We first used the term “publisister” in this space on June 16 of this year, in our first item about Tom Cruise’s Summer of Crazy. A publisister is a publicist who is also the client’s sister, in the familial vein of momager (a mother who is also her child’s manager, like Hilary Duff’s). Cruise’s sister Lee Anne DeVette took over repping duties from the biggest flack of all, Pat Kingsley, in 2003, which is when Cruise began pushing Scientology in high-octane earnest.
That same week we suggested the word to the LA gossip site Defamer, which is a part of the Gawker Media empire. It boasts 14 pop-culture blogs; Gawker.com itself is the 13th most-read blog on the internet. Defamer’s smart, sassy editor Mark Lisanti had been dutifully keeping on top of the whirlwind TomKat story, and all the public scrutiny that followed. He was quoting DeVette a lot, each time calling her Cruise’s publicist/sister, a clunky, unsightly phrase.
So we emailed him with our, we thought, pretty clever term. Once he Googled it and confirmed it hadn’t been used before, Lisanti promised to immediately put the word into rotation, which he did. He hauls it out every time DeVette releases a statement, which is, unfortunately, often. (Free Katie!)
This was a pretty big deal to little old us, desperate to belong as we are. So imagine our delight when we picked up the latest, surprisingly excellent issue of Radar (“The Scary Issue”) and turned to page 18 to find a piece on the fallout between Cruise and Steven Spielberg.
The story alleges that Spielberg mentioned off-hand to Cruise, in front of Scientology honcho David Miscavige, that a relative of his was seeing a psychiatrist. A few days later, a crowd of emphatically anti-psychiatry Scientologists showed up at the shrink’s office in protest.
“The family-man director was not amused and privately blamed Cruise for the unwelcome intrusion,” writes Andrew Goldstein. “The storm might have passed had the filmmaker’s wife, Kate Capshaw, not made an angry call to Cruise’s publisister, Lee Anne DeVette, informing her that Spielberg’s friendship with Cruise was over.”
There you go — our little bit of summer time-wasting has turned up on an honest-to-goodness for-true glossy page in a real magazine. Whenever you see it, remember where you read it first. Ana-motherfucking-blog.
Send congratulatory bouquets to Anablog c/o The Coast 5435 Portland Place, Halifax, B3K 6R7.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2005.