Tales of Hollywood Are Told in Smoke

On cue, a crew member manning the smoke machine on the sidewalk next to a vacant Hollywood storefront blasts a cloud of white smoke toward the star of E! Entertainment Television’s “Mysteries & Scandals.” With the faux fog swirling around him, A.J. Benza begins strolling toward the video camera set up on this evening near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

“Steve Cochran stormed through life like a raging tempest. But even the strongest storms don’t last long,” Benza said, reading from a TelePrompTer, his street-savvy voice and demeanor giving the purple prose a compelling edge.

Cochran, a boozing and brawling minor movie star who died mysteriously aboard his sailboat off the coast of Guatemala while scouting film locations with three young Mexican girls in 1965, is a “Mysteries & Scandals” kind of guy.

Since debuting in March 1998 with an episode on ‘40s “Sweater Girl” Lana Turner, the half-hour “Mysteries & Scandals” has served up the sometimes seamy celebrity dish on everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift to Frances Farmer and Sal Mineo.

In the process, the 38-year-old Benza has become one of E!’s most recognizable on-air personalities, a Tinseltown Rod Serling stepping out of the foggy night to guide viewers “down the flip-side of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

Ratings for “Mysteries & Scandals” have increased considerably since the cable network began showing back-to-back episodes weeknights beginning at 8 in November, say E! executives. On average, 332,000 cable households are tuning in over the course of the hour.

They credit Benza, a former New York Daily News gossip columnist, for making the show’s vintage celebrities relevant, fun and hip to younger audience members. Celebrities like Doodles Weaver. (“That’s right. I said Doodles Weaver,” Benza says on camera for the benefit of those who have never heard of the zany comic who worked with the Spike Jones band.)

“We wanted somebody who was irreverent, didn’t take anything too seriously and was a little sardonic and sarcastic,” said supervising producer Michael Danahy, who had worked with Benza when he was one of the contributing newspaper columnists on E!’s “The Gossip Show” in the late-’90s.

Danahy, who came up with the idea for “Mysteries & Scandals,” said the show “was always supposed to have just the slightest campy quality and A.J. sort of fit that without any effort. And after 150 shows, A.J.’s really what people see: They think of ‘Mysteries & Scandals’ and they see this guy, A.J., standing in smoke.”

Either that or they think of Benza uttering the show’s promotional catch phrase, “Fame: Ain’t it a bitch.”

The line has become part of the pop-culture vernacular. Everyone from kids on the street to flight attendants have repeated the line to Benza. Jack Nicholson couldn’t resist saying it to him at a party and Joe Pesci once shouted it at him on an airplane. In 1999, Benza was even invited to do a cameo on “Saturday Night Live,” emerging in his trademark swirling smoke to utter his signature line at the end of a sketch spoofing the Emmy Awards.

But while he’s best known as E!’s sober-faced scandalmonger, “Mysteries & Scandals” displays only one side of the Brooklyn-born, Long Island-reared Benza, whose father was an undercover cop-turned-carpet salesman.

Born Alfred Joseph (“it’s been A.J. since day one”), Benza majored in journalism and acting in college on Long Island in the early ‘80s. But after his father’s death in 1985, Benza took a scandalous detour of his own: While working part-time as a sportswriter for Newsday in his 20s, Benza says, he became involved in Mafia gambling operations in Queens run by future Gambino crime family godfather John Gotti.

Then married to his former high school sweetheart whom he divorced after five years, Benza also earned extra money as a gambler and con man. He says he once conned a stockbroker out of $50,000 after promising to quadruple his money betting on baseball games in Las Vegas. Instead, Benza says, he and two pals pocketed the cash and proceeded to blow most of it on their own gambling.

In 1992, at age 30, Benza landed a full-time job at the Daily News helping write the popular Hot Copy gossip column. He also later wrote Downtown, a weekly, first-person column about his late-night exploits: a Damon Runyon-style chronicle “of who I was dating, who wanted to kick my [behind], what drugs I was taking.”

Now America at large is about to discover the colorful flip-side of Benza, a man his E! colleagues describe as self-confident, cocky and rough around the edges; a loquacious raconteur with a wicked sense of humor; a cheek-kissing charmer and a notorious womanizer.

In May, Talk Miramax Books will publish his memoirs recounting his rise and fall as a New York gossip columnist--a time when, Benza says, “I really burned the candle at both ends and lit the middle on fire.”

Running throughout the chronicle of his encounters with celebrities, models, mobsters and other New York characters is his love affair with supermodel Kara Young, which ended after Benza moved to Hollywood to begin working on “Mysteries & Scandals.” (He still wears one of Young’s black elastic hair bands on his wrist.)

Although Benza says he “takes apart two or three people” in his book, it’s not a celebrity tell-all. If anything, “it’s a tell-all on me: I really destroy myself.”

At his publisher’s insistence, the book will be titled--not surprisingly--”Fame: Ain’t It a Bitch (Confessions of a Reformed Gossip Columnist).” Benza is currently in negotiations with Miramax Films for the movie rights.

“His book has great movie potential,” Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein said through a spokesman. An admirer of Benza’s rise from the streets, Weinstein was a big fan of his Downtown column, which, he said, “read like free-form verse, like an Italian James Joyce--totally stream of consciousness.”

Coming on the heels of the publication of Benza’s book, E! will premiere “A.J. After Hours,” a weekly, hourlong, late-night talk show on May 31.

But don’t expect Benza to sit behind a desk and deliver an opening monologue a la Dave and Jay. Benza’s inspiration runs more along the lines of Hugh Hefner’s old “Playboy After Dark.”

Taping of the first four shows is expected to begin in mid-April in a 4,000-square-foot loft in New York City’s Chinatown.

“I want that Hefner feel--a party atmosphere--because that’s what New York is,” Benza said over a plate of spaghetti with clams at Ago, an Italian restaurant and celebrity hangout on Melrose Avenue where Benza is a nightly fixture.

Saying he wants to bring back the talk shows of the past when guests appeared even when they didn’t have something to promote, Benza said there will be no pre-interviews, and guests will join him on a couch or join him mingling with audience members, who will be seated at tables and chairs.

“I want to be able to say to somebody, ‘Didn’t I see you at such and such club last week?’ If I want to talk about the presidency, let’s talk about it. Let’s just have people talk again without an agenda all the time.

“If somebody’s in the audience I think is hip, I’m going to bring them up. I don’t know, man, I’m going to fly by the seat of my pants a lot. We’ll see what happens.”

Benza, who has had small parts in eight films--he played a gay hustler in Steve Guttenberg’s “P.S. Your Cat Is Dead”--will also do comedy sketches and location segments at Manhattan nightclubs and on the street.

“We really wanted to create something where a number of different genres collide and wrap that around a piece of talent that’s as unique and fun and sort of hip as A.J.,” said Mindy Herman, president and CEO of E! Network. “That’s at the heart of a lot of E!’s success. We develop personalities that people want to hang out with and try to create a real community around our viewing. If they didn’t have a little attitude and a little edge they wouldn’t be E! A.J. certainly fills that bill.”

Danahy, who will executive produce “A.J. After Hours,” predicts Benza will eventually become a household name.

“One of the things I like about him as a talent is he’s got a little bit of a dangerous quality, which is very attractive to audiences,” said Danahy. “He comes across as a street thug. Where the surprise comes in is he’s very bright, well-read and sophisticated.”

And, Danahy said, brutally honest.

Indeed, Benza readily volunteers that his Cartier watch is a fake he bought for a hundred bucks “from some scammer that comes to Ago every night and sells watches on the cheap,” and that he beat up a New York cabdriver who failed to pick up him and his girlfriend in 1997. Benza said the driver sued him for $25 million but agreed to a “high five-figure” settlement. Benza is still paying the settlement in monthly installments, which he jokingly likens to “a payment for a Mercedes I don’t drive.”

If there’s one thing Benza learned as a gossip columnist, “it’s always tell the truth because, you know what? People will always find it out and if you deny, deny, deny, they’re always going to chase you harder. So my philosophy has always been, ‘You will never get dirt on me. I’ll be the first to tell you.’ I’m not scared of it. Everybody lives through it.”

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* “Mysteries & Scandals” can be seen weeknights at 8 on E!. The network has rated it TV-PG-D (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for suggestive dialogue).