When Mick Jagger balked at doing a promised post-concert interview with Hilburn in San Antonio in 1975, Wasserman responded by stationing Hilburn outside Jagger's hotel room and then waited with him for several hours.
When the door finally opened -- at 4 a.m. -- Wasserman pushed Hilburn inside, and he wound up interviewing the clearly exhausted Jagger as he lay on his bed.
"He was not intimidated by the stars, and he knew and respected the press' needs," Hilburn said of Wasserman. "I had great affection for the guy. It was fun being around him. It's such a tragedy what happened to him."
Those who knew Wasserman were shocked when they learned that for more than a decade, he had been using his connections to swindle people by falsely claiming to be selling shares in investment schemes that he said were backed by clients Nicholson, U2 and the Internet portal Yahoo.
Wasserman, according to a 2000 Times profile of him when he was confined to a six-man cell at the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, "cajoled friends and acquaintances out of cash, usually in $10,000 and $25,000 chunks."
"He got to me on the greed factor," Brenda Kershenbaum, one of his victims, said at the time. She had invested $25,000 in 1999 in a bogus stock option after Wasserman told her that Nicholson had also bought into it.
In November 2000, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge accepted Wasserman's guilty plea to one felony count of grand theft.
He was sentenced to six months in jail, five years' probation and restitution of nearly $87,000 to be paid to Kershenbaum and two others. Most of the other people Wasserman admitted to duping, according The Times' story, did not file police reports.
In an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Times, Wasserman acknowledged swindling more than 20 people. In an attempt to explain what had brought him to jail, Wasserman began by saying he had battled alcoholism.
Like the inability to have only one drink, he said, "everything in my life is not enough. I wasn't as important as I thought I should be. In the back of my mind, I was going to be famous, whatever that means. I'm this 'legendary' person [in entertainment publicity] with this great reputation -- so where am I? Where's my $20-million deal?"
The son of European immigrants -- a garment designer and a housewife -- Wasserman was born in the Bronx, N.Y., on July 30, 1934. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was about 3.
