How the Stars Zap the Tabs

Call it tabloid backlash. Fed up with supermarket publications that peek into their bedrooms, hospital rooms and psyches, celebrities are striking back, telling their secrets before the tabloids can.

Kate Jackson, one of TV’s original “Charlie’s Angels,” chose last month to make public that she had just undergone a modified mastectomy after doctors discovered breast cancer. She said she did so “to help other women facing this difficult situation, encourage early detection of breast disease through mammography--and to save inquiring minds 50 cents.” (The Star bannered the story, “Kate Jackson’s Breast Cancer Heartbreak,” on its Aug. 29 cover.)

Actor Michael J. Fox turned the tables on the National Enquirer in a piece written with his brother-in-law, Michael Pollan, managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, for the June Esquire. They described how they thwarted the Enquirer’s assault at Fox’s wedding last summer in Vermont with the aid of Los Angeles-based security consultant Gavin de Becker and by infiltrating the Enquirer’s command post near the wedding site. They told of “a massive, multiple-front offensive” by the Enquirer, which deployed six helicopters, handed out wads of bills as bribes and even considered dressing a photographer in a llama suit and stationing him in a nearby meadow. All in pursuit of what Pollan and Fox called that “mutation of reality (that) shows up at your local A&P.;”

Virginia King, mother of actress Demi Moore and mother-in-law of actor Bruce Willis, said she was hounded by the Enquirer, then by the Star, after a “friend” apparently had tattled, for money, about her past. She steadfastly refused to talk to either publication. On Aug. 22, the Star ran a story about her “slide into alcohol abuse” and “her violent scrapes with the law.” King, who is fiercely protective of her daughter, is writing a book that, she says, will leave the tabloids little to write about in the future.

On Aug. 29, former “Starsky and Hutch” star Paul Michael Glaser and his wife, Elizabeth, chose to tell the tragic story of their daughter’s death from AIDS to the Los Angeles Times after being, as he put it, “hunted down” by the Enquirer and growing convinced that the tabloid planned to print a sensational account. (On Sept. 5, the Enquirer ran what the Glasers charge is a fictionalized account of their story under the headline “ ‘Starsky & Hutch’ Star AIDS Tragedy.” It got top billing over “Malcolm Forbes Begs Liz: Don’t Marry That Penniless Bum!” and “ ‘L.A. Law’ Hunk Dumps Wife . . .”)

Such actions are being applauded by other Hollywood personalities

who have tangled with the tabloids, among them Susan Dey of “L.A. Law.”

“What makes people feel better about reading the hardships of other people?” she asks. “Why should you have to share the most intimate parts of your life with strangers?”

Striking back at the tabloids is not new. In 1981, for instance, Carol Burnett won $800,000 in a libel suit against the Enquirer, which she said had implied in a 1976 gossip item that she was drunk in a Washington restaurant.

What has changed is the way in which it’s being done. Celebrities who at one time may have ignored what the tabloids print, are instead stealing their thunder. And that’s because, today, the stuff on which the tabloids feed is apt to be far more devastating to the stars and their families than titillating gossip about who’s being seen with whom. Like society at large, the famous are dealing with issues such as drug addiction and AIDS--and violence at the hands of the mentally disturbed.

Enquirer editor Iain Calder did not respond to calls or a telegram requesting an interview for this story. Richard Kaplan, editor of the Tarrytown, N.Y.-based Star, said via a spokeswoman that “he doesn’t want to make any comments.”

The Glasers said that they implored the Enquirer not to print a story, citing their concerns for their son who, like his mother, has not developed AIDS, but that their pleas were unsuccessful.

‘Dreading This Moment’

Publicist Josh Baran, who encouraged them to come forward, said other tabloids had been “sniffing around, getting close.” But when an Enquirer reporter called to say he had their daughter’s death certificate, Baran said, “We knew we had to go public. They’d been dreading this moment for years.”

The response was immediate and emotional.

Donations came in to the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, a private group through which Elizabeth Glaser has raised $2.5 million that is being distributed this month in research grants for the study of pediatric AIDS and maternal transference.

Kate Jackson read the Glasers’ story in the Times and fired off a letter to the editor urging people not to buy the tabloids. “It’s not funny anymore,” she wrote. Save your money, Jackson urged tabloid readers, and send it instead to the Pediatrics AIDS Foundation.

The Glasers, said Susan Dey, have struck a blow for everyone who has ever been defamed by yellow journalism. “Why is it that everybody got so upset about this one article?” she asked, then answered, “All of a sudden, the line is drawn,” the boundaries of propriety versus newsworthiness defined.

Retractions Pointless

“There is no way to stop people from making money off of exploiting some of the most personal things in other people’s lives,” said Dey. “You can’t stop that.” To demand a retraction, she pointed out, is only to ensure that untruths will be retold.

“I think the only thing that can be done is that the readers be shamed into what they are feeding into. . . . I don’t care if it’s Roseanne (Barr). I don’t care if it’s Nancy Reagan. There is a line that these tabloids overstep in the name of news.”

Dey, who has acknowledged being a recovering alcoholic, told how a tabloid ran a story about her involvement with Alcoholics Anonymous in which “they weaved truth and untruth.” Because her AA activities were made public, she said, “I can’t go to meetings and speak any more. I’m scared to go and talk.”

She explained that the tabloid reporter told her the source was someone in AA, which has open meetings.

“That’s why the paranoia struck,” Dey said. “I feel that if I go to a meeting and speak out, that is direct to the tabloids. I might as well call them up.”

She challenges those who read the tabloids: “Everybody who buys these papers and supports this kind of negative journalism should make a commitment within that same day that they will turn around and do something for someone instead of against them,” a kind deed perhaps for a homeless or elderly person.

According to a June story in the National Enquirer, a seemingly security-mad Michael J. Fox had a dozen security guards standing by at Cedars-Sinai while his wife, Tracy Pollan, gave birth in May to their son, Sam Michael Fox.

De Becker, security consultant to Fox and numerous other stars, chuckled over that one--”They did not have anything remotely approaching 12 security personnel.” But there were people present to intercept tabloid reporters who, De Becker said, employed such tactics as paying an orderly to snoop and pretending to be friends visiting chef Wolfgang Puck’s wife, Barbara Lazaroff, who was also a maternity patient.

But in De Becker’s view, many of the papers’ stories are not a laughing matter: “There’s an unholy marriage between cranks, crackpots, crazy people and the tabloids.”

Sometimes Self-Fulfilling

There is no doubt, he said, that the tabloids’ flights of editorial fancy sometimes become self-fulfilling prophecies. A few years back, he noted, the Weekly World News--a publication that recently reported that “Marilyn Monroe’s Ghost Is Roaming the Earth Naked!”--ran a story claiming that Olivia Newton-John, a De Becker client, was being harassed by a mentally ill man who had supposedly killed one of her cats and hung it over the gate.

“About three weeks later,” he said, “sure enough, we get some very unpleasant threatening material regarding finishing the job” against Newton-John.

The Globe once published a story, “Michael J. Fox Terrorized in Death-Threat Drama,” allegedly by fans upset about his relationship with future wife Pollan. There had been no such threats. But then last February, Tina Ledbetter, 26, of Camarillo, was charged with five counts of making terrorist threats, accused of sending 5,000 letters to Fox threatening to kill him, Pollan and their unborn child because she disapproved of the marriage.

De Becker said of the tabloids: “You can ignore what they say but you can’t ignore what they’re doing. You can’t ignore them at 3:30 in the morning outside your honeymoon suite. You can’t ignore them following your 13-year-old daughter to see where she’s going. You can’t ignore six helicopters careening above you. . . . Peeping Tom is a crime but suddenly if you work for some tabloid, you can do whatever you want, and they sure do.”

Peter H. Brown, a Los Angeles-based free-lance writer and former Gannett reporter who wrote for the Enquirer for a short time, said: “You never have any legitimate sources. You say ‘I’m from the National Enquirer’ and everyone hangs up, even the police.” Sometimes the Enquirer actually attributes its tips to the “gossip fairy.”

Finally Found a Source

One Brown assignment was a story about Elvis Presley’s ghost haunting the set of the 1979 Shelley Winters-Kurt Russell film, “Elvis.” He recalled: “It wasn’t good enough that people perceived Elvis’ ghost on the set. The Enquirer wanted someone to have felt Elvis. Elvis had to have touched someone or pushed someone.” Finally, he found someone on the set willing to say it.

The Enquirer’s rule, Brown said, was that “someone had to say everything on tape . . . you had to get someone who was even in the least way connected with (a story) to say it, like a makeup person, anybody. It was usually someone talking about a rumor.”

He recalled being told during a visit to the Enquirer’s Lantana, Fla., headquarters that the tabloid “hooks its readers and keeps them by touching on subjects that involve fear--fear of death, fear of illness, fear of rape, fear of God.”

“Heartbroken Demi and Bruce Agonize Over How to Control Her Wayward Mom,” read the Star’s headline about Virginia King. She does not deny having had an alcohol problem, does not deny having been jailed once on a drunk driving offense, does not deny her husband’s suicide.

But she wonders why the tabloids want to write stories that she believes only hurt innocent people.

Blackmailed, Threatened

She said she was blackmailed starting in fall, 1988, by a man who was extorting money, threatening to tell her story to the Enquirer. She paid him $12,000, she said--”Not only was I trying to protect myself, I was trying to protect my daughter. When he came back for more money and I didn’t have any money, things started getting real crazy.”

She said the Star and the Enquirer sent reporters to her gated apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley.

Later, King said, the Enquirer offered the apartment manager $5,000 and a round-trip first-class ticket to Florida if she would steal photos of King, Moore and Willis and their baby, Rumer, from her apartment.

One day, she said, she received a call that the tabloid had gotten the photos. It wasn’t true but, King said, “I had a nervous breakdown, I really did. I was so terrified that Demi and Bruce would think I had done this, that I would jeopardize my granddaughter for money. The story was that I was selling photographs of the baby for money. I was terrified, angry, hurt, demoralized.”

Her attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Enquirer, which apparently backed off. King believes her blackmailer then took the story to the Star.

“They took a true situation and they wrote it the way they thought it might have been,” she said. They told of a “valiant” Demi giving her $50,000 (not true, King says), of her being drunk at Demi’s wedding (not true, King says), of spending three days in jail in 1988 on a drunk driving arrest (true, she says), of Demi paying thousands for rehabilitation therapy for her (not true, King says).

At the suggestion of her attorneys, and with the help of Los Angeles literary agent Mike Hamilburg and a writer, she is writing a book in which she will tell the true story.

“They’re such vultures,” King said of the tabloids. “I had a tragic childhood, a very tragic childhood. I put out every effort I could to protect my daughter. I’ve worked extremely hard to turn my life around, to get rid of this disease. When the Enquirer did what they did to me, I got drunk again. They really affected my life. . . .

“Instead of ignoring their sleazy maneuvers and letting them write this terrible stuff that devastates people,” King said, “I think we should stand up and fight.”