Great article on Ms. Rona. Some bits: "She’s deeply amused at the idea of people under 40 knowing her name."

" Get her going, and Barrett will offer quick takes on every celebrity from her heyday. Trump: “He didn’t know how to smile, and kept Ivana in the doorway.” Cosby: “We all knew; he was always on the make.” Travolta: “That one’s an odd duck.” Natalie Wood: “I think everyone instinctively feels that something more happened than her just slipping off the deck of the boat and drowning. It's hard for me to say the story that I was told [about her death] — by someone who was around every single day during that time. But I believe that person knows what happened.”

"Even as (Eddie) Fisher’s stardom expanded, in many ways thanks to Barrett’s work with the fan club, he hated Jewish girls. “Jewish girls are nudges,” Barrett overheard him say. “I wouldn’t date a Jewish broad if my life depended on it.” Through the years, Fisher’s internalized anti-Semitism stayed with her. "

"And she knew exactly who her first target would be: Frankie Avalon. “There was something about Avalon I had always found disturbing,” Barrett later wrote of the teen idol, who was a sort of Zac Efron meets Justin Bieber for the late ’50s and ’60s. “I was never sure if he had a sincere bone in his body. He was like a prostitute at heart. His parents had grown up believing that Jews had purple horns.”

"Barrett was comfortable printing an innuendo about Cary Grant — that he was “really more of a mother than a father to his daughter Jennifer” — but drew the line at outing people."

"She established her credibility by breaking the news of Elvis’s forthcoming marriage to Priscilla; she told the world that Mae West’s secret to staying young was a daily colonic; she called Raquel Welch “the two and only.” By 1969, 40% of the country could see Barrett five days a week."

" in the case of one “leading male idol,” a perpetrator of domestic abuse, beating his girlfriend in the early morning hours after he found her at Barrett’s Hollywood apartment. That was Troy Donahue,” Barrett told me, sighing deeply. “It was very hard to witness that. I told her she could not go back to that relationship. And shortly thereafter, Troy married Suzanne Pleshette, and then he started beating her up. That’s when I lost them both. Suzy, who’d been my roommate back in New York — she wouldn’t speak to me. Not for many, many years.”

"Like the time she interviewed Tom Cruise: “I knew something was slightly wrong. I’d done a ton of research on him,” she told me, picking her words carefully, “which was hard to do, since there wasn’t a lot out on him. But one his friends told me that Tom had been studying for the priesthood.” So once she and Cruise established a rapport, Barrett asked, “What made you want to become a priest?” “He didn’t know how to answer,” Barrett told me. “And when the interview was over, he went over to his publicist, Pat Kingsley, and said, ‘You must promise me that never again will you allow Rona Barrett to interview me. That woman is a psychologist. I felt like I had been through a session with a doctor.’”