FROM IMELDA TO SHARON
Stephen Schwartz tells the
inside story of the man who has won Hollywood's Miss Stone
San Francisco WHO is Phil Bronstein, the San Francisco news executive who has managed to cap- ture the world's most desirable ageing star- let, the 39-year-old Sharon Stone? And how did he manage it? Many people, most of them readers of the beyond-the-pale American tabloids, have asked these ques- tions for the last few months, as details of the relationship trickled from the actress's small inner group, and now people all over the world will undoubtedly ask them again.
A picture of the couple, with Mr Stone, er, Mr Bronstein or, perhaps, Mr Brown Stone, looking suitably pleased with him- self, appeared on the front pages of the Monday papers. He is a handsome speci- men, if one knows little about his personal- ity. For his colleagues and subordinates in the world of San Francisco journalism, however, the questions haven't been about him, but about her. They all know him too well, and they wonder if she has any idea what she has got herself into.
Phil Bronstein is widely known as 'Big Phil', even though he is surprisingly small in stature. He's called that for his machismo and, to put it bluntly, his prowess as a seduc- er. Aside from the psychological needs of Miss Stone, Big Phil owes to a surprising item of trivia his arrival at a position to which very many normal men must have aspired. His career as a journalist took flight thanks to a single lucky break: it was he who, leaping through the open doors of Malacanang, the residence of the deposed Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, discovered that Madame Imelda Marcos was an obsessive collector of shoes.
Imelda's shoes made Big Phil famous, and eventually led to a real job as execu- tive editor of the San Francisco Examiner, a now lagging evening sheet that is one of only two dailies in the city but which was once the flagship of the Hearst news chain. Of course, times have changed mightily since the days, portrayed in Orson Welles's classic Citizen Kane, when the Examiner stole the best writers away from its rivals, and when William Randolph Hearst could start a war by using inflammatory head- lines. These days the movement of journal- ists is the other way, with reporters and columnists fleeing the Examiner for the morning San Francisco Chronicle, some out of physical fear of Big Phil.
Big Phil is no Billy Hearst, but he tries. Perhaps he saw a parallel between his acquisition of the blonde goddess and the Hearst-backed war that made Cuba, Puer- to Rico and the Philippines American property. That conquest began just 100 years ago this past week, and he may have been sensitive to the parallel.
Mr Bronstein loves to reminisce about his life as a war correspondent, and those privy to the talk at Miss Stone's parties have said it is one of the aspects of the romance with him that most thrills her. But Big Phil these days does his real fight- ing on the premises of his newspaper, not on faraway battlefields. And that means mano a mano, not editorial or ideological combat. In perhaps the most famous, or infamous, such incident to fill out his fear- some résumé, Big Phil broke the foot of a leading political expert in San Francisco, Clin Reilly, during a contretemps in the newspaper's boardroom. The outcome was that Hearst Corporation paid out some $900,000 to Mr Reilly.
But Big Phil wasn't sacked. After all, two- fisted journalism is a proud tradition in San Francisco; the founder of the rival Chronicle was shot dead in his newsroom back in the 1880s, and if the Examiner could not attract writers of the calibre of Jack London, one of the many local authors of distinction who wrote for the Chronicle, it could at least keep an editor who enjoyed, in his favourite phrase, 'kicking ass'.
Yet what goes around comes around, as Americans say, and eventually Big Phil got his ass kicked in turn — not in the board- room, indeed neither physically nor edito- rially. His come-uppance was delivered in `I must change for dinner.' 1994 when this self-styled guerrilla cam- paigner, who had made the Examiner a bas- tion of the most extreme political correctness, suffered a strike at his newspa- per. Suddenly Mr Wet Left had to look down into the street at enraged pickets; worse, he had to run a gauntlet of abuse just to get into the parking lot. And, worst of all, the hero of Imelda's shoe cupboard had to listen to strikers calling him a cow- ard. In a further display of questionable taste, the pickets took to chanting a cruel rhyme accusing him of sexual harassment.
It was a sore trial, in which it was said that Big Phil jumped from behind his desk and bashed the wall with his fist whenever he heard his name called out by the angry masses. Unsurprisingly, the strike ended after only 11 days in a clear victory for the news unions; those inside the plant during the contest later claimed that the manage- ment had capitulated out of fear that Big Phil would suffer apoplexy. For his part, the paper's owner, the rather weedy heir William Randolph Hearst II, couldn't take it at all; he left the industry entirely (the original Citizen Hearst would not have got into such a fight with the unions and would certainly not have let himself get run out of the news business by a few shouts). Forget- ting his leftist past and his own former union membership, Big Phil then spent two years punishing the strikers for their disloy- alty. The Examiner journalists went without an annual Christmas party until this past December, when the desire to show off his new possession, Miss Stone, outweighed Big Phil's spleen at the ungrateful employ- ees. She was, of course, the star of the party, if only for the 15 minutes she stayed.
What has led this woman to forgo the dubious pleasures of a typical Hollywood marriage and to embrace a man who is lit- tle more than a petty bully in an unfortu- nate position of responsibility? That's easy enough. Miss Stone, like Madonna and other American glamour queens, suffers from a severe case of low intellectual self- esteem. She wants to be taken seriously, to be considered a woman whose head fea- tures a brain as well as a neatly styled quiff. A real writer, say a poet or novelist, wouldn't do — too much like the ill-fated Marilyn Monroe, who once wed the play- wright Arthur Miller. But a journo, and, it seems, a real one — rather than a televi- sion presenter — that conveys credibility, substance, depth, at least to her.
It is said the loving couple have agreed upon a prenuptial contract that preserves her from financial claims by Big Phil; he, for his part, has declared in forelock-tug- ging style that he will not give up his job, and that money means little to him. But Phil Bronstein is, in his way, as fickle in his ideas as La Stone has been with her lovers. The lady had better keep her eyes open.
Stephen Schwartz is a San Francisco Chroni- cle reporter and secretary of the Northern Cali- fornia Newspaper Guild, the journalists' union.
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