David Hartnell - The City of Angels

This is an extract from David's Book - Memoirs of a Gossip Columnist, available in stores now.

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Los Angeles was my next stop. I'd decided LA was the place and I was champing at the bit to get there.

I'd realised early on in my career that if you wanted to be where the stars were, where the movies were made, there was only one thing to do. You had to go to LA. It certainly wasn't going to come to me, so I had to go to it.

I arrived in LA with one or two contacts. Many years ago I'd written to Edith Head, arguably one of the most significant costume designers in film history. Edith was an amazing designer – she'd been nominated for 35 Academy Awards and had won eight, more than any other woman. Edith was such a big deal that her name would appear above the title – something that was truly extraordinary for a costume designer. She was tiny but always seriously stylish, and she was known for her trademark dark sunglasses and severe haircut. They say she wore them to see how clothes would appear in black and white on the screen, but she certainly looked fabulous all the same. Anyway, she answered my handwritten letter and we kept in correspondence.

I also knew Phyllis Diller from our encounters in Australia and London and kept in constant touch with her, so for the first time in my life, while I didn't have any friends or family, I did actually know someone. Phyllis was adorable and ever so helpful. 'If I can help in any way, David, just let me know,' she would always say. We had a healthy mutual respect, and she did help me a few times, as did Edith Head. In fact, Edith and I became very good friends and she even gave me pictures of her early designs – two beautiful costume sketches: one of Elizabeth Taylor that she did for the 1951 movie A Place In The Sun, and the other of Audrey Hepburn from the 1954 movie Sabrina.

LA was all rather magical. It was a gamble moving there, just as it had been a gamble going freelance and travelling to New York all the time, but you can't just sit back and wonder, what if? Still, while it was magical, I have to admit that I also found LA to be a phoney town. There's a good reason they call it La La Land! I also called it the world of the 'possible maybe'. Someone will agree to do an interview with you or come to a get-together, but it's an unspoken rule that it'll only happen if they don't get a better offer – and if they do, they're off and running!

New York was a good grounding place for me before going to LA. As I've said before, they say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, and that certainly gave me confidence. Hustling, bustling New York is so much more exciting than LA, which is sort of far-flung. In LA if you travel by car for a couple of hours, you're still in LA, whereas in New York, all the action is encased in the wonderful condensed area of Manhattan, where everything happens. It's all much more exciting on the east coast of the US, but all the celebrity gossip comes out of LA.

Celebrity is a curious thing. Celebrities worldwide are made by the gossip columnists and tabloids. The women's magazines – which we'll come to later – are also instrumental in creating their images for the public to consume. Celebrities and their press agents are happy to feed on the fantasy of their own public images. But the press agents love to say 'no comment', to be seen as attempting to rise above the gossip. Stars are no better or worse than the average person on the street, but they have one common aspect – they're incredibly insecure, in many cases. I would say nine out of ten celebrities are extremely fragile people.

Celebrity by association is also a curious thing. If you're buying a house in Beverly Hills or Bel Air and a celebrity is a former owner, even if the person hasn't lived there and it was just an investment, people will pay over-the-top prices for it. I was once at a party in LA where everybody was agog when First Lady Nancy Reagan's hairdresser arrived. It just proves how fleeting fame is.

Here's one example of shameless publicity-mongering. I hadn't been in LA long when I got a fax from one of the largest PR companies in America. 'Madonna and Michael Jackson will be having lunch this afternoon at the Ivy Restaurant in Beverly Hills,' it read. 'They would appreciate having some privacy and being left alone.' Of course, what did everyone do? They went straight there – and it was a press agent's dream.

Savvy celebrities who want more publicity are best to simply say 'no comment'. That's licence for the tabloids to get on with it and let rip. In the case of Madonna and Michael Jackson, there was coverage all over the world. Most journalists I worked with were quite serious about the request, but I thought it was a hoot – and one of the best bits of PR I'd ever seen.

'Well, they did ask for privacy,' the conflicted journalists would muse among themselves of the ethical dilemma. 'But this is our job, after all.' What a joke! They were falling over each other to get there in the end, but everyone had to pretend that they were making the best out of an awful situation.

One of the funniest press calls I went to was the opening of Olivia Newton John's Koala Blue shop in fashionable Melrose Avenue. Dame Edna Everage was out from Australia as a special VIP guest. In the eighties, not many people in the US had a clue about her, so they assumed she was there as part of the Australian entourage. Naturally, I knew exactly who she was, but the other American journalists assumed the Dame part of her name was real, and they treated her with such respect. Barry Humphries thought it was hilarious and he set about taking the mickey, although they were hanging on every word. Even though she dressed outrageously, they all thought she really was somebody important from Australia. The sad part is that she'd fit right into the Beverly Hills social set.

I've interviewed Dame Edna on numerous occasions – she actually presented me with both my 40th and 50th birthday cakes. When you're interviewing her, you're never aware that she's anyone else other than Dame Edna. I really come from the Sir Michael Parkinson school of interviewing celebrities – that is, avoid interviewing an artist in character because it seldom works. However, Dame Edna worked a treat. In Australia in 1985 I interviewed Dame Edna for my radio show, Tears Before Bedtime. We were backstage in Barry's dressing room before the show and he hadn't got into costume yet. I'd ask a question and have to look away, as hearing Dame Edna's voice coming out of Barry's mouth just didn't work for me! Of course, on radio nobody was any the wiser. Barry is a comic genius – truly one of a kind. And no, he's not gay – in case you were wondering.

At first it was awkward getting a job in LA. I couldn't work as a makeup artist, either in the movies or in TV, because I didn't have a green card and there were union issues. I'd left Maybelline, and I didn't have any further inclination to work as a makeup artist. By the time I got to LA, I'd firmly fixed my mind on becoming a celebrity journalist and interviewing stars.

By rights, getting a foothold in LA should have been quite tough, but I found ways around everything. You could get by if you were careful with your money. Public transport in LA is great so you don't need a car, which was one expense I didn't have to fork out. I put my celebrity journalism plan into action, and went on the hunt for stars to interview.

It was easier than you'd think – it just required politeness, gumption and a bit of shoe leather. I worked out a plan. Whenever I was out and I'd see a celebrity, I'd go and talk to them. The only rule was that I would never speak to a celebrity when they were eating – I'd always wait until they'd finished or they were leaving. Then I'd introduce myself and mention I was from New Zealand, which was always a good opening.

'New Zealand!' some would exclaim. 'Oh, my father went all around the South Pacific during the war. Are you on holiday?'

It was brilliant and it worked every time.

'I'm doing interviews to send back to New Zealand for radio,' I would say, and they'd happily give me their card, with instructions to mention to any obstructive press agent that we'd met already. Those were the golden days and being from New Zealand definitely helped. I think they saw New Zealand as harmless and quaint.

I would then call up and say to the press agent, 'Celebrity X told me to give them a ring. I met them yesterday at such-and-such.' Unlike today, the agent would actually call you back and you'd get an interview time.

Shirley Jones, the mother from The Partridge Family, invited me to her house to interview her, and during my visit David Cassidy arrived. He had been to New Zealand on tour, so we had common ground too.

A lot of the interviews I did were at people's houses – Mel Blanc, Jackie Collins, Betty White and Lucille Ball, to name a few. They seemed to trust me implicitly – probably because I wasn't the typical LA type, and they felt they were doing a good turn to a small country by talking to me. I was a bit of a novelty, and totally harmless in their minds.

The hardest route was calling up places such as Rogers & Cowan – the holy grail of PR agencies, with a stable of A-list stars – to gain access to a star. Besides an agent and a press secretary, who presented problems of their own, stars had a PA, who was usually a real pain in the proverbial.

'She won't speak about her last divorce,' the PA would say. Or, 'She doesn't want to talk about her children.' You would be given a list of topics that were off the agenda, but suddenly the celebrity would start talking about one of the forbidden topics of her own volition. In my mind, I'd be panicking. Oh God, we're not allowed to talk about that, I'd freak to myself. But the press agent would sit there and say nothing, so after I'd encountered this strange situation a couple of times, I figured I'd let them talk about whatever they wanted, regardless of the banned topics on the PA's list.

The celebrity entourage can be trying. It usually consists of wannabes hanging on the star's coat-tails, who have to justify their existence through irritating rules and interruptions. That's why you'll always see a press agent with their hand up at the airport when a star arrives. 'No press pictures, no photos, no comment,' they'll say to the photographers and journalists. Isn't it a coincidence that the agents and secretaries always seem to want to be in the photos, though? They want to be as famous as the people who employ them.

Technology has changed a lot of that. Nowadays, when you have the likes of Victoria Beckham or Angelina Jolie arriving at an airport, there'll be plenty of fans and hangers-on there taking pictures with digital cameras and cellphones. Fans can start blog sites with all sorts of information, and the celebrity can't control it. And at an airport, there's only one way you can go – there are very few back doors in airports, and trust me, the paparazzi know exactly where they are and they'll have them covered.

It's a game, all the time. Stars want the publicity, and the media wants to sell copies. Ultimately, the worst thing hat can happen to a star is for people to ask, 'Whatever happened to so-and-so?' That's the kiss of death, and that's why there's a constant push to get coverage in the media.

Some of it is carefully constructed by the celebrities' managers, who will do anything to get their clients in the paper. It's their job. But it can be transparent. You can always tell if a romance is fake – it usually coincides with a new movie coming out that the star needs publicity for. Sometimes the fabulous new love interest is another celebrity, and often the new happy couple will have the same agent, who's getting a double fee – a two-for-one! They are common arrangements. The headlines will scream that there's a fairytale romance going on – but you can see through it if you read between the lines. George Clooney is a fake romancer from way back, and many people thought Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were also together as a stunt. I always thought it was a mystery that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman never had any biological kids of their own until they went their separate ways. That's really quite odd – but very Hollywood . . . need I say more?

Most are genuine, though, and often quite delightful. Once I ran into Ed Asner from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At the time he had his own TV programme too, called Lou Grant, and was a high-profile celebrity. I was out with a friend to help him shop for a car, and I spotted Ed doing the same thing. We walked around and around, as I waited for Ed to finish and get ready to leave. Then I pounced and introduced myself.

'Oh hello,' he said, politely. 'I thought you were buying a car.'

'My friend's in the market for a car,' I explained. 'I'm helping him, but I was also just waiting to say hello to you.'

After a good chat, he invited me to the studio the next day where he was filming his show Lou Grant. He pulled out his card, wrote on it and instructed me to show it to the security guard at the gate. The next day I was excited and nervous about the interview, and the nerves were my downfall. In his trailer during the break, I interviewed him, asking all my carefully thought-out questions. The only problem? I had the pause button down the whole time the tape recorder was going. I didn't realise what I'd done until later in the day when I went to play back the interview. 'What the hell am I going to do with this?' I wondered. 'What an idiot, David!' I chastised myself for being totally unprofessional.

There was only one thing for it. I'd have to call him and explain what happened.

'Ed, I'm so sorry,' I said when they put me through to him at the studio. 'I'm an absolute idiot, I had the pause button down on the tape recorder the whole time we were talking.'

Ed laughed. He thought it was a great joke.

'So I'm calling for two reasons,' I continued. 'One is to tell you what an idiot I am, which we've now established beyond doubt. And two, I didn't want you to think you'd wasted your time and that nothing ever happened with the interview.'

'You'd better come back tomorrow, David,' he invited.

The next day, he made a joke out of the whole thing, constantly referring to the pause button and my difficulties with it. Many years later he came to New Zealand for a function and he recognised me straight away.

'Got your pause button on, David?' he laughed. It was such a joke. The moral of the story is that once you get past all the hoopla and the obstructive entourage, celebrities can be very nice people indeed.

As a gossip columnist it's a big no-no to get too close to your targets, otherwise you can't write about them objectively. And over the years I've learnt that just because you're a fan of a star, it doesn't mean they're going to be your best guest or best interview. However, if an interview goes awry, I generally think it's my fault, not theirs. It's my job as the interviewer to bring out the best in them, to ensure I've done my homework and to have interesting questions to ask them. Often you can pick up on something in the conversation, and that's a gem to cash in on. I'm never really disappointed by people, but sometimes when I hear my interviews played back, I think I could have done a better job.

I'm often asked to name the worst, or most difficult, celebrities I've ever interviewed. Well, sorry to disappoint, but there were only two. Sometimes you can get someone on a bad day or you just get off on the wrong foot, but I've never come across any diva-like behaviour from women – only ever from men. In 1977 in New York I interviewed Yul Brynner, who was starring in The King and I on Broadway. He unfortunately only gave one-word answers and wouldn't elaborate on anything. I cringed rather a lot. When a celebrity clams up, there's just not much you can do.

The other tricky one was Mickey Rooney. I presented him with his 80th birthday cake on location but he couldn't have cared less. He had a real chip on his shoulder that Hollywood owed him a living, having been the hottest child star of his time. It was truly uncomfortable – he moaned constantly about Hollywood, and when it came to taking a picture of me holding the cake and giving it to him, things went from bad to worse.

'Take your glasses off,' he bellowed at me. 'I hate having photographs with people with glasses on.'

'I'm awfully sorry,' I said, apologetically but also very firmly. 'The glasses are a part of me. And they stay.'

I think he got a shock that I answered him back, because he then turned to the cameraman and boomed, 'Ah, hurry up then, take the picture.' It was at this point I wished his parents had never met. And that was that.

But in all those years interviewing celebrities, those two are the only grumpy ones who stuck out in my mind. And who knows, maybe they just got out on the wrong side of the bed? Everybody has a bad day from time to time.

Years later, on a Sunday afternoon in 1994, I arrived in LA after a 13-hour flight from New Zealand. I was there to do a series of pre-arranged interviews for my radio shows. I was so pooped I went to bed early as my first interview was scheduled for 10am the next morning.

A terrifying earthquake woke me in the wee hours, along with three and a half million other inhabitants of Los Angeles. The floor-to- ceiling windows in the apartment I was staying in splintered into a million pieces and the curtain rail twisted into a corkscrew. At the same time a subterranean moan shook the ground and tossed me out of bed onto the floor. The low growl echoed for what seemed like forever, and as the strength intensified, water pipes burst and the power and phones went out. Part of the Santa Monica freeway lay in bits, and buildings all around me collapsed. Our apartment block remained standing, thank God, but it was badly damaged. The magnitude 6.7 earthquake left 57 people dead and another 1600 seriously injured. For days afterwards people kept telling me in a matter-of-fact way, 'At least it wasn't The Big One.' Needless to say, all my interviews were canned for several days after that. That was one trip to La La Land I never forgot.
 

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