Anne Heche’s wild hotel showdown with a journalist over a Vince Vaughn rumor
If Anne Heche did not need a story out, she’d go to nice lengths to maintain it below wraps.
Former “Entertainment Tonight” producer Fran Weinstein discovered that the exhausting approach when she interviewed the actress in 1998 throughout a press run for her movie “Psycho,” co-starring Vince Vaughn. Heche was relationship Ellen DeGeneres and was determined to maintain a rumored fling with Vaughn buried.
Weinstein tells Page Six that when she introduced up the rumor, Heche “lost her mind — eyes opened like a sink hole. Her and Ellen had just gotten together.”
Seeing how uncomfortable Heche was, Weinstein moved on. After the interview wrapped, Heche instructed her, “I don’t want you to use that stuff about Vince Vaughn. I don’t want my girlfriend to hear about it.”
The leisure information vet assured her they would not air the query, however that did nothing to quell Heche’s worry of DeGeneres discovering out. He despatched a number of publicists and managers again to Weinstein’s suite to demand she hand over the tape. Weinstein refused and Heche took issues into her personal arms.
“Anne Heche bursts out of the elevator… I wagged my finger in her face [and said]’You’re not getting the tape,’” Weinstein mentioned. “She comes out yelling, ‘You have no respect for me. You have no respect for my girlfriend!’”
The duo moved their screaming match again into the suite on the St. Regis, the place Heche chain-smoked, and “I sprayed her with lavender,” Weinstein mentioned.
Exhausted by the back-and-forth, Weinstein lay down on the mattress — and Heche and the tape vanished.
Weinstein says she stormed Heche’s room, screaming, “Give me my f–king tape!” Heche replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Weinstein threatened to name the police, however her government producer vetoed it, fearing press consideration — though the incident nonetheless made New York gossip pages. A rep mentioned on the time that Heche “finished the interview, never left with the tape and doesn’t have it now.”
Weinstein instructed us she does not know what occurred to the tape. Urban legend has it Heche “instructed someone to throw it into a New York City sewer.”
The retired information vet relives this story and extra in her memoir “Tortured Soles: High Heels, Low Expectations and the Hollywood Gossip Mill,” out April 28.
Heche tragically died following a horrific car crash in 2022.
Weinstein described her to us as “a fine actress.” “I felt bad when she died,” she mentioned.
