Deep Dish
Psst––heard the scoop on Matthew McConaughey, Lauren Bacall, and Don Henley? In a freewheeling give-and- take, Texas’ top gossip columnists tell all.
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Mesinger: Or the marriage of Frank Sinatra, Jr. I had talked to him about it a lot of times, and my impression was that he had no intention of marrying her. She told me a year ago that he had asked her, and that they were going to be married, and they were house hunting in L.A.—all of that. But I’ve learned in forty years that you call Frank Junior and you ask him.
Corcoran: Right. One source is not enough for something like that.
Mesinger: And he tells me, “Don’t print that. I’m just not giving it any thought right now. I have not asked her to marry me.” So I dropped it. And he came through when it was going to happen.
Corcoran: It works the other way too. McConaughey had told me he was in Austin vacationing. But you could look up the tax records for his house on the Internet and see who the owner was. Then you could call her up, and she could say he’s paying so much a month rent. If they’re not straight with you, then it’s . . .
Peppard: Pull the trigger. Lock and load.
Corcoran: Yeah. I recounted the conversation in a column, and he didn’t look too good.
Yerkes: Occasionally, people just make you furious, because they say something like, “Please don’t run that now. I’ll give it to you next week.” And then they don’t.
Peppard: And then it runs all over the world.
Corcoran: Sympathy is dead once you’re being manipulated.
Where Credit Is Due
Mesinger: I got a check for $200 from Reader’s Digest. It was for an item I wrote about Michael DeBakey. The mother of one of his patients was sitting in a room sewing a hem, and DeBakey said, “God, that’s the worst stitching I’ve ever seen. My mother would have beaten me if I had done that.” So he ripped out the thread, grabbed the needle, and did it himself. I loved the story, so I printed it; then Reader’s Digest picked it up.
Yerkes: One of my great moments was when Liz Smith reprinted my entire column and gave me credit.
Peppard: Whenever she picks up something of mine, it’s that old line: “Boy, you never know how many people read your column.” You write about something and they call and tell you, “Oh, everybody saw that.” If you’re in Liz Smith’s column, your phone just rings off the wall.
Yerkes: I was picked up by the Chronicle of the Horse a week or so ago—it was about horses drowning during the big flood in San Antonio—and a bunch of people in Houston called me up and said, “Gosh, Bill Hobby showed us your column from the Chronicle of the Horse.” You just don’t know where stuff is going to come from.
Peppard: When Michael broke the Jennifer Aniston—Brad Pitt story, I ran it four days later, and the wires picked it up as a Dallas Morning News story.
Corcoran: I sold that story to Hard Copy, so Hard Copy came and interviewed me on camera. After Alan got credit for it, I thought, “Well, I’ve gotta get credit back.” You know, you stole my item, but at least I got to be on Hard Copy.
Peppard: And you got actual cash money, which I couldn’t have gotten, since I can’t go on Hard Copy. All I can get is the dignity and pride of working for the Dallas Morning News. Hard Copy has wanted to have me on a couple of times, but the people in the carpeted offices of the Morning News don’t believe that these tabloid TV shows are in the same business that we’re in.
Mesinger: Remember Anna Nicole Smith and her 98-year-old husband? I did every show I could. I had never met her, but I knew her lawyer well, so I could check things out. So I did them all: Hard Copy, all of those afternoon talk shows. I did Entertainment Tonight for five days straight.
How Their Papers Treat Them
Mesinger: They think that I have one happy life—you know, that I don’t do anything. I’d like for any one of them to have my job for a week. And on top of it, I work at home, so that means you never really get to go home.
Corcoran: Everybody I work with thinks these parties are a lot of fun to go to, but sometimes they’re rough. Everybody thinks it’s this glamorous life, that you talk to all of these famous people, maybe spend an hour or two writing the column, and the rest of the time you’re hanging out by the pool.
Yerkes: I like it when they ask, “Well, what do you do? I mean, all you do is four columns a week? What do you do the rest of the time?”
Corcoran: Susan, did you have that Matt Damon item that they put on page one?
Yerkes: No, I think it was a celebrity column.
Peppard: What was the item?
Corcoran: Well, it wasn’t much, just that All the Pretty Horses is scouting locations in San Antonio. On page one they had a big picture of Matt Damon, and I looked inside and saw that there was, like, a little item in the middle of the column, and I thought that it would be great if my editors ever acknowledged my presence on page one. They don’t want to come off looking trashy, so I’ll never get page one. We could have a blockbuster—I mean, just like the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt thing, which wasn’t mentioned at all. I mean, not even as a teaser or anything. And that’s really the only national-type scoop I’ve had.
Yerkes: We would have mentioned it on page one.
Peppard: In the past the unstated policy at the Morning News was that they did not want a newsman to be bigger than the news. They did not encourage columnists to be personalities. I think that’s changing.
Mesinger: The Chronicle doesn’t promote me at all, but they are very supportive.
Yerkes: Well, the Express-News is real good to me. It kind of depends on the story, like when Sandra Cisneros got into the big deal with the purple house. Or when Peter Holt, the owner of the Spurs, wanted to reveal that he’s recovering from alcoholism and called me to do it. When I broke those two stories, I wanted them to run in my section, because we need to bring the readers there. But they were touted on the front page. I know the readership of my column will be higher the days when my picture is out front with a tout for the column. People see it and then they’ll turn to it.
Corcoran: Newspapers are always looking for other people to tell them how important your column is because the inner circle doesn’t really think it is. When I proposed it, I was the music critic, and they were going, “You want to do dots and dashes?” Like I was crazy, like I was nuts. But now, after all of these people say, “Oh, we love Michael’s column; we read it,” they’re into it.
Getting Sued (Almost)
Yerkes: When I was at the Light, I was threatened by this famous architect. His local contact said he was hard to work with, and I reported it. His lawyers wrote us a letter saying they were going to sue, so I went to my source and said, “Can I have permission to use your name? Otherwise I have to retract it.” And my source said, “Retract it. He’ll kill me.” So I did.
Mesinger: I haven’t been threatened lately. I must be getting boring.
Corcoran: Alan, have you been sued?
Peppard: No, but I’ve gotten those letters that are foreplay to suing.
Mesinger: And they think we have it easy.
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