As David Thompson tells it, he came to America to "have some fun." Now, the boyish, 27-year-old British reporter is hot on the trail of Hollywood scandals, El Nin-o-spawned floods and offbeat stories stretching from California to America's hinterlands. One day, Thompson was in Tampa, Fla., writing about a circus performer whose head became locked in the jaws of a Bengal tiger. The next, he was sipping tea at the Miami airport with the Kathie Lee of British television hoping to land a scoop about her love life.
Back home in Los Angeles, Thompson's assignments have been similarly varied. One day, he tracked down a nanny who sued Demi Moore, claiming the actress had locked her in a room. Another day, he arrived on Anna Nicole Smith's doorstep with a bottle of champagne, hoping the zaftig former Guess? model would explain how she became the subject of a citizens' arrest for battery. Thompson, who works for a small news and photo agency called Online USA, is among several dozen expatriates from London's Fleet Street who have descended on Hollywood in recent years. Spurred by competition among newspapers back home, they have scrambled after every twist in Michael Jackson's love life, unearthed each nugget of information about actor Hugh Grant's arrest with a hooker on Sunset Boulevard, and dined repeatedly on the travails of former "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson Lee, who one British reporter describes as "the patron saint of circulation."
Fleet Street's fascination with Hollywood is not new, but with the demand for celebrity photos and articles soaring, three British-staffed news agencies called Splash, Online USA and Headline News L.A.--all located within a soccer kick of one another in Santa Monica--are now tapping into this lucrative, global market.
To understand how lucrative, one only has to consider that recent photographs taken by a freelancer outside a Beverly Hills restaurant of pop singer Jackson kissing Lisa Marie Presley through his omnipresent cloth mask commanded $70,000 in syndication.
But along with the profits, there has also been a clash of cultures as tenacious British reporters confront an image-conscious Hollywood establishment. Among the British reporters covering Hollywood, none has created as much controversy as the reporters and photographers of Splash. From their thread-bare, 10th-floor suite of offices near Ye Olde King's Head tavern on Santa Monica Boulevard, owners Kevin Smith and Gary Morgan take a cocky pride in the scoops they've unearthed over the years--even if skeptics didn't believe them at first.
"We were the first to say that Michael Jackson was having a baby when everyone poured scorn on it," Smith boasts. "When he was dating Lisa Marie Presley, everyone poured scorn on it and then he gets married. We were the ones who discovered the boy [in the Jackson child molestation case], found the boy and photographed the boy next to his father."
More recently, Splash took credit for identifying an Oregon man who admitted having an affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, and Splash claimed to be the first out in England with the story that rock star George Michael had been arrested on a morals charge.
Brad Elterman, an American who co-owns Online USA with a British partner, Paul Harris, said that from the day Splash arrived on the Hollywood scene in 1991, it has excelled at shaking things up. "These young, aggressive guys came out here and took over," Elterman said. "They all worked on Fleet Street, and Fleet Street reporters are just the finest out there. They know that when they are told to get a story, they do whatever it takes to get that story."
But in getting the story, Splash has found itself at the center of controversy. Last year, two cameramen on assignment for Splash were arrested after chasing actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, NBC news correspondent Maria Shriver, through the streets of Santa Monica. At the time, Schwarzenegger was recovering from heart surgery and Shriver was five months pregnant with the couple's fourth child. A Santa Monica judge, who convicted the cameramen of misdemeanor false imprisonment, called their conduct "outrageous" and sentenced them to jail. The cameramen are appealing the convictions.
Smith and Morgan express regret over the pursuit, but insist--as do the photographers--that they were merely going after a legitimate news story: After undergoing heart surgery, Schwarzenegger was out of the hospital and beginning to get around in public. The timing, however, couldn't have been worse. Public opinion had already been inflamed after Princess Diana was killed in a Paris traffic accident while being pursued by European photographers. At the time, some of Hollywood's biggest stars from Tom Cruise to John Travolta openly condemned the paparazzi for chasing celebrities as if they were hunted animals.
Then Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) proposed a federal law that would send photographers to prison for up to 20 years if a celebrity dies during a pursuit. Last week, actors Michael J. Fox, star of ABC's "Spin City," and Paul Reiser, star of NBC's "Mad About You," told the House Judiciary Committee about tabloid photographers sneaking into hospitals to take photographs of their newborn children and spitting on the actors to provoke a dramatic photo. "They chased me on foot and in my car, yelled obscene comments at my entire family, and literally staked out my home, on a 24-hour basis, in hopes of capturing that one photograph that will win them the bounty," Fox testified.
The methods employed by the tabloid media to cover Hollywood have raised questions for years. When actor Marlon Brando's 25-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, committed suicide in 1995, a Splash photographer trudged through a mosquito-infested jungle in Tahiti to snap pictures of her brother lowering the coffin into the grave. "What's wrong with going to Tahiti to cover Cheyenne Brando's funeral?" Morgan asked, when pressed about the incident. "It's a funeral in a cemetery in Tahiti. It's no different than a funeral at Forest Lawn."
It was not the first time Splash was involved in controversy. In 1994, rock singer Rod Stewart and his wife, model Rachel Hunter, went to court seeking a restraining order after the couple learned that Splash was attempting to peddle intimate family photos that were missing from their Bel-Air residence. One photo depicted Stewart feeding his baby while others were of the husband and wife in various stages of undress. The case was settled out of court, with the Splash agency returning the photos. "[A Stewart household employee] came to us with a story and photographs," Morgan recalled. "He signed a document for us saying he was given the photographs by Rod Stewart to do with what he wanted, so we went on that line. Rod Stewart then heard about it and filed a lawsuit. We took them in good faith."
From parking valets to maitre d's, Splash pays an army of tipsters to let them know when celebrities are out on the town. "This is Hollywood," Morgan said. "The god here is money. Publicists give us stories about their clients behind their backs and ask for money. Celebrities give us stories and ask for money. We pay a lot of celebrities." Splash sells its stories and photos to 13 British newspapers and a vast array of publications worldwide. It also supplies video footage of celebrities to such shows as "Extra," "Entertainment Tonight," "Hard Copy" and even local Los Angeles news outlets.
While selling candid celebrity photos and video might meet with a star's wrath, the Splash owners point out that even some big-name stars have been known to sell their family photos. "Pamela Lee and Tommy Lee sold the first pictures of their baby, Brandon," Morgan recalled. "They exploited their child to get on the front covers of magazines for $250,000. And Michael Jackson sold the first picture of his kid for rumors of up to $2 million." Even actor Sylvester Stallone, Smith said, sold his wedding photographs.
Sources close to all the celebrities confirmed that they sold their family photos but said there should be no negative connotations made about the sales. An attorney for Stallone explained that the proceeds from the actor's wedding photos went "to pay for the wedding and the rest of the money went to charity." A source close to Jackson, meanwhile, said that the singer sold his baby's photos to a British syndicate, but that the money went to Jackson's Heal the World Foundation. The source scoffed that the price tag was $2 million. And, a publicist for Pamela Lee said the actress sold her baby's photos to the British gossip magazine OK! out of security concerns, since by doing so she could control who took the photos and how they were released. While paying someone for interviews is usually frowned upon by mainstream American newspapers, the practice is defended by some British reporters who cover Hollywood. "I don't see anything wrong with paying for stories if the story warrants it," said Peter Bond, who spent some 25 years on British newspapers before he and his partner, Mike Parker, opened Headline News L.A. last December. "I've been on the other side of the world in Hong Kong sitting around with a former Miss India who had sexual relations with a host of British celebrities and members of Parliament and there was a wild auction going on," Bond recalled. "People were offering her ludicrous sums of money--up to half a million--for this woman's story knowing it would sell." Ian Markham-Smith, a British journalist who has freelanced stories from Los Angeles since the early 1980s, said Princess Diana's death has made everyone on Fleet Street more cautious about what they publish, although he now believes those restraints are gradually beginning to loosen.
"Immediately after Diana [died], they wouldn't have run a picture of a celebrity couple on a public beach kissing or hugging," Markham-Smith said. "Now, those kinds of pictures are beginning to appear again." Landing an exclusive on a major breaking story remains the dream of every British reporter working the Hollywood beat. Stuart White, the American editor of News of the World, a London weekly with 4.6 million circulation, scooped his rivals in 1995 with his exclusive interview with Divine Brown, the prostitute in the Hugh Grant case. With his British competitors in hot pursuit, White managed to locate Brown in Oakland before the others, then he and a colleague hired a private jet by charging $38,000 on their credit cards and whisked Brown off to Palm Desert, putting her up in a hotel for seven days. White said he was so fearful that his rivals would find her that he spent the tension-packed week patrolling the hotel grounds and scouring the hills for any signs of another journalist. "If [Brown] had walked into the yard and someone saw her and shouted a question and she replied, that would be it," White said. His exclusive would be dead. The Hugh Grant story was so big in England that News of the World sent three reporters and two photographers to Palm Desert to record Brown's story, which she reportedly sold for six figures. White said the newspaper even flew in a photographer from London carrying a red Versace dress similar to one worn by Grant's girlfriend, actress Elizabeth Hurley, and then posed the hooker in the dress for a glamour shot. White said his newspaper ran "something like six exclusive pages" on the story.
While Fleet Street, of course, encompasses a wide spectrum of newspapers, whether they are serious or simply titillating, but British readers love any story that depicts America--and particularly California--as a wild and wacky world unto itself. "America, when you're a kid in Britain, is a land of extremes," White explained. "It's wacky and wonderful. When a guy goes postal in Connecticut, that'll be a big story in Britain. It sets off a debate over there. They aren't going to write about a potato blight in Idaho. Who cares? It's got to be about landslides, earthquakes. It's got to be sensational."
Thompson, the young reporter for Online USA, seems to enjoy his job of racing from one entertaining story to the next. At 5 o'clock one morning, for instance, he was awakened by a phone call from the Daily Mirror in London alerting him that a British man had just been swept away in an Orange County deluge. As he showered, Thompson heard a radio report that Tommy Lee had been arrested for allegedly beating Pamela Lee. Jumping out of the shower, Thompson dialed back the paper and dictated "two or three paragraphs" on the Lee case. As he put it: "I popped it out straightaway." Then it was out the door and off to the flood.
HUSH MONEY: After much speculation, the New York Post's Neal Travis swears he has the lowdown, bottom-line figures on how much money Michael Jackson spent to defend himself against child molestation accusations. Estimates have ranged up to $25 million. Actually, says Travis, Jackson shelled out only $4.5 million in cash plus lawyer's fees to commit himself to the interest on about $10 million for the boy for the next 40 years and $1 million each to the boy's parents. The money in trust is expected to pay the boy, now 15 years old, about $350,000 a year after taxes if interest remains 6 percent for the term. Jackson probably can claim the interest as a tax deduction, Travis reported. ''A cheap settlement, on the one hand, but, on the other, it is generous enough to bring other accusers -- and there seem to be a couple around -- out of the woodwork,'' he wrote.