Do You Remember: Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta-Jones Get Married and the Gossip Mags’ Fight for an Exclusive Ends Up in Court

Hello vs. OK in the battle for tabloid supremacy, featuring a £1m wedding.

Sometimes, I want to write about stuff that doesn’t fit into the usual mould of Gossip Reading Club work. The basic set-up of this dog and pony show is to use specific articles, profiles, reports, etc, as a way to jumpstart a wider conversation on celebrities, the entertainment industry, and the machinations of gossip. Not every story, however, can be covered in this way. Sometimes, you just need to dive into some classic gossip without a primary text as your foundation.

So, I’m starting up a new chapter to this publication: Do You Remember. This will be for stories that aren’t rooted in a previous profile or such, but still tackled in an analytical manner. Think of stuff like Julia Roberts’ A Low Vera t-shirt, Miley twerking on Robin Thicke at the VMAs, Gloria Swanson’s sugar coffin, the dresses that changed Oscars history, one-person awards campaigns, and whatever else I can think of. These issues will be part of the paid subscribers’ offers, but I’ll make the first couple free so you can see if it’s up your alley.

Let’s start things off with some low-stakes power couple tabloid courtroom drama.

In 1999, Catherine Zeta-Jones was a Welsh actress whose star was on the rise. Multi-award-winning and second-generation Hollywood star Michael Douglas walked up to her at a film festival in France and said, "I want to father your children." He was 25 years her senior to the day, and had a reputation as a proud playboy. The pair got engaged very quickly and their first child was born soon thereafter.

They got married in November 2000 at the Plaza Hotel in New York. To say it was a big deal would be an understatement. The BBC called it the wedding of the year, a star-studded party with a guest list that included Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Michael Caine, Sharon Stone, and Sean Connery. The entire event had an alleged budget of about $1.5 million. To help with such eye-watering expenses, Zeta-Jones and Douglas signed a deal with OK! Magazine to award them exclusive coverage of the event. The deal was worth £1 million.

I remember this being a huge deal at the time, to the point where OK! had TV ads reminding us to check out the story exclusively within the pages of their magazine. Remember, it’s 2000, Myspace isn’t a thing, Perez Hilton has not yet been spawned, and tabloids rule all. The amount of money a major star could command from a magazine could easily end up in the seven-figure range. These paydays were seen as a safe bet for increased circulation. When Victoria and David Beckham married in 1999, OK! had the exclusive story, for which they bid £1 million. This was considered obscene at the time. Hell, it's still a disgusting amount of money. But, according to a Guardian article from 2004, it was worth it. "OK!'s circulation received a massive boost from the Beckham scoop, selling 1.5m copies with the wedding issue, quadruple its normal sales figures at the time." This story was also one of many instances where OK! went to war with Hello!

Hello! was founded about five years before OK! and in the UK they were seen as mortal enemies. OK was starrier but Hello was more respectable (sorry, I have to stop using the exclamation points for my own sanity.) Hello has a lot more royal stories, although in recent years both it and OK have turned their eye towards the B-tier and lower levels of celebrity in Britain (think Love Island people, morning TV presenters, and so on.) According to that Guardian story (which covered a BBC documentary that aired that year - I haven't been able to find it myself), OK were convinced that Hello had offered the Beckhams £1m for the wedding exclusive and made the same deal. Hello hadn't offered that much money. Nobody offered that. But Hello was offered the Beckham wedding three months before OK, and they balked at the cost. After that, the prices went up, but so did the dirty tactics.

An exclusive is an exclusive, and OK were determined to keep it. Guests were banned from taking photographs. Security swarmed the Plaza as though the President was in town. Bags were searched. Non-invitees were rejected. This was seen by many as OTT, as though the Douglases thought they were too important for the riff-raff. Now, it seems pretty standard for a celebrity wedding, regardless of who is taking the photographs.

But despite these efforts, someone slipped through the cracks. Rupert Thorpe, a freelance photographer, somehow managed to get into the Plaza and snap a few pics of the happy couple. He then ran to the offices of Hello and sold the photos, which ended up on newsstands before OK could publish their issue. The issues are grainy and not especially striking. They look like what they are: surreptitious efforts to see a celebrity and not be caught. The sneakiness of it seems to be as much a selling point as that first glimpse of the wedding of the year. See, we weren’t supposed to get in but we did. They couldn’t stop us.

The Douglases and OK tried to get an injunction against Hello to prevent publication but that was rejected by the UK Court of Appeal. The judgment ruled that they couldn't claim breach of privacy at a wedding with over 250 guests, regardless of any exclusivity deals with a magazine. So, the Douglases then sued for breach of confidence while OK sued for compensation for the loss of its exclusive right to publish.

This trial was as heavily covered as the wedding itself, and the British press viewed it as yet another symbol of rich people arrogance. They were suing over some photos? That was it? It didn’t help that Zeta-Jones, when she spoke as a witness, seemed a little tone-deaf in her assertions. At one point, she notoriously claimed that the issue wasn’t with the money because £1m "is a lot of money maybe to a lot of people in this room, but it is not that much for us." Fair points she made about wanting to retain a degree of privacy while using the OK deal to keep control over a much obsessed over event in her life were overshadowed by lines about her worrying the Hello snaps made her look fat. The central issue was one that most people struggled with: how can you claim you want your privacy but let millions see your special day through the press for the right fee?

It’s no surprise to me that the British tabloids were furious at the Douglases, seeing them as worth taking down a peg or two. Whatever you think or them or the wedding, I don’t see it as being that weird to want to ensure that press intrusion on your own marriage is kept to a minimum. And remember, this is a time when every celebrity event like this was feverishly followed by dozens of photographers. When Sean Penn married Madonna, helicopters flew over the ceremony to get pictures.

Hello’s fixer Maria Julia, Marquesa de Varela (yes, she’s a real woman), became one of the stars of the trial. She had been given the job of securing the Douglas wedding exclusive for the magazine, but she felt that Hello’s head office in Madrid had meddled too much in her work. "Tou should NEVER cross an agent, never! For me, agents are more important than the celebrities," she said. The Marquesa became something of a scapegoat for the publication. They coaxed her into signing a letter saying that she had bought the pictures and sold them on to Hello. That letter was what lifted the initial injunction, but it also opened the doors to those further lawsuits.

Ultimately, OK Magazine and the Douglases were successful in their claim of breach of confidence against Hello. A 2005 case again upheld the Douglases' claim to confidence. Hello appealed but in the end the photos of the wedding were deemed confidential. OK paid for the deal, they made intense efforts to secure the privacy of it, and Hello breached that. It was not considered a breach of privacy, however, as the judge refrained from fully making that call. The wider battle of privacy versus image control via the free press rages on.

I’m not sure how much has changed in this area. OK and Hello still do wedding exclusives but not with celebrities on the level of Michael Douglas. They sometimes land a lower-tier royal or a primetime TV presenter but nothing that pulls in millions of readers (ah, the depressing realities of dying print media.) Yet there is still a hunger for the classic celeb wedding. We like pretty dresses, tall cakes, and love. Some celebs do a Vogue or Martha Stewart Weddings exclusive, which is a far classier level of coverage than a tabloid magazine, for obvious reasons. Many just go straight to Instagram or keep their marriages secret. Jessica Chastain had wanted to do that but a helicopter with a long lens went through a no-fly zone to spoil the occasion. The ruthlessness of the paparazzi cannot be overstated, even today, but in 2000, it was a far wilder market. Weddings are seen as fairer and more legally sound game than trying to get photos of celebrity offspring.

OK and Hello didn't get any less tacky. When British reality TV star Jade Goody was dying from ovarian cancer, OK published an official "tribute issue" when she was still alive. Michael Jackson's possibly dead body laying out on an ambulance stretcher was a front page image of their "tribute issue" for that star when he passed. Hello didn't stop taking other people's images. In 2006, they got some leaked photos of Shiloh Jolie that were intended as exclusives for People. In the UK, both magazines are prominently featured in any newsagent, but their cultural clout has long been depleted. I haven’t read either in years, not even at the hairdressers.

The Douglases are still together. Catherine works sporadically – she’s the new Morticia Addams on Wednesday – while Michael recently played Benjamin Franklin in a series for Apple TV+. She posts photos of them together on Instagram, usually while they’re golfing. The pair briefly separated in 2013 but remained together, well surpassing the expectations many had for them. Hello still reports on them. At a distance.

Thanks for reading the very first Do You Remember. How was it? Let me know in the comments. I’m not sure this section will have a schedule, per se. Consider it a fun surprise now and then, in between all the other Gossip Reading Club goodies!

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