Dish (3 page)

Harrison was intrigued by how America was spellbound in the early 1950s by the Kefauver hearings—the televised Senate investigation into mob corruption in the government. Housewives abandoned their chores, businessmen canceled meetings, people without television sets of their own crowded into TV-equipped bars. No one wanted to miss a minute of the unfolding scandal. Harrison, who at the time was churning out girlie magazines with names like
Wink, Titter,
and
Eyeful,
was so broke that he was posing as a cop or an irate husband for pictures in his own magazines to save the modeling fee. Harrison decided to try a different kind of titillation. “The daddy of
Confidential,
although he’d be shocked to know it, is Senator Estes Kefauver,” said Harrison. “Behind-the-scenes stories. Inside, gossipy facts, it became clear that’s what America wanted.” The publisher was a fan of Walter Winchell’s column; he took the gossip column format and combined it with the shocking exposé flavor of the Kefauver hearings, and in December 1952, began cranking out
Confidential
every other month. “People like to read about things they don’t dare do themselves,” Harrison said. “And if you can print these things about public figures, so much better.” The scandal magazine was born.

Confidential’
s initial press run was only 150,000. Harrison didn’t have the budget to publicize or get good distribution for his lurid tabloid. In 1953, he had a brainstorm. Walter Winchell—although still the most powerful gossip columnist ever—was starting to lose his grip on America. Winchell was desperately trying to break into the new medium of television, but the transition wasn’t going smoothly. His look, his sensibilities, his causes, all seemed hopelessly mired in the past. In a desperate bid to preserve the old order that once had made him a success, Winchell made some dreadful misjudgments. His most notorious blunder was in 1951. When Josephine Baker accused Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley of racism by giving her slow and sloppy service, Winchell sided with his old friend Billingsley. The controversy brought widespread attack from the liberal crowd that had
always been Winchell’s mainstay. As he became more isolated, Winchell lashed out against his enemies and embraced his allies. Harrison had worked as a copyboy at the ribald New York
Mirror
when Winchell was writing his “Broadway Hearsay” column for the tabloid; he knew the way Winchell operated and decided that even in his weakened state, Winchell could be a powerful friend. Harrison started running articles in
Confidential
to curry favor with the embattled columnist. “Winchell Was Right About Josephine Baker!”
Confidential
declared in its January 1953 issue. “Walter Winchell was virtually the only newspaperman in America who had the guts to stick out his chin and tell the world what a phony Josephine Baker was when she provoked the now-famous ‘Stork Club Incident’ last winter. For his pains, Winchell became an international target for charges of discrimination.”

As soon as the article came off the presses, Harrison rushed over to Winchell’s office with a copy. “He just loved it,” Harrison recalled. Winchell flogged
Confidential
on his television show, holding up the magazine for the camera and urging his viewers to run out and buy an issue. “From then on, this thing flew,” said Harrison. “We started running a Winchell piece every issue. We’d try to figure out who Winchell didn’t like and run a piece on them.”
Confidential
printed articles like “How Winchell Saved a Man from the Commie Kiss of Death” and “Broadway’s Biggest Double Cross,” which told about people whose career Winchell helped launch, only to have the person turn against him. “We kept plugging
Confidential,”
Harrison said. “It got to the point where some days we would sit down and rack our brains trying to think of somebody else Winchell didn’t like. We were running out of people, for Christ’s sake!” Winchell brought
Confidential
to the attention of the public, but it was the magazine’s celebrity scandals that kept them coming back. Readers went wild for the exposés: After only five years of publication,
Confidential
was selling nearly four million copies of each issue, making it the bestselling magazine on American newsstands.

While many older, more reputable publications were losing readers—often to television—
Confidential
became a publishing
phenomenon. From 1952 to 1955,
Confidential’s
circulation went from 150,000 to 3.7 million an issue. In the same period, the
Saturday Evening Post
dropped from 1,742,311 to 1,547,341 an issue, and
Look
magazine fell from 1,153,525 to 1,001,068.
Confidential,
whose sales came entirely from the newsstands, resorted to increasingly sensational headlines to keep its sales up. Major advertisers shunned the tabloid: a typical issue carried only about $55,000 worth of ads, largely from places like correspondence schools and diet pills. By comparison, a single page in
Life
magazine, which in 1955 was fat with ads, cost $30,800.
Confidential’s
overhead, however, was low: While
Life
and other top magazines had huge staffs and bureaus around the world, Harrison had no advertising staff—what little the magazine had was handled by an outside agency—and a tiny editorial staff that rewrote articles that Harrison bought from freelancers for anywhere from $250 to $1,500. Harrison also kept costs down by printing on cheap paper. Most magazines used slick paper that in 1955 cost about $190 a ton;
Confidential
was printed on “super newsprint”—a stock that is just slightly higher grade than the newspaper—which in 1955 cost $134 a ton (newsprint was selling for $126 a ton that year).
Confidential
made Robert Harrison a very rich man.

More than a dozen
Confidential
imitators sprang up. Publications with names like
Suppressed, Top Secret, Hush-Hush, Inside Story, Exposed, Behind the Scenes,
and On
the QT
all competed for the most salacious dirt on movie stars. Harrison started publishing a second scandal magazine called
Whisper.
Scandal magazines became big business. Rather than being coddled and revered by columnists and fanzines, celebrities were suddenly being exposed and ridiculed in the press. Readers were riveted by stories like
Confidential’s
“Open Letter to General Mills: Here’s Why Frank Sinatra Is Tarzan of the Boudoir.” According to the article, the singer took breaks from his lovemaking to eat bowls of Wheaties. “He had the nation’s front page playboys dizzy for years trying to discover the secret—Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anita Ekberg. How does that skinny little guy do it?” said the article. “Vitamins? Goat glands? Nope—Wheaties … After his
fourth
visit to the breakfast room, [an] unbelieving babe
could plainly hear the crunch, crunch, crunch of a man—eating Wheaties.” It was one of Harrison’s all-time favorite articles, but when Sinatra read it, he went on a rampage.

“The Nude Who Came to Dinner,” shocked fans of film noir star Robert Mitchum. “The menu said steak. There was no mention of a stew … and the party boiled over when one guest was not only fried—but peeled!” According to the June 1955 story, Mitchum stripped naked at a Hollywood dinner party and smeared himself with ketchup. “This a masquerade party, isn’t it?” he reportedly said. “Well, I’m a hamburger, well done.”
Confidential
continued: “The hamburger started dancing around the room, splattering the walls and all who came near.” Mitchum was furious. “I never do such things because I have too much respect for the carpeting of my various hosts,” he said. “If I were a catsup tosser, I wouldn’t get invited to parties. And that would be tough. I just love parties.”

The scandal magazines had a prurient yet Puritanical tone: They expressed outrage over Hollywood’s hedonistic behavior—while describing each lurid act in detail. They exploited the peculiar paranoias of the 1950s. Articles about “Commies,” the “Red Scare,” and Cuba were common. So were stories about black stars mixing with whites. Typical was
Hush-Hush’s
September 1955 story, “His Passion for Blondes: Will It Destroy Sammy Davis, Jr.?” Homosexuality was also a big topic. While mainstream gossip columnists were reporting on Rock Hudson’s various romances with Hollywood starlets, the scandal magazines were running the stories of the star’s secret life that had been swirling around Hollywood for years.
TV Scandal’s
“How His Marriage Saved Rock Hudson from Double-Scandal!” reported that the star “was more comfortable with men than with women and had trouble keeping girlfriends.” In its article, “Why Rock Hudson’s Giving Hollywood the Willies!”
Uncensored
reported on various efforts by the studio to keep stories about Hudson quiet. Working for
Confidential
was a private investigator named Fred Otash—who played both sides of the fence. When Phyllis Gates wanted to divorce Rock Hudson, she hired Otash. The investigator taped a conversation of Rock and Phyllis discussing efforts to hide or “cure” his homo
sexuality.
*
Gates got everything she wanted in the divorce, and Otash got a little bonus in the arrangement: He went to Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn with the tape. “Rock is one of our biggest stars,” Cohn pleaded with Otash. “If that stuff gets out, you’ll ruin us.” Cohn became a source and a client. “He handed me mug shots of one of his lesser stars, Rory Calhoun, who had been arrested and sent to prison earlier in life.”
Confidential
did a story on Calhoun’s early brush with the law and Cohn tossed more business Otash’s way.

Hollywood tried to fight back. It made movies that slammed the exposé magazines, including the 1956 films
Scandal Inc.
with Robert Hutton and
Slander,
which was released with the tag line: “Who will be the next victim of this scandal magazine?”
Slander
starred Van Johnson, whose sex life was a regular topic for the scandal magazines. Some stars sued. Liberace filed a $20 million case against
Confidential
for a story that said the flamboyant pianist’s theme song should be “Mad About the Boy.” Maureen O’Hara, the star of
Miracle on 34th Street,
sued over an article, “It Was the Hottest Show in Town When Maureen O’Hara Cuddled in Row 35.” The story reported that O’Hara and her “Latin Lothario” were kicked out of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for a “necking session [that was] so hot it threatened to short circuit the movie theater’s air-conditioning system.” Errol Flynn sued for $1 million, objecting to a story that he had taken several prostitutes as guests on his yachting honeymoon with Patricia Wymore.

Most celebrities, however, were worried that a court case would force out the rest of the story—the embarrassing details that
Confidential
held back. The story that did it—that made Hollywood decide it had to take action—was “The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce.” The September 1955 article told how baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, hoping to catch the sex symbol he was divorcing in the arms of another man, conducted a raid on the apartment of a friend she was visiting. DiMaggio was still in love with Monroe; he was notoriously jealous and hot tem
pered, and he hired a private investigator, ex-cop Barney Ruditzky, and got his well-connected buddy Frank Sinatra to help with the ambush. DiMaggio, Sinatra, and their cronies followed America’s hottest sex symbol to an apartment belonging to little-known starlet Sheila Stuart where, they suspected, Marilyn was having an affair with her vocal coach, Hal Schaefer.
*
There was some confusion and a couple of sidewalk conferences to discuss how to proceed, but at DiMaggio’s insistence, the gang broke down the door and barged in. Once inside, the ambushers heard a woman’s scream. The room was dark, but Ruditzky started taking pictures, using a flash on his camera, while the still-screaming woman tried to cover herself. Then someone turned on the lights. There, according to
Confidential,
the startled group of men saw a middle-aged woman “now sitting bolt upright in her bed, clutching her nightgown around her ribs and staring in utter terror at the invasion forces swarming around her boudoir.” Then one of the invaders, realizing that they had broken into the wrong apartment, bellowed, “We’re in the wrong place!”

During the debate over how to proceed, the hapless raiders lost sight of which door Marilyn had entered, and rather than catching the reigning film goddess in a compromising situation, they invaded the apartment of a bewildered middle-aged woman named Florence Kotz. Although several witnesses—including Kotz—recognized DiMaggio and Sinatra scurrying from the scene, the police department wrote off the incident as a bungled burglary until the blow-by-blow account appeared in
Confidential.
Hollywood’s power elite was outraged—not with DiMaggio or Sinatra, but with
Confidential
for reporting the story.

Confidential
had to be stopped. The heads of six major studios got together and discussed creating a $350,000 war chest to put
Confidential
out of business, according to a private detective named William Lewis, who met with
Wizard of
Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy to discuss the plan. That strategy was dropped, said
Lewis, because the studio heads were worried that the ploy would backfire. The movie community formed a committee “to consider proper ways and means to safeguard the welfare of the movie industry” that would “expose people connected with smear magazines and to alert the industry of their presence whenever they come around.” Actor Ronald Reagan was on the executive committee and he turned to elected officials for help. Attorney General Edmund Brown was sympathetic. He was tight with Frank Sinatra, who would be a big contributor to his gubernatorial campaign. He was friendly with the Kennedy brothers, who knew that
Confidential
had the goods on their sexual escapades. In 1955, a California state senate subcommittee called the Kraft Commission investigated the scandal magazines to determine if private investigators were selling stories to them. The inquiry didn’t produce any indictments, but it laid the groundwork for what was to follow. In May 1957, Brown and the State of California indicted
Confidential,
its owner, and its contributors, and charged them with “conspiracy to commit criminal libel.”