Dec 8, 2008 07:16 PM
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Hollywood, 8:50 AM
Thu Mar 11
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It's been far too long since we last checked in with flack-to-the-nobodies/frequent Page Six source Hal Lifson, who last showed up on our radar for pushing the absurd "scoop" that Sarah Palin would be joining Desperate Housewives (like Marcia Cross would ever let that happen!), which he somehow got into a major newspaper. Imagine our delight, then, when Lifson appeared in today's Page Six with his newest outlandish story:
LEE Majors likes to play Good Samaritan. TV's "Six Million Dollar Man" was leaving a post office in Beverly Hills recently when he spotted a woman struggling with an armload of dry cleaning at her car. "Lee immediately grabbed the clothes and put them neatly on the back seat, telling her, 'Don't hang them from the hooks. They block your vision,' " reports Hollywood p.r. man Hal Lifson. "Then, while walking back to his Jaguar, he spotted a homeless man in front of the BeverLiz Cafe, went up to him and said, 'Breakfast's on me, pal!' He ordered the gent a California omelet with turkey bacon and OJ."
Agog at the blatant P.R. planting and absurdity of the item, we knew we had to find out more about our favorite flack. Then we stumbled upon this wonderful page on Lifson's website, which gathers all of his credited and uncredited New York Post scoops. Let's take a look, shall we?
· Which is harder to believe: that Hollywood would be ready to fast-track a 2008 sequel to the Billy Zane superhero flop The Phantom, that Catherine Zeta-Jones would be eager to reprise a Phantom role that she has all but expunged from her resume, or that Lifson could convince Liz Smith to report it with a straight face?
· "Ellen DeGeneres Plans to Marry at the Riverside Resort and Spa at Palm Springs!" crowed Page Six in June. One problem? She famously married at home. Another? The resort is one of Lifson's PR clients.
· What about this Smith item, in which Lohan purportedly spilled all about her career plans to a total stranger... who turned out to be "former Hollywood p.r. maven Hal Lifson"! Lohan didn't know him then, but apparently she did a year later, when Lifson told Page Six that Lohan would not be doing Playboy. This time, though, Lifson credited himself as "Playboy's creative consultant," though there is no online record of Lifson having anything to do with Playboy outside of planting this item.
The hits keep on coming (Jennifer Aniston found love letters from Jessica Simpson, and they were well-written), though most of the egregious mentions — involving Page Six's crack reporting on upcoming Archie comic storylines (!), or a whole Liz Smith item on coin purses — are merely head-scratching advancements of Lifson's own PR clients. Hey, Page Sixers, just let us know next time you need to fill up space with some crazy PR fluffery! We hear there were some dashing Defamer editors fending off phone numbers at Akbar this week...
[Photo Credit: Hollywood Investigator]
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