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Celebs have helped raise $200M in past 3
months
By Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY
They came quietly. No screaming fans. No
press. No limos. Jack Nicholson. Julia Roberts. Bruce Springsteen.
And more. Four dozen of the biggest stars in show business gathered
in New York and Los Angeles just 10 days after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks for what would be the most successful fundraising
event ever. In two hours, $150 million was pledged during the
America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon. "It was very powerful,"
remembers Tom Cruise. "There was such a sense of community, people
wanting to help out."
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Giving to 9/11 funds has reached $1.4
billion, says Daniel Borochoff, president of The American Institute
of Philanthropy. By USA TODAY estimates, at least $200 million of
that has been raised by celebrities in the past three months — about
as much as the March of Dimes raised all of last year.
Stars and charity always have gone together,
big-name celebrities using their clout and means to help those less
fortunate. But today the two are linked more than ever, as the
charity world has evolved into a big business in Hollywood. A look
behind the scenes shows that:
• Having a star at a fundraising event will
almost guarantee more money for a charity's coffers, sometimes
boosting the take by fivefold or more.
• Stars can earn $15,000 to $250,000
performing at a charity benefit. And even if they don't get paid to
perform, it's common practice to cover all their expenses —
first-class airfare for two, first-class hotel,
limo and meals.
• Third parties — agents and outside
celebrity/charity matching companies — also pull down fees, often in
the thousands of dollars, when they broker a deal to match a star
with a charity event.
• Private foundations are increasingly
popular with stars, who can benefit by putting tax-deductible
donations into the foundation, but by law only have to disburse 5%
of the foundation's funds in a given year.
For Will Smith, charitable giving is almost
genetic. "My grandmother, for her entire life, was doing what's
called tithing, a certain percentage of your money that you give
away," he says. "So Jada (Pinkett, his wife) and I just established
a foundation to give away a percentage of our income every year."
It's a way, he says, "to give back."
Philanthropy has always been a way for stars
to "give back."
Carole Lombard died a hero at age 33 soon
after the start of World War II when her plane crashed on the way
home from a tour in which she had sold a record $2.1 million in
defense bonds. Paul Newman has spent two decades selling salad
dressing and other foods to benefit sick kids.
Jerry Lewis has worked and wept every Labor
Day weekend to rack up dollars for muscular dystrophy. Elizabeth
Taylor threw dinner parties for AIDS at a time when most of her
guests were scared to even talk about it. And the Live Aid concert
organized by Bob Geldof in July 1985 set a new standard for star
charity power as it brought together stars for a 16-hour concert
that raised $100 million for Ethiopian famine relief.
The world of philanthropy has come to realize
that getting even one famous name connected to a cause can bring in
big money.
"I used to do all kinds of charity events,"
says longtime Grammy show producer Pierre Cossette. "Now I've stayed
away from it because it's a business. They'll pay a star $100,000
and build a charity around it and take in $1 million instead of
$200,000, so they're way ahead."
Cossette hasn't stayed completely away,
however. He helped raise just under $1 million at a star-studded
gala in November.
Says Bette Midler, who was at that event:
"The number of charities and charitable events has absolutely
mushroomed beyond all belief. There's hardly any social life anymore
outside of that. In this town, in New York, people go from benefit
to benefit to benefit."
Giving ways
Never underestimate how far some stars will
go for charity. The rapper Coolio, for example, stuck his head in a
tank full of worms and scorpions for the recent TV show Celebrity
Fear Factor. He wound up winning $50,000 for his Heritage Begins
Within group for inner-city kids. "It was fun," he says. "Except for
the bugs."
Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock are two
stars who took a less adventurous path. After 9/11, they simply
wrote a check. For $1 million. Each.
The approaches to giving are almost as varied
as the stars themselves. The cast of The West Wing, for
example, donated their terrorism episode residuals to 9/11 funds.
Jay Leno did his stand-up act for free in Las Vegas to help boost
tourism. And Britney Spears is giving $1 from each ticket of her
current tour to the children of terrorism victims.
Spears probably won't meet the kids who
benefit from that money. But that's not always the case. In August,
she spent a few hours visiting her Britney Spears Camp for the
Performing Arts, held this year on Cape Cod.
Barely through being a kid herself when she
became a multimillionaire — her estimated worth now is $46 million,
says Us magazine — Spears knew she wanted to do something for
kids.
Two years ago, while at a party at Jon Bon
Jovi's house, Spears' manager met Marc Pollick, head of the Giving
Back Fund, a Boston-based company that will set up a foundation in
your name and charge 1% to 5% of its assets to oversee it.
Spears and 'N Sync's Justin Timberlake, her
boyfriend, both have private foundations housed there. The
California Community Foundation is another such umbrella group,
overseeing the Angelina Jolie Foundation, the Ella Fitzgerald
Charitable Fund, the Jamie Lee Curtis & Christopher Guest Foundation
and the Jamie Foxx Foundation, among others. In this arrangement,
stars are not required to reveal how much money is in them or how
it's being disbursed.
But it was in Spears' best interest to show
how she's spending some of her money. Having been criticized for her
sexual persona and for not being a good role model, suddenly Spears
was seen doing something positive for kids.
Not every charity has Spears-like star power.
But having a star does help attract media and big givers. So how can
fundraisers find stars?
They can contact someone such as Norby Walters, a
retired agent who still has a hefty Rolodex and runs a weekly poker
game that keeps him connected. Walters might call Rod Steiger, for
example, and ask him to help out a charity by showing up.
"Guests are happy to see a dozen or 15
celebrities mingling with them and being right there where they can
walk up to them. 'Mr. Steiger, Charlie Bronson, I love your work.'
They're happy they gave $2,000 to the cause," Walters says.
Or a charity can call a big agency, such as
William Morris, and ask for a star. If the charity gets lucky, the
star will charge a discounted fee or no fee at all. In most cases,
any such fees are paid by corporate sponsors or private
underwriters, not the charity itself.
Bottom line: Unless you have connections, it
will probably cost you. Someone such as Jennifer Lopez could command
as much as $250,000, says Rita Tateel, president of Celebrity
Source, a company dedicated to matching stars with causes. A
Caroline Rhea or Carol Channing will cost $15,000. Tateel's starting
fee: $5,000.
Want Marc Anthony to sing at your benefit?
Plan on shelling out $50,000. That's what Anthony wanted to appear
at the Heart Fund's annual Los Angeles benefit, says the fund's
president, Mark Litman. Instead, Litman got Dana Carvey, who had a
vested interest — he had a double bypass surgery in 1998. Carvey
didn't charge a dime.
Joe Piscopo has done so many charity
appearances since his Saturday Night Live exit that he's now
working on a movie in which he plays the main character, Joey
Beneficio, or Joey Benefit. "He just can't say no," explains Piscopo,
who says that in real life he could "do three a week" if he said yes
to all the invitations he receives.
He says the NFL puts on "the classiest" golf
tournament — sports events being a popular charity gig these days.
In return, Piscopo says, he got $10,000 for his own charity, the
Positive Impact Foundation, a New Jersey-based group targeting
at-risk kids.
Following the cash
Because the charity world revolves around
money, one of the areas that receives the most scrutiny is how cash
is handled — from those who chair the fund to how the money gets
doled out.
Heading a foundation can be lucrative.
Margery Tabankin, director of Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons
Foundation, for example, receives a salary of $150,000 — and an
additional $50,000 in her role as director of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation.
There is no rule on how much a private
foundation director can make; only on how much the foundation must
give out — 5% of its assets each year. Watchdog groups such as the
Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance expect public
charities — which solicit money from donors and are treated
differently than foundations by the IRS- to spend at least half
their revenues on program services.
Some charities do this better than others.
The Elton John AIDS Foundation, for example, spent 81% of its $2.2
million on program services in 2000. Conversely, actress Holly
Robinson Peete's HollyRod Foundation, which she founded with husband
Rodney Peete, a former NFL quarterback, spent only 6% of the
$184,000 it raised in 1999 on its mission.
Michael Douglas, in his latest IRS filing
(just posted at thesmokinggun.com), notes that his foundation
lost nearly $1 million through stock trades, posting a net loss of
$204,855 despite nearly $700,000 in contributions.
And Tom Clancy's intentions to do good
recently went bad. In 1992, he established the Kyle Foundation to
start an online health information network for families of
terminally ill children. In seven years, the foundation collected $7
million and spent all but $700,000 of it on salaries, travel,
fundraising and furniture. The director was fired.
No one got a dime, not even expenses, for the
Tribute to Heroes telethon, says the producer, Joel Gallen.
It was all donated.
"Everything from production assistants, to
the crew, to telephone lines, to equipment, to food. People said, 'I
can't get there, can you get me a flight?' I said no. We sent no
cars. There was no hair and makeup. Well, there were if people
wanted a touch up — but they donated their time, too."
The O'Reilly factor
Still, not everyone was impressed. Fox News'
Bill O'Reilly started a controversy by saying that stars who were
involved in the telethon had a responsibility to follow through, to
see that the money gets to those in need.
"Don't (stars) have an obligation to put
pressure on the charities to do what they said they were going to
do?" O'Reilly asked on the air.
George Clooney, one of the organizers of the
telethon's phone bank, was so irked by O'Reilly that he called the
United Way to be reassured by chairman Franklin Thomas that the
money was being disbursed as promised.
But Bennett Weiner, chief operating officer
of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, says stars need to be responsible.
"They need to recognize that the potential impact of their
involvement is not only the goodwill they'll gain, but also the
tarnish they may receive if the activity is not handled well."
Contributing: Anthony DeBarros and Jon
Saraceno |
