Dish (38 page)

Roth made it clear that his client would talk to no one for any amount until the trial was over. But the paying media had better luck with Bowman’s two supporting witnesses. Less than a week into the story, the
Post
reportedly paid an undisclosed amount to Cassone for her account of the evening, including the claim that she had seen Ted Kennedy walking around the mansion late at night dressed only in a nightshirt—”pantless,” as the
Post
called him—and published it under the headline “TEDDY’S SEXY ROMP!”

Soon, any journalist with the inclination had interviewed Cassone, who was also invited to New York, where she made the rounds of talk radio, such as Curtis and Lisa Sliwa’s show, and appeared on
Geraldo
and
Sally Jessy Raphael.
Then, once her usefulness as a witness had been corrupted by overexposure and payoffs, she herself became a victim.

In late May, in exchange for £9,400, a former boyfriend of Michelle Cassone gave Balfour photos of her, naked, performing oral sex on him. Balfour passed them on to Dunleavy, who invited Cassone to New York to make a studio appearance on the show. After lunch at the 21 Club, they arrived at the
Current Affair
set. With the cameras rolling, Dunleavy asked Cassone about the rumors that she was going to pose nude for
Penthouse.
Cassone replied that she could never take her clothes off for a photographer. “It would kill my mother,” she told Dunleavy. At that point, Dunleavy pulled out the photographs of Cassone having sex that Balfour had purchased. Cassone, mortified and incensed, grabbed at the pictures and began hitting the man who had just taken her to lunch at 21. She kneed him in the groin and bit his hand—all while the cameras rolled. When the footage was aired that night, the show earned the highest ratings it would receive all year. Dunleavy treated the entire incident as a joke. “As a man you can’t run away,” he said of Cassone’s attack. “As a gentleman you can’t respond. So you just had to take it. And when she pulled up the knee, then suddenly I was in the Lutan Boys Choir, you know, singing my high C.”

It was
A Current Affair
that also got the first exclusive from Anne Mercer, the woman Patricia Bowman had called to come rescue her from the Kennedy mansion. The fee she finally received, $25,000, was far less than the $150,000 she had originally been offered because by the time she agreed to talk to the show, the police had released the transcripts of her statements, which significantly reduced the news value of what she would say on air.

By the time the trial started the following fall—”Gentlemen,” an article in the
Palm Beach Post
declared as it began, “to the sewers!”—
A Current Affair
and its staff had gone from covering the story to playing a crucial role in its outcome. It had produced some forty segments on the case, and a number of them were indeed pivotal, newsmaking “Exclusives!” In addition to the pieces on Mercer and Cassone, it had interviewed Tony Liott, the bartender whose testimony undermined Patricia Bowman’s credibility, and Ewell Tournquists, a waiter who’d provided an account of Senator Kennedy’s alleged drunkenness. During jury
selection, Willie Smith’s attorney Roy Black mentioned the program and Dunleavy as often as once an hour while quizzing potential jurors about which segments they had seen. Overexposure to the show was grounds for disqualification.

Then on the opening day of the trial, prosecutor Moira Lasch, having decided not to call Michelle Cassone at all because she had been so tainted by her involvement with
A Current Affair,
called Anne Mercer as her first witness. Under cross-examination by Roy Black, Mercer, the thirty-year-old daughter of a wealthy real-estate developer with reported ties to organized crime, admitted that
A Current Affair
had paid her $25,000 for her first interview, which she had spent on a vacation to Mexico with her boyfriend, and another $15,000 for a second interview that very evening. The admission discredited her testimony. Dunleavy, together with Mercer’s attorney, Raoul Felder, escorted her from the courthouse. Later, Felder turned on Mercer, appearing on
A Current Affair
and saying she “once was a poor little rich girl who was used to getting her way with everything. She still had this air that she was rich, famous, and arrogant. There was this attitude, ‘Who are you to question me?’ It was that attitude that killed her on the stand.”

In the end, the trial damaged almost everyone it touched. Patricia Bowman was forever scarred. The Kennedy family’s reputation had received yet another serious blow. The editorial judgment of the
New York Times
had been denounced throughout the country. Cable television, however, had profited handsomely. The day the trial opened, CNN’s audience increased 57 percent. The following day it rose 71 percent. And on the day Patricia Bowman testified, it climbed 142 percent. But the biggest winners were the tabloid news shows. During the sweep-month ratings in November as the trial was getting under way,
Hard Copy
had a 6 Nielsen rating, up from the 4.6 of the previous year, and
Inside Edition
had a 6.8 rating, up from a 5.6. But the leader was
A Current Affair,
with an 8.8 rating, up from an 8.2 a year earlier.

Shortly after the verdict, in acknowledgment of the show’s moment of triumph, the
New York Times,
whom Dunleavy regularly excoriated as stuffy and stiff and boring, ran its affectionate profile of the reporter, calling him “the undisputed maharajah of
tabloid television” and “the ringmaster” of “a media circus.” It was an ironic tribute coming from a. paper that had so publicly bungled its coverage of the story. But it was significant nonetheless. The media establishment seemed to be admitting that, in 1991, it had ceded the field—or at least the role of defining the news—to the tabloid press that one of its reigning members had once haughtily denounced as a “force of evil.”

Tom Cruise, the world’s biggest movie star, was coming to New York the first weekend in December 1996, and entertainment reporters from around the country flew in to interview him. TriStar was releasing Cruise’s
Jerry Maguire
and the elusive star was attending the glittering premiere onboard the luxury liner
Galaxy,
as well as the world premiere of
Portrait of a Lady,
starring his wife Nicole Kidman. “The couple that premieres together stays together,” declared Liz Smith.

In recent months, however, rumors were swirling that the couple’s marriage was troubled. There were reports of ugly arguments and talk that the couple was spending more and more time apart. When Kidman showed up at the black tie post-premiere party for her movie, she looked lovely in a shimmering green gown. She carefully fielded questions about her marriage. “Tom and I are heterosexuals,” the actress said in an even voice. “We have a great marriage. We have two wonderful children. It’s all just vicious, hurtful lies dreamed up to sell magazines and newspapers.” Tom Cruise didn’t have to deal with the prying reporters. He ditched the party and left his wife to fend for herself.

At the Regency Hotel that Saturday, journalists had been invited to interview the stars of
Jerry Maguire.
When they realized that Cruise was going to be a no-show, a halfhearted revolt erupted. “Show Me the Money!” the reporters chanted.

“I know it’s frustrating for you guys,” said director Cameron Crowe, himself a former journalist who had profiled Cruise for
Interview
magazine. Crowe explained that Cruise was just too busy with Stanley Kubrick’s
Eyes Wide Shut
to meet with them. “Kubrick only let him loose for forty-eight hours,” Crowe said. “I’m grateful that he’s packing everything into that time.” In that time, Cruise gave interviews to the
Today Show, Larry King Live,
and avowed Cruise fan Rosie O’Donnell. He also gave a press conference to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

It wasn’t just that Tom was rushed for time, the reporters knew. The actor hated the American press. Journalists who showed up at the Regency with hopes of interviewing Cruise were left quoting the nice things his co-stars said about him. Some of the reporters felt used—they grumbled about the absurdity of gathering flattering comments about a celebrity who refused to speak to them. “Why don’t you guys lighten up on Tom?” said Bonnie Hunt, the actress who played the sister of Cruise’s love interest in
Jerry Maguire.
“He’s a bit press-shy but he’s a truly nice person. It’s not easy being a superstar.”

And no one was a bigger star than Tom Cruise. There’s a Hollywood axiom that on the way up, stars hire publicists to get them press, once they’ve arrived, they hire publicists to protect them from the press. Now, Tom Cruise was doing the seemingly impossible. He was getting good press without having to deal with reporters.

The journalists knew who had created this situation. It was Cruise’s publicist, Pat Kingsley. Among many reporters, Kingsley was the most feared, most loathed woman in Hollywood. In recent years, she had virtually denied print access to most of her bigger clients. Newspaper and magazine reporters, she complained, were always digging for information on stars. Facts, reporting, and real information were enemies of the Hollywood image machine. If Kingsley had her way, she once admitted, profiles of her clients would include almost no information about
them. “I don’t like interesting stories,” Kingsley said. “Boring is good. Good reporting and good writing don’t help my client. New information is usually controversial. I don’t need that. People don’t read. The text doesn’t matter.” All she really cared about was getting her clients’ pictures on the covers of magazines. “Why do you always get to decide who’s on your cover?” she asked an editor in 1990. By 1997, Pat Kingsley sometimes got to decide.

It had all begun five years earlier, during the publicity campaign for
Far and Away.
The movie was imminently forgettable, but the junket had a major turning point in the world of entertainment journalism. It was then that Pat Kingsley first made journalists sign contracts, imposing terms on their interviews with Cruise. At the time, there was outrage over the then-unheard-of restrictions. With each of Cruise’s movies, however, the conditions had gotten increasingly prohibitive. By the time of the
Jerry Maguire
screening, the
Far and Away
junket seemed like the good old days.

Pat Kingsley arrived at the Four Seasons Hotel on the morning of May 9, 1992, and braced herself for a harrowing experience: protecting Tom Cruise from the media. Nearly one hundred reporters from around the country meandered around that Saturday, eager to interview Cruise. Kingsley eyed them suspiciously, interrogating people with a cutting Southern twang that softened into a soothing drawl when it was directed at her high-strung movie star clients. Kingsley was a tall, formidable woman whose blond hair fell in a blunt bob around her strong jaw; she had unflinching eyes and a determined gait that followed wherever her chin led. Pat Kingsley was the first and most powerful of the new breed of publicist: the gatekeeper. She did not subscribe to the theory that any publicity is good publicity; she spent more time squashing stories than she did peddling the celebrities she represented. “The people get used to you awfully fast,” Kingsley would warn her clients. “You never want them to get too much of you.”

Unfortunately, there were times when even stars as big as Tom Cruise had to deal with the media, and this weekend was one of those times. Cruise and Nicole Kidman were starring in
Far and Away,
a $62 million historic, romantic, comic epic directed by Ron Howard and distributed by Universal. The studio had an especially tough job with
Far and Away.
The movie was a clunker, and Universal knew it. It was one of Cruise’s few misfires, and only his star power—and a skillful manipulation of the press—could save it from being a box office bomb. Cruise was getting paid $12.5 million to appear in the movie, and under the terms of his contract, he was required to do a “reasonable amount” of publicity. Cruise’s contract also forced Universal to hire Kingsley and her firm, PMK, to promote
Far and Away.

The arrangement rankled Universal, which already had its own promotion staff. Studio press agents complained that personal publicists like Kingsley were more interested in pacifying their temperamental stars than they were in promoting films. The criticism didn’t bother Kingsley. “That kind of rap has been around,” she said dismissively. Studio publicists had too many films to promote to give each one sufficient attention, Kingsley said. What’s more, “studio publicists don’t have the confidence” of stars like Tom Cruise, Kingsley said. “That’s why a publicist like myself is there—to act as a liaison and work on cooperation.”

There was nothing cooperative, some Universal executives grumbled, about Kingsley’s work on
Far and Away.
The studio was sponsoring a junket to promote the movie: at Universal’s expense, journalists from around the country were flown into Los Angeles and put up at the Four Seasons for the weekend. The print reporters were divided into groups of about ten and led into rooms where they would be granted short group “interviews” with the stars and principals of
Far and Away.
The drill with television journalists was similar: each would be escorted into a room for four-minute interviews that would be taped by the studio’s production team, so that the individual TV stations didn’t even have to send a camera crew to the junket.