The publicist was no stranger to Prince’s capricious nature as well as dealing with his crisis PR (such as when the singer’s bodyguard punched a photographer around the recording of the charity single “We Are the World”). She knew the star was publicity shy. Prince hadn’t yet met Barber so neither ill will or bad vibes could have factored into his decision. So Riggs surmised that Prince was simply following his bliss—and hadn’t thought through backing out of his prescribed part in a marketing campaign that had already sunk a reported $750,000 into Sheridan’s troubled local economy.

At the same time, Riggs knew cancelling the fantasy date would almost certainly sour public opinion against His Royal Badness at a moment when Cherry Moon needed all the help it could get. “The media would have destroyed him for that,” she says.

After a moment of stunned silence, she picked up one of the three phone lines she’d had installed in her hotel room and called Rob Friedman, the vice president of Warner Bros. movie marketing, who was also staying in the hotel. Roused from a deep slumber, he came up to her room “with bed head, scratching his chest hair going, ‘What the fuck!’” then, informed of the situation, picked up the phone to Prince’s manager.

“‘Steven, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get with your client, you’re going to tell him that he’s going to take this girl AS HIS DATE. If he does not do that, then I’m going to haul Warner Bros. out of here. And all of our promotional dollars are going home. Fuck you. Tell the kid he’s got to take her as his date or I’m leaving in the morning,’” Riggs remembers Friedman saying. (Friedman, who stepped down as co-chair of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group in September, declined an interview request for this story). “Robbie sat there for a minute. Then he goes, ‘That’s what I thought. I’m going back to bed now.’ Hangs up. ‘Prince is gonna take her to the movie. G’night Robyn!’”