ANALYSIS : Rivers’ Suit Against GQ Raises Anonymity Issue

The story about Joan Rivers isn’t mentioned on the cover of the December issue of GQ. Her name does not appear in the table of contents, either. In fact, the elongated gossip item is buried on pages 138 and 140 of the 360-page issue, tucked between Campari and Neiman-Marcus ads like a pearl in the bowels of an oyster, waiting to be discovered.

But with Rivers herself showing the way, the article has been discovered and GQ, an upscale men’s magazine not known for spreading gossip, is suddenly one of the hottest items on December newsstands.

Rivers, outraged at her characterization in the article as an exploitive widow who had wished her husband dead days before his suicide, called GQ to account in a press conference last week, and has since filed a $50-million lawsuit accusing GQ owner Conde Nast Publications of conspiring to create a series of false and inflammatory articles about well-known people.

The lawsuit names former Richard Nixon speechwriter Benjamin Stein as the actual author of GQ articles published under the pseudonyms Bert Hacker and Mark Cooperman, and claims the magazine hired Stein specifically to create scandalous personality pieces to beef up circulation.

None of the principals in the lawsuit would discuss the case this week. Rivers is performing in Australia. Stein has had his home telephone number disconnected and has an assistant return his calls. Arthur Cooper, editor of GQ, says he would love to talk about it, but his lawyers have told him not to.

But the Rivers article and the lawsuit, coming near the end of what may be the watershed year in invasive personality reporting, have made media ethics as much the story as the subjects themselves.

“There has been a tendency to go for the jugular in recent months on moral issues,” said Everette Dennis, head of the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University. “The press is probing people’s characters and personalities in a fairly raw fashion. I’m not sure that’s a very good trend in American journalism.”

In the Rivers article, published over the byline Bert Hacker, the author portrays himself as a close friend of Rivers who attempts to calm her during outbursts against her husband Edgar Rosenberg immediately before and after his suicide in August.

At her press conference last week, Rivers said she knew no one named Bert Hacker and offered a $5,000 reward to the person who revealed his true identity. Several people apparently came forward and Benjamin Stein’s name was soon linked to Bert Hacker’s, in news stories and Rivers’ lawsuit.

Rivers’ attorney, Robert Chapman, said Stein is not an acquaintance of Rivers and was not at her husband’s shivah (the seven-day Jewish period of mourning). In a phone interview, Chapman acknowledged that the lawsuit’s reference to a previous “defamatory” article was to one about Fox Television executive Garth Ancier that appeared in the November GQ. Chapman claimed that the Ancier article was also written pseudonymously by Stein.

That first-person story, under the byline of Mark Cooperman, described a scene at the Ivy restaurant in Beverly Hills where Ancier, after being loudly criticized by Fox Chairman Barry Diller, disappeared into the men’s room and wouldn’t come out.

According to the article, titled “Crazy Like a Fox Executive,” Diller and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch supposedly coaxed Ancier out of the restroom, whereupon the TV executive fainted and had to be taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. The story quotes an unnamed former colleague of Ancier telling Diller that Ancier had been having “fainting fits for years.”

Neither Diller nor Ancier would discuss the article in GQ, but a Fox executive acknowledged that the studio has demanded a formal retraction from the magazine. The source said Ancier was taken by ambulance from the Ivy during a dinner with Fox executives one evening, but it was not precipitated by a Diller scolding. In fact, he said, Diller was not even there.

Most of the journalists, media watchers and libel lawyers The Times talked with this week said they have no inherent ethical problem with magazines publishing articles under pseudonyms, but few were ready to rally to GQ’s side.

“I’m against this whole idea of a national publication allowing these kinds of things to be said about a person and not having the guts to use the real writer’s name,” said Mitchell Fink, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner writer who first reported that Stein, a former Herald columnist, was the author of the Rivers article. “I am not anti-gossip. I write it for a living. . . . But if I am not right, I better be man enough to say I was wrong.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Bob Osborne said that even if everything in the Rivers article were true, the author would have been at the mourning services as a friend, not as a journalist, and should not have reported it.

“I just spent a lot of time with Bette Davis at the Kennedy Center Honors and a lot of things were said that were private,” said Osborne, who writes the Rambling Reporter column for the daily trade paper. “But I would not use anything that I picked up under those circumstances.”

Rivers’ suit said the story about her was so irresponsible that it was rejected for publication on that ground by the National Enquirer. The suit says a former employee of Rivers’ (identified as “John Doe 1”) schemed with Ben Stein to create the article, then tried to sell it to the Enquirer. When the tabloid rejected it, the suit says, GQ “leapt at the chance to publish (it).”

The Enquirer did run major stories on Rivers and Rosenberg, said Enquirer editor Iain Calder, but none was similar to the one in GQ. Nor would the newspaper have published it, he said.

“We don’t allow writers to write anonymously,” Calder said, from his Lantana, Fla., office. “If someone was in danger, you might do that, but you would say in the article that it was a false name.”

Gannett’s Dennis said he believes “composite” articles--stories written from the perspective of an invented person--are often examples of outstanding journalism. It is a way of re-creating events out of the recall of corroborating observers. But he said he believes readers should be cued in some way to the technique.

Henry A. Kaufman, general counsel for the Libel Defense Resource Center in New York, said GQ’s decision to run the Rivers story under a pseudonym is irrelevant to the case. “If the material was true, it doesn’t matter whether it was fictionalized or whether the author was actually there,” he said. “It boils down to what was really happening.”

Rivers claims that she said none of the things she’s quoted as saying in the GQ article. Her lawsuit goes into great detail discounting the author’s account of the shivah service.

--She did not say that the shivah was catered by the trendy West Hollywood restaurant Spago, despite the fact that “Edgar couldn’t stand” Spago’s pizzas. In fact, the suit maintains, “Mr. Rosenberg loved Spago pizzas.” (Spago general manager Tom Kaplan told The Times that the restaurant did not cater the shivah.)

--She did not point to a silk-covered couch and tell the author it was the kind her mother used to point out to her in the New Yorker magazine. “Plaintiff’s mother was a wonderful woman,” the suit says, “but she never got past the fourth grade and did not read the New Yorker.”

--Not only did she not have dinner with the author at the Hard Rock Cafe 10 days before her husband’s death, the suit maintains, Rivers wasn’t even in the state then.

Kaufman said it may not even matter in Rivers’ case whether the details in the GQ story are true. Given her public persona as a comedian who lashes other public figures in her act, and that she was doing jokes about her husband in a nightclub performance just three months after his death, Kaufman said it is questionable that the GQ article actually damages her.

“Joan Rivers has a tremendous potential to earn a lot of money,” Kaufman said. “You could argue that even bad publicity is helpful to a celebrity in certain circumstances.”

The Reporter’s Osborne said he thinks there may have been a little of “dishing it back” in the GQ story--that there may be a lesson here for Rivers in how deep unkind cuts go.

“She has really hurt people (in her act),” Osborne said. “Those are human beings she talks about. . . . Liz Taylor could not have read some of those things Joan Rivers said about her and not been hurt by them. I don’t care how thick your hide is, those things hurt.”

Apparently not hurting is GQ’s December-issue sales. Several local vendors said that after Rivers’ press conference, sales of the magazine doubled and tripled.

“People were jumping out of their cars and asking if we had GQ,” said Joe Munez, the manager of At the World Book and Newsstand in Hollywood. “It was like someone wanting a morning newspaper. They’d ask, ‘Is this the one with Joan Rivers?’ ”

Jane Lieberman contributed to this story