114 MARCH 2020from the star at a premiere, Harvey would corral
the star and pull her to the gossip columnist and
say, ‘George is a good guy; we trust him. Take care
of her. Be nice, George.’ And so everybody would
win. You’d have your exclusive interview with
Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt. These
people were coming up—they were babies.”
Weinstein would oscillate from charming and
complimentary to threatening and bullying and
back to get his way. But Rush and other former
gossip columnists say they never heard stories of
Weinstein being sexually abusive—allegations first
reported in 2017 by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
in The New York Times and by Ronan Farrow in The
New Yorker. Froelich, however, says she’d heard
rumors about Weinstein and Rose McGowan, who
later publicly accused Weinstein of raping her.
“There were often rumors about Rose because
Rose would talk about it sometimes,” Froelich
says. “If people aren’t gonna go on the record,
you can’t do it. You know, it’s not like I had some-
body leaking me the inside papers from Miramax
or from the Weinstein Company that show all the
documentation of it.”
Miramax bought the rights to Froelich’s book
at auction while she was still at the Post, though
she says that never affected her reporting on
Weinstein. She says, “He would tell people, ‘I
bought that book!’ And I was like, ‘Whatever,
dude, I don’t give a shit.’ ”
In 2015, the Post reported on Ambra Battila-
na Gutierrez’s harassment accusations against
Weinstein in front-page stories accompanied by
images of the model in lingerie—and they ran on-
line on PageSix.com. Stories by news reporters
sometimes run under the Page Six banner on the
website, but in those cases it’s Page Six that gets
the credit when they’re cited by other publica-
tions. One story quoted an anonymous source
calling the case extortion. The source accused
the model of taking Broadway tickets and asking
for a film role after the molestation claim.
Battilana Gutierrez did take the tickets—attend-
ing the play at the encouragement of the police
and wearing a wire, she said on Farrow’s Catch
and Kill podcast. It was after that play, outside
Weinstein’s hotel room, with several cops sta-
tioned around the hotel, that she recorded Wein-
stein admitting he’d groped her.
Weinstein has since been accused by more
than eighty women of sexual harassment and
assault, up to and including rape. (Weinstein
has denied all allegations of “nonconsensual
sex.”) In 2017, Battilana Gutierrez spoke to a Post
reporter about how painful the 2015 tabloid cov-
erage had been for her. “A friend texted me a
photo of the [Post] cover and asked me what was
happening,” she said. “I didn’t have the power
to defend myself.... It really broke my heart.”
In that story, the Post concedes that when it
came to the 2015 coverage of Battilana Gutierrez,
“Weinstein called the Post with his account” of
her asking for a film role—but the sources quoted
in that piece were unnamed, and it wasn’t made
clear that Weinstein was one of them.
Though Smith has one of four bylines on the
Broadway-tickets story, she says the coverage
wasn’t led by Page Six but rather by the news team
at the Post, and that she didn’t edit the stories or
control the tone in which they were written.
Weinstein continued to turn to Page Six after the
horrifying allegations were revealed in 2017. He
did a series of interviews with Smith in which he
talked about being “profoundly devastated” about
his wife leaving him, saying he “bears responsibil-
ity” for his behavior, while at the same time criti-
cizing The New York Times for “reckless reporting.”
This past December, Coleman wrote a snarky
item about Weinstein’s seemingly selective use
of a walker, implying it may have been used to
garner sympathy before his January trial for pred-
atory sexual assault and rape. And once again,
Weinstein went to the Post—this time for a bizarre
interview that ran on PageSix.com. Sitting in a pri-
vate hospital suite, he refused to talk about the al-
legations against him but “whined” that he should
be remembered more for things like hiring female
directors than for the “sickening accusations.”
Though the short-lived Page Six TV series re-
ported in October 2017 that Weinstein was calling
Smith from rehab nearly nightly, Smith says she’s
no longer in contact with him.IT’S DIFFICULT TO READ PAGE SIX WITHOUT
thinking about how men like Weinstein used it
as a tool for so many years—how it contributed
to his fame at the expense of the reputations of
women like Battilana Gutierrez.
The ways in which Page Six skirts the norms
of traditional journalism—blind items, trades, fre-
quent anonymous sources—cultivate its mystery
and allure. But they also make it difficult to discern
clear motives and create a fog behind which nefar-
ious players can operate. The editors of Page Six
help decide who is famous and who is infamous.
We, the readers, will never know who planted that
salacious item about a starlet canoodling; we just
have to believe that the person writing it knows—
and cares about—the motivation.
On the surface, Page Six has started to evolve:
Gone are the cruel nicknames like “portly pep-
perpot,” “aging pop tart,” and “celebutard.”
“I try not to be mean anymore,” Smith says. “I
wouldn’t call Monica Lewinsky a portly pepper-
pot anymore. And she’s told me many times how
she really didn’t like that.”
Page Six is becoming more global as well, to
appeal to its digital audience. (The downside:
Reading it, particularly online, feels less likesneaking into an exclusive party and more like
reading any number of gossip sites.)
Still, in spite of its history—or, more likely, be-
cause of it—Page Six has persevered.
“When I think of a Park Avenue building, from
the guy answering the door in the package room
to the guy in the penthouse—they’re all avid Page
Six readers,” says Mohr.
Elaine’s, a late-night restaurant on Manhat-
tan’s Upper East Side, was a favorite of all kinds
of fascinating New York characters until it closed
in 2011 after forty-eight years in business. Writers
including Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Di-
dion hung out there. So did movie stars like Judy
Garland, Jack Nicholson, and, famously, Woody
Allen, all of which made it a backdrop to countless
Page Six items. When Johnson ran the column,
he’d often finish his evenings by stopping into
Elaine’s and sitting at the large center table where
owner Elaine Kaufman—herself a fascinating New
York character—held court, to see if she’d seen
anything interesting that night.
Brian McDonald, who worked at Elaine’s from
1986 to 1999 as a bartender and manager, was
a reliable Page Six tipster. Like the time around
thirty years ago when Chinatown producer and
Hollywood roustabout Robert Evans strolled into
the dim, storied dining room around midnight.
“He says the words that put a chill through the
heart of every regular customer: ‘I just had din-
ner at Le Cirque. I’m here for coffee and dessert,’ ”
McDonald says, pausing for dramatic effect.
“Elaine said, ‘If you had dinner at Le Cirque, you
should have stuck around and had dessert there,
too,’ and walked away. So he sat at a table—he was
there with two stunning women, blond-haired
women—and he ordered dinner for everybody, and
it sat there, uneaten, just to make Elaine happy.”
McDonald smiles.
“I called that item in.”
The Evans tidbit is, in a way, the perfect Page Six
item. Evans was a big name, a mysterious creature
whom most people had no access to, never saw.
Elaine’s was an institution, the kind of place most
people might visit in hopes of catching a glimpse
of someone like Robert Evans but never do. The
item captured Kaufman’s gruff charm and Evans’s
showbiz ego. What actually happened? Not much.
The exchange was utterly meaningless. And that
delicious meaninglessness is one big reason so
many people have loved the column so much for
so long. It’s about these titillating and amusing and
sometimes shocking things happening around us
all the time, late at night or at exclusive lunch spots
or in the lobbies of luxury co-ops—things we would
have witnessed if we’d happened to be there.
Alas, we weren’t.
But Page Six was. So for a few minutes as we ride
the subway or drink our coffee or wait for the doc-
tor, we get to escape our little lives that no one ever
writes about. We get to be there, too.THE PLACE TO BE
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