Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip Read online

  Suddenly, his outsider status was an asset, a subject of pride. It was the persona that Drudge would embrace, one that would lead his defenders to describe him as the “Thomas Paine of the Internet” and a “A town crier for the new age.” Drudge also took pains to distinguish what he did from the work of conventional reporters. “I don’t call it journalism,” Drudge told students at New York University. “To me, that is a cuss word, simply because I think there was a period in the past twenty years when we got away from aggressive reporting.”

  Drudge was embraced by the far right, who claimed that ever since the Kennedy era, the left-leaning media had ignored stories that hurt the liberal cause. Drudge insisted that his only allegiance was to scandal. “I’m a partisan for news,” he was fond of saying. “I go where the stink is.”

  The impulse to “go where the stink is” seemed to the dismay of many people—journalists, celebrities, the rich and powerful, and ordinary citizens—to have come to define the entire news industry. Gossip had coexisted vigorously—if not always easily—with more serious news during Walter Winchell’s heyday. It had then disappeared almost completely from newspapers and television during the 1960s, only to reemerge during the 1970s, spread through the media like a virus in the 1980s, and completely consume it by the end of the 1990s. To understand how the modern media could have reached this bizarre state, how someone like Matt Drudge could come to play a pivotal role in American journalism at the end of the millennium, it is necessary to go back to 1957.

  That year, there was an episode that has been all but forgotten by most media students today, but it was a pivotal event that shaped the direction of journalism for decades to come. It was the trial of Confidential.

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  the war against confidential

  Spectators spilled into the corridor of Los Angeles’s Hall of Justice those muggy days in the summer of 1957. Some wore their fanciest evening clothes, some wore short shorts or tight toreador pants, some even brought ballet or tap shoes and danced; they all hoped to catch the eye of the guard who had the power to grant them one of the few seats that had been set aside for the public. Court clerks had searched for hours trying to find a room big enough to accommodate the stars, defendants and witnesses, reporters and photographers, and hundreds of curious onlookers who crowded into the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice, craning their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the unfolding drama of America’s favorite spectator sport: celebrity scandals. In its relatively short history, Hollywood had survived scores of sensational cases, but inside the packed green-and-gold filigreed courtroom that summer, scandal itself was on trial. Confidential—the magazine that had shocked and riveted America with tales of celebrity excesses and debauchery—had been indicted by the California Attorney General’s office on charges of “conspiracy to publish criminally libelous, obscene and otherwise objectionable material.”

  “We will convict the filth peddlers that smear the names of Hollywood,” vowed California Attorney General Edmund “Pat” Brown. The movie industry had been good to Brown and to California; it had endowed the state with millions of dollars in business and international fame. The film world is built on images and appearances, on fantasy and facades; Confidential made its money destroying those images, said Brown, “dragging people’s names through the dirt and mire of gossip.” Brown was a rising political star, a popular prosecutor who was planning to run for governor of California. He had already threatened to prosecute newsstand dealers who sold Confidential, effectively banning the magazine in California. Now Brown was going to finish the job, promising to “end Confidential’s reign of terror.”

  Celebrities had long endured—even embraced—gossip. The cleverly placed tidbit about a star’s lavish lifestyle could actually help his career—or help keep a wayward actor in line. For years, celebrities and studio publicity departments worked with columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—planting items that were often concocted—about romances and marriages, and feuds and fights over film roles. The studios and stars controlled that sort of press; they used the gossip columnists as high-powered publicity machines. Despite their reputation for nastiness, the old-line gossip columnists were usually most vicious when it came to fighting with each other. Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky was so certain that rival Louella Parsons got him fired from the Los Angeles Examiner because she didn’t want the competition in her most valued outlet, that one day he retaliated by sinking his teeth into her arm. The gossip business had gotten very competitive.

  The formula pioneered by Walter Winchell in the 1920s was so successful that by the 1940s gossip columnists were among the best read and most influential journalists in the country. Most newspapers carried several gossip columns; by the 1950s, there were more than four hundred full-time reporters covering Hollywood. Show business columns with announcements of romances and casting news like Hedda’s and Louella’s were becoming old hat. So were the New York columns like Walter Winchell’s that chronicled Cafe Society and the Broadway scene. America was hungry for juicier scandals. In 1952 a flamboyant publisher named Robert Harrison gave it to them.

  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 pictur
es, 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.”