Dish (51 page)

Carol Burnett—who waged one of the longest and most expensive battles against the tabloids—rejoiced when she saw that some supermarkets in Los Angeles had removed the tabloids from the racks and customers who wanted to buy them had to ask.

Fran Drescher angrily called on the American public to boycott the tabloids.
The Nanny
star had apparently forgotten that in her autobiography, she made fun of Diana when the Princess “started to get bitchy, and I thought to myself, ‘Nobody likes a bitchy princess, Princess.’

Almost anyone who had come under media scrutiny joined in on the tirade against the press. O. J. Simpson compared his plight to Diana’s. “I, like Princess Diana, have been hounded by the press,” he said. “It has gone too far.” JonBenet Ramsey’s mother, Patsy, called
Larry King Live
to urge a boycott of the tabloids. “We are normal, everyday Americans and [the tabloids] have ruined our lives,” Ramsey complained. “I would ask in the memory of my daughter for everyone worldwide to boycott these publications.”

The world’s biggest publicity hounds were blasting the media. Donald Trump refused to give the
Daily News
the name of his date one evening. “He wants to keep his private life private,” said a spokesman. “He said it is not fair to expose this girl to the mean world of the paparazzi.” Trump also said that one of the few regrets in his life was that he never dated Diana.

Ivana Trump, not to be upstaged by her husband, said that she learned of Diana’s death while appearing on the Home Shopping Network in Canada. She was so overcome with grief, she had to leave the air. “I wept for a true friend,” she said. “When her marriage to Charles was near its end, Diana turned to me for advice…. Both of us also knew the bitterness of betrayal by the one we trusted the most. Sometimes we’d laugh about the bad
choices our husbands had made. Other times, we’d just exchange knowing glances.”

“People have the same fixation with her that they do with me,” Madonna told the
London Times.
They had met and talked once for ten minutes. Madonna told the Princess that she was “about the only person who seemed to get more attention than me.” Demi Moore called Madonna to compare notes. Madonna called George Clooney and discussed organizing a tabloid boycott.

Any suggestion that Diana courted the press was met with disgust and outrage. “They say she wanted it,” said
Mad About You
star Paul Reiser. “That’s how they talk about rape victims!”

Even after the photographers were exonerated, they were not forgiven. It was the nature of their work that disgusted people; they were like parasites or vultures, as Sylvester Stallone said, like “birds that sit on tombstones.” After it was revealed that the driver had almost four times the legal limit of alcohol in his system, the anger still focused on the photographers. “One could almost hear the audible, smug sighs of relief at the news that the driver from the Ritz was legally drunk,” wrote Liz Smith, “not that this group of tabloid assassins was prepared to accept any criticism even if the driver had been cold sober.” No celebrity crusades were organized against drunk driving. “I think that as far as the issue of this guy who was driving the car being drunk is a kind of bizarre joke on everyone,” said Alec Baldwin, who had recently been found not guilty after punching out a photographer who tried to take pictures of his newborn child. “I certainly hope that this guy’s intoxication doesn’t wind up letting these [paparazzi] off the hook.”

After Dodi’s death, Mohammad Al Fayed kept PMK on retainer, and some reporters who tried to write stories not favorable to the Al Fayeds were told they risked losing access to the impressive roster of celebrities represented by PMK—including Tom Cruise and George Clooney. “We were working on a story about the real Dodi Fayed,” said a producer. “We got a threatening call from PMK and decided that the tradeoff wasn’t worth it. We dropped the story.”

A “Cult of Diana” quickly emerged. “Bigger than Jackie!” the London papers declared. “Bigger than JFK.” “Bigger than Grace Kelly.” Diana’s burial site, predicted one headline, “will become the new Graceland.” Diana’s brother Lord Spencer cashed in on the cult by charging people to visit the “New Graceland.” Charles Spencer—who had been at war with the tabloids since they revealed his marital infidelities, but who had also worked as a royal commentator for
Today
and had sold pictures of his newborn son to a British tabloid—asked that tabloid editors be banned from the funeral. Although some editors had already accepted invitations, they agreed not to attend.

One tabloid reporter who could not bear to stay away, however, was James Whitaker. Shortly after the crash, Whitaker told a television reporter that sometimes the Princess would “use” photographers to advance her causes. The public was so outraged by Whitaker’s comments that his editors forced him to apologize. “I regret now that I said anything that caused offense to anybody listening to what I thought was a balanced appraisal of Diana and her complicated life with photographers,” a repentant Whitaker wrote. Whitaker was as grief stricken as most Brits. He was haunted by a conversation he had had with Diana not long before her death. “Would you come to my funeral if I were to die?” the Princess asked. Shocked, Whitaker assured Diana that she would outlast him. To the reporter’s horror, Diana persisted with the morbid conversation.

“Why would you want to come to my funeral?” she asked.

“For two reasons,” he said. “Professionally, to report and record your death. And, second, because you are an astonishing lady who often confuses me but always intrigues. It is an event I could not miss.” At Diana’s funeral, distraught mourners carried hand-painted signs blasting the press. “You murdering bastards,” a middle-aged woman wept at she spat on a photographer. “You killed her, you pigs. You murdered her.” Two people who knew Whitaker, however, told him that they enjoyed a tribute he wrote to Diana. When the third person told him that she knew he had loved the Princess, Whitaker burst into tears.

Although no one could bring back Diana—the press and the public seemed to agree on one thing: Diana’s tragic fate should
not be passed on to the sons she loved and protected so desperately. The consensus was clear: leave the boys alone. The public was shocked and outraged; therefore, when the day after the funeral, a photograph appeared in almost every national paper in England showing the young princes and Charles in a car heading to the funeral. Newspaper switchboards lit up across London as horrified readers protested the media’s continuing tasteless intrusiveness. Some of the editors were too embarrassed to tell the grieving callers that the photo op had been arranged by Buckingham Palace.

The members of the media were so mortified at being implicated in the death of Princess Diana that it seemed possible that finally gossip columnists and scandal rags—as well as the mainstream press that had come to follow their lead—would be shamed, or legislated, into behaving themselves. Six months after Diana died, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch introduced the Personal Privacy Protection Act. The law would make it a crime to persistently follow or chase a person in order to film or record them for commercial purposes. It also allowed celebrities to bring suit against photographers who use high-powered lenses, microphones, and other devices to invade people’s privacy. “If Senator Feinstein is able to steer this bill through the Senate, we owe her a great debt of gratitude,” said Pat Kingsley

“The bill
will
be passed,” said Feinstein, “we owe it to the memory of Princess Diana.” Michael J. Fox and Paul Reiser testified on behalf of the bill. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone, Ed Asner, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith, and Whoopi Goldberg also threw their weight behind
the bill. While the celebrity support was not surprising, the mainstream media, for the most part, also supported the bill. In late 1998, state legislation containing many of the provisions of the federal bill sponsored by Feinstein and Hatch was signed into law by California Governor Pete Wilson.

In the year since Diana’s death, it seemed as if the industry had come full circle since the
Confidential
scandal forty years earlier. Just as had happened in 1957, politicians and celebrities, with the support of the public and the establishment press, were working together to curb the power of the paparazzi and the tabloid publications that employed them.

And, indeed, they seemed to be succeeding, for the tabloid press at large, both print and broadcast, was suffering. The
National Enquirer,
with its circulation continuing to fall, was sold again in 1999 to a group that included former Treasury secretary Robert Altman, and in a wild effort to demonstrate its increasingly deferential attitude to celebrities invited Roseanne, who had once sued the publication, to guest-edit an issue. The same group also bought the
Enquirer’s
nemesis,
The Globe.

People
had so alienated top-tier stars that it was publishing mostly tabloid-style write-arounds and cover stories on ordinary people in extraordinary situations. To fill the void, Time Warner had started up
In Style,
a celebrity magazine that did no reporting. Utterly fawning, it took the place that
People
had occupied when that magazine was celebrity friendly, and it was a stunning success.

The situation was, if anything, even more grim in the broadcast field. Faced with increasing competition from the proliferation of new network news magazine shows like
48 Hours
and
Dateline NBC,
and from softer-edged syndicated programs like
Access Hollywood,
both
Hard Copy
and
A Current Affair
tried to reposition themselves in the mid-nineties as serious news shows. Neither succeeded. Ratings continued to fall. Fox, in desperation, fired Steve Dunleavy, the “ringmaster of the media circus,” from
A Current Affair
in 1996. When that didn’t work, Fox canceled the show altogether in 1997.
Hard Copy
managed to hang on for another two years but in the fall of 1999 it, too, was taken off the air.

At the same time, many of the figures instrumental in the “tabloidization” of the media had fallen by the wayside. Rona Barrett left the gossip business altogether and spent the 1990s selling real estate in Los Angeles, quite successfully by most accounts. Doris Lilly was less fortunate. She died in 1991, destitute and forgotten, screaming from her hospital bed, “Call the newspapers! Call Richard Johnson [of Page Six]! Call Cindy Adams!” Others were trying to create post-tabloid incarnations for themselves. Geraldo Rivera, who had joined NBC with a serious news show on CNBC, declared his hopes to establish himself as the “anchorman for the new millennium.” His co-host was former
Hard Copy
reporter Diane Dimond. Cindy Adams and Liz Smith ended up at the same tabloid, the
New York Post,
and although the rivalry between them was still keen, they no longer fought the great tabloid wars that they had when they were at competing papers. Gossip foes, such as Anthony Pellicano, were back in business. Although the White House has denied it, the private detective reportedly was working for the Clinton administration, and is said to have been a major source for unflattering stories on Monica Lewinsky. Tina Brown left the
New Yorker
and launched
Talk
magazine. But the articles—like a cover story in which Liz Taylor and Michael Jackson gushed over each other—seemed like a tired formula.