TCA Terror! When Publicists Attack! - Ed Martin Live at TCA

I have watched a number of personal publicists express extreme displeasure with journalists during my almost 20 years of covering TCA tours, but I have never seen anything like the assault Tuesday night on Hal Boedeker, the hard-working and very well liked television critic for the Orlando Sentinel.

A female publicist who shall remain nameless (namely because she didn't offer me her card even though I was showing great interest in one of her clients) actually went for poor Hal's throat during an exchange at the Fancast.com party on the penthouse terrace of the Beverly Hilton Hotel!

Read on, folks, and remember … you can't make this shiz up.

Hal and I were talking with Hartford Courant critic Roger Catlin when this publicist and her pretty young client walked by (the client is also going to remain nameless here, since the publicist did nothing to encourage coverage, but I will note that she is a rising star in the Disney Cable universe). In the conversation that followed, the publicist mentioned how pissed off she was about the Hallmark Channel session at TCA last week.

Her specific beef concerned comments by beloved Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson, who was at the Hallmark session to promote her upcoming Hallmark Original Movie Ladies of the House. During her press conference, Henderson was asked what she thought about her former TV children appearing in reality television programs. Henderson's face went rigid. "You see this face?" she replied, pointing at her grim visage. Then she told us that while appearing on VH1's The Surreal Life, Christopher Knight (who played Peter Brady) called her and asked her to come on the show and counsel him and his co-star, America's Next Top Model Season 1 winner Adrianne Curry. (Henderson is a licensed hypno-therapist, hence the call.)

"They were trying to actually, I think, force [Chris] to get engaged," Henderson told us.

She agreed to meet with them, but Chris and Adrianne "didn't take my advice at all," Henderson recalled. "As you know, they did get engaged and they did get married. They asked if I would come and counsel them before the marriage and I said, 'No, but maybe I'll come and counsel the divorce!'"

It was unclear if Henderson disproved of Curry, the circumstances surrounding the engagement and marriage, or all of that. But she did say of Chris, "He's like my son."

Anyway, the woman who grabbed Hal by the throat one week later was Curry's publicist!

According to said publicist, Henderson's comments were hurtful and have been tearing through the media for the last week, though the fact that this "story" had "legs" was news to those of us who have been entrenched at TCA tour for 10 days. (We're concerned about Iran firing a nuclear missile, gas prices, banks in crisis and the war in Iraq - and the fate of Katherine Heigl's character on Grey's Anatomy. Christopher Knight's marriage, not so much.)

While the publicist was ranting, Hal made the mistake of mentioning that he was the critic who had asked Henderson the fateful question. (He had been thinking of Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady, and who would be attending TCA later in the week to talk about her new CMT series, Outsider's Inn.)

This was more than the menacing publicist could handle. She pounced, grabbing Hal around the throat and shaking him. (If a man grabbed a woman he did not know in so rough a manner I believe there might be legal consequences.) Catlin, who had reported the Henderson story at length in his blog at Courant.com, tried to reason with the woman, as did I, but neither of us dared grab her and pull her off Hal, because in Hollywood a man can end up behind bars (or, worse, on TMZ) for grabbing a woman he doesn't know at an industry event. Also, it was clear this woman could open a can of whup-ass on all three of us without breaking a fingernail.

When the publicist finally released poor Hal she apologized. Then she told us she had sent out a statement from Curry about Henderson's remarks last week. (I asked why she didn't send the statement to the 200 reporters who attended Henderson's press conference. The response: Crickets. Apparently Fancast got one.)

And then she was gone, leaving all of us to wonder, what the heck was that?