Dish (40 page)

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.
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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.
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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 risk 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.
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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.
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Kingsley’s power was such that at times, she could almost manufacture a star out of whole cloth. In 1997, she teamed up with director Joel Schumacher to perform such sleight of hand on the virtually unknown Matthew McConaughey, a twenty-six-year-old Texas law school student whose biggest role had been in
The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Schumacher cast him as an idealistic lawyer in
A Time to Kill
and Kingsley got the publicity machine rolling, and before long, McConaughey was profiled by
48 Hours,
Liz Smith praised him in her syndicated column, and he was the first virtually unknown actor to have the cover of
Vanity Fair
to himself. Articles in
Newsweek,
the
New York Times,
and
Us
magazine followed. Even before
A Time to Kill
was released, McConaughey was turning down multimillion-dollar offers,
including the role opposite Julia Roberts in
My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Schumacher jokingly called McConaughey “my Frankenstein,” but some in Hollywood say the creation was equally Pat Kingsley’s. “This guy’s salary is being built on buzz alone,” noted one observer. “It’s what’s wrong with Hollywood.” Kingsley dismissed talk that she “made” McConaughey. “He was made a star because of his startling debut in
A Time to Kill,”
she said. “He delivered the goods.”

By the time of the
Far and Away
junket, Pat Kingsley was succeeding in reversing the power relationship between the press and the publicists that existed since the days of
Sweet Smell of Success.
It was now the journalists who did the groveling. “Publicists control every word, every picture, every caption and if anybody says they don’t, they don’t know what time it is,” said Koral. “They have enormous power. If you want their stars, you’ve got to play by their rules.” With journalists feeling increasingly strong-armed by publicists, the relationship became incredibly antagonistic. Horror stories abounded about Kingsley. “I used to be a war correspondent, but entertainment journalism is much nastier,” said one reporter. “Hollywood has made me very, very tough. War might be hell, but the people you have to deal with are nicer.”

Even Pat Kingsley, however, had her failures. Julia Roberts was one of them. The actress was notoriously prickly. Once, when she moved into a very upscale apartment complex while her house was being renovated, she reportedly had notices sent to the other well-to-do tenants that if they ran into her in the hallways, they were not to speak with her or even look at her. She was also very demanding about her publicity. When a
People
magazine photographer snapped photos of Roberts onstage with Lyle Lovett the day after the two got married, she had police confiscate the film.
People
sued and a judge sided with the magazine, so Roberts’s publicist gave
People
flattering, authorized wedding photos instead. But later, when Roberts was trying to get some good press as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in Haiti, she recognized the
People
photographer and became so beligerent that UNICEF
officials had to apologize to the members of the media for her outburst.

In 1991, the actress was being represented by publicist Susan Geller when she learned that
Vanity Fair
had wanted to do a cover story on her, but Geller turned down the magazine. Tina Brown had reneged on an agreement, according to Geller, to put her client Ellen Barkin on the cover. Geller insisted that she simply didn’t want to deal with a magazine whose editor didn’t keep her word, but the buzz was that Geller was also punishing Tina Brown. Julia Roberts was furious; she thought she was being used and so she dropped Geller and signed up with PMK. It was a big coup for Kingsley, but shortly after the deal was done, Roberts’s life became tabloid fodder. The actress canceled a lavish Hollywood wedding to Keifer Sutherland less than a week before it was scheduled to happen. Within days, she was spotted nuzzling with Jason Patric. There were reports of erratic behavior on the set of Steven Spielberg’s
Hook.
There were rumors of drug abuse. The actress became the butt of jokes. Jay Leno said he was taking the toaster he had bought for Julia and Keifer and giving it to Maria and Donald.

“Why can’t you make it stop?” Roberts sobbed on the phone to Kingsley. The publicist called some of the reporters who had written unkind things about Roberts. She insulted and threatened them, but she had no leverage with the tabloids because they would never be given access to Roberts anyway. So Kingsley sought out friendly reporters—like her good friend Liz Smith—to deny a story about friction between Roberts and Steven Spielberg on the set of
Hook.
“The only way it was finally stopped was that Steven Spielberg got on the phone with Liz Smith,” said Kingsley. That finally quieted everyone down, but the damage was done. “It was one thing after another, and it was all about her personal life,” Kingsley said. “It seemed like any time I would talk to her, I was the bearer of bad news, I was the messenger.” By the end of the year, Roberts dumped Kingsley. “I don’t blame her,” said Kingsley. “I was sorry to lose her, but I don’t fault her for what she did.”

Shortly after Kingsley lost Roberts, she got an even bigger star. Tom Cruise had been represented by publicist Andrea Jaffe
since 1981, but when Fox hired Jaffe to do publicity in 1992, she had to drop all her clients. Cruise was by then perhaps the most image-conscious, controlling star in Hollywood. He bought up the rights to photos of himself and made people who worked with him sign confidentiality agreements. The crews on the sets of movies were often given long lists of do’s and don’ts—mostly don’ts: don’t talk to him unless he speaks first, don’t ask for his autograph. Cruise surrounded himself with a small circle of close friends, family, and co-workers.
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Andrea Jaffe knew how important control and privacy were to the powerful, somewhat prickly star; when she moved to Fox, she recommended Cruise consider Kingsley.

Kingsley became fiercely protective of Cruise. The brighter Cruise’s star became, the more control he wanted over his career. When Columbia released
A Few Good Men
in 1992, Cruise forced the studio to bring Kingsley on board, and again she insisted that the journalists who interviewed Cruise sign a consent agreement. Under the conditions of the agreement, the interviews from the
Few Good Men
junket could be “printed and/or broadcast only once during or in connection with the initial domestic theatrical release” of the movie. “The one-time airing defies all knowledge of what it takes to promote a movie,” complained one person close to the film. “Columbia wants the interviews to air as much as possible and promote the movie. That’s the point of having a junket.”