Fran Weinstein says Anne Heche exploded during a 1998 interview after a rumor linking her to Vince Vaughn came up, then demanded the tape of the conversation. Weinstein says the actor, who had just begun her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres, told her, “You have no respect for me. You have no respect for my girlfriend!”
Weinstein is telling the story now as part of the run-up to her memoir, Tortured Soles: High Heels, Low Expectations and The Hollywood Gossip Mill, which is set for release on April 28. She says the tape from that St. Regis suite interview still has never turned up, more than two decades after Heche died on August 11, 2022, six days after a high-speed car crash.
The account comes from a 1998 press run for Psycho, when Weinstein says Heche first seemed unruffled, even chain-smoking while she was sprayed with lavender. Then, after the Vaughn rumor was mentioned, Weinstein says Heche “lost her mind — eyes opened like a sink hole” and sent several publicists and managers back to the suite to demand the interview tape. The shouting, Weinstein says, kept going inside her room at the St. Regis until the tape disappeared.
That missing recording has become part of a long-running Hollywood gossip trail around Heche and DeGeneres. Weinstein says a representative later denied that Heche had stolen it, saying she “finished the interview, never left with the tape, and doesn’t have it now.” Even so, Weinstein says the tape remains missing to this day, with one urban legend claiming it was thrown into a New York City sewer.
Heche’s relationship with DeGeneres was still new when the 1998 interview took place, and the story reflects how closely the actor’s private life and public image were already tied together. The timeline matters because the interview dispute did not stay in that suite: it shadowed later accounts of Heche discussing DeGeneres again in 2001 and resurfaced in a 2021 episode of the Better Together podcast, where Heche spoke about Portia de Rossi’s intentions to pursue DeGeneres. For Weinstein, the unfinished business is simple: the tape that set off the fight is still gone.
