Jeremy Murphy: the owner of “a respected US PR agency”. But does he want to be respected?
In this blog two years ago, back in June 2022, I chatted to American PR man Jeremy Murphy about his book F*ck Off, Chloe: Surviving the OMGs! and FMLs! in Your Media Career.
Now he has another book out (published tomorrow): Too Good to Fact Check: Flying the Skies with Stars, Scotch, and Scandal (Mostly Mine).
So, obviously, I FaceTimed him in New York…
JEREMY: You know, I looked at the interview that we did for my first book and I remembered I got in a lot of trouble because I was very, very saucy… My publisher was like: “Can you not be yourself?”
JOHN: (LAUGHS) This time you told me… “I’ll be extra saucy,”… I quote.
JEREMY: Well, yeah, because it worked before. It got a lot of attention, so I’m like That’s the secret!
JOHN: My attitude is that all publicity is good publicity unless it involves sex crimes…
JEREMY: That’s true. And, you know, the first book was saucy. So I figured I’d have to play the part, right? This book is the same. It’s very witty, dishy, sarcastic and honest.
JOHN: But how is this book different from the first book?
JEREMY: Well, the first book was very topical. It kind of captured the Woke movement and my feelings towards it. This book is very personal.
It’s about a ten year period when I was the editor of a magazine. I worked with celebrities and I traveled the world with them and we did really, really amazing stuff on a global scale. You always hear about celebrities being misbehaved, but I was worse.
CBS Watch! magazine cover in 2015…
JOHN: What was the glossy magazine?
JEREMY: CBS Television published a magazine called Watch! It was kind of like a Vanity Fair for TV.
At the time, those kind of magazines were ignoring TV… TV was like the redheaded stepchild of movies. We took the treatment that Vanity Fair and Vogue gave to movie stars and we gave it to TV stars.
Shows like CSI had like 30 million viewers, but those magazines were not paying attention to them then. So that was kind of our niche: we took actors who were, like, in Crime Scene outfits and we brought them to Paris and to Milan and all these other places.
In the early 2000s, movies were still, you know, glamorous. TV was crime scene procedurals and the stuff that people actually watched, but that was not seen as ‘glamorous’. The golden age of television really started kind of after, you know.
I mean, HBO really started it with Sex and the City (1998-2004) and The Sopranos (1999-2007) and then Mad Men in 2007.
All of a sudden, you had these amazing directors and actors shifting to TV because there was more freedom.
JOHN: You’ve been called the owner of “a respected PR agency”. But do you want to be respected? Surely not. Your whole shtick seems to be, I’m outrageous. That’s your shtick.
Although, in the new book, there’s a quote from Louis Pasteur: Chance favours the prepared mind. That’s obviously very important to you, as you’ve put it in the front of your book.
JEREMY: Yeah. If you look at any breakthrough, like penicillin or whatever, it happened by accident. They were testing something else and they found out: Oh! This answers another question…
And that’s very meaningful to me, because I had a medical issue that they thought it was and then this doctor said: Wait a minute, this other thing! And he put the clues together and what they were testing for was completely different than what it was and it really changed my life.
So, that quote means a lot to me. This guy, his mind was prepared to consider other solutions. That quote really speaks to me.
JOHN: So, you’re serious and outrageous simultaneously…
JEREMY: I have two different lives. I run a PR agency called 360bespoke that’s very curated and I deal with small luxury brands…
…but then I’m also an author that writes outrageous stuff.
The PR agency is very, very buttoned up… and then there’s my personal life, which is incredibly boring compared to what I really like. This new book captures my wild days.
It was a very defined period. I was traveling with celebrities; we flew first class; we stayed in the best hotels. And, you know, I had never experienced that. I grew up very, very modest… And then, all of a sudden, you have this life and I went a little crazy. I took advantage of it.
JOHN: Setting fire to a hotel room…
JEREMY: Yes, that was one of them.
JOHN: …and there’s what happened at King Cole Bar…
JEREMY: Yes. I’m actually quite proud of this story.
I was at the King Cole, which is a famous bar in the St. Regis Hotel – a very, very famous luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue…
The King Cole Bar at the highly respectable St Regis Hotel in New York…
I was with two colleagues at the King Cole Bar and, to the corner of us, were these three beautiful women who turned out to be high-end call girls. Two tables away from them was this very modest couple from the Midwest and they had had a little too much to drink.
The wife got very emotional. She thought the women were making fun of her, were laughing at her. So the husband got up and went to the women and started yelling at them: “How dare you treat my wife this way! blah, blah, blah!”
Then he started using really nasty words, so my colleagues and I stood up and we tried to break up the fight. We were like: Well, don’t…Come on… Nothing’s happening, you know… blah, blah, blah.
And then the guy, the husband, really got in my face and words were exchanged and then he pushed me against one of the columns. He literally got in my face and pushed me. And one of my colleagues, who was a woman, pushed him back.
So a little fight emerged and that was broken up and then the couple left the bar.
The prostitutes were incredibly honored by our chivalry and bought us drinks, so we talked to them and it was very good.
But then the couple brought back security. And we got banned from the King Cole Bar.
We were very honorable. You have to defend the call girls. You know, they’re working hard for their money.
JOHN: American entrepreneurship at its best.
JEREMY: Yes.
Originally the book was supposed to be just little anecdotes about celebrities, but my co-writer was like: “You were worse behaved than the others – that’s the book.”
JOHN: Why did you co-write it? You are a PR person. You can write.
Jeremy’s co-author, actress Sophia Paulmier…
JEREMY: I started off as a newspaper reporter writing about other people, then PR, then magazine editor.
I co-wrote it because it was my first time writing about myself. I had never written about myself. I wanted someone to get stuff out of me that I couldn’t.
Sophia Paulmier is a fantastic writer and she asks really good questions. She really jogged my memory and unearthed some stuff that I could not have done myself.
JOHN: So the book is all about you doing outrageous things…
JEREMY: Sophia is very smart. She also said: “Jeremy, the thread here is your journey and HOW this happened.
So it IS a book about me doing outrageous things, but there’s also a chapter that really gets personal. A lot of this outrageous stuff I was doing – bar fights, getting banned, setting a hotel room on fire – there was a reason for it.
What happened was that I had developed a very weird medical condition. I was constantly in pain. And, to alleviate the pain, I was drinking more. But the drinking made the pain worse.
Then I got diagnosed with being bipolar and so that really explains a lot of the book.
JOHN: What was the medical condition?
JEREMY: Well, my bladder was not contracting. It was constantly filled. So anything I drank, it made doing nature’s callings very painful. I was constantly in pain, excruciating pain. When you’re like that, you want to self-medicate, right? And I would do that: I would drink too much. But that made it worse because it’s liquid.
So finally – this is kind of like Chance Favors the Prepared Mind…
I went to a urologist who said: “It’s not medical. It’s not anatomical.” He said it might be neurological.
So I went to a neurologist. They tested me and said: “This is not neurological.” So they sent me to a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist was like: “I don’t think that’s causing the problem. You ARE crazy, but not about this… Get a second opinion.”
So I went to another urologist and I did all the tests again, which are excruciating. And he said: “I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”
I said: “You do?”
“Yes, I can solve this…. OK, I hate to tell you this… but… I CAN solve this, but you’ll never have children. I have to cut something.”
I’m like: “Where are the scissors? I’ll do it myself!” because I never wanted children.
He solved it. There was one operation, and it went away. And it changed my life.
JOHN: …though you’re never going to have children.
JEREMY: I don’t care. Oh, my God, I’m gay. That was the best part of being gay. You didn’t have to join the military or have children.
(CONTINUED HERE with tales of Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie…)
