Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood

9. BRAD DARRACH VS. ROBIN WILLIAMS

("A Comic's Crisis of the Heart," People, February, 1988)

A lot of people in Hollywood got very bent out of shape over this one, which touched on the issue of the rights of the press versus the expectations of publicity. In a nutshell: Disney's Touchstone Studios agreed to set up an interview between Robin Williams and People's Brad Darrach in order to promote Good Morning, Vietnam, with the understanding that they would get a cover story. They got it, all right, but as the cover itself made perfectly clear, the story was about Williams's domestic crisis, not the movie.

Williams had recently left his wife, Valerie, to live with Marsha Garces, his son Zachary's former nanny with whom he'd fallen in love, and had spoken candidly to Darrach about this. People, naturally, printed his ramblings chapter and verse. Among other things, the rather poetic Williams said, "Right now I'm moving through my personal life like a hemophiliac in a razor factory," and observed that "therapy helps." In fact, he went on to say, "We're all in therapy-- Jesus, I should get a discount!"

Disney, feeling betrayed, put out the word that People was not to be trusted, and for a while, sources say, the magazine did experience some difficulties in getting its usual access to choice subjects. Both sides could have locked horns over the philosophical issues involved, but both lacked the necessary temperament. People managing editor Jim Gaines worked on mending fences for several months and the situation is more or less back to normal.

10. MAUREEN DOWD VS. KEVIN COSTNER

("Hollywood's Superhunk Heads for Nottingham," The New York Times, Sunday Arts &. Leisure, June, 1991)

This is a rare recent example of a genuinely confrontational interview. The difference is that this time it was the writer, Maureen Dowd, who took all the abuse and the star, Kevin Costner, who dished it out. Costner was, to put it mildly, in a rancid mood. Asked if he was feeling defensive about his (inept) English accent in Robin Hood, Costner hit right back with, "Are you being offensive about it by asking about it?" When Dowd asked about what some felt was a gratuitous nude scene in the film, he asked, "Aren't you trying to completely trivialize my life?"

In his defense, wrote Dowd, Costner has "been taken aback by the wind shear of his stardom." In addition, she acknowledged, there had been a fair amount of critical barbs. The Washington Post's Tom Shales had called him "the Prince of Sanctimony." In her now legendary pan of Dances With Wolves, Pauline Kael delivered one of her characteristically withering lines: "Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head." Dowd herself remarked that Costner had lost his "roguish gleam" in recent years in favor of "a tiresome thirty something earnestness and smugness."

Given these slings and arrows, one could feel a certain empathy with Costner's sour attitude. Still, Dowd's article seemed to wipe that boyish, easygoing grin off his image for good, portraying instead a man at a crossroads in his life and career, a point at which his ascendancy was perhaps peaking and his weaknesses beginning to show. As Dowd concluded, "It has been said that Mr. Costner is worried about his thinning hair. His hair looks okay. It's his thinning skin he should be worried about."

Dowd now says, "I used every quote I got. I only had about a half hour or 45 minutes with [Costner]. He didn't seem to be all that well informed. I'm not sure he even knew what paper I was with.

"After the piece came out, there was some reaction from his friends, some PR people. They all asked, 'What happened?' I never understood if they felt that my writing about Costner's angry side was unfair--or whether it was just the first time they'd ever seen it in print."

But there was reaction in other quarters as well: Michael Fleming, a reporter at Variety, says, "I heard numerous times that CAA had put the word out on [Dowd]. One source told me point-blank, 'It'll be a long time before she gets a shot at any more CAA clients.' But then again, she's a White House correspondent. It's not like they're hitting her where she lives. Anyway, that was the word on the street. I heard it echoed many times."

Dowd confirms this, saying, "[The Times] wanted me to do a piece with Danny DeVito [a CAA client], but DeVito stalled about committing to the interview, presumably because of what he'd been told about me. When I did my Warren Beatty interview recently, he told me he'd been warned about me because of the Costner piece. I was told that my name was crossed off the invite list for a JFK party given in Washington, at the request of Costner and Oliver Stone."

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Jeffrey Wells is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Entertainment Weekly and Empire.

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