Dish (13 page)

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 the 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!”

In 1975, Rona Barrett was hired by ABC, becoming the first gossip columnist to appear in a national newscast. Again, she raised the ratings, but the serious news people resented her presence. “I hear Elmer Lower, the head of ABC News, sends memos daily to get me fired,” Rona said shortly after she was hired by the network. “But I don’t care. I mean, it annoys me, but I don’t
care.
… I am a very big moneymaker that gives the station a very enormous rating. Elmer Lower’s ratings
stink.”

The truth is, Rona did care. After joining the national network, she decided she wanted to be taken seriously. “It grieves me that they categorize me as a gossip,” she said in 1977. “I have brought the business of entertainment to the American public.” She also informed people that they should no longer call her “Miss Rona.” And she began making demands. She considered celebrity news, which the network was increasingly emphasizing, to be her exclusive territory. She liked to maintain that she had pioneered the format of the long celebrity interviews, and she became resentful at the growing number of such assignments being given to a woman who was politically shrewder than she was, Igor Cassini’s former assistant and Roy Cohn’s former “girlfriend,” Barbara Walters, whom ABC had lured away from NBC with a salary of $1 million.

Rona was a regular on
Good Morning America,
but she complained that Barbara Walters was upstaging her and that all of her good ideas were being given to Walters. “I’m smarter than Barbara and I do a better job than she does on the specials,” Rona complained. “She has invaded my turf.” The ever diplomatic Walters knew better than to get into a catfight with Rona. “Rona is entitled to her opinion,” Walters said. “I have great respect for her.”

Rona wasn’t calmed. In April 1980, she poured her heart out to Tom Snyder on the
Tomorrow
show. “I feel raped!” she told him. “I can’t watch my ideas be given to somebody else. There’s an old expression, you can steal my wife, but don’t steal my ideas…. There is nothing worse than feeling raped. You feel sick. And you feel violated.” Rona quit ABC in 1980 and was hired by NBC, where she was paid $1 million a year and teamed
up with Tom Snyder. “This is not a ploy to get more money,” Rona declared. “It’s an artistic decision.”

With Snyder broadcasting from New York and Barrett from Los Angeles, NBC had great hopes for the show, but it was a disaster from the beginning. For Rona’s debut episode, she had taped an interview with Mary Tyler Moore. Shortly before the segment was to air, however, Moore’s son killed himself. Moore’s estranged husband, Grant Tinker, the former head of NBC, advised Moore that it would be unseemly for her to appear gossiping and giggling with Rona Barrett on national TV shortly after her son committed suicide. Barrett begged Moore to help her update the segment, but the actress refused. Barrett then threatened to run the interview without Moore’s approval, introducing it by noting that the actress was devastated by the tragedy. “Mary said that if Rona did that, she would issue a public statement blasting Rona,” according to a source. “Snyder sided with Moore against Barrett.” So, on her heralded
Tomorrow
debut, Rona Barrett discussed politics.

The second show went even worse. Rona was scheduled to interview Victor Navasky, author of the McCarthy era chronicle
Naming Names,
but Snyder, according to sources, was unhappy because he felt Barrett was invading his territory by tackling such a serious subject. When the broadcast began, Snyder told viewers that Rona would not be part of that evening’s show because of “communications difficulties.” In truth, he simply refused to turn any part of the show over to his West Coast co-host. Barrett was left stranded in her Hollywood studio with Navasky, humiliated and furious.

“He told me I was trying to steal his program,” Barrett later said. “I was stunned.” It was her understanding, Barrett said, that she and Tom were supposed to be equals on the show. That was not Snyder’s understanding. “It’s Tom Snyder’s show, not hers,” Snyder’s agent, Ed Hookstratten said. “She can be an integral part of it, but she can’t be co-host. It’s not her show.”

Snyder wasn’t Rona’s only enemy. The critics were also vicious. “Poor little Miss Ro-Ro,” wrote the
Washington Post’s
Tom Shales, referring to the “one blessed night” when Snyder refused to throw the show over to her. “Yesterday only a few people
knew about The Rona Syndrome. It used to be known as biting off more than you can chew, even if you have a very big mouth. Miss Rona reached—for the stars! And not just Burt Reynolds, either. She wanted more than glamour, more than fame, more than daily morning exposure on television with her tattered Tinseltown tidbits. She wanted RESPECT. But Rona and Tom together was one shrieking peacock too many even for the peacock network.”

Although NBC’s executives valued the viewers that Barrett brought to the show, they balked at giving her celebrity reports equal billing with the “hard news” that was Snyder’s beat. The feud continued to escalate until one day in June 1981, Rona simply refused to show up for work. “I don’t want to be on any show with Tom Snyder anymore,” she said. “No matter who I got as a guest, no matter how important, they never put me first up. If NBC doesn’t like what I have to say I’m really sorry.” She insisted on hosting her own show, declaring, “I won’t play second fiddle to [Snyder] or anybody else any longer.” She had hoped to stay with NBC, but left the network entirely not long afterward. “It’s really mind-boggling the way NBC has treated me,” she said, “and I’m tired of being the good little girl.”

In 1985, Rona was hired by
Entertainment Tonight,
the all-celebrity nightly newscast started by Paramount in 1981. She was reportedly making $700,000 a year and her contract stipulated that if her segments ran longer than eighteen minutes, she was to be paid an extra $1,200 per minute. But the show’s producers soon realized that Barrett’s reports contained no greater revelations, and drew no more of an audience, than the pieces by the junior reporters, who were paid much less and who were less difficult to work with. The audience was tuning in for information about celebrities and didn’t particularly care who reported it. Rona and
Entertainment Tonight
parted company after nine months. She tried doing an industry newsletter, “The Barrett Report” but at $1,200 a year, it was considered overpriced for information that could be found in other places, and it soon folded. Rona tried a number of TV and radio shows, including a shortlived return to NBC, but nothing worked. Her personal life wasn’t going much better. She had split from her husband. The form of
celebrity news that Rona had given birth to had outgrown her. “Hedda and Louella had it easier,” Rona complained in 1986. “Today, if Ingrid Bergman got pregnant, it would be lucky to make the inside pages.”

That same year Macmillan announced that it was canceling the sequel to Barrett’s best-selling
Miss Rona
and asked for the return of the $300,000 advance. By the end of the eighties, Rona finally acknowledged that her brief reign as America’s premiere gossip columnist was over. “As Walter Cronkite once said, now and then there’s a fabulous story and I go for my fireman’s hat and I say, ‘Where’s the fire?’ ” Rona said in 1989. “And that’s when I remember that I don’t have the forum.”

Rona Barrett’s legacy, however, was lasting. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she had proved—against all odds and despite the contrary feelings of so many newspaper editors—that the public was still interested in celebrity news, and that for fledgling television stations, gossip was the surest, quickest route to profitability. Once that had been established, it wasn’t long before the “legitimate” print press would rediscover the formula was well.