This is an I Heart original. It's the fourth of July in Hailey, Idaho, and the town's residents are lining the streets, although admittedly the streets aren't that big, so it doesn't take many people to accomplish that. Haley is a small town. It's got a population of about five thousand, and on this sunny Independence Day in the residents are probably getting more commotion, more action than they've seen all year. Every year. We had a nice Fourth of July parade. Wayne A. Dare is among those watching from the sidelines. Wayne is the news editor of the Wood River Journal, one of the papers of record in this part of Idaho, And while he's standing there taking in the site, he sees something in the parade that's never quite left his mind. It's Bruce Willis Diehard, Bruce Willis moonlighting, Bruce Willis Planet Hollywood. Bruce Willis a guy who makes twenty million dollars a movie. He was in the parade Roddy, this big, beautiful probably of a hundred thousand dollar horse. You know, he kind of joyed the parade, riding right down the middle of main Street, and literally the middle of main street. Bruce Willis is not only in the parade. He's leading the parade dressed as a cowboy. It's not like Bruce Willis was a Western star though, not like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne A tough guy, sure, but Bruce Willis grew up in New Jersey. I can't remember if you had a cowboy hat on, but it seemed like he was, you know, kind of Western e He had cowboy boots at the best I remember, like a grand marshal. Willis waves to the crowd, turning his attention from one side of the street to the other, and the people are eating it up. He was having a hell of a good time. You could tell from his body language and from his smile, and you know, he was waving to the crowd like a homecoming queen. And uh, our photographer got a really nice image of then we put it on the front page. But Wayne isn't that impressed, not by Willis anyway. I mean, I enjoy looking at the horse board and I looked at Bruce Willis. It was just such a beautiful creature. Now there's probably a level of celebrity where someone feels diminished leading a small town parade A kind of has it come to this melancholy, but that's not what's happening here. Willis could not be happier. The smile, the trademark smirk that's familiar to hundreds of millions of people, is genuine. He's totally in his element, totally confident in his status as one of the biggest box office attractions in the world. One hit like Pulp Fiction follows another like die Hard with a Vengeance, which is in theaters at that very moment. There's almost a kind of irony in someone as famous as Willis ambling along on horseback in Idaho. Would Sylvester Stallone have done this? Would Harrison Ford? Would Meryl Straight be seen riding at Clydesdale in a town with just a handful of traffic lights. Probably not. But Bruce Willis isn't here to preserve the mirage of the Hollywood actor, which is in these pre Instagram days, something that still feels larger than life. At age forty, He's not worried about denting his reputation in the movie business, which has never been stronger. He's John McClain, one of the most iconic action here of the late twenty century. He's married to Demi Moore, making him one half of the classic nineties power couple troupe. There's not a street in America Willis could walk down or gallop down without being recognized. But here in Haley, Willis believes he's found the one place in the world he can go to be well himself, and Haley has welcomed him with open arms. But when Wayne A. Dair published that photograph of Willis on the horse on the front page of the Wood River Journal, maybe that's when both Willis and Haley realized things weren't going to be easy. We got a call that David was published from one of his angry attorneys saying we had no right to publish his image because he based his living based on selling that image. And day gorham Field is that called on paper day I was not there in the morning. Then, paraphrasing the conversation, said, you know, when somebody rides down the middle of Main Street on our horse in the fourth a job parade, we can take their picture. We damn what I want to And that's the last we heard her. Yeah, not exactly. For Bruce Willis, Haley was the thing he had been searching for since he became a household name, a place to escape, a place he could mold and shape to fit his needs, to make it not just a small idahotel, but a place worthy of being the home of a global movie star. He found it in tiny Haley, Idaho, population five thousand, well five thousand and one. For I Heart Radio, I'm Anishwarts. Welcome to Haleywood, an I Heart original podcast. On my podcast, Noble Blood, I tell the true stories of historical royals. This series is a little different, a few centuries and an ocean apart. It's a story of Hollywood royalty, about a man who, for the better part of two decades, had millions of people lining up for his movies, making him one of the highest paid actors in the world, and about someone who was a brand, the everyman action star who could seamlessly switch from firing machine guns to intimate character dramas, a man who got so famous he ran out of places to just be Bruce until he came to Haley. What happened next is something the people of Haley have never been eager to talk about until now. It's a strange story about Hollywood and identity, the need for privacy, and the trappings of ego and much much more episode one his own Private Idaho. Of all the places near Sun Valley, Idaho, Haley is the most serene. Cars don't speed, people don't walk too briskly. Depending on where you are, the only noise you hear would be the gentle current of the Big Wood River. Some places can seem idyllic, but only in your imagination, only when the mood is just right. Haley is not like that. It's the real thing. The town was founded in the late eighteen hundreds by John Haley, a gold prospector who thought that the area would soon be a hub of mining and transportation. And that's what happened. For a while, Hailey was full of blue collar workers who got their hands dirty and then closed the local bars. Businesses catered to the miners. Then the mining gave way, and only families remained. By the early nineties nine nineties, it was the kind of town where when you turn onto Main Street you see mountains where you'd half expect to see Bob Ross putting the finishing touches on the scene, where one of the landmarks is a museum holding one of the world's largest collections of political campaign buttons, where most of the residential streets are lined with trees, and homes are set twenty five ft from the street to keep their occupants safe. Where people at the diner know you, and you know them, and probably their siblings and parents and kids too. When you hear the phrase small town values, someone is thinking of a place like Haley. It's May Street was hallmark movie quaint, with a surprising amount of traffic thanks to the Sun Valley Ski Resort, a kind of alternative to Aspen about fifteen miles away. A lot of people would go through Haley, but not many stopped. If they did, they'd see a lot of historic buildings made of brick, some still with tin ceilings. An old bar, still home to career drinkers, stood tall nearby. A rundown movie theater opened since the nineteen thirties, but in dire need of renovation. A community planner once described Haley as being just one breaststroke away from being vibrant, like a painting that needs just one more color to come to life, or maybe someone with a vision. That's what made such an interesting year. That was when a number of proper these around town that had been sitting dormant or ignored for years began to rumble with activity. Someone was buying them That old miner's bar, the Mint was picked up, so was the building next to it, which used to house Mama Riley's Pizza. So was the Rundown Movie Theater. Other commercial buildings followed, some promising but empty lots too. It was clearly a concerted effort to acquire choice pieces of Haley, but for what purpose no one knew. A cursory search revealed that the company behind the purchases had a strange name. Here's Wayne A. Dare. We kept hearing that a corporation named x may I x in a Y was making offers to to buy some properties right on Main Street, and we couldn't find out who was the force behind XNY the xnay Investment Trust. That's the pig Latin version of Nicks, which means to put a stop to something. It was kind of strange. Everyone in Haley was used to knowing everyone else's business. The fact that xnay was a mystery was well a mystery. Rumor had it that Kmart was after some of the lots. A month went by and then two Haley wondered if they would soon be overrun by national chain stores. Goodbye main Street. What Haley needed was someone who could sniff out the truth, someone who could peel back the layers of bureaucratic red tape, someone who could figure out who was behind XNA. This was a job for Wayne's top gun, C. J. Carra Margin, reporter for the Wood River Journal, and he was just a bulldog at at going after the stories and uh he did some really outstanding work for a you know, small town newspaper. Carra Margin worked the phones and came to an unlikely suspect, a guy named Joe McAllister, a relatively recent transplant to the area. McAllister was behind x Nay for what purpose, care Margin wasn't quite sure, but the acquisitions were definitely newsworthy. Someone was looking to invest in Haley in a big way. The denizens of Haley were talking. It was the kind of diner and coffee shop talk that the town hadn't enjoyed since Bruce Willis bought a home there a few years prior. Willis's private home was in the housing subdivision known as the Flying Heart Ranch. Flying Heart Ranch was a place between two mountains. A river literally ran through it. With his wife Demi Moore and a growing family. Willis had escaped to Haley to avoid the spotlight cast on the mega famous Willis was a huge star thanks to a hit detective show, Moonlighting and then the die Hard films. So a quiet house in the mountains to get away from it all. Who doesn't want that? He was just outside of town. You know, I'm not quite sure i'd called her mansion, but he probably was was close to one. And I've never been one whose star struck. I wouldn't walk across the street commutic as movie star. But I liked his uh TV series bood Lighting. I love die Hard and some of these other movies at all. Bruce Willis this year, that's kind of fun. He wasn't in the news much for a couple of years. He just was living there now. Reporter c J. Carra Margin was on the trail of Haley's next big story, the XNA property grab, but Joe McAllister was elusive. He wouldn't say much of anything. Then Cara Margin noticed something something big. C J. Uh, you got some paperwork on Xnay and noticed that there was a mailing address attached to the company, and he did a little uh research and realized that the the address for the company was the same post office box that the Willis's head. So you know, put two and two together and you got a pretty solid for there. Bruce Willis was the one on the spending spree. This was unusual. Sun Valley definitely attracted celebrities, some of whom bought seasonal or permanent homes in the area. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a place nearby, so did Clint Eastwood. But that's all they did. They bought homes, old bars, not empty lots, not vacant drug stores. So what exactly was Willis doing? Carr Margin tried to dig deeper, but he couldn't get anywhere, couldn't breach the wall of silence surrounding Haley's most famous resident. Then suddenly he didn't have to. Dan gorm got a call. He was the papers editor and publisher. Carr Margin's phone rang two. It was Bruce Willis, But instead of explaining what he was doing, he tried to get them to lay off the story, to brush aside the fact that Bruce Willis was becoming Haley's premier real estate investor. The Wood River Journal wasn't going to do that. Bruce Willis, once a quiet resident of Haley, was now suddenly in probably a developer. Not only that he had an entire company devoted to his business interests in Haley, a company that had seemingly materialized out of nowhere, and he had a growing staff attending to all of it. It had been happening right under Haley's collective knows Willis did let a few things slip out. He told Gorham he didn't want to live his life in the public eye, that he had moved to Haley to avoid exactly that. Willis also told Gorham that while he understood the interest, he didn't want to be price gouged by sellers who had built the movie Star. However, you know, he was buying properties right on Main Street, and he was going to have to go to the Planning and Zoning Commission and the city Council for you know, for any kind of approval. So, uh we failed. It was our duty, our journalistic responsibility to let our readers know exactly who was buying property on Main Street. And uh, I think he was less than happy with us over that. Willis and the Wood River Journal would soon have a dust up that made the carra Margin incident seem quaint in comparison. It makes you wonder what exactly happened to Bruce Willis that made him so reluctant to deal with the press, and why was he so insistent on Hailey's reporters staying out of his business. There's an answer, maybe not the answer, but an answer nonetheless, and it involves Tom Hanks being just a little bit of a jerk. A couple of years before Willis began what would grow into a love affair with Haley, he had already decided he wasn't going to be overly cooperative with the press. Stardom had put him in the sights of the tabloids. Reporters seemed to want to know who he was sleeping with, not who he'd be working with. His transition from being anonymous to famous had happened virtually overnight. Once Moonlighting premiered in March nineteen five. The show was a hit, but Bruce seemed completely unprepared for the scrutiny that accompanied being a successful actor. The media had made a big deal of his relationship with Sybil Shephard, his Moonlighting co star. Moonlighting Wars Jealous set turns into battleground. That kind of thing. The rumors sold papers and magazines. Willis estimated he was on a tabloid cover at least once a week. People enjoyed reading about Bruce Wood Willis being a jerk, even if virtually all of it was embellished or made up. Bruce Willis's shocking arrest, the untold story Bruce Willis and X rated actress Bruce Willis and Miami Weis Galley in new romance Pals warn He'll break your heart. Rather than cope with the press, it became easier to ignore it. He felt the media sometimes made actors a target, that there was a certain time when it became someone's turn to be cut down a peg. For Willis, it came with Hudson Hawk, a crime caper musical he released. In That's Right, a musical starring Bruce Willis, Willis played a cat burglar who enjoyed a little singing during his art heists. Willis helped conceive of the story and even helped write the theme song. His producer was Joel Silver, who had made Willis a box office star with the die Hard Films, and Willis loved shooting the movie mostly because while on location in Hungary, no one really knew who he was. But the director, Michael Lehman, complained that his ideas would be challenged or vetoed by Willis, who wielded so much influence in Hollywood that even a director would have to defer to him. At one point, Willis insisted his character Hudson Hawk needed a pet monkey named Little Eddie. No one else really wanted the movie to have a monkey, but Willis wouldn't let it go, so producers decided that Willis's character Hudson had a monkey past tense. The monkey was never shown on camera because it turns out Little Eddie had been murdered while Hudson was in prison, So yeah, you couldn't maybe see where this might be going. One source on set said that Willis thought he was making a hip MTV style movie, but it was really more of an homage to the fast talking caper comedies of the nineteen forties. He had trouble describing it in interviews. It was, he said, a film that needed to be experienced more than explained. Yo, did I miss anything? Gates dries a blackmail me. You asked me, did I miss anything Gates. Gates killed you say, did I miss anything? I bet you? Going up to Mrs Lincoln at the Fourth Theater said how is the show? Did I miss anything? No one felt like they missed anything With Hudson Hawk, critics were unkind It flopped at the box office, making just seventeen million dollars against a fifty million dollar budget. Today it has a score of just thirty three on Rotten Tomatoes. To Willis, it seemed like there had been a concerted effort by the media to curb his start um. It would happen with Kevin Costner and water World and to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero. The press seemed to relish those moments, and Willis resented them for it. They'd cut him before too, during the fallout from The Bonfire of the Vanities. The film released in starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Willis, all three of them actors at the top of their games. Seemed like a recipe for a hit. Bonfire was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel about greed and corruption among the powerful and protected class in New York's high society. Willis played Peter Fallow, a predatory tabloid reporter, a not very subtle jab at his adversaries in the press. When Willis was asked why he took the part, he'd shoot back, why do you think, Oh, excuse me, I have introduced myself, have I? My name is Peter Fallow. I'm a writer. But you know that already. Unless you haven't read a newspaper or seen a television in the last few months, you know exactly who I had. But despite how well regarded the novel was, some people considered it too complex to be adapted. They warned it might even be unfilmable, and it looks like they were right. The film was a disappointment, blown out of the water during the holiday season by Home Alone. To be fair, every movie was blown out by Home Alone, but still it was a black mark for all involved, and Willis was no exception. But he had reason to regret the film beyond its box office. The movie's director, Brian de Palmer, had allowed a journalist named Julie Salomon, unprecedented access to observe the production from casting to release. It was an opportunity Nitty rarely afforded to the media, because well filmmaking can be messy. Salmon got to see it all and report on it all, all the creative tension, all the tumultuous exchanges. Salomon even captured a moment between Willis and Hanks, who were both watching playback of a scene on a monitor. Hanks, with some apparent glee in his voice, made a show of pointing out when Willis smirked in the scene. It was the same smirk that had made him such a hit in Moonlighting and die Hard and in other films. Hanks playfully pointed it out there. It is that big sing Gren, he said. It was not very Tom Hanks thing to say. A brooding Willis said nothing. Smirk was a Willis trademark. It was sacra sanct Tom Hanks was reducing it to a crutch. Salomon's book was released in nine It was titled The Devil's Candy, A great book. The Bonfire the Vanities had become a bad movie, and thanks to Salomon, a bad movie had inspired a pretty good book. It was well received by most everyone except Willis. He hated the fact Salmon had observed him, had criticized him. He hadn't even granted her an interview, and he still got bad press. If he was pressed shy before Salomon may have made him press loathing, Hollywood loathing. Even when he consented to an interview, he usually regretted it, and so did the journalist. A thousand its views, and I would say, there's a handful four or five that were just a complete nightmare. Bruce was one of those nightmares. That's Martha Frankel. Martha writes books now, but in the nine nineties she was focused on entertainment journalism and she was good at it. She wasn't fawning, she wasn't insulting either. She was just doing her job, and she laid out what she perceived as a mutually beneficial transaction. I used to say this one when I would sit down with somebody, I'd say, listen, here's how it works. I'm getting paid five grand. You're getting paid five million. My job to make you seem even cooler than you are. Some more people go and you can make six million next time. So let's just have a conversation. This is what I would say. And most people were like, that sounds great. Bruce Willis did not think it sounded great. When Movieline Magazine sent Frankel to interview Willis in Europe. In it was the beginning of one of the most torturous experiences of Frankel's professional career. And I went to England to do a story about him, and like, I thought we were going to be like, you know, it was gonna be cool. We had this history, and you know, we knew a lot of people in common and a lot of my friends of Kiss directors and actors. And he wanted no part of that. He didn't want to talk about it. He wanted no part of it. I was in a spa in Windsor waiting for him, supposed to be there one night. I was there for nine Frankel stood vigil as Willis seemed to weigh whether or not he really wanted to be interviewed. I had the two bitchest editors in magazine history, so they would spend fortune sending you around the world in the hope that you hated your subject. So I mean I kept calling them every day and saying, I don't think this interview is happening. I think I should come home, and they were like, nope, you're staying because even if you never get to interview, and that will be the story Martha persisted, tried different tactics to appeal to Bruce. It was raining, pouring, and there was no good food to eat, and I was stuck in the spa. I mean all I did was swim, so and every day I would write to him and say, let's do it today, Let's do it today. And I had some funny ideas. I thought, you know, he has a big entourage. He always had a very big entourage. And I was there all alone. So I said, why don't we just sit down me, you and your people will play poker for an hour, the interview will be over. It'll be a great interview. You know, I'll make you sound even funnier than you are. He said, no, we have a lot of people in common. I don't want to talk about that. So we really were at odds. Finally, after well over a week, Willis agreed to meet when I do an interview on somebody. I watched everything, and so when I went to meet Bruce, I had seen all the clunkers and all the good stuff. You know, the die Hard movies are fantastic to watch. They take you to a place you've never been before. And so he wanted to talk to him about that, and he didn't want to talk about that. He didn't really want to talk about anything, which is funny after you've waited nine days in a spa in Windsor. I did the interview and he made them shut down the restaurant in the hotel, and then he like, oh, it's just a dragon. He wasn't fun and he wasn't funny, and I know he's all of those things. You know, I had seen him in action. I know he can be that. He was, you know, very serious, and he just kept telling me how you know, Hudson Hawk was a great movie and this one. I was like, Bruce, you know I saw it. You can't convince me of that. And it was really one of the first interviews that I just put it into the story and said, I didn't like this guy. He didn't like me. We didn't have fun. Willis was touchy and evasive. He kept asking her to turn off the tape recorder for him to explain what went wrong with Hudson Hawk, as though there had been potential for anything to go right with Hudson Hawk. Naturally, Frankel's editors at movie Line loved it. They weren't unhappy that it went like that. I mean, I was because I want to light the people I interview, I want them to do well. I want to root for them, and there was no way I could root for Bruce will Say. After this, four months and years afterward, people would approach Frankel with the idea that she and Willis were rivals, enemies. They wanted her to talk about what a jerk Bruce Willis was poked and prodded on. She'd sometimes indulged them. He had, after all, kept her waiting for nine days and then stonewalled her, and there was something else that bothered her. So I was already annoyed at him when he walked in. And then he made them shut the restaurant. He made them shut it down for two hours during dinner service so that nobody would come over for his autograph. And then he didn't throw three hundred bucks on the table for the waiter, so I did. So I was already like, this is not okay. You know, I want rich people to be more generous than not rich people. And Bruce, okay, he wants the restaurant close. I get it. Then pay the guy for the two hours that he missed. He didn't have that attitude, So we were really at hots But you know, it was the best think. He walked in and out of that hotel and nobody said a word to if nobody recognized him. So it's kind of important this part, because even when people weren't looking at Bruce Willis, he could feel eyes on him. He felt the need to get away, felt the need to keep to himself. All of that would fuel what would happen in Haley when journalists plowed forward. Well, that's when Haley was exposed to another side of Bruce Willis, the one where he's most definitely not smirking. When word of Willis's real estate acquisitions got out, a lot of Haley residents were excited by the possibilities. There hadn't been any radical changes to Haley in decades. Some people thought Haley's buildings were quaint, others thought quaint was just another word for old decrepit. Now someone with a singular vision was snapping up properties and professing his love for the town. It was like having a benefactor, or, as one columnist put it, Haley had found a sugar daddy. A few people had some fun with it. A local high school paper ran a cartoon that depicted main Street as Planet Haleywood, a nod to Willis's involvement in the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise. Another paper, the Idaho Mountain Express, ran in editorial that cheekily suggested Willis should just buy the entire town as a holiday present to himself. That got the papers publisher an angry phone call. Willis did sometimes talk to the press, but he usually had to be angry. First. Things came to a head on that front when the Wood River Journal ran a story that Bruce Willis didn't care for not a bet. We did a story, and I can't remember the exact year, but I've been there for several years by then. We again, editor of the Wood River Journal. The Forest Service would lease uh land to private individuals. They've been doing it for decades. It was right on a lake, I think it was red Fish, like a big, beautiful natural lake. But somehow Willis got one of these leases and he built a really nice home on the right on the lake. This was another Willis property and escape a little further up the road from his escape. And we were doing a story because there was a lot of discussion in Washington. They wanted to drastically increase the prices that people had to pay for these leases. Bruce Willis, I'm sure it didn't bleeve twice about a price height, but the normal people and they were concerned about it. So the Wood River Journal wrote about it. We did an article about the about the proposal to increase the lease rates up there, and we took a picture of the outside of Bruce Willis's house and we published it. We didn't identify it as Bruce Willis's place. We just used it to show that these were not all just tar paper shacks up there where. There was some really nice, high end residences up there, of which this one was by far the nicest. The cabin could have been anyone's. There were a total of twenty three cabin owners who leased property at Pettit Lake on the Forest Service land, including Willis. There was nothing about his cabin that was demonstrably Willis esque. His name wasn't on a plaque out front or anything. But Bruce Willis stormed into the offices of the Journal, angry his privacy had been violated. He was enraged the fact that we didn't identify it. Um didn't assuage the matter whatsoever and what little advertising he did with us he canceled. I'm sure he if you asked him today, he would, you know, still have a chip on his should about it. I know what you're thinking, What did Bruce Willis need to advertise in the Wood River Journal. It's coming promise, but for now the Wood River Journal had broken its unspoken vow to protect its famous residence. Of course, losing any advertising is something that you don't want to have happened. But you have to have journalistic integrity. And if if, uh, somebody wants to cancel their advertising because of a story you did, if it's a story that was solid and it's a story you stand by, it's sorry you feel that way, Better luck next time. Willis also phoned reporter c. J. Carra Margin and said something pretty strange. Willis said that he heard the reporter had quote a vendetta against him, like they were feuding families in The Godfather. But Cara Margin argued he was just doing his job, just digging up information that was in the public interest, information like just what exactly Bruce Willis was planning for Haley. No one had a vendetta against Willis. He was investing in real estate and leasing federal land. Bruce Willis seemed to take reporting on his public activities very, very personally and with a dramatic flare. The tension became almost operatic, like Willis wasn't being reported on for business ventures so much as being besieged by goons out of die Hard. But Haley residents were mostly on Willis's side. He wasn't just snapping up properties. He was investing in the community too. Willis and more made donations to a local group advocating for victims of domestic violence. He donated to the local library and the Little League. One winter, when Haley seemed as though it might be overrun by snow, he donated snowblowers to the town. There was a real philanthropy in what Willis was doing. He was community minded in many ways. He was very generous in many ways, and uh I admired him for that. Haley was his hometown, now his escape. He could spend up to six months out of the year or more recuperating from the demands of stardom. No one in hay Haley asked Bruce Willis for his autograph. Sometimes city officials would float his name in political circles. Willis, they said, should consider running for mayor. Hey, there was precedent. Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel by the Sea in California in the nineteen eighties. But Willis wasn't about to run for office. What he wanted was to build up Haley more discreetly, and that's what Wayne A. Dare C J. Carre Margin and the town of Haley would soon realize. For Willis, there seemed to be appeal in treating Haley like a big, fresh, unpainted canvas. He was here for that final brush stroke. He had come to get away from it all, But in doing so, he realized he didn't necessarily want to get away from it all, just the parts he disliked, the unwanted attention, the insecure Hollywood types. At some point Willis might have realized he could start painting that canvas in his own image. The Willis effect was coming like a tidal wave, and with it would come some good things like prosperity and culture and movie stars. But there was always a sense that what Bruce Willis giveth, Bruce Willis could also taketh away. In Willis opened an office and retail complex that he dubbed the E. G. Willis Building after his grandfather Willis had bought the building, renovated it, and then least out space to a jeweler of furniture store and others. It was a pretty standard developer move, nothing too flashy. Nonetheless, Entertainment Tonight came out to cover the grand opening. One of the existing occupants of the E. G. Willis Building was the gang at the Wood River Journal. He bought the building that we were in. We were in the building before he owned it. He purchased it, and you weren't sure what was gonna happen. Dad gorm wrote an editorial about the odd situation. I remember I put a headline on the editorial it's hit Bruce Willis stars as quote the landlord, and uh, we were trying to make a little bit light of the situation. When the lease for the Journal expired, Willis's company didn't renew it, Wayne and Dair C. J. Carr Margin and the rest of the crew would have to move. We ultimately had to move, But I don't think it was I don't think he was any animosity towards us that to end our lease. It worked out fine because we got a better office in a bigger office just half a block away. So all's well, that end well. It was clear Willis wasn't overjoyed with the Journal, but who could complain When he did make a move, Like with the E. G. Willis Building, he put dozens of trades people to work for years at a time, carpenters, bricklayers. Haley was beginning to radiate with the glow of a movie stars affection. It was Hudson Hawk all over again, where Willis could have almost complete control. But thanks to his infamous press silence, no one knew what else Bruce Willis was planning for Haley, or that it would soon grow to include secret rooms, a clandestine security force, and car chases. Not movie car chases, but the real thing. This season on Haleywood, Bruce kind of thought that he would have the same effect as he would in New Jersey, and of course that wasn't true at all. It was just a whole different world, cowboy country. You know, you're getting out in the real West. He was flying a G two arm in arm with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was also flying a G two, and he would fly in at two o'clock in the morning, and I mean that woke you up. And there was this Victorian house Bruce Willis had bought for Tony Moore at that point to house or doll collection of course, Bruce and get up. There was a while it's harmonic and try to ruin it all. I'm just kidding, but I'm not a big lover of that kind of musy. Then something went sour and it was like, boy, biggo sour with Willis, You're likely to lose. He looked roughed up Fara and he said they smashed my equipment. Roughed me up, said they told me to get the hell out of town. Mr Willis doesn't like your newspaper type people are out here. You don't want to come into Mr Willis's town. Haleywood is hosted by Danish Woods. This show is written by Jake Ross, editing, sound design and mixing by me Josh Fisher, Additional editing by Mary Doo, Original music by Natasha Jacobs, mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Jake Rosson, Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quentinia Our Senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer is Jason English. Special thanks to the people of Hailey, Idaho and all those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of I Heart Radio Until Next Time.

This is an I Heart original. It's the fourth of July in Hailey, Idaho, and the town's residents are lining the streets, although admittedly the streets aren't that big, so it doesn't take many people to accomplish that. Haley is a small town. It's got a population of about five thousand, and on this sunny Independence Day in the residents are probably getting more commotion, more action than they've seen all year. Every year. We had a nice Fourth of July parade. Wayne A. Dare is among those watching from the sidelines. Wayne is the news editor of the Wood River Journal, one of the papers of record in this part of Idaho, And while he's standing there taking in the site, he sees something in the parade that's never quite left his mind. It's Bruce Willis Diehard, Bruce Willis moonlighting, Bruce Willis Planet Hollywood. Bruce Willis a guy who makes twenty million dollars a movie. He was in the parade Roddy, this big, beautiful probably of a hundred thousand dollar horse. You know, he kind of joyed the parade, riding right down the middle of main Street, and literally the middle of main street. Bruce Willis is not only in the parade. He's leading the parade dressed as a cowboy. It's not like Bruce Willis was a Western star though, not like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne A tough guy, sure, but Bruce Willis grew up in New Jersey. I can't remember if you had a cowboy hat on, but it seemed like he was, you know, kind of Western e He had cowboy boots at the best I remember, like a grand marshal. Willis waves to the crowd, turning his attention from one side of the street to the other, and the people are eating it up. He was having a hell of a good time. You could tell from his body language and from his smile, and you know, he was waving to the crowd like a homecoming queen. And uh, our photographer got a really nice image of then we put it on the front page. But Wayne isn't that impressed, not by Willis anyway. I mean, I enjoy looking at the horse board and I looked at Bruce Willis. It was just such a beautiful creature. Now there's probably a level of celebrity where someone feels diminished leading a small town parade A kind of has it come to this melancholy, but that's not what's happening here. Willis could not be happier. The smile, the trademark smirk that's familiar to hundreds of millions of people, is genuine. He's totally in his element, totally confident in his status as one of the biggest box office attractions in the world. One hit like Pulp Fiction follows another like die Hard with a Vengeance, which is in theaters at that very moment. There's almost a kind of irony in someone as famous as Willis ambling along on horseback in Idaho. Would Sylvester Stallone have done this? Would Harrison Ford? Would Meryl Straight be seen riding at Clydesdale in a town with just a handful of traffic lights. Probably not. But Bruce Willis isn't here to preserve the mirage of the Hollywood actor, which is in these pre Instagram days, something that still feels larger than life. At age forty, He's not worried about denting his reputation in the movie business, which has never been stronger. He's John McClain, one of the most iconic action here of the late twenty century. He's married to Demi Moore, making him one half of the classic nineties power couple troupe. There's not a street in America Willis could walk down or gallop down without being recognized. But here in Haley, Willis believes he's found the one place in the world he can go to be well himself, and Haley has welcomed him with open arms. But when Wayne A. Dair published that photograph of Willis on the horse on the front page of the Wood River Journal, maybe that's when both Willis and Haley realized things weren't going to be easy. We got a call that David was published from one of his angry attorneys saying we had no right to publish his image because he based his living based on selling that image. And day gorham Field is that called on paper day I was not there in the morning. Then, paraphrasing the conversation, said, you know, when somebody rides down the middle of Main Street on our horse in the fourth a job parade, we can take their picture. We damn what I want to And that's the last we heard her. Yeah, not exactly. For Bruce Willis, Haley was the thing he had been searching for since he became a household name, a place to escape, a place he could mold and shape to fit his needs, to make it not just a small idahotel, but a place worthy of being the home of a global movie star. He found it in tiny Haley, Idaho, population five thousand, well five thousand and one. For I Heart Radio, I'm Anishwarts. Welcome to Haleywood, an I Heart original podcast. On my podcast, Noble Blood, I tell the true stories of historical royals. This series is a little different, a few centuries and an ocean apart. It's a story of Hollywood royalty, about a man who, for the better part of two decades, had millions of people lining up for his movies, making him one of the highest paid actors in the world, and about someone who was a brand, the everyman action star who could seamlessly switch from firing machine guns to intimate character dramas, a man who got so famous he ran out of places to just be Bruce until he came to Haley. What happened next is something the people of Haley have never been eager to talk about until now. It's a strange story about Hollywood and identity, the need for privacy, and the trappings of ego and much much more episode one his own Private Idaho. Of all the places near Sun Valley, Idaho, Haley is the most serene. Cars don't speed, people don't walk too briskly. Depending on where you are, the only noise you hear would be the gentle current of the Big Wood River. Some places can seem idyllic, but only in your imagination, only when the mood is just right. Haley is not like that. It's the real thing. The town was founded in the late eighteen hundreds by John Haley, a gold prospector who thought that the area would soon be a hub of mining and transportation. And that's what happened. For a while, Hailey was full of blue collar workers who got their hands dirty and then closed the local bars. Businesses catered to the miners. Then the mining gave way, and only families remained. By the early nineties nine nineties, it was the kind of town where when you turn onto Main Street you see mountains where you'd half expect to see Bob Ross putting the finishing touches on the scene, where one of the landmarks is a museum holding one of the world's largest collections of political campaign buttons, where most of the residential streets are lined with trees, and homes are set twenty five ft from the street to keep their occupants safe. Where people at the diner know you, and you know them, and probably their siblings and parents and kids too. When you hear the phrase small town values, someone is thinking of a place like Haley. It's May Street was hallmark movie quaint, with a surprising amount of traffic thanks to the Sun Valley Ski Resort, a kind of alternative to Aspen about fifteen miles away. A lot of people would go through Haley, but not many stopped. If they did, they'd see a lot of historic buildings made of brick, some still with tin ceilings. An old bar, still home to career drinkers, stood tall nearby. A rundown movie theater opened since the nineteen thirties, but in dire need of renovation. A community planner once described Haley as being just one breaststroke away from being vibrant, like a painting that needs just one more color to come to life, or maybe someone with a vision. That's what made such an interesting year. That was when a number of proper these around town that had been sitting dormant or ignored for years began to rumble with activity. Someone was buying them That old miner's bar, the Mint was picked up, so was the building next to it, which used to house Mama Riley's Pizza. So was the Rundown Movie Theater. Other commercial buildings followed, some promising but empty lots too. It was clearly a concerted effort to acquire choice pieces of Haley, but for what purpose no one knew. A cursory search revealed that the company behind the purchases had a strange name. Here's Wayne A. Dare. We kept hearing that a corporation named x may I x in a Y was making offers to to buy some properties right on Main Street, and we couldn't find out who was the force behind XNY the xnay Investment Trust. That's the pig Latin version of Nicks, which means to put a stop to something. It was kind of strange. Everyone in Haley was used to knowing everyone else's business. The fact that xnay was a mystery was well a mystery. Rumor had it that Kmart was after some of the lots. A month went by and then two Haley wondered if they would soon be overrun by national chain stores. Goodbye main Street. What Haley needed was someone who could sniff out the truth, someone who could peel back the layers of bureaucratic red tape, someone who could figure out who was behind XNA. This was a job for Wayne's top gun, C. J. Carra Margin, reporter for the Wood River Journal, and he was just a bulldog at at going after the stories and uh he did some really outstanding work for a you know, small town newspaper. Carra Margin worked the phones and came to an unlikely suspect, a guy named Joe McAllister, a relatively recent transplant to the area. McAllister was behind x Nay for what purpose, care Margin wasn't quite sure, but the acquisitions were definitely newsworthy. Someone was looking to invest in Haley in a big way. The denizens of Haley were talking. It was the kind of diner and coffee shop talk that the town hadn't enjoyed since Bruce Willis bought a home there a few years prior. Willis's private home was in the housing subdivision known as the Flying Heart Ranch. Flying Heart Ranch was a place between two mountains. A river literally ran through it. With his wife Demi Moore and a growing family. Willis had escaped to Haley to avoid the spotlight cast on the mega famous Willis was a huge star thanks to a hit detective show, Moonlighting and then the die Hard films. So a quiet house in the mountains to get away from it all. Who doesn't want that? He was just outside of town. You know, I'm not quite sure i'd called her mansion, but he probably was was close to one. And I've never been one whose star struck. I wouldn't walk across the street commutic as movie star. But I liked his uh TV series bood Lighting. I love die Hard and some of these other movies at all. Bruce Willis this year, that's kind of fun. He wasn't in the news much for a couple of years. He just was living there now. Reporter c J. Carra Margin was on the trail of Haley's next big story, the XNA property grab, but Joe McAllister was elusive. He wouldn't say much of anything. Then Cara Margin noticed something something big. C J. Uh, you got some paperwork on Xnay and noticed that there was a mailing address attached to the company, and he did a little uh research and realized that the the address for the company was the same post office box that the Willis's head. So you know, put two and two together and you got a pretty solid for there. Bruce Willis was the one on the spending spree. This was unusual. Sun Valley definitely attracted celebrities, some of whom bought seasonal or permanent homes in the area. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a place nearby, so did Clint Eastwood. But that's all they did. They bought homes, old bars, not empty lots, not vacant drug stores. So what exactly was Willis doing? Carr Margin tried to dig deeper, but he couldn't get anywhere, couldn't breach the wall of silence surrounding Haley's most famous resident. Then suddenly he didn't have to. Dan gorm got a call. He was the papers editor and publisher. Carr Margin's phone rang two. It was Bruce Willis, But instead of explaining what he was doing, he tried to get them to lay off the story, to brush aside the fact that Bruce Willis was becoming Haley's premier real estate investor. The Wood River Journal wasn't going to do that. Bruce Willis, once a quiet resident of Haley, was now suddenly in probably a developer. Not only that he had an entire company devoted to his business interests in Haley, a company that had seemingly materialized out of nowhere, and he had a growing staff attending to all of it. It had been happening right under Haley's collective knows Willis did let a few things slip out. He told Gorham he didn't want to live his life in the public eye, that he had moved to Haley to avoid exactly that. Willis also told Gorham that while he understood the interest, he didn't want to be price gouged by sellers who had built the movie Star. However, you know, he was buying properties right on Main Street, and he was going to have to go to the Planning and Zoning Commission and the city Council for you know, for any kind of approval. So, uh we failed. It was our duty, our journalistic responsibility to let our readers know exactly who was buying property on Main Street. And uh, I think he was less than happy with us over that. Willis and the Wood River Journal would soon have a dust up that made the carra Margin incident seem quaint in comparison. It makes you wonder what exactly happened to Bruce Willis that made him so reluctant to deal with the press, and why was he so insistent on Hailey's reporters staying out of his business. There's an answer, maybe not the answer, but an answer nonetheless, and it involves Tom Hanks being just a little bit of a jerk. A couple of years before Willis began what would grow into a love affair with Haley, he had already decided he wasn't going to be overly cooperative with the press. Stardom had put him in the sights of the tabloids. Reporters seemed to want to know who he was sleeping with, not who he'd be working with. His transition from being anonymous to famous had happened virtually overnight. Once Moonlighting premiered in March nineteen five. The show was a hit, but Bruce seemed completely unprepared for the scrutiny that accompanied being a successful actor. The media had made a big deal of his relationship with Sybil Shephard, his Moonlighting co star. Moonlighting Wars Jealous set turns into battleground. That kind of thing. The rumors sold papers and magazines. Willis estimated he was on a tabloid cover at least once a week. People enjoyed reading about Bruce Wood Willis being a jerk, even if virtually all of it was embellished or made up. Bruce Willis's shocking arrest, the untold story Bruce Willis and X rated actress Bruce Willis and Miami Weis Galley in new romance Pals warn He'll break your heart. Rather than cope with the press, it became easier to ignore it. He felt the media sometimes made actors a target, that there was a certain time when it became someone's turn to be cut down a peg. For Willis, it came with Hudson Hawk, a crime caper musical he released. In That's Right, a musical starring Bruce Willis, Willis played a cat burglar who enjoyed a little singing during his art heists. Willis helped conceive of the story and even helped write the theme song. His producer was Joel Silver, who had made Willis a box office star with the die Hard Films, and Willis loved shooting the movie mostly because while on location in Hungary, no one really knew who he was. But the director, Michael Lehman, complained that his ideas would be challenged or vetoed by Willis, who wielded so much influence in Hollywood that even a director would have to defer to him. At one point, Willis insisted his character Hudson Hawk needed a pet monkey named Little Eddie. No one else really wanted the movie to have a monkey, but Willis wouldn't let it go, so producers decided that Willis's character Hudson had a monkey past tense. The monkey was never shown on camera because it turns out Little Eddie had been murdered while Hudson was in prison, So yeah, you couldn't maybe see where this might be going. One source on set said that Willis thought he was making a hip MTV style movie, but it was really more of an homage to the fast talking caper comedies of the nineteen forties. He had trouble describing it in interviews. It was, he said, a film that needed to be experienced more than explained. Yo, did I miss anything? Gates dries a blackmail me. You asked me, did I miss anything Gates. Gates killed you say, did I miss anything? I bet you? Going up to Mrs Lincoln at the Fourth Theater said how is the show? Did I miss anything? No one felt like they missed anything With Hudson Hawk, critics were unkind It flopped at the box office, making just seventeen million dollars against a fifty million dollar budget. Today it has a score of just thirty three on Rotten Tomatoes. To Willis, it seemed like there had been a concerted effort by the media to curb his start um. It would happen with Kevin Costner and water World and to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero. The press seemed to relish those moments, and Willis resented them for it. They'd cut him before too, during the fallout from The Bonfire of the Vanities. The film released in starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Willis, all three of them actors at the top of their games. Seemed like a recipe for a hit. Bonfire was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel about greed and corruption among the powerful and protected class in New York's high society. Willis played Peter Fallow, a predatory tabloid reporter, a not very subtle jab at his adversaries in the press. When Willis was asked why he took the part, he'd shoot back, why do you think, Oh, excuse me, I have introduced myself, have I? My name is Peter Fallow. I'm a writer. But you know that already. Unless you haven't read a newspaper or seen a television in the last few months, you know exactly who I had. But despite how well regarded the novel was, some people considered it too complex to be adapted. They warned it might even be unfilmable, and it looks like they were right. The film was a disappointment, blown out of the water during the holiday season by Home Alone. To be fair, every movie was blown out by Home Alone, but still it was a black mark for all involved, and Willis was no exception. But he had reason to regret the film beyond its box office. The movie's director, Brian de Palmer, had allowed a journalist named Julie Salomon, unprecedented access to observe the production from casting to release. It was an opportunity Nitty rarely afforded to the media, because well filmmaking can be messy. Salmon got to see it all and report on it all, all the creative tension, all the tumultuous exchanges. Salomon even captured a moment between Willis and Hanks, who were both watching playback of a scene on a monitor. Hanks, with some apparent glee in his voice, made a show of pointing out when Willis smirked in the scene. It was the same smirk that had made him such a hit in Moonlighting and die Hard and in other films. Hanks playfully pointed it out there. It is that big sing Gren, he said. It was not very Tom Hanks thing to say. A brooding Willis said nothing. Smirk was a Willis trademark. It was sacra sanct Tom Hanks was reducing it to a crutch. Salomon's book was released in nine It was titled The Devil's Candy, A great book. The Bonfire the Vanities had become a bad movie, and thanks to Salomon, a bad movie had inspired a pretty good book. It was well received by most everyone except Willis. He hated the fact Salmon had observed him, had criticized him. He hadn't even granted her an interview, and he still got bad press. If he was pressed shy before Salomon may have made him press loathing, Hollywood loathing. Even when he consented to an interview, he usually regretted it, and so did the journalist. A thousand its views, and I would say, there's a handful four or five that were just a complete nightmare. Bruce was one of those nightmares. That's Martha Frankel. Martha writes books now, but in the nine nineties she was focused on entertainment journalism and she was good at it. She wasn't fawning, she wasn't insulting either. She was just doing her job, and she laid out what she perceived as a mutually beneficial transaction. I used to say this one when I would sit down with somebody, I'd say, listen, here's how it works. I'm getting paid five grand. You're getting paid five million. My job to make you seem even cooler than you are. Some more people go and you can make six million next time. So let's just have a conversation. This is what I would say. And most people were like, that sounds great. Bruce Willis did not think it sounded great. When Movieline Magazine sent Frankel to interview Willis in Europe. In it was the beginning of one of the most torturous experiences of Frankel's professional career. And I went to England to do a story about him, and like, I thought we were going to be like, you know, it was gonna be cool. We had this history, and you know, we knew a lot of people in common and a lot of my friends of Kiss directors and actors. And he wanted no part of that. He didn't want to talk about it. He wanted no part of it. I was in a spa in Windsor waiting for him, supposed to be there one night. I was there for nine Frankel stood vigil as Willis seemed to weigh whether or not he really wanted to be interviewed. I had the two bitchest editors in magazine history, so they would spend fortune sending you around the world in the hope that you hated your subject. So I mean I kept calling them every day and saying, I don't think this interview is happening. I think I should come home, and they were like, nope, you're staying because even if you never get to interview, and that will be the story Martha persisted, tried different tactics to appeal to Bruce. It was raining, pouring, and there was no good food to eat, and I was stuck in the spa. I mean all I did was swim, so and every day I would write to him and say, let's do it today, Let's do it today. And I had some funny ideas. I thought, you know, he has a big entourage. He always had a very big entourage. And I was there all alone. So I said, why don't we just sit down me, you and your people will play poker for an hour, the interview will be over. It'll be a great interview. You know, I'll make you sound even funnier than you are. He said, no, we have a lot of people in common. I don't want to talk about that. So we really were at odds. Finally, after well over a week, Willis agreed to meet when I do an interview on somebody. I watched everything, and so when I went to meet Bruce, I had seen all the clunkers and all the good stuff. You know, the die Hard movies are fantastic to watch. They take you to a place you've never been before. And so he wanted to talk to him about that, and he didn't want to talk about that. He didn't really want to talk about anything, which is funny after you've waited nine days in a spa in Windsor. I did the interview and he made them shut down the restaurant in the hotel, and then he like, oh, it's just a dragon. He wasn't fun and he wasn't funny, and I know he's all of those things. You know, I had seen him in action. I know he can be that. He was, you know, very serious, and he just kept telling me how you know, Hudson Hawk was a great movie and this one. I was like, Bruce, you know I saw it. You can't convince me of that. And it was really one of the first interviews that I just put it into the story and said, I didn't like this guy. He didn't like me. We didn't have fun. Willis was touchy and evasive. He kept asking her to turn off the tape recorder for him to explain what went wrong with Hudson Hawk, as though there had been potential for anything to go right with Hudson Hawk. Naturally, Frankel's editors at movie Line loved it. They weren't unhappy that it went like that. I mean, I was because I want to light the people I interview, I want them to do well. I want to root for them, and there was no way I could root for Bruce will Say. After this, four months and years afterward, people would approach Frankel with the idea that she and Willis were rivals, enemies. They wanted her to talk about what a jerk Bruce Willis was poked and prodded on. She'd sometimes indulged them. He had, after all, kept her waiting for nine days and then stonewalled her, and there was something else that bothered her. So I was already annoyed at him when he walked in. And then he made them shut the restaurant. He made them shut it down for two hours during dinner service so that nobody would come over for his autograph. And then he didn't throw three hundred bucks on the table for the waiter, so I did. So I was already like, this is not okay. You know, I want rich people to be more generous than not rich people. And Bruce, okay, he wants the restaurant close. I get it. Then pay the guy for the two hours that he missed. He didn't have that attitude, So we were really at hots But you know, it was the best think. He walked in and out of that hotel and nobody said a word to if nobody recognized him. So it's kind of important this part, because even when people weren't looking at Bruce Willis, he could feel eyes on him. He felt the need to get away, felt the need to keep to himself. All of that would fuel what would happen in Haley when journalists plowed forward. Well, that's when Haley was exposed to another side of Bruce Willis, the one where he's most definitely not smirking. When word of Willis's real estate acquisitions got out, a lot of Haley residents were excited by the possibilities. There hadn't been any radical changes to Haley in decades. Some people thought Haley's buildings were quaint, others thought quaint was just another word for old decrepit. Now someone with a singular vision was snapping up properties and professing his love for the town. It was like having a benefactor, or, as one columnist put it, Haley had found a sugar daddy. A few people had some fun with it. A local high school paper ran a cartoon that depicted main Street as Planet Haleywood, a nod to Willis's involvement in the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise. Another paper, the Idaho Mountain Express, ran in editorial that cheekily suggested Willis should just buy the entire town as a holiday present to himself. That got the papers publisher an angry phone call. Willis did sometimes talk to the press, but he usually had to be angry. First. Things came to a head on that front when the Wood River Journal ran a story that Bruce Willis didn't care for not a bet. We did a story, and I can't remember the exact year, but I've been there for several years by then. We again, editor of the Wood River Journal. The Forest Service would lease uh land to private individuals. They've been doing it for decades. It was right on a lake, I think it was red Fish, like a big, beautiful natural lake. But somehow Willis got one of these leases and he built a really nice home on the right on the lake. This was another Willis property and escape a little further up the road from his escape. And we were doing a story because there was a lot of discussion in Washington. They wanted to drastically increase the prices that people had to pay for these leases. Bruce Willis, I'm sure it didn't bleeve twice about a price height, but the normal people and they were concerned about it. So the Wood River Journal wrote about it. We did an article about the about the proposal to increase the lease rates up there, and we took a picture of the outside of Bruce Willis's house and we published it. We didn't identify it as Bruce Willis's place. We just used it to show that these were not all just tar paper shacks up there where. There was some really nice, high end residences up there, of which this one was by far the nicest. The cabin could have been anyone's. There were a total of twenty three cabin owners who leased property at Pettit Lake on the Forest Service land, including Willis. There was nothing about his cabin that was demonstrably Willis esque. His name wasn't on a plaque out front or anything. But Bruce Willis stormed into the offices of the Journal, angry his privacy had been violated. He was enraged the fact that we didn't identify it. Um didn't assuage the matter whatsoever and what little advertising he did with us he canceled. I'm sure he if you asked him today, he would, you know, still have a chip on his should about it. I know what you're thinking, What did Bruce Willis need to advertise in the Wood River Journal. It's coming promise, but for now the Wood River Journal had broken its unspoken vow to protect its famous residence. Of course, losing any advertising is something that you don't want to have happened. But you have to have journalistic integrity. And if if, uh, somebody wants to cancel their advertising because of a story you did, if it's a story that was solid and it's a story you stand by, it's sorry you feel that way, Better luck next time. Willis also phoned reporter c. J. Carra Margin and said something pretty strange. Willis said that he heard the reporter had quote a vendetta against him, like they were feuding families in The Godfather. But Cara Margin argued he was just doing his job, just digging up information that was in the public interest, information like just what exactly Bruce Willis was planning for Haley. No one had a vendetta against Willis. He was investing in real estate and leasing federal land. Bruce Willis seemed to take reporting on his public activities very, very personally and with a dramatic flare. The tension became almost operatic, like Willis wasn't being reported on for business ventures so much as being besieged by goons out of die Hard. But Haley residents were mostly on Willis's side. He wasn't just snapping up properties. He was investing in the community too. Willis and more made donations to a local group advocating for victims of domestic violence. He donated to the local library and the Little League. One winter, when Haley seemed as though it might be overrun by snow, he donated snowblowers to the town. There was a real philanthropy in what Willis was doing. He was community minded in many ways. He was very generous in many ways, and uh I admired him for that. Haley was his hometown, now his escape. He could spend up to six months out of the year or more recuperating from the demands of stardom. No one in hay Haley asked Bruce Willis for his autograph. Sometimes city officials would float his name in political circles. Willis, they said, should consider running for mayor. Hey, there was precedent. Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel by the Sea in California in the nineteen eighties. But Willis wasn't about to run for office. What he wanted was to build up Haley more discreetly, and that's what Wayne A. Dare C J. Carre Margin and the town of Haley would soon realize. For Willis, there seemed to be appeal in treating Haley like a big, fresh, unpainted canvas. He was here for that final brush stroke. He had come to get away from it all, But in doing so, he realized he didn't necessarily want to get away from it all, just the parts he disliked, the unwanted attention, the insecure Hollywood types. At some point Willis might have realized he could start painting that canvas in his own image. The Willis effect was coming like a tidal wave, and with it would come some good things like prosperity and culture and movie stars. But there was always a sense that what Bruce Willis giveth, Bruce Willis could also taketh away. In Willis opened an office and retail complex that he dubbed the E. G. Willis Building after his grandfather Willis had bought the building, renovated it, and then least out space to a jeweler of furniture store and others. It was a pretty standard developer move, nothing too flashy. Nonetheless, Entertainment Tonight came out to cover the grand opening. One of the existing occupants of the E. G. Willis Building was the gang at the Wood River Journal. He bought the building that we were in. We were in the building before he owned it. He purchased it, and you weren't sure what was gonna happen. Dad gorm wrote an editorial about the odd situation. I remember I put a headline on the editorial it's hit Bruce Willis stars as quote the landlord, and uh, we were trying to make a little bit light of the situation. When the lease for the Journal expired, Willis's company didn't renew it, Wayne and Dair C. J. Carr Margin and the rest of the crew would have to move. We ultimately had to move, But I don't think it was I don't think he was any animosity towards us that to end our lease. It worked out fine because we got a better office in a bigger office just half a block away. So all's well, that end well. It was clear Willis wasn't overjoyed with the Journal, but who could complain When he did make a move, Like with the E. G. Willis Building, he put dozens of trades people to work for years at a time, carpenters, bricklayers. Haley was beginning to radiate with the glow of a movie stars affection. It was Hudson Hawk all over again, where Willis could have almost complete control. But thanks to his infamous press silence, no one knew what else Bruce Willis was planning for Haley, or that it would soon grow to include secret rooms, a clandestine security force, and car chases. Not movie car chases, but the real thing. This season on Haleywood, Bruce kind of thought that he would have the same effect as he would in New Jersey, and of course that wasn't true at all. It was just a whole different world, cowboy country. You know, you're getting out in the real West. He was flying a G two arm in arm with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was also flying a G two, and he would fly in at two o'clock in the morning, and I mean that woke you up. And there was this Victorian house Bruce Willis had bought for Tony Moore at that point to house or doll collection of course, Bruce and get up. There was a while it's harmonic and try to ruin it all. I'm just kidding, but I'm not a big lover of that kind of musy. Then something went sour and it was like, boy, biggo sour with Willis, You're likely to lose. He looked roughed up Fara and he said they smashed my equipment. Roughed me up, said they told me to get the hell out of town. Mr Willis doesn't like your newspaper type people are out here. You don't want to come into Mr Willis's town. Haleywood is hosted by Danish Woods. This show is written by Jake Ross, editing, sound design and mixing by me Josh Fisher, Additional editing by Mary Doo, Original music by Natasha Jacobs, mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Jake Rosson, Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quentinia Our Senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer is Jason English. Special thanks to the people of Hailey, Idaho and all those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of I Heart Radio Until Next Time.