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Thanks, I almost posted that myself, and I did put the article URL into the Wayback machine, but it no longer exists, except that quote which you provided.
This could be a copy of that said article - found on FreeKatie.com...
The article is an excerpt from Jannette Wall's 2001 book - Dish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show. The small extract is highlighted...
By Jeannette Walls
MSNBC
Feb. 8 Journalists trying to write about Tom Cruise in recent years have had to deal with his publicist, Pat Kingsley, a woman feared and loathed in Hollywood because she would deny print access to any of her stable of stars if a story appeared to involve any reporting at all. In Chapter 16 of her book Dish, MSNBCs Scoop columnist Jeannette Walls writes about the gatekeepers surrounding this Hollywood star. Read an excerpt below:
The Gatekeepers
TOM CRUISE, the worlds biggest movie star, was coming to New York the first weekend in December 1996, and entertainment reporters from around the country flew in to interview him. TriStar was releasing Cruises Jerry Maguire and the elusive star was attending the glittering premiere onboard the luxury liner Galaxy, as well as the world premiere of Portrait of a Lady, starring his wife Nicole Kidman. The couple that premieres together stays together, declared gossip columnist Liz Smith.
In recent months, however, rumors were swirling that the couples marriage was troubled. There were reports of ugly arguments and talk that the couple was spending more and more time apart. When Kidman showed up at the black-tie post-premiere party for her movie, she carefully fielded questions about her marriage. Tom and I are heterosexuals, the actress said in an even voice. We have a great marriage. We have two wonderful children. Its all just vicious, hurtful lies dreamed up to sell magazines and newspapers. Tom Cruise didnt have to deal with the prying reporters. He ditched the party and left his wife to fend for herself.
At the Regency Hotel that Saturday, journalists had been invited to interview the stars of Jerry Maguire. When they realized that Cruise was going to be a no-show, a halfhearted revolt erupted. Show Me the Money! the reporters chanted.
LEFT QUOTING NICE THINGS
It wasnt just that Tom was rushed for time, the reporters knew. The actor hated the American press. Journalists who showed up at the Regency with hopes of interviewing Cruise were left quoting the nice things his co-stars said about him. Some of the reporters felt used; they grumbled about the absurdity of gathering flattering comments about a celebrity who refused to speak to them.
The journalists knew who had created this situation. It was Cruises publicist, Pat Kingsley. Among many reporters, Kingsley was the most feared, most loathed woman in Hollywood. In recent years, she had virtually denied print access to most of her bigger clients. Newspaper and magazine reporters, she complained, were always digging for information on stars. Facts, reporting and real information were enemies of the Hollywood image machine. If Kingsley had her way, she once admitted, profiles of her clients would include almost no information about them. I dont like interesting stories, Kingsley said. Boring is good. Good reporting and good writing dont help my client. New information is usually controversial. I dont need that. People dont read. The text doesnt matter.
SEEKING MORE CONTROL
Cruise was perhaps the most image-conscious, controlling star in Hollywood. He bought up the rights to photos of himself and made people who worked with him sign confidentiality agreements. The crews on the sets of movies were often given long lists of dos and donts mostly donts: dont talk to him unless he speaks first, dont ask for his autograph.
Kingsley was fiercely protective of Cruise. The brighter Cruises star became, the more control he wanted over his career.
When Columbia released A Few Good Men in 1992, Cruise forced the studio to bring Kingsley on board, and again she insisted that the journalists who interviewed Cruise sign a consent agreement. Under the conditions of the agreement, the interviews from the Few Good Men junket could be printed and/or broadcast only once during or in connection with the initial domestic theatrical release of the movie. The one-time airing defies all knowledge of what it takes to promote a movie, complained one person close to the film. Columbia wants the interviews to air as much as possible and promote the movie. Thats the point of having a junket.
Pat Kingsley could have her choice of covers, and with the release of A Few Good Men, a mens magazine like GQ seemed a good place for a cover story on Cruise. Writer Stephanie Mansfield interviewed the actor at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles; Pat Kingsley was sitting in the next room.
NOT EASY TO GET TO KNOW
The interview lasted probably the requisite hour and a half, Mansfield recalled. He seemed very congenial if somewhat I would say aloof. Hes not a real easy person to get to know certainly in that situation. But, according to Mansfield, she felt she and Cruise had bonded in a mutually self-serving way that journalists and their subjects often do.
Shortly after the interview, Mansfield mentioned to a friend that she was profiling Cruise. My friend said This is such a coincidence. You should call my cousin who grew up with him, said Mansfield. So I called this young girl who went to Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey with Tom Mapother . . . As it turned out, she was very positive about Tom.
When Cruise telephoned Mansfield for a scheduled follow-up interview, she casually mentioned the conversation with Cruises old classmate. He went ballistic, Mansfield recalled. He started yelling into the phone: How dare I talk to someone he went to school with. What is this, a profile or a biography? He accused me of conducting a covert operation. He was so irrational. He didnt make any sense. I tried to explain that the former friend didnt say anything negative, but it didnt matter. He was obviously very upset that I had done any reporting, that I hadnt just taken the interview with him and printed it verbatim.
THREAT OF BLACKLISTING
Cruise slammed down the phone, and Mansfield just sat there, somewhat stunned. In a few minutes, the phone rang again. It was Pat Kingsley.
She said, and this is a direct quote, Tom is going to be around for a long time and Im sure that you want to be around in your business for a long time. I said, Pat, I dont know what youre driving at. She made it very clear that if I used any of this interview from this young girl, I would be blacklisted from her clients.
Mansfield decided to use the material anyway, and when the piece was published, it was one of the most revealing portraits ever written about Cruise. Kingsley decreed that Mansfield would never interview another one of her clients. Am I stupid? she said of such blackballing tactics. If they burn me once, wont they burn me twice?
I guess Im perceived in the industry as a junkyard dog by making a phone call and doing some reporting, Mansfield said. If you want to stay in the business of interviewing celebrities, you better write the sort of piece that is fawning and adoring and has no facts.
RIGHT TO KNOW?
Pat Kingsley and other celebrity protectors argued that Tom Cruises personal life his religion, his romance were nobodys business. Where is it written that stars are public figures? That the press has a right to know? Kingsley said. If they were elected officials, I could see it. . . . But where is it written that the stars life is news? Cruises life was news, some journalists countered, because he used his tremendous clout behind the scenes to advance his agenda. There was the issue of his religion, which, on the face of it, would certainly seem to be Cruises private business. It was, however, a factor in the film industry; Cruise reportedly put pressure on studios he was working with to use ClearSound a sound system developed by the Church of Scientology. While some, including non-Scientologists, swear by ClearSound, others are less taken with the system. Cruise tried to get producer Don Simpson to use ClearSound in Days of Thunder, but Simpson refused. When the producer, after having spent $25,000 on Scientology classes at Cruises urging, called the church a con, Cruise reportedly retaliated by having Simpson eased out of directing a Top Gun sequel. Cruise did succeed in persuading director Ron Howard to use the system in Far and Away although it cost $120,000, when most sound systems cost about $5,000. Cruise, who also got Rob Reiner to use ClearSound in A Few Good Men, was angered by reports that ClearSound was a squeak-suppressing system designed to lower the actors sometimes high-pitched voice. *beep* he said. Alls it is, is a recording system, designed to capture the voice not to enhance or change it.
QUESTIONS ABOUT SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Pat Kingsley was having to deal with questions not just about Cruises religion, but also his sexual orientation. In 1987, when Cruise was 24, he had married Mimi Rogers, who was seven years his senior. The ceremony was so secretive that even Andrea Jaffe, who was his publicist at the time, didnt know about it. Stories soon began to circulate that the couple was having trouble conceiving a child. Cruise denied any problems. In late 1989, he told a number of publications how happy he and his wife were. I just really enjoy our marriage, he said to Jann Wenners Us in December 1989. I couldnt imagine being without her. One month later, Cruise announced that they were splitting and refused to discuss it. When Playboy asked Rogers if she had dumped Cruise, she bristled. Is that the story that I was bored with that child and threw him over, chewed him up and spit him out? Rogers said. Well, heres the real story. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldnt fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. My instrument needed tuning. Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.
Almost immediately, Rogers withdrew the comment. According to some reports, Cruises lawyers had warned Rogers that she could lose her multimillion-dollar divorce settlement if she didnt keep quiet about the marriage, but Rogers insisted she got no pressure from Cruise.
RUMORS PERSIST
Speculation about the actors sex life didnt die down after his marriage to Nicole Kidman. Cruises new wife was put in the awkward position of defending her husbands sexuality to the media. I dont know what [Mimi Rogers] meant, but I can assure you my husbands no monk Kidman once said. Hes a very sexual guy.
Kidman was even asked, point blank, if her husband was gay. Gay? Really? she said. Well, ummm, hes not gay in my knowledge. Youll have to ask him.
Kidman, who had grown up in Australia, was once described as breathtakingly determined ... She has pursued her career with the relentlessness of a heat-seeking missile. Her first big film, the 1989 Australian suspense thriller Dead Calm, got some attention in the United States, but produced no offers of roles, so Kidman took charge of the situation. She got hold of a purloined copy of a script for Ghost, in which she recognized a potential blockbuster, and videotaped a private production of the film, with herself in the role that would go to Demi Moore. She sent the unorthodox audition video unsolicited to director Joel Rubin. I dont know how she got the script a stunned Rubin said. But the video was an elaborate production fully cast, blocked and acted with little sets and lights and everything. Ive never seen anything like it.
Rubin was impressed, but not impressed enough to give Kidman the role. She got her break playing a brain surgeon in Tom Cruises Days of Thunder; after the movie appeared, she converted to Scientology, married Cruise, and the couple adopted two children in Florida, where a controversial Republican gubernatorial candidate, Anthony Martin, called for an investigation into the adoptions, calling them egregious examples of baby selling.
CAREER MOVE FOR BOTH?
Some critics questioned whether Kidmans marriage to Cruise was a career move for both of them. Entertainment reporters debated about whether the media had an obligation to investigate the possibility. On the one side, there were those who agreed with Pat Kingsley that stars private lives are nobodys business; others countered that celebrities were among the richest, most influential people in the country and that the press should not put itself in the position as it did in the days of Hedda and Louella of perpetrating public relations myths. The rumors about the Cruise-Kidman marriage were so rampant, this argument went, that even if they werent true, the media had an obligation to address them. Accordingly, in a profile of Kidman, McCalls ran an anonymous quote, attributed to a prominent movie critic who said he had heard rumors that Cruise and Kidman had married to squelch the gay stuff and that Nicole was told that if she married Tom, CAA would make her a movie star. The article also quoted a number of people who dismissed the speculation and said that Cruise and Kidman had an ideal marriage. Printing the rumor, however, spread it beyond the media and entertainment circles that traffic in such things and put them in mainstream America.
Kingsley wanted a retraction and she wouldnt wait until the next issue of McCalls came out; it was delivered through Pat Kingsleys office the day the offending magazine hit newsstands: McCalls knows of no evidence indicating that Mr. Cruise is sterile or homosexual, or that Ms. Kidman is anything other than a highly competent actress, or that they married for any reason other than mutual love and respect, or that any of the other reported rumors is true.
CELEBRATIONS OF GOOD DEEDS
By the late 1990s, negative articles about Cruise, like the one in McCalls or fact-filled ones like Stephanie Mansfields, were a rarity. Kingsley had succeeded in intimidating the entertainment press so thoroughly that it was willing to publish increasingly implausible celebrations of the actors good deeds.
In 1996, around the time Mission Impossible was being released, Cruise was being depicted in the media as a real-life action hero for a series of heroic rescues: he had saved the life of a boy being crushed by his throng of fans and paparazzi, he had come to the aid of a woman who had been hit by a car. In August, Cruise made headlines for saving the lives of a French family whose yacht exploded off the Isle of Capri. Articles and TV segments around the world applauded the actors bravery: No Mission Impossible declared one newspaper. Tom Terrific, proclaimed People magazine. The only problem was it never happened. While there was an accident, neither Cruise nor anyone on his yacht participated in the rescue in any way, according to a spokesman for the coast guard in Capri, which rescued the family and brought it to safety on the yacht on which the star was sailing. Cruise, according to the coast guard spokesman, never lifted a finger in the actual rescue, The star did, however, visit the victims in the hospital.
When questioned about the story, Kingsley at first praised Cruises heroics and courage. If Im ever in danger, she said, I hope Tom Cruise is around! When pressed for a specific description of Cruises heroism, however, she got vague. And when presented with the coast guards official version of events, Kingsley backed off.
The press made up the story! she declared angrily. They got it wrong! And then she added triumphantly: They always do.