Posts Tagged ‘gordon ramsay’

I was asked to comment on the fallout from Tiger Woods’s bad week in the press by the Guardian last week – the resulting article appears in today’s Media section and online under the headline In Need of a Tigerish Attorney. I took a critical look at the way he and his lawyer, Mark NeJame, are handling the story. Here’s an excerpt:

“Tiger Woods’s nasty bump on the head after his car’s tussle with a fire hydrant has rendered the golfer mostly speechless. It’s all very well that he’s admitted “transgressions” and muttered an apology, but at the heart of the press release he put out is a cry for silence and privacy. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Orlando attorney Mark NeJame, who has made his name defending drug offenders and people accused of murder, is the man behind this strategy. The ‘Johnnie Cochran of Central Florida’ has thrown his weight behind the Tiger Woods brand at the formerly squeaky-clean golfer’s darkest hour.

“Attorneys are the new breed of tough image protector – PR spin technicians are losing out to hard-nosed lawyers. But will NeJame’s strategy help his client to regain his flawless veneer of celebrity? Woods’s ignominy is fast becoming one of 2009’s top trending topics and has exposed the media-shy golfer to the dark side of ‘improperganda’.”

To read the full article, click here.

I was also asked for my opinion on the Tiger Woods affair and whether or not he can rebuild his brand’s reputation by Channel 4 News – to read the article, click here.

It seems, of late, that sleaze is a gift worth giving and that it’s for life, not just for Christmas or for politicians. The latest example – the News of the World phone tapping scandal – is, in Variety’s slanguage, a “dramedy”. It has the potential for seriously succulent consequences, which might be deeply costly for News International. The potential scale of the scandal is enormous.

Most agents and celebrities will be trying to find out if Nick Davies’ research is robust, wondering if they are one of the thousand celebrities whose phones were hacked. If nothing else, the alleged espionage will result in a welter of wealthier celebrities – all thanks to Davies’s diligence.

These are dark times for executives in the Wapping gulag. The sound of gnawing of fingernails will do nothing to deaden the relentless hum of prurient, smug outrage from the celebrity commentariat. For some battle-scarred PR flaks it will come as no surprise that the tabloids have deployed the dark arts of espionage to root out succulent showbiz sweetmeats.

But, from my standpoint, I am expecting the hacking scandal to empower prominent celebrities to wreak legal havoc in a bout of retrospective revenge. Wasn’t it Edward Gibbon who said: “Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive”? Celebrities will certainly be riffing on the first part of that quote in the coming months – the genie is about to be escape the bottleneck of secrecy and those affected will almost certainly start suing News International.

I guess that the News of the World will struggle to contain the details of the Taylor settlement, the details of which they have, to date, been able to withhold from the public domain. Once out, however, the paper will be forced to pay out and the ensuing costs will cripple the title. I expect a snowstorm of writs and a couple of spectacular court cases – all of which will make the News of the World look very feeble. Many celebrities will want to follow the Taylor example and will be eager and greedy to extract their own a six figure sums – I know that various high profile legal figures have already attempted to discover who the targets were.

It’s a fact that many misguided public figures feel that their treatment by the likes of News Of the World, who leverage mundane and routine facts and turn them into highly pejorative and prejudicial reports, is entirely unjustified. To achieve monetary reparation for what they see as unfair treatment will certainly be a revenge of sorts. And the paper has played into their hands.

But can you image the chaos the likes of Max Mosley, David Beckham, Gordon Ramsey or even Max Clifford, aggrieved and determined to get some reparation, might create if they can prove that the News of the World has gained access to their phone messages? Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but I’m certain it’ll be heating it up in the microwave of public attention soon enough.

The wrath of a celebrity is impossible to underestimate. There is an apocryphal tale about a celebrity crimper, apoplectic that he had been turned over by the News of the World. To ease the pain he created an effigy of Andy Coulson out of a teddy bear, which he threw it into the bathtub, doused it with lighter fluid, and set it on fire in a fit of voodoo celebrity therapy. Now it is possible that he will be calling Messrs Schillings instead to achieve a more satisfactory – and conventional – form of retribution; a financial sting.

The likely consequence of this potentially seismic activity is that the world of celebrity will have the upper hand in tabloid land in the future. Journalistic research will have to rebooted and the honourable profession will need their own PR to rebuild a tarnished reputation. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Gordon Ramsay’s given up his flak-managing flack Gary Farrow as part of a series of moves that see him scaling down his spending and financially restructuring his massive empire under the management of his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson.

This may come as something of a blow for Farrow in these recessionary times; his skill with crisis management has seen Ramsay through some hard times, not least the revelation of an affair with Sarah Symonds last year, but it’s the sort of thing that should come as no surprise to a seasoned publicist.

It’s the sort of move that has happened time and again, as I have described in The Fame Formula. An early example is the relationship between Harry Reichenbach and Rudolph Valentino. Reichenbach discovered Valentino, pushed him on movie executives and encouraged them to see beyond the cauliflower ear to the essential star within. Valentino, with Reichenbach’s help early on, went on to become one of the great screen presences of all time.

Eventually, a time came when Valentino began to resent that he was spending money on publicity when he – and particularly his wife – thought that his image could be managed in house. Valentino’s wife took on the role of managing the star’s career. She vetoed all the publicity work that Reichenbach, then working for Paramount, offered her and struck out alone, even though she did not know how to go about managing a star.

The audience for Monsieur Beaucaire, the first film for which Mrs Valentino handled all publicity, was 80 per cent men when previous Valentino film audiences had been comprised almost solely of lustful women. This picture proved a failure, as did the follow-up, Sainted Devils.

‘In 1923, a thousand women swarmed around the Ritz-Carlton when I walked out of it with Rudolph Valentino,’ wrote Reichenbach. ‘But ten days before he died – he was eight years older then and already wore a wig – we went to see George White’s Scandals and nobody knew he was in the theatre. In his case, his wife was an anti-alchemist changing gold to dross. She handled the selection of his stories, dominated him and the studio and inflated his ego to the breaking point.’

There’s a definite risk that Ramsay, out of reach of the man who has guided his personal life through the press and who kept at bay the potential full impact of the Sarah Symonds story, will run into trouble again. His father-in-law has kept on Sauce PR, the firm that oversees event management, brand work and building the reputation of Gordon Ramsay Holdings, but seems to have forgotten that the man is the brand and the brand the man, something that Gary Farrow knows only too well. Without Farrow’s ministering influence, the rumours that surround Ramsay might well have sunk him years ago.

If Gordon Ramsay, in the face of mounting business problems and a recession, strays again, it won’t just be a personal crisis. The whole business is tied up in his image, and if the public’s perception of that changes, as it did for Valentino, then all is easily lost. Dispensing with Farrow’s services, which have kept Gordon Ramsay’s image magnificently afloat in the face of many difficulties, could well be a saving that will end up costing Ramsay and his company much more than mere money.

There’s a new player in town attempting to break in to what Toby Young calls the celebritariat, the fame class. She is Sarah Symonds and she has had her moments in the spotlight before – an affair with Jeffrey Archer and an appearance on Oprah plugging her book Having An Affair? A Handbook For The Other Woman.

In the book, she discussed “a friend” who was having an affair with a foul-mouthed celebrity chef. Now, she has revealed that the “friend” was in fact herself and that she had been having a long-term, on and off affair with Gordon Ramsay. The ingredients of a story that should run and run, you might think? I’m not so sure.

The scenario of the kiss-and-tell hooker is a well-rutted field – remember David Mellor’s downfall at the hands of Antonia de Sancha and Rebecca Loos’ attempt to sell herself as the mistress of David Beckham? Both women were accepted into the media maelstrom of the celebritariat without a second thought. Not so with Sarah Symonds.

Her stab at fame is essentially a DIY job; she tried to find representation with Max Clifford but he passed up on the opportunity. There is, it seems, little appetite for a DIY Rebecca Loos at the moment, no secure place in the pantheon for kiss-and-tell mistresses.

What it boils down to is that, in these recessionary times, there seem to be a lot less blank chequebooks floating around just waiting for mouths to open. Added to that, we are currently seeing the public direct their ire at people who disrupt the status quo, as has happened with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s lewd phone calls to Andrew Sachs.

I would suggest that the public response is likely to be less than rapturous towards Symonds. Certainly, since the story broke in the News of the World yesterday, there has been a welter of press pointing out the stoical response of Gordon Ramsay and his family. It was a classic display of marital strength from the chef and his family; they went shopping and posed, smiling, for the cameras One of their spokespeople was quoted as saying: “There is no comment to make at all. They had gone to Harrods for some Christmas shopping and I think to get some things for lunch. Everything is fine. Life is good and business is good.”

I would suggest that Symonds is going to have to work extremely hard to make her break into the celebrity classes. The fourth estate is likely to be concentrating its resources on bigger game for a while and the public clearly want celebrities who conform to the illusion of stability in these uncertain times. At this juncture, the woman who writes handbooks on how best to keep a married man and outs beloved celebrities as cheaters is much more likely to fall foul of the British public than the man who allegedly cheated, especially if his family stands with him.

Whether or not Ramsay and Symonds had an affair is beside the point; if she is going to achieve what she wants, then there is no doubt that Sarah Symonds has an extremely steep hill to climb.