Neil Patrick Harris Is My Celebrity Nemesis

I am a veteran of the celebrity-industrial complex, and have the battle scars to prove it. In this week’s edition of Between The Lines, where Crushable peeks behind the Hollywood curtain , I reveal how Doogie Howser broke my heart — and then some.

There was the vicious tongue-lashing from a woman who represented Jeremy Piven; back in 2005, when New Yorkers went to clubs like Marquee for the bottle service and celeb gawking, I was dispatched by the magazine I worked at to a nightspot where Piven was doing a promotional thingy for Hamptons magazine. The Pivs, then on a PR bender after getting well-deserved recognition for Entourage, seemed exhausted, catatonic, spent. I approached him for an interview but he could barely stand up; his then-publicist ordered me to interview  publisher Jason Binn instead and I was all, “Who’s that?” (No offense Jason Binn, but you’re no Ari Gold.)

She got in my face and shrieked bloody murder, and while I can’t quite recall what she said, my ears still burn to this day.  As a straightforward Midwestern girl who was naive to the dark side of celebrity journalism, it was a fascinating and crude initiation into the machinations behind it: one in which the stars are sometimes driven to near-exhaustion on the promotional circuit, the PR people driven nearly paranoid trying to protect their clients and the reporters reduced to peons to nab That One Interview.

Soon after club-stalking Piven and Lindsay Lohan for that specific magazine — called Inside TV, it lasted only eight months  — I moved to The Associated Press as an entertainment reporter. That meant not only covering the ongoing narratives of celebrities’ lives (births, deaths, trainwrecks, Britney) but also interviewing lots of them for projects they promoted. While most interviews went smoothly, with subjects willing to smile and provide a soundbite or candid conversation, others exposed the cold hard truth: Sometimes celebrities you admired can let you down, and sometimes they can be jerks (and aren’t afraid to let you know it). Sometimes their harried handlers can’t control their client’s  behavior (and all hell breaks loose as a result).

Such experiences have been few and far between, with stars from Robert Redford to Anne Hathaway to David Hasselhoff no less than lovely, obliging and game for an interview. But here are some encounters with boldfaced names that sent a chill down my spine and left me feeling like an ego-deflated peon with a tape recorder:

• Travis McCoy, the guy from Gym Class Heroes who used to date Katy Perry, gave mostly monosyllabic answers to my questions and ate potato chips during an interview in the Heroes’ trailer outside a concert in downtown Manhattan. At one point, he took his hand out of the potato-chip bag and smeared the grease on my sleeve. Out of nowhere. I have a weak stomach so I almost threw up right then in the trailer. His publicist sat there with a serene stare, possibly screaming internally, possibly just used to it.  Either way, harrowing!

• Eva Longoria iced me out while promoting those estrogen-targeted gourmet M & M’s in the tents at New York Fashion Week. She was most likely getting paid the big bucks because otherwise she might not have shilled for M & M’s in full view of the most fashionable people in the world. And she was most likely not in the mood to discuss the pregnancy rumors that were dogging her at the time when I walked into a backstage VIP lounge for our interview — which was, of course, meant to focus on Eva’s love for M & M’s. The effervescent actress was unusually chilly: her body language was stiff, her expression sour.  After three minutes of trying and failing to get Eva to open up (and be funny like she is on the TV), I went in for the money question: “How do you respond to rumors you and Tony are pregnant?” To this, she zipped her mouth shut and refused to answer any other questions. She did not give the throwaway “No comment” or redirect the conversation to Desperate Housewives or even those blasted M & M’s.  I thanked her for her time, got up and walked out — sigh of relief. My next interview was Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, a breath of fresh warm air compared with Eva’s arctic chill.
• Neil Patrick Harris. Smart guy, great entertainer, provocateur. Yet NPH broke my heart a little after he claimed through hard-charging publicists that I had taken his words out of context in a story I’d written about CBS’ How I Met Your Mother and his disdain for stunt casting. (This was after the show began recruiting string of celeb guest stars including Britney, by far the most high-profile). He talked candidly on the L.A.-based set on the show and, when asked which actress might turn out to be  “Mystery Woman” — then a plot point on the show in the spring of 2008 — Neil responded,  “No telling, but based on the stunt casting we’ve done in the past I’m guessing Tara Reid.” Oh, burn! The story hit the wire, and the next morning, I received a flurry of furious emails and phone calls from CBS and Neil’s representation, accusing me of pulling a “bait and switch” and seeking out only Britney scoop (rather than writing an innocuous story about how great the show was–and STILL is, by the way). That was not the case but they hit back via Entertainment Weekly’s web site, which ran a statement from Neil saying I’d taken some quotes of his and speculated on their intent. My story spread like wildfire, hitting all the entertainment news shows — proof that I had done something right, I think — but it took me a while to get over a simple fact: Doogie had done me wrong!!! Neil Patrick Harris, who EVERYONE LOVES! (Except my mother). He did take some responsibility in his statement, however, conceding: “My job description is to act, and I should really do just that.” But he clearly enjoys stirring up controversy — celebs would be far more interesting were they to follow his lead — and when a former AP colleague encountered Neil on the red carpet, he made a snarky comment to the effect of: “You’re the AP? Oh, I don’t talk to you!” OH, BURN. (Gratuitous Seinfeld reference: Neil is my Newman).

So, let’s hear it! Has anyone in the celeb-sphere acted in a way that took you by surprise? Someone out there must have some juicy stories. Share your comments below.