the public at large would concern themselves with their own lives, with their own personal business and affairs and then probably divorce rates would be lower, there wouldn’t be so many fractured families and troubled people and things would be a lot easier for everybody.”
After a long, awkward silence a reporter finally said, “You’re not happy being here, are you?”
“I’ve learned the hard way to be more frugal with words around people like you,” Roberts shot back. When a reporter phoned in a story that some people were disappointed with Hook and Roberts, she was asked to leave the junket early.
Kingsley had a problem with junkets. They were grueling work for her stars. They also created the sort of media blitz that made her clients seem more accessible than she liked. Reporters who went on junkets would stockpile quotes or footage and trot them out whenever that star was in the news. Even worse, as far as Kingsley was concerned, junketeers would sometimes repackage the interviews and sell them to other publications—including the dreaded supermarket tabloids. The studios didn’t care, but Kingsley certainly did. She did not want it to look like her hard-to-get celebrities were chatting it up with enemies like the National Enquirer. What’s more, appearing to give interviews to tabloids cheapened the value of the star’s words and put Kingsley in a weaker position when she negotiated exclusive interviews with upscale magazines. Kingsley was determined to tighten up the market for the precious Cruise interviews, so she teamed up with Kidman’s publicist, Nancy Seltzer, and demanded that reporters who wanted to interview Cruise or Kidman at the Far and Away junket had to sign a “consent agreement.” The contract stipulated, among other things, that quotes from Cruise and Kidman could be used “only during or in connection with the initial theatrical release” of Far and Away. All hell broke loose.
“Outrageous!” said an editor of the Dallas Morning News.
“Blackmail!” charged one broadcast reporter.
“Manipulation!”
“A threat to freedom of the press!”
“This is the final insult,” said New York Newsday movie critic Jack Matthews. “Publicity has taken over. It’s really offensive. This is entertainment extortion.”
“Since when is it a bad thing to make tough demands on behalf of your client?” Kingsley said. “The person who has the goods has a much stronger position. Why not exercise that position? In which business do you not do that?”
“Marlin Fitzwater wouldn’t have Sam Donaldson sign this,” HBO’s assignment editor Glen Meehan complained. “I had to sign it and I didn’t like it because it put me in a situation that makes us non-news.”
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Kingsley said. “If they don’t like it, they don’t have to participate.” Kingsley had some very sound reasons for wanting the journalists to sign the agreements. For one thing, freelance reporters would sometimes sell articles in countries where Kingsley had negotiated exclusive interviews. “It makes us look like we’ve reneged on an agreement,” she said. Kingsley knew she’d lose a few journalists, but not many. Despite their noisy protests, Kingsley knew that the media needed Tom Cruise; they wanted a piece of his star power. It translated into TV ratings and newsstand sales that they needed to survive. And indeed, as she anticipated, the Four Seasons was packed that Saturday.
The junketeers were shepherded into rooms where reproduction Queen Anne chairs were arranged in semicircles around a coffee table and an overstuffed couch. Publicists escorted in the interview subjects, and the reporters politely sat through question-and-answer sessions with Nicole Kidman, Ron Howard, and producer Brian Grazer. When Cruise walked into a room, however, the excitement was palpable. Cruise flashed his movie star smile and appeared genuinely happy to be there. He wore pointy-toed buckskin boots with heels at least an inch high, black jeans, and a white tee-shirt under an embroidered black shirt. He looked quite relaxed and fit, though a few journalists thought he looked a tad shorter than the five feet nine inches listed on his official biography.* “He reached over and gave you a handshake with such a firm grip,” recalled one reporter. “He looked you right in the eye. He connected. He had real personal power.” One journalist made the terrible faux pas of asking for Cruise’s autograph. Several of her colleagues gasped—many of them were starstruck, but they weren’t supposed to be so obvious about it. There was an embarrassed silence for a moment, then Cruise grinned and gave the reporter his autograph.
Some reporters who had interviewed Cruise before recognized the charm that he could turn on and off like a light switch. “His smile was a little too quick,” according to one writer. “And his laugh was a little too loud.” His grammar wasn’t great either: “alls I’m saying” seemed to be a favorite phrase. Still, they lapped it up—including comments like, “Comedically, dramatically, physically, this movie opens up new avenues for me.” In a typical revelation, Cruise confided: “The story was enchanting. My character had a lot of dimensions I had never before explored.” He discussed the joys of being married to Kidman. “It’s just gotten better,” he gushed. “You just get to share everything. It’s really incredible.”
It all seemed so heartfelt, so spontaneous, so genuine. But when some reporters compared notes afterward, they realized that Cruise said nearly the same thing to each of the groups. Regarding the Irish brogue he learned for the film, for example, Cruise told one group: “This isn’t your old Lucky Charms accent.” To another, he said: “We didn’t just do the old Lucky Charms sort of accent.” To another he spoke of his “all-out Irish accent. Not the Lucky Charms type of stuff.” As with most junkets, the star’s answers were most likely scripted in advance.
That didn’t matter. The reporters weren’t there to expose the publicity ruse they were perpetrating. To the contrary. The junket-produced stories were usually worded to make it sound as though the writer had sat down for an exclusive interview with the star. “When a confident, smiling Cruise arrives at the Four Seasons hotel for a recent interview, he considers what drew him to Far and Away …” read one article. “Cruise passes on coffee for a bottle of Canadian Glacier spring water, then, settling into an overstuffed couch, he says Far and Away demanded he master horseback riding and bare-knuckled boxing …” read another. The headlines were fawning: “Tom and Nicole: Far and Away a Dynamic Duo on Screen” declared one headline. “Romantic Leads On Screen and Off,” went another. There were a few unpleasant incidents at the junket—a reporter who had refused to sign the consent agreement was forcibly escorted out of a Cruise interview—but overall, it was a resounding success.
Far and Away needed all the good press it could get. When the film premiered in Cannes, it was met with outright ridicule. The audience hooted and howled with contempt. Viewers threw things at the screen. Though Far a
nd Away fell short of Cruise’s biggest hits—Top Gun earned $171.6 million, and Rainman grossed $173 million domestically—if the studio’s accounting is to be believed, the movie actually made money. It cost about $62 million to make and, according to one estimate, grossed about $100 million worldwide. Far and Away was a critical flop, but Cruise’s star power—and the glowing articles from the junketeering reporters—saved what might have otherwise been a box office bomb. Pat Kingsley had created a relationship between the stars and press that had not existed since the studios spoon-fed stories to Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper: she had turned the mainstream media into a public relations machine for the stars.
Back in her cluttered office in a nondescript building near West Hollywood, Pat Kingsley put in long hours, negotiating with journalists who were willing to cut deals, screaming at those who weren’t, and comforting distraught stars who thought reporters didn’t keep their end of the agreement. Kingsley’s desk was a former blackjack table, covered with green felt and surrounded by newspaper and magazine clippings, videocassettes, unopened mail, and still-wrapped gifts from grateful stars and hopeful journalists. On her desk was a group photo of Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, Goldie Hawn, and Barbra Streisand, autographed by each of them.
Considering her power and her influence, Pat Kingsley was not particularly well-paid by Hollywood standards. The $3,000 to $7,000 monthly retainer most clients paid was a pittance compared to what producers and agents made. PMK, which Kingsley owned with Lois Smith and Leslee Dart in New York, had a staff of 45—about half of them in Los Angeles. It had 135 clients in 1992 and an annual billing of about $4 million.
Kingsley did not lead the life of a Hollywood mogul. She lived alone in Pacific Palisades—she had a grown daughter from a twelve-year marriage that ended in divorce in 1978—and avoided the party circuit except when working. She disliked crowds. “I get panicky when I’m in a big department store,” she confessed. “I have to go into one of the changing stalls, put my head between my knees, and concentrate on breathing deeply.”
Kingsley hadn’t always wanted to be a publicist. When she was growing up, she didn’t want to be anything in particular. “I figured I was just going to get a job until I got married and had a child,” she said. “I had no ambition.” She was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1932 and her family moved from one Southern town to another, following her father’s work as a civilian quartermaster in the army. She enrolled in Winthrop College in South Carolina but wasn’t a particularly motivated or scholarly student, and dropped out after two years. “I never read Shakespeare or the classics,” she once admitted, “and when I’m with people who have read them, I have always felt the lack.” After dropping out of college, Kingsley held a variety of odd jobs, once vaccinating cows in Reno, Nevada, before a friend got her a stint in the publicity department of the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. That led to a publicity job at NBC in New York and with syndicator Ziv TV. In 1959, she moved to Hollywood where she worked as a secretary at Rogers and Cowan, the most powerful of the independent publicity firms that emerged after the fall of the studio system. Rogers and Cowan’s clients included Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Natalie Wood, and Doris Day. Kingsley’s various duties included going to a Dodgers game with Day and helping Monroe’s cat give birth.
When Kingsley started in the business, publicity was a poor cousin of the movie industry. Publicists sat around concocting stories about the stars they represented—some true, some not—and the best ones were rewarded with space in the gossip columns and fanzines. Groveling publicists pleaded with powerful columnists like Walter Winchell for mentions of their clients—as epitomized in the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. The philosophy was simple: celebrities needed the press. “Dog food and movie stars are much alike,” Warren Cowan’s partner Henry Rogers once decreed, “because they are both products in need of exposure.”
Cowan made Kingsley a “planter”—someone who gave gossip columnists tidbits about clients. “Hedda and Louella were still there, and getting the lead in one of their columns was vitally important, but when there would be some news item or gossipy item, I would almost never think to call up a columnist,” Kingsley recalled. “I never really went in for the side of the business most people think of when they think of publicity—the gimmicky stuff, the stunts…. Calling columnists about where stars had lunch and all that. I was never any good at it. Besides, it doesn’t have anything to do with anybody’s career.”
In 1971, Kingsley and two partners formed Pickwick Public Relations, which merged with a competitor in 1980 to become PMK.* The agency formed ties with Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles and ICM in New York, and together, the agents and publicists filled the function that studios once had: controlling access to the stars. “I hesitate to say that Pat does my public relations,” Sally Field said. “It’s way beyond that. I send her material, the scripts I’m thinking about doing or developing. And I’m not the only one who does. Jim Brooks, Goldie Hawn—a whole bunch of people ask her about scripts, about writers, about almost everything…. With Pat, a sort of safeness came over me I’d never felt before.”
In the early years of Kingsley’s career, celebrities were very much at the mercy of the few publications that covered television and Hollywood. Then the mainstream press discovered what the stars could do for their ratings and circulation, and the balance of power began to shift. By the 1980s, there were more TV shows and publications that needed big movie stars than there were big stars. It was, quite simply, a seller’s market, and Kingsley began to set the terms. She would withhold her clients, seeing who would offer best deal: the most favorable coverage, the most flattering photographs. At first, Kingsley would only allow her bigger stars to give interviews if they were promised a cover; soon the stars began insisting that the publicist be present for the interview; then they demanded veto power over the writer.† Then they asked for photo approval, quote approval, and sometimes, even veto power over text and headlines. Stars loved the gatekeeper style of publicity; they were not only getting better placement for less work—they were being publicized like movie stars, rather than dog food.
Pat Kingsley’s gatekeeper style of public relations caught on and other publicists adopted—and even exaggerated—Kingsley’s methods. New York-based Peggy Siegal was so renowned for her hardball tactics that Los Angeles magazine called her “Doyenne of the Dragons.” Her tirades are legendary. Ex-Vogue features editor Randall Koral butted heads with Siegal when he ran a piece on Mel Gibson’s Air America, which called the movie an “ill-informed, half-baked and unfunny comic caper.” Siegal, who was representing the film, called Koral. “Siegal told me I was wet behind the ears and ready to learn a thing or two; I was just a kid who wouldn’t last long,” said Koral. “It was very, very threatening.” When Dick Tracy was released, Siegal blackballed Vogue from interviewing her client Warren Beatty. It was a pattern Koral would see repeated many times in his career.
Publicist Nancy Seltzer has a similar reputation. Journalist Ivor Davis, whose column was syndicated to about fifty newspapers, was invited to a press junket for My Life, starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. Seltzer had clashed with Davis in the past, and when she found out that he was scheduled to attend the junket, she announced that Kidman would boycott the event unless Davis was barred from attending. “I didn’t even want to write about Kidman,” Davis complained. “I wanted to do Keaton, but she succeeded in getting me disinvited. The studio said it was out of their hands. So Michael Keaton lost press in fifty papers for an interesting film about a man dying of cancer that desperately needed help at the box office.”
Despite the competition, PMK remained the most powerful agency because it had the most impressive roster of clients. In addition to Cruise, PMK represented Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jodie Foster, Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, Candice Bergen, Roseanne Arnold, and Courtney Love. If a reporter wrote anything critical about any PMK client, he would ris
k losing access to the other stars—effectively destroying his career as a celebrity writer.
Once a celebrity went under PMK’s protective umbrella, the press’s treatment of him or her changed dramatically. When Courtney Love was merely a Seattle grunge rocker, Vanity Fair did a scathing profile of her that resulted in her temporarily losing custody of her daughter.* After Love decided she wanted to be a movie star, she hired PMK, and Vanity Fair did a cover story on Love, depicting her as an angel. PMK further cleaned up Love’s image by mailing out glamour shots of the former grunge queen along with a thinly veiled threat. “We got calls telling us to discard any old photos of Courtney, like the ones where her makeup was smeared all over her face and you could see her underwear,” according to one reporter. “We were told that we would be ‘monitored’ and anyone who used old photos instead of the ones of her looking like a Hollywood goddess would risk losing her cooperation and other PMK clients too.” Such threats usually worked. Hollywood journalists couldn’t afford to antagonize PMK. In 1993, Vanity Fair had agreed to put PMK client Andie MacDowell on the cover, but when a last-minute interview with Bill Clinton came through, the magazine’s editors were so worried about upsetting PMK that they published two versions of the magazine: one with Clinton and one with Andie MacDowell.†
Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip Page 29