After she confessed to a young reporter about the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, Betty Broderick became an icon for women scorned. Twenty years later, that reporter reconnects with the killer who launched her career.

BY: Amy Wallace

She took her gun, entered her ex-husband’s house, tiptoed into the darkened bedroom where he slept with his new young wife, and shot them both dead. In just seconds Betty Broderick ended two lives, but her vengeful act would do a lot more than that. Pop culture has long had a familiarity with ladies who kill the men they can’t keep. People have been singing “Frankie and Johnny” since the turn of the 20th century; George Cukor directed his classic film The Women in 1939. Twenty years ago, however, Betty riveted our attention like no other scorned woman. Instantly she became a new kind of antiheroine. Not only has the post-Betty era been richer in female payback, but unwittingly, in ways none of us could have imagined, she has helped change the rules of retribution.

On November 28, 1989, just after Thanksgiving, I drove to the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, near San Diego, to talk to Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick for the first time. It had been three weeks since she’d murdered Dan and Linda Kolkena Broderick. I had a hundred questions, but they boiled down to two: Why had an affluent 42-year-old woman with four children and a home in La Jolla overlooking the Pacific Ocean thrown it all away just to get even with the father of her kids? Had he really done her so wrong? I had no reason to think she would see me. Then, all at once, there she was. Betty was tall, statuesque, if a little plump, with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore jailhouse garb—a gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. As she took her seat in a hard plastic chair on the other side of a glass partition, her blue eyes flashed with intelligence. Smiling wanly, she picked up a phone receiver connected to one I held to my ear and began to talk.

That interview with Betty was my first big scoop as a journalist. Eight weeks before, I had started a new job at the Los Angeles Times. I was 27 years old, green, and determined to prove myself. Suddenly I was a lead reporter on a story the whole country was talking about. Overnight Betty had become not only infamous but  culturally significant: the focus of a debate over whether divorced women inevitably were treated unfairly. Betty’s suspicions that her husband had cheated, combined with her claim that she had been a victim of emotional abuse—assault by lawyering—resonated with many women. People,Ladies’ Home Journal, the syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen—everyone had an opinion about what had made her snap. Eventually Court TV would cover her trials (there were two; the first resulted in a hung jury), Oprah Winfrey would interview her in prison, and her case would inspire two top-rated TV movies, three books, a documentary, even a skit on Saturday Night Live.

When she took her seat across from me at Las Colinas, Betty seemed tired but self-assured. For the next half hour she recited a catalog of complaints about her ex-husband’s slights and infidelities. She had supported Dan while he completed Cornell University Medical School, then Harvard Law. She had raised their two sons and two daughters almost single-handedly, with little help and less money. Then, when he had finally achieved everything they’d scrimped and worked for—he was a thriving medical malpractice attorney—he threw her over for Linda, his receptionist. Since then, she said, he had tormented her in and out of court. If I could understand every moment of her marriage and its undoing, she said, I would agree that Dan was to blame, not her.

She didn’t acknowledge the murders. It was immediately clear, however, that one conversation would not be enough. After our jailhouse meeting, Betty started calling me collect and sending frequent letters, always on yellow legal paper and always in pencil.

Originally appeared in GQ October, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”

In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier high jinks. Into this jolly tableau strides Smilin’ Bob—just your average middle manager with a bigger-than-average grin—in a Santa suit. “Not long ago, Santa decided he needed a little more room in his sled,” goes the smarmy voice-over, as a whistling theme song plays in the background. “So he made a call to Enzyte about natural male enhancement. And after a few short weeks, what did he get?” The camera cuts to a group of women who titter and leer in Bob’s general direction. “Why, not only a sleigh full of confidence and a sack full of pride, but it looks like Bob got the one thing that every lady likes: the joy of a gift that keeps on”—big pause—“giving.”

And that’s just one of eighteen Smilin’ Bob ads, all of which share the same objective: to sell a truckload of Enzyte, the once-a-day tablet that touts itself as “the effective, reliable way” to “the strongest, most powerful erections imaginable.” There’s the airport ad, in which Bob smiles his way through security (“Bob is not traveling as light as he used to!”), the one where Bob jumps off a diving board (“Bob has a big new spring of confidence, a generous swelling of pride”), and the one at the bowling alley (“Bob is throwing them hard and straight”). Smilin’ Bob never speaks, but the voice-over explains that he is “doing well. Very well indeed.”

Retro in style and slyly inexplicit, the ads let Bob’s smirk suggest what Enzyte can do, and millions of men have responded—even after the man who created Bob lost his business, his home, his fortune, and ultimately his freedom. Since then, that man—Steven E. Warshak, Federal Inmate #04431-061—has kept as quiet as the star of his commercials, refusing all interview requests. Here, for the first time, he attempts to explain himself.

*****

THE PROBLEM WAS GROWTH, Steve Warshak tells me. First it made him a threat, he says; then it made him a target.

We are alone, except for two distant prison administrators, in the huge sterile visiting room of a medium-security facility in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I have come to ask Warshak, 43, about what prosecutors call his “diabolical” nature, a nature exhibited—to quote the judge who sentenced him to twenty-five years behind bars—by the “massive fraudulent undertaking” for which he was convicted in August 2008.

Warshak was the founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a Cincinnati company that sold a wide range of supplements but made most of its money on one blockbuster product: Enzyte. Warshak sold countless men on the simple idea that happiness was just a little blue pill away. His pill had a six-letter name, just like the prescription drug it was designed to evoke. But unlike Viagra, Enzyte was “natural” and could be ordered without a prescription in the privacy of one’s home.

At last year’s trial, prosecutors alleged that Warshak had exploited that desire for privacy to bilk his customers out of more than $100 million. The scam was simple, they alleged: Get a customer’s credit card number by offering a free sample (pay only the postage!), then charge the card again for more product than the customer ever ordered. Enzyte was marketed to men who didn’t want to go to the doctor, the government argued, and thus were likely to be ashamed of their sexual inadequacy. Warshak figured he could steal from these customers with minimum risk, prosecutors said; embarrassment would keep them from complaining.

Like most convicts, Warshak maintains his innocence. But his argument is more creative than most. He says he is being unfairly punished for something that as a free man he claimed to know a lot about: getting too big too fast.

“We were a million times more successful than I ever dreamed of being,” he tells me, settling into one of 144 blue plastic chairs that are bolted to the linoleum floor in rows of twelve. His voice is soft, his manner overly polite. He looks athletic, even boyish, despite touches of gray at the temples of his dark hair. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes are alert and, at moments, warm—beseeching, even. But for the prison khakis with warshak printed on a white iron-on label over his heart, he could be your kindly neighborhood dentist.

How did the scam of the century reach all the way across the country and into the pockets of the showbiz elite? It wasn’t hard at all.

Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio March, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

To hear him talk about the economic challenges facing the entertainment industry, you’d think that Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, would be worried. Still, sitting in a meeting room on the DreamWorks campus, surrounded by plush toys commemorating his company’s biggest hits, Katzenberg speaks in a tone that borders on serenity.

“I tell people, ‘Wherever you are today, this is the new great,’ ” he says, a Kung Fu Panda doll looming over his shoulder. “The sooner you forget what you had, the better off you’ll be.”

Katzenberg’s Zen-like calm is especially surprising, given that just weeks before, he’d learned that he was among the Hollywood victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Both Katzenberg and his DreamWorks co-founder, Steven Spielberg, had millions tied up with Madoff, most of it money they’d set aside for charity and all of it probably gone. As Katzenberg speaks of the belt-tightening that is happening in Hollywood, it’s hard not to wonder about his own belt.

“If you look at where you were last summer, and that’s your measure of how you’re doing, it’s hopeless,” he says. His words could also apply to life after Madoff, I suggest. Katzenberg nods. His loss was humiliating, he admits. “It’s gone. It’s finished,” he says. He refuses to reveal how much “it” is, though public tax filings show his and his wife’s foundation had assets of more than $22 million in 2007. “I’m as lucky and as blessed as I can be,” he says. “Let’s move on.”

If only it were so easy. The names of Madoff’s other Hollywood victims are still gradually and grudgingly coming to light. Condé Nast Portfolio has learned that Arnon Milchan, the billionaire producer of such films as Fight Club and Pretty Woman, lost at least $18 million in the scam.

(Milchan declined to comment.) Actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who are married, have acknowledged that they too were taken.

How did so many smart people get so suckered? By Katzenberg’s own account, he had never met Madoff, never even heard his name. Katzenberg is not a member of the Jewish country clubs in Palm Beach and Minneapolis where Madoff and his agents trolled for investors. He doesn’t move in the social circles of New York’s Upper East Side to which many of the scheme’s patsies belong.

The answer, it turns out, lies closer to home. Katzenberg and Spielberg, like many people on the top rungs of the entertainment business, relied on the services of a personal business manager. Madoff had apparently figured out what industry insiders have known for years: More than agents, more than lawyers, business managers are the financial gatekeepers to Hollywood’s elite.

Since Madoff confessed to spinning a web of deceit that bilked thousands of people, universities, and philanthropic organizations out of an alleged $50 billion, two West Coast business managers have been embroiled in the scam. One is Katzenberg and Spielberg’s adviser Gerald Breslauer, who at 80 years old is widely revered as the dean of his profession. The other is Stanley Chais, 82, who has been helping prominent Angelenos invest their money for decades.

In addition to steering their clients to Madoff, both Breslauer and Chais reportedly have incurred huge personal losses themselves. But in Chais’ case, at least, that shared misfortune hasn’t prevented clients from suing. A magician and entertainer named Michael Chaleff was the first to file, accusing Chais, in a $250 million federal action, of “false, misleading, unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent acts and practices.” (Chais would not comment for this story.)

Then, on Christmas Eve, screenwriter Eric Roth—who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump—sued Chais in Los Angeles County Superior Court. In a classic good news-bad news scenario, the 65-year-old scribe had learned on the same day he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a drama in which Brad Pitt ages backward, that his retirement nest egg was gone.

Originally appeared in Portfolio, October 2007

BY: Amy Wallace

In May 2002, Richard Parsons, then co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, received a scathing letter from the widow of Jerome Siegel, the man who invented Superman.

  “Dear Dick,” wrote Joanne Siegel. “Have you been aware that your representatives have gone too far?”

In the mid-1930s, when she was in her late teens, Siegel had been the sketch model for Lois Lane. Now she was accusing Parsons’ company of trying to fleece her and her daughter of their share of Superman revenues. She called AOL Time Warner “greedy” and alleged a “heartless attempt” to rewrite history. “Just like the Gestapo, your company wants to strip us naked of our legal rights…. Is that the reputation you want?”

In the five years since Parsons received that three-page screed, Siegel’s outrage has found a more formal outlet: two lawsuits, both championed by a controversial Malibu litigator named Marc Toberoff. The 52-year-old attorney has made a career of taking on big entertainment companies on behalf of creators and their heirs. He has been especially successful against what is now Time Warner.

His most publicized victory came in 2005, when he persuaded a judge to enjoin Warner Bros. from releasing the movie The Dukes of Hazzard because it was based in part on an earlier film, Moonrunners. Six weeks before the Dukes premiere, the studio settled with the Moonrunners producers for $17.5 million.

In the pending cases, Toberoff is taking a different tack, asserting that the Siegel family has terminated the grants to the Superman and Superboy copyrights that Jerry Siegel had bestowed in 1938 and 1948, respectively. The Siegels have exercised a clause in U.S. copyright law that gives creators or their heirs a five-year window to reclaim rights to their works 56 years after the copyright was issued. Toberoff says this entitles the Siegels to half of all Superman-related profits earned since the copyright termination took effect in 1999—a sum he estimates tops $50 million—as well as any future profits. He also asserts that Time Warner has infringed the Siegels’ Superboy copyright with its Smallville TV series and thus owes unspecified damages.

Time Warner’s lawyers dispute these claims, saying, among other things, that the Siegel heirs have reneged on a settlement hammered out before Toberoff entered the picture. The attorneys also question whether the termination papers were filed correctly and say that, even if they were, the Siegel family has vastly overstated how much it is owed.

At stake is not just money but, potentially, the very future of the franchise. If the Siegel heirs prevail in winning back their copyrights, the result could be a similar challenge by the heirs of Superman’s co-creator, artist Joe Shuster. And if that challenge were successful, then Time Warner—which is currently developing a follow-up to last year’s film Superman Returns—could eventually find itself out of the Superman business altogether. How big is that business? Only Time Warner knows for sure (and it isn’t saying), but counting the Superman- and Superboy-related movies, TV shows, DVDs, books, comics, and merchandise, the conservative estimate is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Toberoff says it’s $1 billion.

As the first suit moves toward a January trial, Time Warner has retained three law firms to keep the Man of Steel in the fold. Overkill? Not considering how much the company stands to lose—and the fact that it has lost to Toberoff before.

Reviled by some as the Hollywood equivalent of an ambulance chaser, Toberoff specializes in helping aging writers and artists (or their heirs) reassert their claims to decades-old properties. Then, in exchange for an ownership stake in the recovered rights, Toberoff tries to get new projects produced that are based on those properties, sometimes at the very same media company with which he just did battle.

<<>>

Now more than ever, risk-averse Hollywood loves remakes, which are seen as easier to market. That trend has created opportunities for Toberoff, who, despite what one executive has called “pushy and aggressive” tactics, has a knack for attaching himself to projects that studios want to make. For example, back in the mid-1990s, it occurred to Toberoff that the 1978 TV series Fantasy Island could be the basis for a feature film. He tracked down Gene Levitt, the series’ creator, and convinced him that it would be worth his while to dig his original contract out of the basement. Toberoff then proved that Levitt (who died in 1999) owned the show’s movie rights. Sony Pictures is now developing the series into a film to star Eddie Murphy. If it is made, Toberoff will collect a producing fee. (He won’t say how much.)

Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine September 1, 2001

BY: Amy Wallace

Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.

“I really take umbrage at the gotcha nature of your interrogation,” he says. His voice is taut. I can’t see his knees, but I’m sure at least one is twitching.

Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, the entertainment industry’s dominant newspaper, is accustomed to being in charge. Studio heads woo him; strivers kiss his ass. Everyone wants his insight and his wisdom — or prominent placement in Variety’s big, glossy pages. In his weekly column, “The Back Lot,” he alternately strokes and scolds moguls and movie stars, addressing them by their first names. When Bart telephones the powerful, he is put right through. Now he’s calling me.

“I think to plunk documents out of context,” he says, “on people whose lives are as busy as yours or mine is a little unfair. This is not consistent with the access and cooperation I have afforded you.”

Over several months I have encountered a dizzying variety of Peters. I have spent many hours with Charming Peter, who is smart, funny, fierce. I have gotten to know Judgmental Peter, who loves to size up others. I’ve met Crude Peter, Brilliant Peter, Hypocritical Peter, Loyal Peter.

Bart calls himself “Zelig-like.” A setter of rules who hates to follow them, a lover of labels who resents being characterized, a seeker of the truth who doesn’t always tell it, Bart believes he is immune to the conflicts that derail lesser men. It’s one of the things that place him among the most despised and feared people in Hollywood. I listen to him speaking now. It’s a Peter I’ve never met.

“When you’re in public life, people attack you,” Intimidating Peter tells me. “But I’m taken aback by a bogus document suddenly being slammed on the desk. I’ll send you a note saying I will sue you, which I sure as hell will.”

IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR OR A GROCER or an airline pilot with no ties to the business that produces America’s number-one export – entertainment — you probably have never heard of Peter Bart. But if you are among the 70,000 people in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world who can’t start the day without knowing which big-name movie director just got a two-picture deal, Bart is an institution.

Over nearly four decades in Los Angeles he’s been a reporter for The New York Times, an executive at three movie studios, an independent film producer, a screenwriter, and an author of both novels and nonfiction. For the past dozen years he has been the editor of and most influential columnist at Daily Variety and Weekly Variety, the sister publications whose zippy headlines, who’s-in-who’s-out reporting, and largely anonymous sources routinely make and break reputations. In clout-conscious Hollywood, that makes Bart not just an observer but a player.

There are two keys to success in Hollywood: relationships and information. Bart traffics in both. He lunches almost every day with a studio chief, a marketing executive, a top manager or talent agency head, an entertainment lawyer or lobbyist. In the course of just a few weeks earlier this year he dined with Screenwriter William Goldman; Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios; Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Warner Bros. president of worldwide production; Michael Ovitz, CEO of Artists Management Group; Mike De Luca, former New Line president of production (and now production chief at DreamWorks SKG); Mike Medavoy, chairman of Phoenix Pictures; Tom Sherak, partner at Revolution Studios; Rob Friedman, vice chairman at Paramount Pictures; John McLean, executive director of the Writers Guild of America; Don Marron, chairman of PaineWebber; and Skip Brittenham, a partner in the entertainment law firm Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca & Fischer.

These meals aren’t interviews, according to Bart, but meetings between equals. After all, in his 17 years as an executive, most prominently at Paramount Pictures, Bart was one of them. He likes to think he still is. “Some people say I owe Joe Roth a lot,” Bart says of the former Disney chief who now runs Revolution Studios. “But I don’t. Joe Roth owes me. I gave him his first job. “(While Bart was president of Lorimar Film Company, Roth produced the 1979 dud Americathon, but it was Roth’s fourth film, not his first.)