Dish (19 page)

Stolley had to figure out what the magazine would be. “It’s hard to understand, today, in this celebrity-saturated world, how revolutionary
People
was. Newspapers and news magazines were totally ignoring personalities,” said Stolley. Women’s magazines still had cakes and crochet on their covers. “There wasn’t a niche. There was a wide open crevice.”

Although newspapers and magazines across the country were closing or cutting back, investigative reporting was going through an almost unprecedented vogue. Watergate dominated the papers. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were stars, role models that just about every other journalist in the country followed. There were more students enrolled in journalism schools than there were journalism jobs. In the mid-1970s, journalism was serious business. “It was a time when individuals got submerged, buried,” Stolley recalled. “For the most part, the news was depressing.”
People
would not be.
People
made no pretensions to being an in-depth magazine. Many items were very short, a few paragraphs, and the upper limit for most stories was 1,500 words. The entire
issue would be limited to 13,000 words. Stolley would actually sit there counting them. “This was going to be a quick, easy read,” said Stolley, “which most of the magazines were not.”

People
was done on the cheap; Time Inc. wasn’t completely committed to the project, and didn’t want to get caught up in the expensive news-gathering operation that
Life
had become. The entire editorial staff numbered only thirty-four, a minuscule number for a weekly magazine.
Life,
at its peak, had more than ten times as many. Most of the reporting was done by a staff of sixty-six stringers, often newspaper reporters who were paid $7.50 an hour. The articles were usually rewritten by editors in a snappy, chatty style. Stolley—determined not to make the magazine a reincarnation of
Life—
didn’t want to hire too many of his colleagues from the recently folded magazine. It wasn’t a problem. Not many wanted to join. In fact, very few people from inside the Time-Life corporation wanted to be part of the new enterprise.

The first year was rough. Ad pages were cheap, $4,550 for black and white, $5,800 for color—slightly more than one-tenth what
Life
had charged. Nevertheless, the first several issues of
People
were quite thin. The first issue carried twenty pages of ads, and there were only 601 advertising pages that year. “The advertisers remembered
Confidential,”
said Stolley, “and it scared the hell out of them.”

The cover of the first regular issue, dated March 4, 1974, featured Mia Farrow, who was starring in
The Great Gatsby,
nibbling on a strand of pearls. Inside was a little something for everyone: profiles of authors Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Clifford Irving, as well as pieces on porn star Linda Lovelace,
Exorcist
author and producer William Blatty, kidnapped socialite Patricia Hearst, gymnast Cathy Rigby, actresses Debbie Reynolds and Joanne Woodward, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow, Marina. The magazine was still clearly trying to find its market, but wanted to make it clear that it was not
Confidential
revisited. “We think of
People
as a very contemporary magazine,” Stolley noted, “one attuned to the free-wheeling seventies and its mood of burning curiosity, wry detachment, and tolerance for other people’s manners and morals. We want
People
to reflect the times.”

People
was greeted with hoots of derision and howls of protest.
It was referred to as “Peephole.” It was parodied in
Esquire
and in
National Lampoon.
It was called “celebrity pap” and “fluff and puff.”
Newsweek
predicted that it would run out of people to profile. “We were universally scorned and put down by our journalistic colleagues,” former executive producer Jim Seymore recalled. His friends at serious publications would mock
People
at cocktail parties, but as soon as they were alone, they would corner him and ask him what various celebrities were
really
like.

William Safire, the esteemed columnist for the
New York Times,
was perhaps the harshest critic. “By the choice of topics, the
Time
editors … give us their frank assessment of
[People’s]
audience: A collection of frantic, tasteless fadcats, deeply concerned with social climbing and intellectual pretensions, panting for a look at celebrities in poses that press agents staged back in the thirties,” he wrote. “Maybe there is money in this sort of thing; if so, publishing empires whose executives harrumph about social responsibility should leave the field to upstart publishers more adept at grubbiness.” Stolley tacked Safire’s essay to his bulletin board. Whenever he got tired or discouraged, he’d read Safire’s sneering putdown, start seething, and he’d find the energy to go on.

The reaction inside the Time-Life building was even more hostile. “It was very tough in those first few years,” said one former reporter. “We were putting in these eighty-and ninety-hour weeks, working until four or five three nights a week, and you’d hear people joking in the elevator about how we weren’t really journalists. If they knew you were with
People,
they’d just sort of be quiet and move away, as if they were afraid they might catch something. I dreaded taking the elevators.”

“Do you know the word
pariah
?” Stolley said. “Well, that pretty well describes how we were regarded…. There was great concern—especially with the distinguished
Life
having recently died and the body hardly cold—that we were cheapening the precarious coin of the Time Inc. realm.” Then one day, Stolley rode down in the elevator with a
Time
writer, who turned to him and said, “I know you’re taking a lot of crap about this magazine, but I’m telling you, it’s getting better. I like it.” He paused then added, “More important, it’s going to pay my pension some day.”

In the early issues,
People
editors were still trying to figure out exactly what sort of celebrity stories America was interested in reading. The common wisdom was that contemporary stars were all unglamorous and boring and that the public was more fascinated by the Golden Age of Hollywood. As an experiment to gauge the public’s interest in that period,
People
located one of the great old gossip columnists to contribute to the first issue. Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons were all dead, but the great Sheila Graham was still alive. Graham, who sometimes was lumped together with Louella and Hedda as “The Unholy Trio,” was the least famous of the three, but toward the end of their careers, Graham was actually syndicated in more newspapers than either of her rivals. She also had the most fascinating life. Born Lily Sheil, Graham grew up in an orphanage in London’s East End. She wanted to become a writer, but was terribly insecure about her lack of a proper education and took jobs as a domestic, a toothbrush demonstrator, and a showgirl in London before she came to Los Angeles, with hopes of launching her writing career. “No one there could embarrass me with erudite conversation,” she later explained. “Hollywood was notorious even in London for the ignorance of the people who made the films.” Within three years, she had a syndicated column that, she claimed, earned $5,000 a week. She had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose career was on the skids and who tutored Graham, giving her lists of books to read and quizzing her on them afterward. They had a tortured relationship, however; he refused to leave his institutionalized wife Zelda, and he frequently went on drunken rages during which he would mock Graham relentlessly about her ignorance and her Jewish background. Fitzgerald used Graham as the inspiration for Kathleen from
The Last Tycoon,
and he died in her arms. She wrote about their relationship in
Beloved Infidel,
which in 1959 was made into a movie.

People
asked Graham, who had recently retired and moved from Hollywood to Palm Beach, to write an article for its first issue, comparing the film community she had left with the old money society she had recently entered. When Graham handed in her manuscript, the editors were shocked. “It turned out that the poor woman couldn’t put two words back to back,” according
to Hal Wingo, the editor who oversaw the piece. “She was almost illiterate. It was almost comical. Here she was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mistress and this fabled writer of columns all these years and she could hardly construct a sentence.”

Buried deep inside the piece was a startling bit of information: In discussing how someone with an unsavory past could make it in Hollywood, Graham wrote “you can be a illegitimate, as Marilyn Monroe was” you could “have a juvenile delinquency record, as Steve McQueen did,” or you could be a call girl, “as I was.” “I remember very clearly when I read this my jaw dropped,” said Wingo. “I said, Well this is an interesting admission on her part anyway.’ ” Wingo rewrote much of Graham’s story, but, he said, he carefully read back the entire text to her—including the explosive “call girl” sentence.

When the issue hit the newsstands, Graham went ballistic. She had never, she insisted, written that she was a former call girl. It was a typo, she maintained, and should have read “J” was a former call girl—”J” was the anonymous author of the best-selling book,
The Sensuous Woman.
The article was libelous, Graham said, and she hired lawyer Edward Bennett Williams to sue
People.
Getting sued for such a howler of an error in its first issue—by the person who ostensibly wrote the article—would have given
People’s
many critics additional ammunition. “The whole joke about
People
from the beginning was that we would have a staff of three writers and ten lawyers, so this was not good for our first issue,” said Wingo.
People
paid for Graham to come to New York, during which time she was treated like a star, and ran a “clarification” in the “Chatter” section of the magazine. “From Sheila Graham comes word that the eyebrow-raising phrase in her by-lined story … should have read “former ‘chorus’ girl,” the item explained. It went on to quote Graham, “As I have written in several of my books, I have always believed in love. I was so busy in this area that I didn’t have time to consider the financial aspects.”
*

One of the truly startling things about the Sheila Graham debacle is that hardly anyone noticed.
People
had accidentally called one of the most famous gossip columnists of her time a call girl, and no one seemed to care. It was a clear sign that
People
shouldn’t cater to a nostalgia for Hollywood. What many other editors had long interpreted as a lack of interest in gossip was in fact, merely boredom with the old stars they continued to write about.

The public’s apparent aversion to gossip was also, at least partially, the result of a more than decade-long vilification of gossip columnists. It was a crusade that went into full throttle at the
Confidential
trial and was continued through the 1960s by some of the nation’s most popular stars, such as Frank Sinatra, and beloved politicians, like the Kennedys. By the mid-1970s, the
idea
of gossip was repugnant to most Americans, but they had never lost their appetite for juicy tidbits about celebrities. Readers liked gossip best,
People
realized, if it wasn’t served up by gossip columnists.

Readers weren’t the only ones hungry for celebrity news. The celebrities themselves were starved. “Stars clamored to be profiled,” remembered one reporter. “We could really call the shots. We’d set these conditions back then that we had to be allowed into the celebrity’s home, they had to tell us personal and private things. There were so many stars wanting to be interviewed, that once, in a single day, I had breakfast with Nelson Rockefeller, lunch with Gloria Swanson, and dinner with Sophia Loren.”

Dick Stolley worked hard to ensure the notion that
People’s
brand of gossip was harmless fun. “I think it was important that the magazine established a reputation for not only fairness and decency but also kindness,” he said.
“People
is a good cheer magazine and always has been. It is also a magazine that has tended to be kind to people—not to say it hasn’t embarrassed people and hurt people.” Nevertheless,
People
staffers were continually shocked by the confessions celebrities would make.

Celebrities, and even politicians, were so unfamiliar with dealing with the press that they used to blurt out things that they never would have a decade later. “Sex and money were two of the things no one had asked celebrities about before,” said Stolley,
“and damned if they didn’t answer.” Rosalynn Carter told
People
about her plastic surgery. Gloria Steinem caused an uproar when she posed for photographers in a bubble bath.

“The awfulest things about them would come out of their own mouths and they often had no idea what they were saying,” said Stolley. “There was a kind of wonderful innocence then. Particularly when it came to people talking about themselves or their spouses, children and all the rest—we were very, very careful about what we let people say.”