Episode 8: Until Further Notice

security team. They appear to be visibly angry. Their anger is being directed at two men. Officer Jones doesn't recognize. One of those men is holding a camera. Officer Jones squeezes himself in between the two parties. He take one of the strangers aside and asks him what's going on. The man identifies himself as Keith. Standing nearby is his partner, Brian.

The two had been deployed to Haley to film a segment for the cable channel i f C. They're reporting on Bruce Willis's business dealings in the area, and so far it's not going great. Brian will counts what happened before Officer Jones arrived. They were filming from their car when two men in a silver vehicle began following them. When Brian and Keith pulled over, the car circled the block and then pulled over right behind them. That was weird, but it got weirder when Brian and Keith drove to

the Liberty Theater. The car followed them. As Brian and Keith got out and began to film, some of the men ran up and tried to wrestle away their camera. In the police report, Brian said one of the men had insisted he was a licensed security officer who had a right to quote obtain them. So the security officer wasn't a stickler for the English language, but he still felt entitled to approach the filmmakers and attempt to confiscate

their equipment. When questioned, the security guys said they were responsible for protecting Bruce Willis's properties from what from anything? Even Cable channels Officer Jones referees the situation for a bit before sending the filmmakers in one direction and the locals in the other. Jones tells the filmmakers that the security men have promised not to follow them out of Haley how reassuring. As strange as it sounds, this wasn't

an isolated occurrence. Leash Lender, a lawyer practicing in Haley, recalls that another journalist had once run into his office obviously distraught. He said, when I got out of my car down downtown on Main Street, a couple of guys gave up to me and said get out of here with those cameras. Mr Willis doesn't like your newspaper type people are out here. He was incredulous. I said, well, what's this all about. I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, he said that happened, and I said, oh,

come on, he said it yeah. I said, well, why don't you do this, Why don't you go down there and drag your coming out and just stand around and see what happens and then come back and tell me because I didn't believe it. Well, he came back and about it. It It couldn't have been twenty minutes. He looked roughed up to her up and he said, they smashed my equipment, rough me up, but they told me to

get the hell out of town. And he wrote a big piece of about it, and it was in one of your new York newspapers and the Eddie Know What was something like, um, you don't want to come into Mr Willis's town. Mr Willis's town. Like everyone else, Lee thought he was living in Haley. So what exactly was Bruce Willis trying to hide? And why had the town of Haley suddenly become an impenetrable fortress where security idly attacked anyone asking questions? Wasn't this idyllic Haleywood? Well? It was,

but not for much longer. For I Heart Radio. This is Haleywood and I heart original podcast. I'm your host Danish Schwartz, and this is our final episode. Until for their notice, it had all been so simple. A year prior, when Haley was still in the throes of being Bruce Willis's pet town. His band Jammed at the Mint Shorties was serving up eggs well into the night. The Liberty

was putting on plays and hosting movie premieres. The E. G. Willis Building was home to businesses and retail office space. Willis even owned a ski mountain, and after abandoning plans to resurrect his hometown of penns Grove, New Jersey, Haley was once again the sole object of his affections. Things

couldn't be better on the surface anyway. Beneath the flashing marquees of the Mint and the Liberty, there were whispers that things weren't going so well, that despite appearances, Willis's businesses were falling victim to mismanagement, that Willis himself was not quite the hands on boss he needed to be because he was busy being a huge movie star. Bruno was no longer minding the store. The first crack in the veneer came at Shorty's, the casual diner Willis had

put up in for two years. The place had been the premier greasy spoon in town. Hub Caps lined one of its walls and the jukebox blare tunes from the fifties while patrons eight burghers and fries. Then in the spring of Willis stormed in with a message, everyone was fired, go home. The words hit employees between the eyes in classic Willis fashion. There was no explanation offered. One day Shorty's was rocking out, the next it was shuttered. The

Mint was next that winter. In spring, people walking by were surprised to see a notice posted on its doors, closed for slack. It read slack is the regional phrase used for the decrease in business when it's too warm for skiing but too cold for summer tourism. Some businesses were seasonal just to avoid slack, but the Mint had never been a tourist dependent destination. It was a rock and roll joint. To some Haley locals, closed for slack

rang false. It was too pat too easy. It was a little foreboding, and sure enough there was another wave of layoffs. The Mint staff got pink slips and no indication of when or if they'd be asked to come back. Willis's big plans were put on hold. Two He'd had buildings earmarked for a recreation center for fitness and other pursuits, but those projects sold. Plans for a Willis owned hotel

went by the wayside. The offices of Valley Entertainment, his local company handling Haley business, put up black sheets on its windows, blocking out all natural light. Doesn't exactly scream hey, we're in business. He even stopped paying for the annual Fourth of July fireworks show. Only the Liberty remained fully open.

It's still played Bruce Willis and Demi Moore movies and Moore's Victorian house was still stocked with two thousand dollars, but locals who drove by the local airport, craning their necks looking for Willis's private jet, were claiming they weren't seeing it. As often the slack excuse was tossed around. People thought that the businesses would rebound when the tourists came back, except in the winter of and into when you'd expect the Mint and shorties to open their doors,

they didn't, not for long, anyway. The Mint reopened, but only briefly. Vacant spaces in the E. G. Willis Building remained vacant, and that's when Haley began to think something was a miss in Haleywood. At first, it was just the local press who peppered employees at Willis's Valley Entertainment with questions. Mostly they got the brush off. Willis, they said, was a fixture of Haley and would remain so he wasn't going anywhere. But if he wasn't going anywhere, why

were his businesses locked up? And why did anyone outside of town looking for answers get followed, harassed or confronted and told to leave? What is it? They were afraid of someone finding out. As the months went on and Willis remained silent, the national entertainment media began to pay attention to the story about the movie star who had swept Haley off its feet, only to leave it at the altar. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you everything

that happened. One of the first journalists to head out to Haley was Nancy Rammelman. So I had gone from my first story for bonap a team magazine. Um, I guess in like the well, I don't know, winter of nineties seven or something like that, I can't remember. And when I was there, um, a lot of people were talking about Bruce Willison Haley, and you know, he'd come and maybe he wasn't there anymore, and it was just

sort of like a topic of conversation. Roman also wrote for l A Weekly, a well respected and influential newspaper that covered a lot of Hollywood stories. It was full of fists up, no old barred kind of journalism. So when his back in l A, I was talking to my editors at the l A Weekly, and he said, Nancy, don't you think that's a story. So I did. I went out to Haley probably about eight months after I

had been there originally and reported on the ground. So there was Nancy approaching Haley residence about the sudden disappearance of their benefactor. Some seemed agitated, cautious, like they were afraid of something or someone. But Nancy was used to getting reticent people to talk. She's a real pro. I happen to do stories that sometimes they're around really difficult topics.

I wrote a book a couple of years ago, called to the Bridge, about a woman that threw you know, children off a bridge and killed one of them life. I interviewed John Wayne Gacy like I'm used to walking into places where you're not just asking like how's the grilled cheese today? Turns out it's somewhat easier to talk to people about John Wayne Gayzy than about Bruce Willis. When Nancy arrived in Healey, she found a fair amount of Willis apologists, still in awe and weary of criticizing him. Like,

think about it. You've lived in this town or maybe fifteen years, maybe your whole life, maybe generations of your family have lived there, and all of a sudden, there's a movie star that comes and says, I want to be part of this community. Well, you're gonna take them at face value, right, And this is pretty exciting in a sense. I mean you you can't help but be sort of starstruck. So I think people really want it to appreciate that. And of course there's you know, the

reflective sunshine. You'd go home and you say, oh my god, I saw to me in the store today with your girls. They were buying tuna fish. I was buying tuna fish too. You know. It's it's sort of like maybe you're having this shared experience, but in reality, or at least the way it turned out in this case, you really weren't. Nancy said that many of Haley's denizens were also fed up. I would say the majority of people I spoke with,

and this could be the case. Just like we know from you know, Twitter or yelp, unhappy people like to complain. So I think I did get my share of sort of unhappy people. Uh. Speaking in the in the article too, one resident who went unnamed, said Haley was quote a definite case of before and after, like you see in those magazine ads for plastic surgery, and it was Willis wielding the scalpel at least, Nancy wasn't followed in her car like the filmmakers who'd run out of town earlier. No,

but I was told to be careful about that. Now, well, you know, I just have to highly doubt there was a squad of Willis informants. But you know what there could have been the you know, the people like hey, my pal, Hey, you know, listen to me a favor, like, you know, just keep an eye out, you know, we want to keep this kind of private. Like you know, if you think, if you see that someone's around her sniffing round, just let me know. It's like something like

if you're in good Fellows or something. It's like, oh, you know, the guy likes me, I better like I better do maybe what he wants. I have no idea. This is completely you know, conjecture. And the informants or security guys or whatever they were hadn't just accosted Brian and Keith, the duo from the i f C. Andrew Gumbel, a reporter for The Independent out of England, was also followed in his car, this time by two car loads full of supposed surveillance experts. They refused to offer him

any explanation. Why he was being tracked and photographed as he weaved through town. When Gumble lagged down a police officer, they ran the license plates of his pursuers, and that's when speculation about the motives of these men turned into fact. The plates were registered to Bruce Willis. A security detail had set themselves up as a century around Haley, warding

off anyone posing uncomfortable questions. Brian and Keith had been lucky to leave town with their footage escaping like two journalists evading a banana republic in a foreign country, but the i f C chose not to air it, preferring not to risk angering Willis. When journalists left town, they left without an answer. Willis wasn't talking, but he hadn't disappeared. Just the opposite, Bruce Willis was about to make a

rather dramatic reappearance in Haley. It's September of ninety nine, and Willis's movie The Sixth Cens is in theaters across the country. You've probably seen it. It's about the kid who sees dead people. Naturally, it's playing in Haley at the Liberty Theater. Even though Willis had been evasive about his plans for Haley as of late. It's no surprise

his big movie is playing in his opulent theater. What is surprising is that Willis is there, not on screen, but in the flesh, handing out popcorn to bewildered audience members. Willis still owns the Liberty, hasn't given that up, and apparently one of his employees called in sick, so Willis stepped in to hand out concessions. Did anyone ask Willis what his plans were in Haley beyond handing out soft pretzels. It's hard to know, but they had to be wondering, right,

I mean, his other businesses had shuddered. There was a kind of whiplash. It seemed like Willis was done with Hay late until he wasn't. I think it's sort of like when you have a breakup with someone, journalist Nancy Rommelman. Again, let's say you break up with someone but you really still kind of want to be with them, and like you think you're broken up, but there could still be a chance, and then there's the port where you know

there's no chance. Well, they were sort of in between the could be a chance on the no chance stage, like the s He's not coming back, but I think they still sort of wanted to keep a smile on their faces, keep the possibility that they could come back. But it was sort of like not in denial so much.

There was just a little bit of hope still alive, that that they would be coming back, and that maybe, you know, maybe the town had done something wrong, like maybe they hadn't performed exactly well enough, Like what could they have done better to make this work? And I think that's probably the wrong question, um, But if you're these people, then you could understand them asking themselves that The answers came pretty quickly. A few months before Willis

was behind the popcorn counter at the Liberty. He had let go of something else, Shorties, the fifties style diner he had opened three years earlier, after rumors that it might become a pancake joint. It turned out the new operator was a local businessman named Jacob Greenberg, who pledged to keep the fifties aesthetic intact. Pretty soon, other properties were coming up for sale, all will Is owned, all located in Haley or nearby. Catchum, that's when Haley really

started to take notice. This wasn't a trial separation this was a divorce and not Willis his only one. In June, Bruce Willis and Demi More announced their separation after over a decade of marriage. The reasons varied depending on which supermarket news outlet you chose to believe, but in Moore's own words, it was just time. Willis moved into their guesthouse.

More stayed in their home. Eventually, Bruce bought a property ten miles away in nearby Catchum, and suddenly things started to make a bit more sense In Haleywood, Willis had fallen in love with the town around the time he had fallen in love with More. Maybe Haley was the home that once belonged to both of them, and it didn't feel like home to Willis anymore. Maybe it was just cleaner this way. Was this why Haley was being ghosted? Willis, true to his nature, would never say time passed, the

millennium ended without a bank. Gradually, Haley became more of a vacation destination than a full time home for Willis. He played a few dates with his accelerators, but the house he had shared with More seemed to be occupied mostly by More and their kids. Their divorce was finalized in two thousand and so it began for Haley. After over a decade of being Willis's personal project, the town

had to prepare for life without him. There would be no more big movie premiers, no more announcements of Warren buildings being resurrected, no more excitement, no more Haileywood. After reopening a couple of times, the Mint went up for sale. Soldier Mountain was donated to a nonprofit. The liberty went to Company of Fools, the theater group will Is imported from Virginia. Through it all, he never, at least publicly offered a reason why anyone wanting to know was getting

strong armed out of town. But if you talk to an tough people, the answer can be found back where it all started at the Mint. So I moved to New York. I probably had my my jeep stolen, my wallet stone, my passport stolen New York. Even though I'm originally from New York, I grew up in Florida and then moved back to New York. And it it ate me for lunch. In the beginning. Rob Cronin's life in New York City got off to a rough start in the nineties, but as the New head bartender a Planet

Hollywood in Times Square. The job Perks made up for it perfectly. Example, on our grand opening party, at one point, you know, we had the cast of Saturday Night Live sitting at the bar, and you went down and it's like, oh my Adam Sandler, David's Bay, Chris Farley, all those guys who I got to know you better over the years.

Uh there as well. And then the next morning, after the gred opening party, I came and to set the bar up for regular business and Sylvester Stallone was sitting at the bar with we just filled in doing a live feed, and you know, I'm behind the bar just setting up and he was just twenty four year old. Over all of me, it was pretty neat. Pretty soon Rob was commiserating with another bartender, Bruce Willis, who was then a partner in the Planet Hollywood chain, along with

other stars including his then wife Demi Moore. The first time Demi ever came in the restaurant, her plane was delayed. Uh the closing the restaurant down. These three women walk in. I don't I've never seen them before, and I tell them what they're closed, and they asked if they can lurk around, and so I started trying to giving them a little out of tune. And then I looked closer and it was to me in a trench coat and dot Martin boots and her hair pulled back. I hadn't

even recognized her. I was mortified. So I walked back up and said, well, since you owned the place, I guess we could throw yet burger and we became friends after that. She apparently was amused. It made a couple of different magazines where she had said, you know, they didn't even recognize me in my own restaurant, And eventually she introduced me to Bruce. Bruce and Rob were kind of bartender brothers. Bruce knew what that life was like, and pretty soon Rob was moving up the ranks of

Planet Hollywood, opening locations in Chicago and Miami. Willis soon brought Rob to Haley to manage a restaurant Willis was about to open. Originally, it was going to be something simple, a steakhouse, but when Willis turned forty, well some men by convertible, others go bigger. It was it was his birthday weekend when he turned forty, and the famous party planner Colin Calie was in town and he, uh, you know, he and Bruce into me just started talking and uh,

the concept literally changed in an afternoon. Went from you know, a casual locals steakhouse saloon sort of feel to a high end restaurant with a world class nightclub on top. And we turned that around. Unfortunately at Bruce's expense. You know, it was not cheap. The project was. The Mint turned that around from early May until we opened the week of fourth or July with you know, a couple of large,

really well known Bruges bands, Bruce's band. It was the busiest weekend of the year in Haley, between the rodeo and the Fourth of July parade, and it was wild. It was a tall order, but Willis and Cronin made it happen. No expense was spared to open the Mint in a matter of weeks, and it turned out no

expense was spared after it opened either. You know, when you've opened up business and you say you're not worried about it making a profit, that's a real fine line because you especially in the restaurant and bar business, all too quickly and easily that are thin margins. It goes the opposite direction. And that's actually what you know happened

with the Mint. It was it became a monster. Bruce Willis treated the Mint like it was right in the middle of a busy metropolitan area flying in high ticket musical acts. But according to Rob it was not a product market fit. This community was not ready to support uh fifty person cover charge. So, you know, we we get to the point where, you know, all right, or ten dollars ahead and let's packed to joint and try and off set costs with liquor sales, and it just

didn't work. You just don't have the volume in town. You have to to cover that kind of overhead. And by the time you get through it, you know, payroll and payroll, taxes and insurance and all that keeping a ten thousand scriptfort building open even in the highest species, and you're not going to pack it every night. You know, when we first opened it was it was packed, and it was never covering the costs of the high end entertainment.

Was never about getting enough bodies. It was just, you know, once again, just get enough bodies at that initially budgeted cover charge, and the public just wasn't willing to go there. I was the one, you know, in my position, that had to drop the bomb on him that you know, hey, we need two dollars of more some months to cover the bills, primarily pay roll. Willis had always wanted to throw the biggest, best party possible as a bartender in New York, as a TV star in California, and now

as an a list in Idaho. But throwing a bashed night after night is well expensive and unsustainable. In the end, Rob parted ways with the Mint amicably. It was my ending at the Mint a little rough, absolutely, but I've you know, what I've witnessed. It was, you know, maybe the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the intentions were good. They really wanted to be a part of the community and give back, and you know,

showed it with their checkbooks. But in trying to make a small town feel big, Willis had turned Haley not into his own private Idaho, but his own private Hollywood, a tone that ran on Bruce Willis, and suddenly Haley wasn't his getaway. It was his responsibility, and that, more than anything, is why the relationship couldn't last. Other things changed for Willis at the turn of the twenty one century.

He still had a few hits like Since City and a fourth die Hard, but conquering the eighties and nineties had been the zenith of it, all of the career that had gotten started with Seagram's commercials and sparring with Sibyl Shepherd on Moonlighting. Not long after a fifth die Hard was released, in it was called a Good Day to die Hard If you're keeping track, Willis moved on

to another stage of his career. Rather than top lining huge movies, he settled into a role as a familiar face in geezer teasers, a genre of video on demand movies that enlist major movie stars to work for a few days for a lot of money and then sprinkle in their scenes Throughout Willis was in Six movies were released, including Surviving the Game, Midnight in the Switch Grass, Out of Death, Apex, and Cosmic Sin, where he gets to put on a space suit again. This year, Willis even

took one more step towards armchair acting. He licensed his image to a Russian cell phone company for an ad where he's tied to a bomb, but Willis never went near a set. Instead, Willis's deep faked face was superimposed over a standing actor created with more than thirty thousand images for vintage Willis movies like die Hard and The Fifth Element. The man who once only wanted to drive an hour or so from Haley to a movie set now doesn't even have to leave his living room to

appear on screen. Heck, he doesn't even need to get out of bed. Some speculate this process could be the future for all Hollywood actors. In fact, it's a common part of appearance contracts already. The commercial shows an image of Willis, the ideal image of a young, smirking Bruce, the image that was once the face of Hollywood and of Haleywood, the image that once literally overlooked the highway into town, but ultimately one that Haley never really got

to know. In eight nine, just a few years after gold prospector and businessman John Haley laid claim to the land, the town of Hailey, Idaho, was engulfed in fire. A blaze tore through the business district, destroying most of the buildings. Only bare stone walls were left standing. Idaho wasn't even the state yet, but Hailey was resilient. Less than three months after the fire, new buildings began to spring up in their place. A lot of them were just a

single story to save on restoration costs. But the point is if Hailey could do it once, they could do it again. Here's leash Lender. Because of the valley. If you think back it's history of being a mining town, it had always been boom and bust. You know, one day everybody in town, somebody strikes it rich and there's money. Two weeks later they've all packed up and moved on. It was very, very much from that Western motif, which was real. That was the way that the West was.

And so people building big buildings or homes and then just walking away from him not unusual at all. Um, it was a boom and bust society. More than a hundred years later, even after a Bruce Willis sized boom, not much had changed. And he's just he got tired of it. And that's his right if he didn't want it. He doesn't really want to stick around here. Um, it's okay, Well you know we've we've lived here. The people that survived have been through those good and bad times. Four

hundred and twenty five years. The Halif today bears the marks of it's Bruce Willis affair. The Mint is still on Main Street, now owned by developer Paul Conrad and his wife. Jenny. Shorty's is still here too, now operated by Jacob Greenberg's son Josh. So is the Liberty. So is that office building, now owned by someone else, but still referred to as the e G. Willis likely said, through the good and bad, Haley remains. So what do we make of Bruce Willis? Small town citizen with big

time ambitions. He swept Haley off its feet before putting her back down with a lack of grace. He went there to get away, to feel normal, but then installed all the bright lights and glips of Hollywood that he was trying to leave behind. Maybe some said Bruce Willis had a bit of a savior complex. He couldn't save Penn's Grove, his hometown, though he tried. So we found a place that may not have needed saving. Today. Bruce

and Demi both maintain their own properties in Idaho. They even quarantined together during the first major wave of the pandemic in tw and they're signed Willis may not be totally done tinkering. In March twenty one, the county approved a long planned private airport near Haley after lengthy debate of the economic benefit versus the environmental impact. Willis hasn't publicly confirmed he's behind the airport, but the application was filed by the x Nay Investment Trust. We hope you've

enjoyed listening to Haleywood. Please tell a friend to binge the show. I'm Danish Wartz. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok at Danish Wartz spelled with three z's at the end, and you can also find me hosting the podcast Noble Blood and sometimes as a guest on You're Wrong About or Hysteria. You can also read my latest novel, Anatomy, a Love Story, which comes out January, and you should absolutely please pre order by from your

local indie bookseller. Check out some of our other I Heart original podcasts like Operation Midnight, Climax, Newton's Law, and Black Cowboys, and keep your Ears Peeled for Big Brother, North Korea's Forgotten Prince and What Happened to Sandy Beale. Haleywood is hosted by Danish Schwartz. This show is written by Jake Rawson, editing by Derrick Clements, Mary Do and me Josh Fisher. Sound design and mixing by Jeremy thal Derrek Clemens and me Josh Fisher. Original music by Natasha Jacobs.

Research and fact checking by Jake Rawson, 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 p full of Hailey, Idaho and all those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of I Heart Radio h