The Christian Bale movie blighted by a secret prostitution ring: “They were using my dressing room”
In 1997, Christian Bale was in a transitional phase in his career. At 13, he had been cast as the lead in Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Empire of the Sun, and at 18, he sang and danced his way through a Disney musical. Neither movie was a hit, though, which left Bale as a 23-year-old adult actor on the brink of stardom whose profile meant very little to the cinemagoing public.
Indeed, at that time, Bale revelled in his anonymity and seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a star. Perhaps this is why he gave such unusual interviews – including one infamous chat in which he claimed a secret prostitution ring was in operation behind the scenes of that very musical.
When Bale sat down with Movieline in 1997, interviewer Michael Atkinson spent a lot of time establishing how studiously the young star avoided the trappings of fame. At that point, he had no publicist, preferring to let his agent run his career out of a Dublin pub where she conducted business on a nearby pay phone. Bale loved how he’d never been subjected to a publicity campaign as he grew up, meaning he could walk the streets of LA without worrying about being recognised.
“I’ve never worked more than once a year,” Bale admitted. “In between, I’ve had nothing written about me whatsoever. It was definitely a strategy. I like not being in magazines, not being seen on TV, except when I’m actually in a film. I want to work as much as I can and still go to parties and be the geezer in the corner.”
Perhaps this natural avoidance of the spotlight is why Bale has always had such a tough time when asked about Newsies. That all-singing, all-dancing 1992 Disney spectacle took him wildly outside his comfort zone, as he claimed he never liked musicals. In fact, he signed onto the film when it was a standard movie, but then producers decided to add musical numbers, much to his chagrin.
In 2007, he told Entertainment Weekly, “At 17, you want to be taken very seriously — you don’t want to be doing a musical.”
Bale confessed that he asked director Kenny Ortega if he could just go to the pub while the musical numbers were shot, then return when it was all over. “I hoped I could be the lead in a musical without doing any singing and dancing,” Bale said, chuckling at his own naivety. “Eventually, I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do it.’ But I had a lot of doubts about it.”
When Newsies was released and grossed a horrifyingly low $2.8million, it became one of Disney’s biggest-ever bombs. Over the years, though, it has developed a rabid cult following – so much so that a Broadway version was staged in 2012 that raked in $1m per week. One person who is resolutely not a part of that following, though, is Bale, and in 1997, even talking about the movie at all made him behave a little strangely.
During his Movieline interview, Bale was talking about the film when he quickly changed the subject by asking Atkinson, “Hey, want to hear about the Newsies prostitution ring?” He then regaled the interviewer with a tale of young actors working as extras on the film secretly conducting illicit activities under the noses of everyone at Universal Studios.
Bale claimed: “It was a massive production, with hundreds of extras, which is where I got work for lots of my family and friends, even my dog. But apparently, there were a few extra kids who were offering their services to anybody who paid, all during the time we shot there.”
Stunningly, Bale even claimed that this “pimp ring” was operating out of his dressing room on his days off.
Bizarrely, Atkinson didn’t push Bale on this salacious claim and moved on to other things. In the years since, nothing else has been published about any prostitution ring on the Newsies set, and Bale has never referenced it again, either. It all makes you wonder: was Bale, still awkward in front of the media, simply making a joke? Was he merely hinting that the young, hormone-ravaged cast of Newsies was sneaking around each other’s dressing rooms, as horny teens tend to do? Or did he really mean that sex was being sold behind closed doors of the wholesome musical about the 1899 newsboys’ strike in New York City? Answers on a postcard, please.
