Stars in his eyes

NIKKI MACDONALD

It's not often you get to say 'I've just spent the night with Madonna', a giddy-grinned Dan Wootton tells British showbiz fans. It's 4am in New York but is he going to let a little thing like sleep prevent him promoting the interview of a lifetime on his weekly Friday Five television slot? Fat chance.

At 9.30pm the 29-year-old from Avalon was waiting in the lounge cum makeshift television studio of the penthouse suite of New York's posh Carlyle Hotel. Madonna was glamming up in the bathroom. At 11pm the pair had a 30-minute knee-to-knee. Madonna wanted to promote her new album, MDNA. Wootton wanted to talk Adele and One Direction, and get that saleable big reveal without provoking a diva strop or walkout.

Yikes - scary. But just being there was already a remarkable coup. Ten months ago this scenario would have seemed unthinkable, even to a relentlessly upbeat self-promoter like Wootton. Last July 7, News International announced it would close disgraced tabloid News of the World - where Wootton worked for four years as television reporter then showbiz editor - in an attempt to silence the deepening scandal of its journalists using phone hacking, police bribery and other nefarious means to get stories. In the course of a week, Wootton went from star scribe to the stars to jobless hack sidestepping smear by association.

"I would never be one of these people who just accepted I'll never work in the media again. That's not how I've achieved what I have achieved. But I thought it was going to be very difficult. I had had a very quick rise at the NOTW . . . I'd put everything into getting there."

Wootton focused on distancing himself from the under-fire pre-2007 NOTW regime, giving global media interviews defending the paper's current staff and his own conduct. He took August off to regroup, then set about rebuilding career and reputation. The first lifeline came from BBC radio documentaries. He got a gig for ITV breakfast show Lorraine, became Now magazine's editor-at-large and, in November, began writing a column and interviewing celebs for the Daily Mail.

And now Madonna's only British television interview. One of the gems Wootton took from that half hour was Madonna's revelation that she wouldn't fret if daughter Lourdes chose to follow in her pop-superstar footsteps. "To me that's such a bizarre thing, seeing the pressures of the industry, how, over 50 per cent of the time, fame is fleeting and incredibly damaging. Very few people have long and successful careers like Madonna. I love pop culture and I love celebrity but the one thing I have learnt, close up, is that fame is definitely not something that is particularly desirable."

It's one of many apparent contradictions Wootton serves up in the course of our interview - he acknowledges celebrity's sting, yet defends the industry providing much of its poison. But he works in a world of paradoxes, in which Dannii Minogue's reasons for splitting with boyfriend Kris Smith are deemed printworthy, while her affair with fellow X Factor judge Simon Cowell is kept secret; in which Wootton spends four years writing about other people's love lives, but won't discuss his own (but accepts if someone reported it that would be fair game); in which it's considered normal behaviour for a celebrity to have a miscarriage on a Friday and call up Wootton to ensure it makes Sunday's paper.

Google Dan Wootton and you'll get a fair grip of the polarising work of the showbiz journalist: "Rapper admits posing with his todger out"; Madonna on Brit culture and not being superwoman; "Dan Wootton is just a poisonous old queen who should sod off back to New Zealand on the next available flight."

Dining with Dame Judi Dench and Meryl Streep at the Baftas might be the stuff of dreams for showbiz obsessives such as Wootton - who has been reading Variety since the internet began delivering it to Lower Hutt - but it's also prime hatemail fodder. And never more so than in the wake of revelations that NOTW journalists hacked into celebrities' (and a murder victim's) phones to glean their most intimate secrets.

While he condemns the hacking, the subterfuge, the bribery (in which he took no part), Wootton makes no apology for bringing private lives into the public eye. And he has little time for whinging celebs. Especially Hugh Grant.

"I think he's a complete hypocrite really. I loathe the current breed of celebrity who a few years ago did everything possible to become famous and sold every possible part of their lives and then, at times when it suits them, decide they don't want to have any of the trappings that come with fame.

"There's a climate at the moment where people like Hugh Grant are given all of this sympathy and treated as some sort of victim. I genuinely believe if someone wants to withdraw from the public eye it's very easy to do so. Don't appear in Hollywood movies, don't go to red carpet premieres, don't eat out at The Ivy."

A Victoria University political science and media studies graduate, Wootton always figured he'd be either a political journalist or a showbiz hack. Irreconcilable extremes? Wootton reckons they're not such distant cousins. Both require journalists to inhabit the world they report on, to socialise with their subjects yet be able to navigate a straight moral path through the ethical tangle when source becomes subject and friend becomes foe. "It's always a balancing act doing my job, between making sure you've got a really great exclusive interview with loads of new lines, something that's insightful and isn't just PR- driven rubbish. You obviously have to balance that up with the fact that I've got this interview because someone has trusted me. But that doesn't mean that you compromise your journalistic integrity."

Wootton says around half his celeb scoops are written with the star's co-operation. Others come from old-fashioned industry chatter. And still others lie in a murky area in between, such as the scoop that helped cement his reputation - emerging from the loos at the 2007 NME awards with an out-of-it Pete Doherty into the path of Kate Moss, and lingering as the pair discussed their engagement. That, Wootton says, was unquestionably fair game.

But what of Simon Cowell's 2007 affair with fellow X Factor judge Dannii Minogue? When that news filtered out in April, Wootton tweeted "Was always going to emerge at some point," revealing he had known all along. Wootton is a Cowell fan, to the point he's one of two celebs (with Rihanna) Wootton would choose to be shipwrecked with. So was Cowell off limits because he's a mate, or because he allows open access to reality TV shows providing endless D-list celebrity gossip?

"It actually wasn't my choice. I believe there were various editors who made the decision not to publish that story. There was a lot exploding on the X Factor that year, Sharon Osbourne and Dannii Minogue on the panel had a huge falling out and this thing was going on with Simon Cowell. I think if that had emerged publicly it would have seriously added to that tension. Obviously, as a journalist, that's what you want to do, but likewise you don't want to ruin the most popular TV show in the country."

In a post-Big Brother world there's no shortage of gossip fodder. Each new reality show grows another crop of wannabe stars dishing dirt or fessing up to past transgressions to prolong their fame. Ironically, Wootton says it's the D-listers who are most likely to be rude and obnoxious, while the real stars are generally down-to-earth and respectful.

His worst experience was with Kim Kardashian, who huddled under a blanket and fiddled with her Blackberry.

Those are also the interviews showbiz journos pay for. At NOTW, Wootton would pay 750-1000 pounds (NZ$1500-$2000) for a scoop. Buying stories remains a regular part of his job at Now magazine.

Asked what he thinks is the value of what he does, Wootton hesitates.

"How do you mean? For me there's no business like showbiz. There, just at the moment, seems to be a very negative view of it from certain incredibly Left-wing newspapers. I just can't understand why anyone thinks there's anything wrong with people loving showbiz.

"We were fascinated with Marilyn Monroe and her personal life in the 1950s, and now we're equally fascinated by Kim Kardashian and her private life. I think what it gives people is enjoyment and it's also very big business. The fact of the matter is all the Hollywood studios and TV networks need stars because it's stars who sell movies and TV shows and albums.

"I don't question the system of how it works at all. This entire industry, from the BBC to NOTW, was set up to report on star culture. And there's a huge, huge market for it."

Wootton landed at NOTW via The Evening Post youth focus pages and a Dominion Post daily diary column, interviews with Helen Clark on a beanbag for youth television show The Mic, a producing job for Good Morning and a stint at British showbiz mag Broadcast.

Never shy of putting himself forward, he says he was headhunted by both NOTW and The Times, which wanted him to report on the business of showbusiness. His boss told him to hold out for The Times but Wootton was seduced by the glamour job.

Despite the scandal's impact, he doesn't regret taking the NOTW job. When he arrived in 2007, former royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had just been jailed for phone hacking. Then-editor Colin Myler assured Wootton the dodgy conduct was confined to one rogue reporter, and that no illegality would be tolerated.

In his evidence to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics this February, Wootton said he would be hugely disappointed if it emerged that News International executives knew the real extent of the problem. Myler later admitted he always suspected the offending went beyond one rogue reporter, and he knew, by May 2008 at the latest, that the hacking was more widespread.

Nonetheless, Wootton continues to back his former editor. "Colin is a very moral man who was just put in an impossible situation."

Wootton argues he simply can't expend any more energy on what happened at NOTW. "Since July I have absolutely 100 per cent focused on my own situation."

Nine months on, Wootton says no-one ever mentions his NOTW association. He's financially better off than at NOTW, and he can now spend weekends in his central London apartment with lilac pedigree British shorthair cat Dirk (named for his police sergeant uncle, Derek, who was killed laying road spikes in Porirua in 2008).

Now needing to build a media brand bigger than one publication, Wootton uses Twitter as "his hub" to promo his writing and provide "insightful opinion" about breaking news and minute-by-minute updates on reality TV show The Only Way is Essex. And to fuel outrage.

He took flak for last year arguing news organisations should lead with the death of Amy Winehouse rather than the massacre of 77 people in Norway, which was by then yesterday's news. "I would be very surprised if a New Zealand newspaper didn't change their front page if Dan Carter died two days after a foreign tragedy . . . Yes, newspapers have to report news that's important, but if you have something the entire country is talking about . . . and you're a tabloid newspaper, you put it on the front page."

Wootton also spurred abuse with an ugly stoush with former Spice Girl Mel B, whom he castigated for a tweet threatening to date rape her sleeping husband. In the exchange that followed, Wootton called her homophobic and controlled by her husband. In reply, she called him a "super big butt hole".

His justification for the exchange could double as a mantra for all showbiz journalism. "We're not talking about life and death here. We're not debating nuclear policy. It's debating whether Mel B is a diva."

- © Fairfax NZ News