Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original. It's the fourth of
July in Hailey, Idaho, and the town's residents are lining
the streets, although admittedly the streets aren't that big, so
it doesn't take many people to accomplish that. Haley is
(00:24):
a small town. It's got a population of about five thousand,
and on this sunny Independence Day in the residents are
probably getting more commotion, more action than they've seen all year.
Every year. We had a nice Fourth of July parade.
Wayne A. Dare is among those watching from the sidelines.
(00:47):
Wayne is the news editor of the Wood River Journal,
one of the papers of record in this part of Idaho,
And while he's standing there taking in the site, he
sees something in the parade that's never quite left his mind.
(01:07):
It's Bruce Willis Diehard, Bruce Willis moonlighting, Bruce Willis Planet Hollywood.
Bruce Willis a guy who makes twenty million dollars a movie.
He was in the parade Roddy, this big, beautiful probably
of a hundred thousand dollar horse. You know, he kind
(01:29):
of joyed the parade, riding right down the middle of
main Street, and literally the middle of main street. Bruce
Willis is not only in the parade. He's leading the
parade dressed as a cowboy. It's not like Bruce Willis
was a Western star though, not like Clint Eastwood or
John Wayne A tough guy, sure, but Bruce Willis grew
(01:52):
up in New Jersey. I can't remember if you had
a cowboy hat on, but it seemed like he was,
you know, kind of Western e He had cowboy boots
at the best I remember, like a grand marshal. Willis
waves to the crowd, turning his attention from one side
of the street to the other, and the people are
eating it up. He was having a hell of a
(02:13):
good time. You could tell from his body language and
from his smile, and you know, he was waving to
the crowd like a homecoming queen. And uh, our photographer
got a really nice image of then we put it
on the front page. But Wayne isn't that impressed, not
by Willis anyway. I mean, I enjoy looking at the
horse board and I looked at Bruce Willis. It was
(02:35):
just such a beautiful creature. Now there's probably a level
of celebrity where someone feels diminished leading a small town
parade A kind of has it come to this melancholy,
but that's not what's happening here. Willis could not be happier.
The smile, the trademark smirk that's familiar to hundreds of
(02:57):
millions of people, is genuine. He's totally in his element,
totally confident in his status as one of the biggest
box office attractions in the world. One hit like Pulp
Fiction follows another like die Hard with a Vengeance, which
is in theaters at that very moment. There's almost a
(03:19):
kind of irony in someone as famous as Willis ambling
along on horseback in Idaho. Would Sylvester Stallone have done this?
Would Harrison Ford? Would Meryl Straight be seen riding at
Clydesdale in a town with just a handful of traffic lights.
Probably not. But Bruce Willis isn't here to preserve the
(03:40):
mirage of the Hollywood actor, which is in these pre
Instagram days, something that still feels larger than life. At
age forty, He's not worried about denting his reputation in
the movie business, which has never been stronger. He's John McClain,
one of the most iconic action here of the late
(04:00):
twenty century. He's married to Demi Moore, making him one
half of the classic nineties power couple troupe. There's not
a street in America Willis could walk down or gallop
down without being recognized. But here in Haley, Willis believes
he's found the one place in the world he can
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go to be well himself, and Haley has welcomed him
with open arms. But when Wayne A. Dair published that
photograph of Willis on the horse on the front page
of the Wood River Journal, maybe that's when both Willis
and Haley realized things weren't going to be easy. We
(04:45):
got a call that David was published from one of
his angry attorneys saying we had no right to publish
his image because he based his living based on selling
that image. And day gorham Field is that called on
paper day I was not there in the morning. Then,
paraphrasing the conversation, said, you know, when somebody rides down
(05:09):
the middle of Main Street on our horse in the
fourth a job parade, we can take their picture. We
damn what I want to And that's the last we
heard her. Yeah, not exactly. For Bruce Willis, Haley was
the thing he had been searching for since he became
a household name, a place to escape, a place he
(05:33):
could mold and shape to fit his needs, to make
it not just a small idahotel, but a place worthy
of being the home of a global movie star. He
found it in tiny Haley, Idaho, population five thousand, well
five thousand and one. For I Heart Radio, I'm Anishwarts.
(06:01):
Welcome to Haleywood, an I Heart original podcast. On my podcast,
Noble Blood, I tell the true stories of historical royals.
This series is a little different, a few centuries and
an ocean apart. It's a story of Hollywood royalty, about
(06:22):
a man who, for the better part of two decades,
had millions of people lining up for his movies, making
him one of the highest paid actors in the world,
and about someone who was a brand, the everyman action
star who could seamlessly switch from firing machine guns to
intimate character dramas, a man who got so famous he
(06:45):
ran out of places to just be Bruce until he
came to Haley. What happened next is something the people
of Haley have never been eager to talk about until now.
It's a strange story about Hollywood and identity, the need
(07:06):
for privacy, and the trappings of ego and much much
more episode one his own Private Idaho. Of all the
places near Sun Valley, Idaho, Haley is the most serene.
(07:27):
Cars don't speed, people don't walk too briskly. Depending on
where you are, the only noise you hear would be
the gentle current of the Big Wood River. Some places
can seem idyllic, but only in your imagination, only when
the mood is just right. Haley is not like that.
It's the real thing. The town was founded in the
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late eighteen hundreds by John Haley, a gold prospector who
thought that the area would soon be a hub of
mining and transportation. And that's what happened. For a while,
Hailey was full of blue collar workers who got their
hands dirty and then closed the local bars. Businesses catered
(08:11):
to the miners. Then the mining gave way, and only
families remained. By the early nineties nine nineties, it was
the kind of town where when you turn onto Main
Street you see mountains where you'd half expect to see
Bob Ross putting the finishing touches on the scene, where
one of the landmarks is a museum holding one of
(08:32):
the world's largest collections of political campaign buttons, where most
of the residential streets are lined with trees, and homes
are set twenty five ft from the street to keep
their occupants safe. Where people at the diner know you,
and you know them, and probably their siblings and parents
and kids too. When you hear the phrase small town values,
(08:56):
someone is thinking of a place like Haley. It's May
Street was hallmark movie quaint, with a surprising amount of
traffic thanks to the Sun Valley Ski Resort, a kind
of alternative to Aspen about fifteen miles away. A lot
of people would go through Haley, but not many stopped.
If they did, they'd see a lot of historic buildings
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made of brick, some still with tin ceilings. An old bar,
still home to career drinkers, stood tall nearby. A rundown
movie theater opened since the nineteen thirties, but in dire
need of renovation. A community planner once described Haley as
being just one breaststroke away from being vibrant, like a
(09:42):
painting that needs just one more color to come to life,
or maybe someone with a vision. That's what made such
an interesting year. That was when a number of proper
these around town that had been sitting dormant or ignored
(10:03):
for years began to rumble with activity. Someone was buying
them That old miner's bar, the Mint was picked up,
so was the building next to it, which used to
house Mama Riley's Pizza. So was the Rundown Movie Theater.
Other commercial buildings followed, some promising but empty lots too.
(10:27):
It was clearly a concerted effort to acquire choice pieces
of Haley, but for what purpose no one knew. A
cursory search revealed that the company behind the purchases had
a strange name. Here's Wayne A. Dare. We kept hearing
that a corporation named x may I x in a
(10:49):
Y was making offers to to buy some properties right
on Main Street, and we couldn't find out who was
the force behind XNY the xnay Investment Trust. That's the
pig Latin version of Nicks, which means to put a
stop to something. It was kind of strange. Everyone in
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Haley was used to knowing everyone else's business. The fact
that xnay was a mystery was well a mystery. Rumor
had it that Kmart was after some of the lots.
A month went by and then two Haley wondered if
they would soon be overrun by national chain stores. Goodbye
(11:32):
main Street. What Haley needed was someone who could sniff
out the truth, someone who could peel back the layers
of bureaucratic red tape, someone who could figure out who
was behind XNA. This was a job for Wayne's top gun, C. J.
Carra Margin, reporter for the Wood River Journal, and he
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was just a bulldog at at going after the stories
and uh he did some really outstanding work for a
you know, small town newspaper. Carra Margin worked the phones
and came to an unlikely suspect, a guy named Joe McAllister,
a relatively recent transplant to the area. McAllister was behind
(12:20):
x Nay for what purpose, care Margin wasn't quite sure,
but the acquisitions were definitely newsworthy. Someone was looking to
invest in Haley in a big way. The denizens of
Haley were talking. It was the kind of diner and
coffee shop talk that the town hadn't enjoyed since Bruce
(12:43):
Willis bought a home there a few years prior. Willis's
private home was in the housing subdivision known as the
Flying Heart Ranch. Flying Heart Ranch was a place between
two mountains. A river literally ran through it. With his
wife Demi Moore and a growing family. Willis had escaped
(13:06):
to Haley to avoid the spotlight cast on the mega
famous Willis was a huge star thanks to a hit
detective show, Moonlighting and then the die Hard films. So
a quiet house in the mountains to get away from
it all. Who doesn't want that? He was just outside
of town. You know, I'm not quite sure i'd called
(13:27):
her mansion, but he probably was was close to one.
And I've never been one whose star struck. I wouldn't
walk across the street commutic as movie star. But I
liked his uh TV series bood Lighting. I love die
Hard and some of these other movies at all. Bruce
Willis this year, that's kind of fun. He wasn't in
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the news much for a couple of years. He just
was living there now. Reporter c J. Carra Margin was
on the trail of Haley's next big story, the XNA
property grab, but Joe McAllister was elusive. He wouldn't say
much of anything. Then Cara Margin noticed something something big.
(14:13):
C J. Uh, you got some paperwork on Xnay and
noticed that there was a mailing address attached to the company,
and he did a little uh research and realized that
the the address for the company was the same post
office box that the Willis's head. So you know, put
(14:35):
two and two together and you got a pretty solid
for there. Bruce Willis was the one on the spending spree.
This was unusual. Sun Valley definitely attracted celebrities, some of
whom bought seasonal or permanent homes in the area. Arnold
Schwarzenegger had a place nearby, so did Clint Eastwood. But
(14:57):
that's all they did. They bought homes, old bars, not
empty lots, not vacant drug stores. So what exactly was
Willis doing? Carr Margin tried to dig deeper, but he
couldn't get anywhere, couldn't breach the wall of silence surrounding
Haley's most famous resident. Then suddenly he didn't have to.
(15:22):
Dan gorm got a call. He was the papers editor
and publisher. Carr Margin's phone rang two. It was Bruce Willis,
But instead of explaining what he was doing, he tried
to get them to lay off the story, to brush
aside the fact that Bruce Willis was becoming Haley's premier
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real estate investor. The Wood River Journal wasn't going to
do that. Bruce Willis, once a quiet resident of Haley,
was now suddenly in probably a developer. Not only that
he had an entire company devoted to his business interests
(16:07):
in Haley, a company that had seemingly materialized out of nowhere,
and he had a growing staff attending to all of it.
It had been happening right under Haley's collective knows Willis
did let a few things slip out. He told Gorham
he didn't want to live his life in the public eye,
(16:28):
that he had moved to Haley to avoid exactly that.
Willis also told Gorham that while he understood the interest,
he didn't want to be price gouged by sellers who
had built the movie Star. However, you know, he was
buying properties right on Main Street, and he was going
to have to go to the Planning and Zoning Commission
and the city Council for you know, for any kind
(16:51):
of approval. So, uh we failed. It was our duty,
our journalistic responsibility to let our readers know exactly who
was buying property on Main Street. And uh, I think
he was less than happy with us over that. Willis
(17:14):
and the Wood River Journal would soon have a dust
up that made the carra Margin incident seem quaint in comparison.
It makes you wonder what exactly happened to Bruce Willis
that made him so reluctant to deal with the press,
and why was he so insistent on Hailey's reporters staying
out of his business. There's an answer, maybe not the answer,
(17:38):
but an answer nonetheless, and it involves Tom Hanks being
just a little bit of a jerk. A couple of
(17:59):
years before Willis began what would grow into a love
affair with Haley, he had already decided he wasn't going
to be overly cooperative with the press. Stardom had put
him in the sights of the tabloids. Reporters seemed to
want to know who he was sleeping with, not who
he'd be working with. His transition from being anonymous to
(18:21):
famous had happened virtually overnight. Once Moonlighting premiered in March
nineteen five. The show was a hit, but Bruce seemed
completely unprepared for the scrutiny that accompanied being a successful actor.
The media had made a big deal of his relationship
with Sybil Shephard, his Moonlighting co star. Moonlighting Wars Jealous
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set turns into battleground. That kind of thing. The rumors
sold papers and magazines. Willis estimated he was on a
tabloid cover at least once a week. People enjoyed reading
about Bruce Wood Willis being a jerk, even if virtually
all of it was embellished or made up. Bruce Willis's
(19:08):
shocking arrest, the untold story Bruce Willis and X rated
actress Bruce Willis and Miami Weis Galley in new romance
Pals warn He'll break your heart. Rather than cope with
the press, it became easier to ignore it. He felt
the media sometimes made actors a target, that there was
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a certain time when it became someone's turn to be
cut down a peg. For Willis, it came with Hudson Hawk,
a crime caper musical he released. In That's Right, a
musical starring Bruce Willis, Willis played a cat burglar who
enjoyed a little singing during his art heists. Willis helped
(19:52):
conceive of the story and even helped write the theme song.
His producer was Joel Silver, who had made Willis a
box office star with the die Hard Films, and Willis
loved shooting the movie mostly because while on location in Hungary,
no one really knew who he was. But the director,
Michael Lehman, complained that his ideas would be challenged or
(20:15):
vetoed by Willis, who wielded so much influence in Hollywood
that even a director would have to defer to him.
At one point, Willis insisted his character Hudson Hawk needed
a pet monkey named Little Eddie. No one else really
wanted the movie to have a monkey, but Willis wouldn't
let it go, so producers decided that Willis's character Hudson
(20:38):
had a monkey past tense. The monkey was never shown
on camera because it turns out Little Eddie had been
murdered while Hudson was in prison, So yeah, you couldn't
maybe see where this might be going. One source on
set said that Willis thought he was making a hip
(20:58):
MTV style movie, but it was really more of an
homage to the fast talking caper comedies of the nineteen forties.
He had trouble describing it in interviews. It was, he said,
a film that needed to be experienced more than explained. Yo,
did I miss anything? Gates dries a blackmail me. You
(21:21):
asked me, did I miss anything Gates. Gates killed you say,
did I miss anything? I bet you? Going up to
Mrs Lincoln at the Fourth Theater said how is the show?
Did I miss anything? No one felt like they missed
anything With Hudson Hawk, critics were unkind It flopped at
the box office, making just seventeen million dollars against a
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fifty million dollar budget. Today it has a score of
just thirty three on Rotten Tomatoes. To Willis, it seemed
like there had been a concerted effort by the media
to curb his start um. It would happen with Kevin
Costner and water World and to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last
(22:05):
Action Hero. The press seemed to relish those moments, and
Willis resented them for it. They'd cut him before too,
during the fallout from The Bonfire of the Vanities. The
film released in starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Willis,
all three of them actors at the top of their games.
(22:28):
Seemed like a recipe for a hit. Bonfire was an
adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel about greed and corruption among
the powerful and protected class in New York's high society.
Willis played Peter Fallow, a predatory tabloid reporter, a not
very subtle jab at his adversaries in the press. When
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Willis was asked why he took the part, he'd shoot back,
why do you think, Oh, excuse me, I have introduced myself,
have I? My name is Peter Fallow. I'm a writer.
But you know that already. Unless you haven't read a
newspaper or seen a television in the last few months,
(23:12):
you know exactly who I had. But despite how well
regarded the novel was, some people considered it too complex
to be adapted. They warned it might even be unfilmable,
and it looks like they were right. The film was
a disappointment, blown out of the water during the holiday
season by Home Alone. To be fair, every movie was
(23:34):
blown out by Home Alone, but still it was a
black mark for all involved, and Willis was no exception.
But he had reason to regret the film beyond its
box office. The movie's director, Brian de Palmer, had allowed
a journalist named Julie Salomon, unprecedented access to observe the
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production from casting to release. It was an opportunity Nitty
rarely afforded to the media, because well filmmaking can be messy.
Salmon got to see it all and report on it all,
all the creative tension, all the tumultuous exchanges. Salomon even
(24:17):
captured a moment between Willis and Hanks, who were both
watching playback of a scene on a monitor. Hanks, with
some apparent glee in his voice, made a show of
pointing out when Willis smirked in the scene. It was
the same smirk that had made him such a hit
in Moonlighting and die Hard and in other films. Hanks
(24:38):
playfully pointed it out there. It is that big sing Gren,
he said. It was not very Tom Hanks thing to say.
A brooding Willis said nothing. Smirk was a Willis trademark.
It was sacra sanct Tom Hanks was reducing it to
a crutch. Salomon's book was released in nine It was
(25:01):
titled The Devil's Candy, A great book. The Bonfire the
Vanities had become a bad movie, and thanks to Salomon,
a bad movie had inspired a pretty good book. It
was well received by most everyone except Willis. He hated
the fact Salmon had observed him, had criticized him. He
(25:23):
hadn't even granted her an interview, and he still got
bad press. If he was pressed shy before Salomon may
have made him press loathing, Hollywood loathing. Even when he
consented to an interview, he usually regretted it, and so
did the journalist. A thousand its views, and I would say,
(25:45):
there's a handful four or five that were just a
complete nightmare. Bruce was one of those nightmares. That's Martha Frankel.
Martha writes books now, but in the nine nineties she
was focused on entertainment journalism and she was good at it.
She wasn't fawning, she wasn't insulting either. She was just
doing her job, and she laid out what she perceived
(26:08):
as a mutually beneficial transaction. I used to say this
one when I would sit down with somebody, I'd say, listen,
here's how it works. I'm getting paid five grand. You're
getting paid five million. My job to make you seem
even cooler than you are. Some more people go and
you can make six million next time. So let's just
have a conversation. This is what I would say. And
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most people were like, that sounds great. Bruce Willis did
not think it sounded great. When Movieline Magazine sent Frankel
to interview Willis in Europe. In it was the beginning
of one of the most torturous experiences of Frankel's professional career.
And I went to England to do a story about him,
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and like, I thought we were going to be like,
you know, it was gonna be cool. We had this history,
and you know, we knew a lot of people in
common and a lot of my friends of Kiss directors
and actors. And he wanted no part of that. He
didn't want to talk about it. He wanted no part
of it. I was in a spa in Windsor waiting
for him, supposed to be there one night. I was
(27:12):
there for nine Frankel stood vigil as Willis seemed to
weigh whether or not he really wanted to be interviewed.
I had the two bitchest editors in magazine history, so
they would spend fortune sending you around the world in
the hope that you hated your subject. So I mean
I kept calling them every day and saying, I don't
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think this interview is happening. I think I should come home,
and they were like, nope, you're staying because even if
you never get to interview, and that will be the
story Martha persisted, tried different tactics to appeal to Bruce.
It was raining, pouring, and there was no good food
to eat, and I was stuck in the spa. I
mean all I did was swim, so and every day
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I would write to him and say, let's do it today,
Let's do it today. And I had some funny ideas.
I thought, you know, he has a big entourage. He
always had a very big entourage. And I was there
all alone. So I said, why don't we just sit
down me, you and your people will play poker for
an hour, the interview will be over. It'll be a
great interview. You know, I'll make you sound even funnier
than you are. He said, no, we have a lot
(28:15):
of people in common. I don't want to talk about that.
So we really were at odds. Finally, after well over
a week, Willis agreed to meet when I do an
interview on somebody. I watched everything, and so when I
went to meet Bruce, I had seen all the clunkers
and all the good stuff. You know, the die Hard
movies are fantastic to watch. They take you to a
(28:37):
place you've never been before. And so he wanted to
talk to him about that, and he didn't want to
talk about that. He didn't really want to talk about anything,
which is funny after you've waited nine days in a
spa in Windsor. I did the interview and he made
them shut down the restaurant in the hotel, and then
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he like, oh, it's just a dragon. He wasn't fun
and he wasn't funny, and I know he's all of
those things. You know, I had seen him in action.
I know he can be that. He was, you know,
very serious, and he just kept telling me how you know,
Hudson Hawk was a great movie and this one. I
was like, Bruce, you know I saw it. You can't
convince me of that. And it was really one of
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the first interviews that I just put it into the
story and said, I didn't like this guy. He didn't
like me. We didn't have fun. Willis was touchy and evasive.
He kept asking her to turn off the tape recorder
for him to explain what went wrong with Hudson Hawk,
as though there had been potential for anything to go
right with Hudson Hawk. Naturally, Frankel's editors at movie Line
(29:44):
loved it. They weren't unhappy that it went like that.
I mean, I was because I want to light the
people I interview, I want them to do well. I
want to root for them, and there was no way
I could root for Bruce will Say. After this, four
months and years afterward, people would approach Frankel with the
(30:04):
idea that she and Willis were rivals, enemies. They wanted
her to talk about what a jerk Bruce Willis was
poked and prodded on. She'd sometimes indulged them. He had,
after all, kept her waiting for nine days and then
stonewalled her, and there was something else that bothered her.
So I was already annoyed at him when he walked in.
(30:27):
And then he made them shut the restaurant. He made
them shut it down for two hours during dinner service
so that nobody would come over for his autograph. And
then he didn't throw three hundred bucks on the table
for the waiter, so I did. So I was already like,
this is not okay. You know, I want rich people
to be more generous than not rich people. And Bruce, okay,
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he wants the restaurant close. I get it. Then pay
the guy for the two hours that he missed. He
didn't have that attitude, So we were really at hots
But you know, it was the best think. He walked
in and out of that hotel and nobody said a
word to if nobody recognized him. So it's kind of
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important this part, because even when people weren't looking at
Bruce Willis, he could feel eyes on him. He felt
the need to get away, felt the need to keep
to himself. All of that would fuel what would happen
in Haley when journalists plowed forward. Well, that's when Haley
(31:32):
was exposed to another side of Bruce Willis, the one
where he's most definitely not smirking. When word of Willis's
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real estate acquisitions got out, a lot of Haley residents
were excited by the possibilities. There hadn't been any radical
changes to Haley in decades. Some people thought Haley's buildings
were quaint, others thought quaint was just another word for
old decrepit. Now someone with a singular vision was snapping
(32:18):
up properties and professing his love for the town. It
was like having a benefactor, or, as one columnist put it,
Haley had found a sugar daddy. A few people had
some fun with it. A local high school paper ran
a cartoon that depicted main Street as Planet Haleywood, a
nod to Willis's involvement in the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise.
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Another paper, the Idaho Mountain Express, ran in editorial that
cheekily suggested Willis should just buy the entire town as
a holiday present to himself. That got the papers publisher
an angry phone call. Willis did sometimes talk to the press,
but he usually had to be angry. First. Things came
(33:05):
to a head on that front when the Wood River
Journal ran a story that Bruce Willis didn't care for
not a bet. We did a story, and I can't
remember the exact year, but I've been there for several
years by then. We again, editor of the Wood River Journal.
The Forest Service would lease uh land to private individuals.
(33:30):
They've been doing it for decades. It was right on
a lake, I think it was red Fish, like a big,
beautiful natural lake. But somehow Willis got one of these
leases and he built a really nice home on the
right on the lake. This was another Willis property and
(33:51):
escape a little further up the road from his escape.
And we were doing a story because there was a
lot of discussion in Washington. They wanted to drastically increase
the prices that people had to pay for these leases.
Bruce Willis, I'm sure it didn't bleeve twice about a
price height, but the normal people and they were concerned
(34:12):
about it. So the Wood River Journal wrote about it.
We did an article about the about the proposal to
increase the lease rates up there, and we took a
picture of the outside of Bruce Willis's house and we
published it. We didn't identify it as Bruce Willis's place.
(34:34):
We just used it to show that these were not
all just tar paper shacks up there where. There was
some really nice, high end residences up there, of which
this one was by far the nicest. The cabin could
have been anyone's. There were a total of twenty three
cabin owners who leased property at Pettit Lake on the
(34:56):
Forest Service land, including Willis. There was nothing about his
cabin that was demonstrably Willis esque. His name wasn't on
a plaque out front or anything. But Bruce Willis stormed
into the offices of the Journal, angry his privacy had
been violated. He was enraged the fact that we didn't
(35:19):
identify it. Um didn't assuage the matter whatsoever and what
little advertising he did with us he canceled. I'm sure
he if you asked him today, he would, you know,
still have a chip on his should about it. I
know what you're thinking, What did Bruce Willis need to
advertise in the Wood River Journal. It's coming promise, but
(35:44):
for now the Wood River Journal had broken its unspoken
vow to protect its famous residence. Of course, losing any
advertising is something that you don't want to have happened.
But you have to have journalistic integrity. And if if, uh,
somebody wants to cancel their advertising because of a story
(36:05):
you did, if it's a story that was solid and
it's a story you stand by, it's sorry you feel
that way, Better luck next time. Willis also phoned reporter c. J.
Carra Margin and said something pretty strange. Willis said that
he heard the reporter had quote a vendetta against him,
(36:27):
like they were feuding families in The Godfather. But Cara
Margin argued he was just doing his job, just digging
up information that was in the public interest, information like
just what exactly Bruce Willis was planning for Haley. No
one had a vendetta against Willis. He was investing in
(36:47):
real estate and leasing federal land. Bruce Willis seemed to
take reporting on his public activities very, very personally and
with a dramatic flare. The tension became almost operatic, like
Willis wasn't being reported on for business ventures so much
as being besieged by goons out of die Hard. But
(37:11):
Haley residents were mostly on Willis's side. He wasn't just
snapping up properties. He was investing in the community too.
Willis and more made donations to a local group advocating
for victims of domestic violence. He donated to the local
library and the Little League. One winter, when Haley seemed
as though it might be overrun by snow, he donated
(37:33):
snowblowers to the town. There was a real philanthropy in
what Willis was doing. He was community minded in many ways.
He was very generous in many ways, and uh I
admired him for that. Haley was his hometown, now his escape.
He could spend up to six months out of the
(37:54):
year or more recuperating from the demands of stardom. No
one in hay Haley asked Bruce Willis for his autograph.
Sometimes city officials would float his name in political circles. Willis,
they said, should consider running for mayor. Hey, there was precedent.
Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel by the Sea in
California in the nineteen eighties. But Willis wasn't about to
(38:19):
run for office. What he wanted was to build up
Haley more discreetly, and that's what Wayne A. Dare C J.
Carre Margin and the town of Haley would soon realize.
For Willis, there seemed to be appeal in treating Haley
like a big, fresh, unpainted canvas. He was here for
that final brush stroke. He had come to get away
(38:41):
from it all, But in doing so, he realized he
didn't necessarily want to get away from it all, just
the parts he disliked, the unwanted attention, the insecure Hollywood types.
At some point Willis might have realized he could start
painting that canvas in his own image. The Willis effect
(39:02):
was coming like a tidal wave, and with it would
come some good things like prosperity and culture and movie stars.
But there was always a sense that what Bruce Willis giveth,
Bruce Willis could also taketh away. In Willis opened an
office and retail complex that he dubbed the E. G.
(39:25):
Willis Building after his grandfather Willis had bought the building,
renovated it, and then least out space to a jeweler
of furniture store and others. It was a pretty standard
developer move, nothing too flashy. Nonetheless, Entertainment Tonight came out
to cover the grand opening. One of the existing occupants
(39:47):
of the E. G. Willis Building was the gang at
the Wood River Journal. He bought the building that we
were in. We were in the building before he owned it.
He purchased it, and you weren't sure what was gonna happen.
Dad gorm wrote an editorial about the odd situation. I
(40:07):
remember I put a headline on the editorial it's hit
Bruce Willis stars as quote the landlord, and uh, we
were trying to make a little bit light of the situation.
When the lease for the Journal expired, Willis's company didn't
renew it, Wayne and Dair C. J. Carr Margin and
(40:29):
the rest of the crew would have to move. We
ultimately had to move, But I don't think it was
I don't think he was any animosity towards us that
to end our lease. It worked out fine because we
got a better office in a bigger office just half
a block away. So all's well, that end well. It
(40:50):
was clear Willis wasn't overjoyed with the Journal, but who
could complain When he did make a move, Like with
the E. G. Willis Building, he put dozens of trades
people to work for years at a time, carpenters, bricklayers.
Haley was beginning to radiate with the glow of a
movie stars affection. It was Hudson Hawk all over again,
(41:13):
where Willis could have almost complete control. But thanks to
his infamous press silence, no one knew what else Bruce
Willis was planning for Haley, or that it would soon
grow to include secret rooms, a clandestine security force, and
car chases. Not movie car chases, but the real thing.
(41:38):
This season on Haleywood, Bruce kind of thought that he
would have the same effect as he would in New Jersey,
and of course that wasn't true at all. It was
just a whole different world, cowboy country. You know, you're
getting out in the real West. He was flying a
G two arm in arm with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was
(42:00):
also flying a G two, and he would fly in
at two o'clock in the morning, and I mean that
woke you up. And there was this Victorian house Bruce
Willis had bought for Tony Moore at that point to
house or doll collection of course, Bruce and get up.
There was a while it's harmonic and try to ruin
it all. I'm just kidding, but I'm not a big
(42:20):
lover of that kind of musy. Then something went sour
and it was like, boy, biggo sour with Willis, You're
likely to lose. He looked roughed up Fara and he
said they smashed my equipment. Roughed me up, said they
told me to get the hell out of town. Mr
Willis doesn't like your newspaper type people are out here.
(42:42):
You don't want to come into Mr Willis's town. Haleywood
is hosted by Danish Woods. This show is written by
Jake Ross, editing, sound design and mixing by me Josh Fisher,
(43:04):
Additional editing by Mary Doo, Original music by Natasha Jacobs,
mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Jake Rosson,
Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quentinia
Our Senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer
is Jason English. Special thanks to the people of Hailey,
(43:27):
Idaho and all those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is
a production of I Heart Radio Until Next Time.