New York's biggest gossip source is just an average schmo from Jersey

There's a good chance you've never heard of self-professed "international celebrity journalist" Chaunce Hayden. There's an even better chance you've never heard of Steppin' Out, the free New Jersey–based gossip weekly he edits that is distributed in strip malls, diners, movie theaters, street boxes, and fine drinking establishments throughout the Garden State. But if you've read Page Six or any of the gossip columns that have run in the NY Daily News over the past decade, you've definitely seen Hayden's imprint: According to LexisNexis, the tattooed 49-year-old has provided the two tabloids with a combined 262 items since 1995—more than any other single source.

That track record, however, is now in jeopardy: Earlier this month, Hayden was banned from contributing items to Page Six for being the source of a false item about a sex tape starring Jackass player Bam Margera and Lynsi Smigo, the fiancée of jackass radio shock jock Gregg Hughes, aka "Opie." The details, predictably, are murky. Hayden claims he simply told Page Six reporter Bill Hoffman that he'd heard a tape may have been made, and says he was shocked that the item ran the next day without anyone at the paper authenticating its existence. Page Six editor Richard Johnson was eventually forced to issue a retraction after it became apparent there was no tape, though he placed the blame squarely on Hayden and vowed to never use him as a source again.

Now Smigo has filed a $10 million defamation suit against Johnson, the Post, and Hayden, in which she claims that Hayden is culpable because he mentioned the tape in a column in Steppin' Out that ran a week after the Post broke the story. (For the record, Hayden indeed mentioned the tape, but only to say he doesn't think it exists. He did, however, anoint Opie "Asshole of the Week," which probably didn't go over well. He also claims he's talking to a lawyer sometime next week about countersuing Smigo and Opie, so don't expect this thing to go away anytime soon.)

"This is the type of shit that makes me really hate this job," Hayden told us recently over drinks at the Thompson Hotel in SoHo. "The people in this business are the worst people in the world. I can't stand them one bit. Everyone's such a sleazebag."

It's the type of statement you'd expect from someone who has spent the past 18 years dealing with people who deal with the minutiae of other peoples' lives. Hayden, 49 and still built like a cinder block, fell into gossip reporting mostly by accident. He held a variety of dead-end jobs—male stripper, car washer, failed punk rocker, bartender, swimming pool digger—after finishing up a four-year stint with the navy in 1981, and had settled into a gig in Ridgewood selling blood chemistry machines to hospitals in Kuwait and Iraq. ("They check your cholesterol levels and stuff like that," he says.) Sinead O'Connor was performing at the nearby Garden State Arts Center, and Hayden desperately wanted to meet the bald-headed singer, on whom he had a crush.

"I figured the easiest way to do that would be by trying to interview her," he explains. "I'd seen this magazine called Steppin' Out at a bar across the street, so I took a copy, pasted the logo onto some fake stationary, and sent a press request to Warner Bros. I figured I'd get away with it because who the fuck had heard of Steppin' Out?"

He got the press pass. And then when O'Connor caused a minor firestorm by refusing to go onstage if the American national anthem was performed beforehand, Hayden ended up with a compelling interview on his hands. He immediately called up Larry Collins, the magazine's publisher, and offered to sell him the interview. Collins gave him $25 and told him that he'd pay him for any future interviews. Hayden's been wrangling celebrities for Steppin' Out ever since.

Today, Steppin' Out has a circulation of around 85,000 and is distributed throughout New Jersey and New York City by a team of 30 drivers. Hayden is the editor, but, more important, also serves as the magazine's de facto publicist: Since no one actually reads it, it's up to him to feed the best material to the various gossip outlets around town, most of which are desperate to fill column space each day. In this capacity, Hayden has proven fairly adept.

"It's actually not that difficult to get people to appear in the magazine," he says. "I just promise them the cover. Of course, no one has ever seen the damn thing, but publicists have usually heard of it, which is good enough. Everyone's a fame whore in this town."

Granted, the interview subjects usually aren't A-list—this week's cover girl, a blonde failed reality-show participant with pneumatic breasts named Lauren Jones, talks up an upcoming guest stint on FX show Rescue Me—but they can be oddly topical: a recent story about Tatum O'Neal ran the week the former child star just happened to be arrested while attempting to purchase crack cocaine on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Hayden, the pool of would-be takers for his items has dwindled considerably of late. The Post is no longer an option following the Opie brouhaha. (Reached for comment on this story, Richard Johnson said only, "I am not proud to be associated with Mr. Hayden, so I'll decline.") Hayden was banned for life from contributing to MSNBC three years ago after getting into a dustup with a guest on Joe Scarborough's show. While filming a segment for ABC News Now's Tattle Tales with Gigi Stone in 2004, Hayden was asked to keep his voice down by Diane Sawyer, who happened to be shooting Prime Time Live nearby. Annoyed, he mentioned on-air that he had been rudely shushed by Diane Sawyer. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, he was led out the building and asked not to come back.

"Chaunce certainly knows what a gossip item is, but sound journalistic method is not his strong suit," says Portfolio's Lloyd Grove, who used to work with Hayden when he wrote the Lowdown column for the Daily News. "He was one of the many self-promoting fame junkies that a gossip columnist deals with every day."

Another former reporter who dealt extensively with Hayden agrees: "He wasn't always reliable—he would push whatever thing he had that was the most gossip-worthy. But he was always friendly."

The latter is certainly true—Hayden is very agreeable, particularly if you're a hot chick and he's interviewing you. (Says Joanna Molloy, of the Daily News' Rush and Molloy column: "Chaunce is a guy who likes beautiful women and asks them questions. He's nice and funny, but you can't just take his stuff verbatim.") It's just that Hayden's willingness to gab has the habit of landing him in hot water.

Perhaps the biggest fallout of his career occurred with Sirius Radio's Howard Stern. Hayden was a frequent guest on Stern's program when he was still on terrestrial radio, often providing the big-haired shock jock with tidbits he'd sourced from deep within the bowels of the strip club Scores. (Stern was even a guest on an Internet radio show Hayden hosted for eYada.com from 1999 to 2000. Joanna Molloy, who hosted a celebrity gossip show on the same station in an adjacent room, recalls that guests of Hayden's show—often paraplegics and amputees—frequently had sex in the studio. "It was a really dark room," she says.) But right when Stern was set to make the jump to satellite radio in 2005, Hayden was subpoenaed by the SEC after making comments during an ABC television appearance that implied Stern might be guilty of insider trading for leaking key financial details of the move. Hayden told Richard Johnson about the subpoena, Johnson turned it into a Post cover story, Stern flipped out, and he and Hayden haven't spoken since.

"That whole thing was so fucking ugly, and I feel really bad about it, but that's showbiz," says Hayden.

That Hayden considers his line of work "showbiz" is telling. "It's pretty addictive to see your name in print," he admits. "But these days, it almost seems like journalists have to be celebs themselves to get the really high-paying gigs. I'm just trying to make sure people know who gave them the story."