Illness Just Doesn’t Play Well

Few people outside his family knew it, but Steven Spielberg was sick. Earlier this month, the 53-year-old Oscar-winning filmmaker checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where doctors removed one of his kidneys, and no one in the press or the public had a clue.

Word got out last week, four days after Spielberg’s operation, when publicist Marvin Levy released a statement citing a kidney “irregularity.” Spielberg was at home recuperating and even “doing some work,” Levy said, and no follow-up treatment was needed. Even some who are close to Spielberg still don’t know exactly what the problem was.

The fate of Spielberg’s kidney is just the latest high-ranking entertainment health crisis in recent weeks, and the latest example of why illness doesn’t play well in Hollywood. Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, 47, has yet to return to work after being hospitalized for most of January with what officials described as a bacterial infection that made him miss the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Globe Awards. And a month ago, late-night TV host David Letterman, 52, had emergency quintuple bypass surgery that will keep him off the air until next week.

In all three cases, the same publicity machinery that usually magnifies the importance of the tiniest Hollywood news items has proved deft at minimizing what is undeniably life-threatening. Spielberg’s kidney came out behind a veil of vagueness that gave the media little but conjecture to report. With Weinstein, Miramax was initially mute and later downplayed the seriousness of his malady, comparing it to mononucleosis. Letterman’s surgery has been public record from the start, but nearly every update from his publicists includes a joke crafted to make him sound as healthy and hilarious as ever.

Such spin has prompted speculation of the type usually reserved for heads of state and raised questions about whether these very public men have a right to personal privacy. But the subterfuge also spotlights an issue woven deep into the competitive culture of Hollywood, where even the whiff of weakness can negatively affect the bottom line. As producer Lynda Obst once wrote, in a town where the ability to inspire envy is seen as an achievement in itself, no one wants to appear either soft or small--let alone seriously ill.

“This is a sea and these people are sharks swimming in it. And other sharks can smell blood,” said Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles. He called Spielberg, Weinstein and Letterman “linchpins in major commercial enterprises. You don’t want people to know how sick you are because not only does it affect your image but it affects your company.”

“Nobody trusts anybody in Hollywood. Everybody is seen as a potential rival. So it’s very dangerous to show weakness or mortality.”

In some ways, it’s the same for any powerful corporate or political leader: To admit vulnerability is to risk losing ground. But being ill has an added stigma in Hollywood, whose economy is driven by the currency of beauty, youth and vitality. As actress Kathleen Turner recently observed, in the entertainment industry, disease can kill a career.

“It seemed wiser to let people think I was drinking too much, rather than let them know I was ill,” Turner told a London newspaper, explaining that she opted not to refute rumors that she was an alcoholic because she figured the truth would be more damaging to her career: She suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. “In this business, they’ll hire you if you drink, but take two steps back if you’re ill.”

Spielberg Makes an Appearance

No wonder DreamWorks officials have been not entirely forthcoming about Spielberg’s condition. Before his hospitalization was made public, at least one person who had an appointment with the director that was canceled was told that Spielberg was suffering from a “serious flu.”

Levy, Spielberg’s personal publicist, acknowledged that, by not specifying exactly what Spielberg’s problem is, he has left the door open to rumor and speculation.

“It’s Hollywood; if somebody sneezes, you hear three different reasons why,” said Levy, who called gossip that Spielberg had cancer “outrageous. Some of this stuff is so totally bizarre that you want to scream.”

At a dinner Saturday night in Los Angeles, at which he received an NAACP Image Award, Spielberg looked to be in good health and told the crowd: “A couple of days ago I was in the hospital, so this is the first time I’ve been out since my operation. It feels like a dream--one of the most wonderful dreams I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

Spielberg is not alone in seeking to control the perception of his health. After action star Arnold Schwarzenegger had elective heart surgery to replace a faulty valve in 1997, for example, he hired lawyers to go after those who made it appear too serious. He sued (and ultimately settled with) a tabloid newspaper for calling it a “heart crisis” and won a $10,500 judgment from a Berlin heart specialist who had predicted on the radio that Schwarzenegger didn’t have long to live.

Seem like overkill? Not to actor Robert Urich, who knows firsthand how the admission of mortality can halt even a flourishing career. He was starring in the 1996 TV series “The Lazarus Man” when he was diagnosed as having synovial sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. The show had been picked up for a full season and Urich wanted to keep working during his treatment, but Turner Television balked and canceled the series.

“Hollywood is not known for its open-heart policy when it comes to this kind of thing. The notion of the big C scared them to death,” said Urich, 53, who has been in remission for 3 1/2 years and is considering legal action against the network. Urich continued acting and doing interviews, even after his treatment caused the temporary loss of his hair.

“I instinctively went public without much thought to the repercussions--and there have been some,” said the actor, who suspects that still “there are some producers and directors who would eliminate me [from a casting call]. . . . Even now, after this much time has passed, it’s still a very touchy subject because Hollywood wants its men to be virile, strong and heroic. It’s what we sell.”

Even legendary movie stars fall victim to such thinking. Burt Lancaster, for example, was all set to star in Hector Babenco’s 1985 movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman” when he had a mild heart attack. Babenco still wanted the Oscar-winning leading man, who felt able to work, but no insurance company would underwrite the project.

“If you lost your leg skiing it wouldn’t be that big a deal,” said Chris Thompson, a screenwriter who created last year’s “Action,” a Fox TV series that spoofed the brutal world of Hollywood deal-making. But for actors and executives in Hollywood, he said, “illness is equated with decrepitude. Things that point to aging and not being part of the youth zeitgeist--things that make you appear old school--are to be avoided.”

Hollywood is about jockeying for advantage and inspiring fear, Thompson said, and that fact pervades the language and the rituals of the business. When Al Shapiro, a 57-year-old distribution executive at New Line Cinema, succumbed to cancer last fall, for example, among the fond remembrances printed in Daily Variety was this quote from his boss, Michael Lynne: “It’s a big loss. He never got rattled, he rattled other people.”

References to size--and attempts to appear bigger than one’s opponent--abound. Long before Michael Eisner admitted under oath that he’d called Jeffrey Katzenberg a “little midget,” for example, David Geffen (one of Katzenberg’s partners at DreamWorks SKG) was quoted in the New Yorker as saying this about Eisner: “As tall as he is, he’s a little guy.”

“There are a lot of explicit phallic references in Hollywoodspeak,” Obst, the producer, observed in her 1996 book “Hello, He Lied.” “This is neither accidental nor peripheral. Subtext here is text. . . . Subtlety is wasted.”

In an odd way, said Thompson, the screenwriter, this reality affects how Hollywood deals with human frailty.

“In this town there’s an odd lack of noblesse oblige,” he said. “There are all these huge producers and executives who are so abusive to the little people around them. Why? It’s almost just to stay in practice. At the top levels in Hollywood there’s a sort of a gladiatorial aura of ‘We are the big boys in the arena and we don’t want the other gladiators to think that we’ve got a bad knee.’ Because then, they’ll hit you in the knee.”

Movie producer Jonathan Dana called it “the Darwinian principle. When the top dog is vulnerable, people don’t gravitate toward the pack.”

Perhaps this helps explain why, immediately after Letterman emerged from heart surgery, his publicists began peppering their press releases with jokes.

“I feel fantastic. In addition to rerouting the arteries, they also installed an E-Z Pass,” Letterman was reported to have said the morning after his bypass. A few days later, on his release from the hospital, Letterman was said to have quipped that he was planning to spend the weekend doing some heavy lifting and playing handball, adding, “There must have been some kind of mix-up; I went into the hospital to get a face lift.”

‘Joking on Way’ to Surgery

Steven Rubenstein, a spokesman for Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants, flatly rejected the suggestion that Letterman might have come up with the gags in advance, as a way of appearing to be on top of his game.

“Dave was joking on the way in [to surgery]. Dave was joking on the way out. Dave is funny,” he said. “Every joke we have put out” has been “his and his only.”

Levy, Spielberg’s publicist, said the day he made Spielberg’s kidney removal public, a local TV news station reported that something was also wrong with the director’s remaining kidney.

“That actually got on TV while Steven was watching it,” Levy said. “Steven got on the phone and gave me a direct quote: ‘My other kidney is as good as the day I was born.’ ”

“Everybody knew we’d get [speculation] if we didn’t specify every single, solitary detail,” Levy said. “But I thought saying he had a kidney taken out was pretty bold. What’s most important is, ‘How is the guy?’ And he’s fine. He had a kidney taken out. We’ll leave it at that.”