By the time I got to work with William Keck at TV Guide Magazine, his tabloid days were long behind him. Sort of. Always with a twinkle in his eye, Keck still knew a good story when he found one — even if it caused a bit of a stir with celebrities or (more likely) the publicists employed to shield them from dogged reporters like him.
At TV Guide, I got to watch first-hand as Keck dug into the on-set turmoil during the final seasons of “Desperate Housewives” and create some ire with his own eyewitness accounts. And then there was the time that Victoria Principal promised Will an exclusive about why she wouldn’t appear on the “Dallas” revival. There’s no bigger “Dallas” fan than Keck, and it was a hot scoop — which she then gave to a competitor instead.
Will didn’t take it well, taking to social media to burn a few bridges. Or as he himself puts it, “I’d lost my fucking mind.” Keck is fearless, which makes him the best kind of journo.
And it’s also why he has more outrageous stories than virtually any other reporter I know — many of which he chronicles in his new memoir, “ When You Step Upon a Star : Cringeworthy Confessions of a Tabloid Bad Boy.” Most of those tales come from his three years at the National Enquirer in the mid-1990s — which coincided with the peak of that publication’s power. At the time, the Enquirer was earning begrudging respect from the mainstream media as it consistently broke exclusive news about the O.
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