If Anne Heche didn’t want a story out, she’d go to great lengths to keep it under wraps.
Former “Entertainment Tonight” producer Fran Weinstein learned the hard way, when she interviewed the actress in 1998 during a press run for her film “Psycho.” Heche had just started dating Ellen DeGeneres, and was desperate to keep a rumored fling with Vince Vaughn buried.
Weinstein tells Page Six that when she brought 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 told her, “I don’t want you to use that stuff about Vince Vaughn. I don’t want my girlfriend to hear about it.”
The entertainment news vet assured her they wouldn’t air the question, but that did nothing to quell Heche’s fear of DeGeneres finding out. Heche sent several publicists and managers back to Weinstein’s suite to demand she hand over the tape. Weinstein refused and Heche took matters into her own hands.
“Anne Heche bursts out of the elevator. . . I wagged my finger in her face, [and said], ‘You’re not getting the tape,’” Weinstein said. “She comes out yelling, ‘You have no respect for me. You have no respect for my girlfriend!’”
The duo moved their screaming match back into the suite at the St. Regis, where Heche chain-smoked, and “I sprayed her with lavender,” Weinstein said.
Exhausted by the back-and-forth, Weinstein lay down on the bed — and Heche and the tape vanished.
Weinstein says she stormed Heche’s room, screaming: “Give me my f–king tape!” Heched replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Weinstein threatened to call the police, but her executive producer vetoed it, fearing press attention — though the incident still made New York gossip pages. A rep said at the time that Heche “finished the interview, never left with the tape, and doesn’t have it now.”
Weinstein told us she doesn’t know what happened to the tape. Urban legend has it Heche “instructed someone to throw it into a New York City sewer.”
The retired news vet relives this story and more 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 concluded.
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