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Chen took on the secretarial and scheduling duties for the star, eventually edging out her long-time publicist Springer. Taylor’s career was in crisis at that point. At forty-nine she could no longer play romantic leads; she became the butt of fat jokes. She was overweight, overaged, and given to tantrums. No producer wanted to hire her. After her marriage to Virginia Senator John Warner ended in 1981, she was at a loss over what to do with herself. Despite her world fame, she was essentially another unemployed actress. Chen Sam set out not to revitalize Taylor’s acting career but to give her a new career—one in which being famous was itself her full-time occupation.

“Perhaps because Chen didn’t have a background in P.R., she didn’t follow all the old rules,” says a former employee. “She invented new ones.” One of the things that Chen had to address was that Taylor had become too
accessible.
“We were told that whenever someone wanted her to appear at a function we were to say Miss Taylor is
so
busy these days,” says the source. “It’s all about saying no, until you create an appetite in people,” Chen used to say, “and knowing the exact right moment to say yes.”

Another way that she upped Taylor’s celebrity image was by making outrageous and sometimes capricious demands. Taylor
had a seven-page list of requirements on how her hotel room should be prepared for her stays. When she appeared in
Little Foxes
at the Victoria Theatre in 1982, she not only insisted that the walls of her dressing room be painted violet to match her eyes, but she also had a violet carpet installed, violet flowers delivered daily, and demanded a huge tank of exotic tropical violet-colored fish.

Chen also started to charge for Taylor’s appearances and interviews. “If she was looking to promote something, fine, the interview was free,” says the source. “But if someone just wanted time with Elizabeth, Chen always demanded money. “Why should we give it away?” she would ask. Sometimes, there were misunderstandings over fees. In 1985, Chen accepted an offer of $1 million from Bob Guccione to pose for
Penthouse
magazine. “Chen and Elizabeth were both very excited by it,” says a source. “They had several meetings with Guccione to discuss the details. Then Bob asked what Elizabeth wanted to wear in the pictures where she’d be dressed. There was some confusion, and then Bob realized that Chen and Elizabeth thought they were going to get $1 million for her posing
with
clothes. Bob couldn’t believe it! Chen and Elizabeth were furious and stormed out. But that was the way that Chen was marketing Elizabeth.”

Chen Sam, according to those who knew her, believed she was also the mastermind behind Taylor’s “relationships” with men like Michael Jackson and Malcolm Forbes. It was she, says a source, who arranged the “romance” between the actress and publisher Malcolm Forbes, who was gay. “Chen came to me and asked me if I knew of any rich men who’d be willing to donate money to Elizabeth’s charity,” says a former editor for
Forbes
magazine. “I knew that Malcolm was looking for a beard. Chen hooked them up.”

Similarly, when Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi was looking for entree into respectable society, he started escorting Taylor around. He donated $1 million to her charitable organization. “She gave people credibility and Hollywood cachet,” says a source. “They gave her money.”

By that time, Taylor had successfully repositioned herself not just as a scandalous tabloid fixture but as a genuine celebrity icon.
Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than the success of her line of fragrances: Passion, White Diamonds, and Black Pearls, which grossed some tens of millions of dollars. “We did tours of department stores and sometimes the managers of the stores were unprepared for the onslaught of fans when Elizabeth appeared,” says a former employee of Sam. “They were like rock concerts. We would give store managers a list of things they had to do for crowd control, like turn down the thermostats so that people wouldn’t get overheated. One store manager refused to comply. He said, ‘Oh, we’ve had celebrities here before. We had Cindy Crawford here once.’ But they had no idea about the incredible drawing power of someone like Elizabeth Taylor. We said, ‘You haven’t seen true stardom in effect until you’ve seen Elizabeth Taylor.’ But they didn’t believe us. It got overcrowded, and people fainted. It was mayhem.”

Other celebrities tried to imitate this marketing strategy, but without similar success. When Karl Lagerfeld created a fragrance called Sun, Moon, Stars, Chen Sam was hired to do the publicity. “Karl Lagerfeld chose Daryl Hannah to be the face behind the fragrance because at the time she was dating John Kennedy Jr. and the Europeans are obsessed with anything Kennedy,” says a source who worked on the campaign. “Chen made up a list of the publications Daryl should talk to and the cities she should visit. Daryl refused to do any of the interviews or make any appearances. She told us, and I quote, ‘I am the next Jacqueline Kennedy. I have to be careful who I give myself to.’ Our jaws all dropped. We all called her the mute spokesperson.” Eventually, she did start talking, and some wished she had stayed mute. When asked if she wore Sun, Moon, Stars all the time, Hannah replied, “I don’t wear perfume.” The fragrance bombed.

By the late eighties, celebrities had rediscovered the tremendous power of celebrity. Stars have long had a reputation for being spoiled and demanding, but by the late 1980s, they were making increasingly capricious demands for special treatment. Demi Moore asked that the studios foot the bill for her entourage of bodyguards, nannies, trainers, and makeup artists. Demi’s personal
staff cost the producers of the clunker
Scarlet Letter
more than $877,000.

As the years progressed, some of these demands became obscene. When John Travolta was negotiating to appear in
The Double, Variety
reported that producers agreed not only to his $17 million salary, but also agreed to foot the bill for more than a dozen assistants, trainers, makeup artists, stand-ins, security guards, and massage therapists. He wanted his personal cook as well as approval over the catering staff for the rest of the cast and crew. What’s more, he insisted that the studio had to rent his private plane from him for the Paris-based shoot and that the trailer he normally uses in Los Angeles be shipped to Europe. (By the time it arrived, Travolta had dropped out of the film.) During the shooting of
Ace Ventura 2,
Jim Carrey asked for a chef not only for himself but for his pet iguana as well. When producers balked at that expense, Carrey compromised: they shared the cost of the iguana chef.

In the most notorious and capricious of all celebrity demands, the rock group Van Halen had it written into their contract that a large bowl of M&M’s had to await them in the dressing room of any place they played and that all brown M&M’s had to be removed before they arrived. If a brown M&M was found, the group would receive full pay and didn’t have to play. “Word got around that we really meant it,” lead singer David Lee Roth once said. If Roth found a brown M&M in his dressing room, he would throw a fit. He would hold the offending M&M in his hand and bellow “What is this?” The promoter would be called. “How could you do that to Dave?” his manager would bellow. The Rolling Stones mocked Van Halen’s demand by putting in their contracts that they wanted only brown M&M’s. (Once Mick Jagger bought a used Volkswagen, had it painted like a brown M&M and parked it in front of Van Halen.) But the Rolling Stones made their own outrageous demands as well, insisting on pool tables, a golf driving range, and imported caviar.

“Celebrities love to play power games—to see how high people will jump for them,” says one Hollywood producer. When on the set of
Star Trek Generations,
William Shatner insisted that Volvic mineral water be delivered to his trailer, Patrick Stewart
insisted on the same perk. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he reportedly explained. “I remember once Bruce Willis called all these [film] heavyweights to his ranch to discuss film projects,” said the producer. “There was about four feet of snow outside and Bruce suggested they go out for a stroll. They had shown up in these paper-thin, custom-made Gucci loafers and these lightweight Southern California coats, but they all swallowed hard and went out and traipsed in waist-high snow. Then Willis stops at a snowbank and says, ‘You know, last week I lost the rearview mirror in this very spot.’ Then he looks all wistful. ‘Sure do wish I could find it.’ Then he looks at the moguls expectantly. They all dived into the snow and Willis stood there with this big shit-eating grin watching them.”

As celebrities became more coddled and more powerful, they expected gentler treatment from the publications that covered them—at a time when those publications were getting increasingly aggressive. Even
People,
that onetime celebrity-fawning magazine, was finding itself at loggerheads with the stars it covered. Jim Gaines, a former editor from
Saturday Review
and writer for the national affairs section of
Newsweek,
became managing editor of the magazine in 1987. Unlike Dick Stolley, who left
People
to head up a revived
Life,
or Pat Ryan, who succeeded Stolley, Gaines didn’t feel the need or desire to protect celebrities from themselves. He was an ex-reporter, with a taste for news, and felt that
People
was there to tell its readers the truth about the rich and famous. The different philosophy led to some nasty conflicts between
People
and its celebrity subjects. “They surrounded themselves with fire walls of P.R. people who began trying to manipulate the press,” Gaines said. “They became obnoxious, difficult barriers to the truth. It became very confrontational.” The most serious of those clashes, and the one that would for years affect the relationship between
People
and celebrities, was over a profile of Robin Williams.

In early 1988, publicists for
Good Morning, Vietnam
pitched a story on Williams, but they didn’t want to give
People
access to the actor unless they were promised a cover. Gaines wasn’t sure he wanted to make the agreement. Comedians traditionally didn’t
sell well on covers, and the once-hot actor was going through a lull in his career—films like
Popeye
and
The World According to Garp
were big box office disappointments. Then Williams’s publicist said the actor would discuss the affair he was having with his nanny. Gaines was thrilled. He agreed and assigned writer Brad Darrach to do the piece. Darrach spent five days with Williams, then, late one evening during a break in a photo shoot and while the actor’s P.R. agent was out of the room, the actor unburdened himself about his relationship with Marsha Garces, his son’s nanny. Not long after the interview, Williams started getting nervous about what he had told the reporter. He insisted that he had cooperated only after being assured that the article would focus on his professional, not his personal, life. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Disney, which was bringing out
Good Morning, Vietnam,
asked Jim Gaines to breakfast. Katzenberg warned Gaines not to publish anything that might upset Williams. He suggested that if
People
upset someone as popular in the Hollywood community as Williams was, other stars might retaliate. Gaines was furious at what he considered an attempt at coercion and refused to change the story.

The February 22 cover was pure tabloid: “Public triumph, private anguish. Robin Williams.
Good Morning, Vietnam
has made the comic genius into a movie star at last, but his life is a minefield. Having beaten alcohol and drugs, he’s now entangled in a love affair with his son’s nanny that has left his wife embittered—and Zachary, four, in the middle. It’s the emotional challenge of his life. ‘I’ll do anything,’ he says, ‘to keep my son from harm.’ ”

Williams was outraged. “It feels like psychic rape,” he said in an interview years later. “When you do these things, you get halfway through and you realize, my god, they’re sticking it to me. It’s like this feeling of violation. And what’s weird is they’re stabbing you with your own kitchen utensils.”

After the appearance of the article, Hollywood, which had thought it could always depend on
People
for the sort of sympathetic treatment the magazine had given celebrities like Carol Burnett when the
Enquirer
threatened to expose her daughter’s drug use, now began to consider the magazine just another tabloid. And
treated it as such, for the boycott threatened by Katzenberg did take place. Top stars refused to speak to Gaines’s staff. “You walk up to them looking for an item,” complained one writer, “and they turn on you: ‘How could you do that to Robin?’ ” Some celebrities might have been motivated less out of loyalty and more out of fear of the onetime celebrity-friendly magazine. Citing reasons they didn’t want to cooperate with the magazine, publicists would say, “You might do a Robin Williams on us.”

Richard Stolley,
People’s
founding editor, believed Gaines had made a fundamental mistake in antagonizing Williams and the Hollywood community. “The Robin Williams story was harsher than it needed to be,” he says. “When he began yelping, people automatically rallied to his side…. In a fight between an icon and the press, there’s no question who Hollywood will side with.”

The press, so daunted by Williams’s awesome power to punish publications that printed stories he didn’t like, almost totally disregarded the news when shortly after the
People
flap a former cocktail waitress named Michelle Tish Carter filed a lawsuit alleging that the comedian had given her herpes. Williams countersued, saying that Carter had threatened to tell her story to the media unless he paid her. In July 1992, shortly before he was scheduled to testify, Williams and Carter reached an out of court settlement. Under the terms of the agreement, neither side was allowed to discuss the details of the settlement. “There was no way we were going to touch that story,” says a reporter for a competing magazine. “The word was out: If you take a shot at Robin Williams, you’re going to get hit yourself.”