To the stars, it must have seemed too good to be true – a miracle pill that would help them shed those last few pounds in time for the weekend’s red carpet.
The product was StarCaps, a powerful diuretic. Nikki Haskell, the drug’s creator, claims celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Winslet, Chelsea Handler, Ivana Trump, Beverly Johnson and even President Bill Clinton were all taking it.
Haskell befriended many household names ranging from Michael Jackson to Imelda Marcos, and even brought her pal Donald Trump with his new bride Ivana to the opening night of Studio 54.
StarCaps hit the scene in the 1980s and swept Hollywood by the ’90s, with billboards up and down the Sunset Strip splashed with slogans like ‘Dare To Be Thin’ – but that was before an explosive scandal brought the whole enterprise crashing down.
In 2008, Haskell was sued by an NFL star who got suspended when he tested positive for a banned substance that can be used to hide steroid use. He blamed StarCaps, triggering a rollercoaster of legal drama that left Haskell bankrupt.
Now, Haskell exclusively tells the Daily Mail about the rise and fall of the original Hollywood weight-loss hack, and how she became the ‘scapegoat’ for the ultimate juggernaut of American professional sports.
Nikki Haskell, pictured with Donald Trump in 1998, created the StarCaps diet pill that became a sensation in the entertainment industry
StarCaps was a powerful diuretic whose creator claims it was taken by celebrities ranging from Elizabeth Taylor (pictured left in 1993) to Kate Winslet (pictured right in 1998)
Who Is Nikki Haskell?
Haskell, who calls Hollywood hot spot Craig’s her ‘favorite fast food restaurant,’ has watched her weight like a hawk all her life.
She is not opposed to Ozempic and its ‘phenomenal’ impact, given the ‘huge crisis’ of obesity in America, but she also takes pains to draw a distinction between the potent diabetes drug and what she maintains was her own ‘natural product.’
Her mother ‘put me on a diet when I was born’ and wanted her to be ‘born married,’ she quipped over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge.
Haskell’s go at matrimony yielded less than fairytale results – two failed marriages to the same man – but the first divorce got her $18,000 that she successfully invested, leading to a career as one of the first female stock brokers on Wall Street.
Haskell has said Bill Clinton, who is pictured in 1997 with Monica Lewinsky, also took her product while he was President of the United States
Haskell has also named her supermodel friend Beverly Johnson (pictured in 1998) as one of the people who took StarCaps, as well as Chelsea Handler (pictured in 2007)
Elizabeth Taylor, pictured in 1991 promoting her White Diamonds fragrance, saw her weight fluctuate throughout her long career
When she got tired of finance, she moved to showbiz, hosting a globetrotting interview program called The Nikki Haskell Show that pioneered the formula subsequently turned into a sprawling industry by series like Entertainment Tonight.
Brooke Shields, Giorgio Armani, Andy Warhol, Sophia Loren, Kevin Kline, Liza Minnelli, the Trumps, the Marcoses, all wound up chitchatting with Haskell on camera.
In April 1977 Haskell brought her pals, the newlywed Trumps, to the opening of a buzzy new Manhattan nightspot called Studio 54 – but The Donald was ‘not a club person,’ and when they arrived at the venue at what was apparently the preposterously early time of 10:30pm it was still being painted.
‘So they weren’t even playing any music yet. We were there when they dropped the first record and we stayed there for awhile,’ she said.
‘So when we we went out the back door, there were thousands of people pushed against the door. This is the back door, not even the front door. They went all the way around the block. So that’s what happened. People couldn’t get into Studio and because they couldn’t get in, it became a hit.’
How It Started
‘It took me 10 years to become an overnight success,’ Haskell says now.
By 1986, surrounded by an army of showbiz connections and with supermodel Beverly Johnson as her best friend, Haskell was poised to create a product that would eventually grow into a Hollywood sensation.
Enter StarCaps, billed as a natural diuretic made from garlic and papaya, capsulized in Peru and then priced at $100 for a bottle of 30 tablets.
Unlike the injectable Ozempic, which has helped users shed over 100lbs, Haskell’s diet pills would only ‘flush you out’ and enable a few pounds of weight loss.
Tireless and determined, she hustled around to the drugstores herself, hawking her product to the leery owners and being turned down again and again.
After years as a stockbroker, she became a star in the 1970s with her celebrity interview series The Nikki Haskell Show, on which she chatted with the likes of Liza Minnelli
The globetrotting talk-show, which pioneered the formula later popularized by Entertainment Tonight, also saw Haskell interview such figures as Imelda Marcos
Haskell was lifelong close friends with Ivana Trump, whom she is pictured with at a 1998 launch party for Haskell’s weight-loss book Star Diet
Her ship finally came in when she had lunch in New York with Liza Minnelli and then took her to the upscale Madison Avenue pharmacy Boyd’s, where she made an attempt to finagle StarCaps onto the shelves – and got an unexpected helping hand from the city’s spiraling crime problem.
‘I was pitching the product to the owner and just then a woman yells out: “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” Like right in the middle of my sales pitch,’ said Haskell. ‘Everybody walked away. I was like hysterical.’
Luckily, the fact Minnelli was at the scene of a theft at a swank Upper East Side redoubt meant Haskell got a call from the famous gossip columnist Cindy Adams.
‘And I told her what happened and she wrote the first story about the StarCaps,’ Haskell proudly recalled. The product was then featured on the popular tabloid TV show Hard Copy, and the business was off and running.
She hit the road as a saleswoman for her pills, dashing around to drugstores and conventions, occasionally with Beverly Johnson in tow. ‘It was really a hard job,’ she says now. ‘I mean, I give myself a lot of credit. I did not take no for an answer.’
The Rise…
In the 1990s, as the StarCaps craze gathered steam, Haskell had a brainwave that tuned her brand into a part of the Los Angeles landscape.
Following on from the era of Angelyne and her pink Corvette, Haskell acquired a string of billboards along the Sunset Strip, with her own trim frame and broad smile prominently featured as she held up her diet pills.
She unveiled the first ad at a party attended by Milton Berle and Red Buttons, and the billboards then quickly spread, blaring messages at commuters like: ‘You don’t have to be a star to look like one,’ ‘Dare to be thin,’ and ‘One size fits all.’
Haskell had now fashioned herself and StarCaps into a Hollywood landmark, an achievement that hit only a slight snag when her billboards disappeared one day.
Following on from the era of Angelyne and her pink Corvette, Haskell acquired a string of billboards along the Sunset Strip
StarCaps enjoyed 70 percent repeat business and ‘no returns,’ she insisted: ‘Nobody ever got sick from it, nobody ever had a problem with it’
The company that owned them had, it turned out, been sold to another firm whose CEO Brian Kennedy had taken down Haskell’s ads and would only agree to restore them at what she said was a brutal markup.
She recalled that over lunch at La Scala on a rainy day in Beverly Hills, he informed her that if she wanted her billboards back she would have to splash out $25,000 a month, at which point she duly dissolved into floods of tears.
‘I never cry,’ she said. ‘I’m not a crier. I’m not a crybaby, and I got hysterical. I don’t know. And he went: “No, no, no, whatever you do, here, stop crying.”‘
Having weakened his defenses, Haskell sweetened by the pot by offering him artwork by the acclaimed American painter LeRoy Neiman, who happened to be a friend of hers, and whom Kennedy happened to hugely admire.
‘I mean, if I had given him a Picasso he wouldn’t have wanted it,’ said Haskell. ‘He only wanted LeRoy Neimans. I mean, how lucky was that?’
Her success did put the occasional crimp in her love life, as when she went on a blind date at the bar of the Sunset Tower Hotel with a man who ‘looked like Robert Redford’ but appeared not to know who she was.
Over dinner, he told her he had no desire for the ‘spotlight’ and hoped to lead a ‘very quiet life’ – only for them to stroll out of the hotel and be immediately confronted by the sight of a massive billboard with his date’s face on it.
StarCaps enjoyed 70 percent repeat business and ‘no returns,’ she insisted. ‘Nobody ever got sick from it, nobody ever had a problem with it. It was a hit. It was flawless.’
…And Fall
The beginning of the end came in 2008, when NFL lineman Jamar Nesbit of the New Orleans Saints was slapped with a four-game drug suspension.
His system had been found to contain the banned substance bumetanide, a loop diuretic that can be used to conceal steroids or performance-enhancing drugs by flushing them out of a player’s system before he has to get tested.
Nesbit turned around and sued Haskell, claiming the bumetanide was only in his body because he was taking StarCaps, which he had no idea contained it.
The beginning of the end came in 2008, when NFL lineman Jamar Nesbit of the New Orleans Saints was slapped with a four-game drug suspension; Nesbit pictured that year
Indeed, the StarCaps bottle described the formula as a ‘natural extract’ of ‘papaya and garlic,’ with no mention of bumetanide.
A cascade of NFL players started pinning the blame on StarCaps when their drug tests turned up evidence of the prohibited chemical.
Haskell wound up in court fighting for the life of her company, not to mention the whopping $17 million worth of pills she had just gotten bottled.
Six years after Nesbit’s drug test, Haskell pled guilty to misbranding StarCaps by failing to disclose there was any bumetanide in it.
Now, however, she insists that the product never actually contained bumetanide at all, which she says she knew because she maintains she had her StarCaps tested when they arrived in America after being capsulized in Peru.
Haskell’s argument is that the StarCaps did not have bumetanide in them when they were ingested in the proper amounts, but that ‘if you take a high concentration of something, it becomes another product.’
Her guilty plea, she says, was the final result of years of catastrophic legal advice by various attorneys, some of whom ‘got me in more trouble than I was already in.’
‘I’m never gonna change my passion for the diet industry and for health and things that you shouldn’t be eating,’ said Haskell, pictured in recent years
She burned through $20 million of her life savings on lawyers, over the course of a bruising battle that drove her to declare personal and corporate bankruptcy.
Haskell says she ultimately gave up and pled guilty because her finances had been depleted and she would have had to ‘depose the whole NFL’ to keep going.
She becomes visibly emotional when discussing the ordeal even now, a decade later, and at times appears as though she might be on the verge of tears.
Haskell maintains she became a ‘scapegoat’ for steroid use in pro football, where the alleged offenders ‘went up to NFL Heaven, and they blamed me and the whole thing went away for them, but I lost my business.’
One silver lining was that her celebrity friends rallied around her, including Ivana Trump, who was ‘very protective of me.’
However she had to have her $17 million worth of StarCaps destroyed, a blow that still rankles with her, emblematic of the saga she now looks back on as ‘the most devastating experience I’ve ever had in my life.’
Ozempic
‘I’m never gonna change my passion for the diet industry and for health and things that you shouldn’t be eating,’ said Haskell, who noted by way of example that she ‘wouldn’t drink a Coca-Cola if you paid me.’
She takes a nuanced view of the current Ozempic trend sweeping Hollywood, where a drug created to treat diabetes has turned into a galloping weight loss fad because of its function as an appetite suppressant.
Haskell feels the ‘end result’ of the injectable ‘has been phenomenal,’ given the ‘hit’ taken by ‘the snack industry and the candy industry. All the profits are down because people have stopped eating as much.’
Indeed, junk food companies including Frito-Lay, Campbell’s, General Mills and Kraft Heinz have suffered financially in the past year, per the Wall Street Journal.
‘The only problem is,’ said Haskell: ‘you’re not changing your eating habits. You’re just eating less. And the trick to diet is you have to change your eating habits.’
Case in point: having had ice cream with lunch, Haskell skipped dinner that night.
