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When her publicist invited me to interview Gloria Allred to promote the high-profile attorney's Jan. 12 guest appearance on the blaxpoitation sitcom "In the House," the image that immediately came to mind was Dr. Joyce Brothers, another high-profile professional who should know better, sitting in a box on "The Hollywood Squares" sometime during the Carter administration. Allred's guest shot on UPN, the stealth network, jibed with my personal and professional knowledge of her. What's a kind way to describe Allred's MO? Media exhibitionist? During my incompetent tenure on the news desk at UPI in 1984, Allred would call me almost daily, trying to get her name and latest litigation on the wire. No story was too small for the bankrupt wire service, and the bureau chief would invariably make me write 750 words every time Allred picked up the phone. So, 13 years later, when she tried to hustle me for an even less newsworthy story, a guest shot playing a judge opposite LL Cool J on a lame sitcom, I experienced something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder from our tortured relationship at UPI. Now, however, I felt empowered. As a freelance writer, I didn't have an editor ordering me to cover the story. Even so, I was happy to give Allred some ink -- or more accurately, pixels -- but this time on my terms. Can you say "ambush interview," boys and girls? While many attorneys chase ambulances (Alan Dershowitz chases them all the way to the Supreme Court), Allred chases klieg lights. She may be the only celebrity who stalks paparazzi. (With the possible exception of the extant Gabor.) Allred is all over the tube and papers, litigating sometimes laudable, sometimes laughable, but always headline-grabbing cases. In the recent Hunter Tylo "Melrose Place" case, for example, Allred successfully fought to prove a pregnant woman could be sexy. She sued Dodi Fayed when he jilted retired mannequin Kelly Fisher and grabbed some of the media spotlight trained on the playboy's replacement, Ol' Tiara Head herself, the Princess of Wales. Jill Stewart, the political columnist for New Times magazine, thinks Allred's "In the House" appearance is part of a calculated image-management strategy. "Gloria knows she's widely hated. The minute she leaves the room people call her a raging bitch. She has bigger balls than any male attorney in California. This is her attempt to show she's fun and human, approachable, not a bitch. Gloria knows that 12 hours of work to reach 10 million viewers is extremely cost-efficient. A lot of leading figures use the sitcom and talk show forum to prove they're human. Johnnie Cochran would go on a blaxpoitation sitcom in a minute." So I was all set to bury Allred, not praise her. My hit mission, however, started falling apart before it even got started. First of all, it turned out that the publicists who pitched the interview with Allred were not hers -- they were hired by the sitcom. When I interviewed Allred on Christmas Eve (yes, she was working the night before Christmas -- voluntarily; I wasn't), she said, "I have never ever hired a publicist or had a publicist work for me on anything. No publicist has ever represented me." On the other hand, who needs a publicist when your client is "the other woman" in the Dodi-Di triangle? Beyond that, the fact is that Allred does a lot of good work. While l'affaire Fayed-Fisher and the Hunter ("I want to have a baby on 'Melrose Place'!") Tylo trial may seem frivolous, other Allred causes are noble and precedent-setting and don't earn the Queen of Pro Bono a dime. Allred was being modest when she told me "a good percentage" of her cases were freebies: According to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, all her clients are repped for free. Her partners do the big billable hours stuff that pays the rent. What has Gloria Allred done for us bleeding-heart liberals lately? In "Mermelstein vs. the Institute for Historical Review et al.," she sued an anti-Semitic think tank that promised big cash prizes to her client, an Auschwitz survivor, if he could prove the Holocaust had taken place, then reneged when he did. She sank the think tank, bankrupting it with a six-figure judgment, three times the original contest offer. (Now, if only she would do the same to the Hoover Institute.) The case was especially gratifying to Allred since both her partners, Michael Maroko and Nathan Goldberg, are the children of Holocaust survivors. "We cared a lot about that case and we won," she says. In another case, Allred is suing the Boy Scouts because they won't let a girl named Katrina Yeaw join the organization. The knee-jerk response is to tell her client to check out the Girl Scouts. But I must admit I'm personally glad she's beating up the Boy Scouts: They don't allow gay troop leaders, and I'm an activist who came out in the pages of Penthouse (with photo!) two summers ago, decrying Hollywood homophobia. Asked what her favorite case was, Allred says there was one case "that makes me feel really good about what we do in our law firm." Ironically, it was one she tried to discourage her client from pursuing. For two years, beginning in 1990, when she was 10, Desiray Bartak was sexually assaulted by her godfather. When Desiray showed up in her office three years later, Allred recalled, "I tried to talk her out of (suing). I said, 'You're only a child. This may not be a good thing for you. Are you sure you want to do this? You have to think about it for several months. You must persuade me by making sure your therapist thinks this would be good for you.'" So much for my original image of ambulance-chaser Allred. The girl won Allred over, and Allred won her client a multimillion dollar verdict and sent the molester to jail. Allred read me the inscription on a letter that hangs on the wall of her office: "Dear Gloria and Lisa, Thank you for giving me my life back. It's great. Desiray." Ten-year-old rape victims, girl-hating Boy Scouts, think tanks in denial make headlines and "Hard Copy." A wire service reporter (not me) dished up the sobriquet "the ever-camera-ready Gloria Allred." A reporter at the Houston Chronicle, incensed by the Boy Scouts suit, called her "an ambitious lawyer willing to manipulate the law for personal gain and notoriety." But Allred insists she's not a media slut (my phrase, not hers). "I never seek high-profile cases. I never seek anybody out. People seek us out all the time." When she isn't stalking a paparazzo, Allred is being stalked by wannabe clients -- "in retail stores, in parking lots, at restaurants." In a variation on the story of a fan who asked for Paul Newman's autograph while he was using a public urinal, Allred recalls the time a supplicant shoved her hand under a bathroom stall wall and asked for her business card. Candide-like, Allred says of the incident, "I'm happy people feel they have access." If Allred isn't a fame junkie, however, why is she playing Here Come Da Judge on "In the House"? My misgivings didn't decrease when she volunteered, "I've played myself before," then listed her acting credits on USA's "Pacific Blue" and a movie of the week, "National Lampoon's Seven Deadly Sins." But even if Allred never met a microphone she didn't like, so what? There are worse crimes than limelight addiction. As far as her acting career goes, Allred seems to be a Renaissance gal who occasionally needs to flee the left brain life of lawyering for the right brain terrain of Newton Minow's vast wasteland. Like Cyndi Lauper, sometimes girls -- even girl lawyers -- just want to have fun. "It's fun to do something a little different from what I usually do. I enjoyed ('In the House') enormously," she says. "Everybody was very nice to me. It's fun to enter a different world. My world is the world of law, politics, feminist activism. It's fun to play hooky for a day." Not that she does much of that: When I interviewed her, it was the day after "Melrose Place's" Queen Lear had relieved the captain of "The Love Boat" of 5 million bucks. "Shouldn't you be sipping champagne on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean?" I asked. Allred told me she works seven days a week and hasn't taken a vacation in 15 years. So, my final take on my former tormentor at UPI? If I had an Oscar in my hands, I might feel compelled to put it down and type, "I liked her. I really liked her!"
Frank Sanello is the author of several biographies, including "Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life" and "Naked Instinct: The Unauthorized Biography of Sharon Stone." |
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