Dish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show

1

citizen reporter

My reaction to having our speaker today at the National Press Club was the same as a lot of other members, Doug Harbrecht, the club’s president and Business Week’s Washington bureau chief, told the two hundred journalists gathered before him on the afternoon of June 2, 1998. Why do we want to give a forum to that guy?

That guy was Matt Drudge, who, said Harbrecht, mucks through the hoaxes, conspiracies, and half-truths posted on-line in pursuit of fodder for his website. Six months earlier, Drudge had posted the sordid story that had subsequently exploded into the biggest political scandal since Watergate. But while journalists had gloried in the heroic part they had played in Watergate, most reporters were repulsed by their role in the Lewinsky affair. Despite charges of Clinton’s alleged perjury and obstruction of justice, this story was driven not by issues or by questions of national security and the abuse of power—but by sex. It was the stuff of gossip columns. Yet because the scandal dominated the news for months, Matt Drudge, who never studied journalism and had never worked for a news organization, became one of the bestknown reporters in the country. Matt Drudge was the personification of how scandal had hijacked the news—and those in the establishment media hated him for it.

So, Matt, know this, said Harbrecht. "There aren’t many in this hallowed room who consider you a journalist. Real journalists pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over backwards to get the other side. Journalism means being painstakingly thorough, evenhanded, and fair. Now, in the interest of good journalism, let’s hear Matt Drudge’s side of the story."

An awkward moment of silence followed, and then polite applause. Matt Drudge stepped up to the podium. He was only thirty-one years old, a young man dressed in old man’s clothes: a cream-colored suit with unfashionably wide lapels, a blue shirt and striped tie, and tortoiseshell glasses. He was pale with a somewhat asymmetric face and small but intense dark eyes. He somehow appeared more vulnerable without his trademark fedora, which made him look more like a vaudeville character than a pasty-faced, self-described computer geek with a slightly receding hairline.

Applause for Matt Drudge in Washington at the Press Club, Drudge joked. Now there’s a scandal. He was nervous at first, but just as his voice was about to falter, he reached over and grabbed his fedora and placed it on his head. With his talisman, this relic that evoked populist tabloid journalism of Walter Winchell’s days, Drudge found his voice. For the next forty minutes, he spoke passionately—if not always eloquently—about his love of journalism, about the importance of the unfettered flow of information, about how scandals, while sometimes ugly, were important to democracy and to individual liberty. Drudge spoke of being a loner, a little guy in a business dominated by conglomerates, about the importance of persevering to tell the truth, even when it embarrassed and infuriated powerful people.

‘Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one,’ he said, quoting the legendary journalist A. J. Liebling. The Internet, Drudge’s medium, was a great equalizer, he insisted. Now, everyone who owned a laptop and a modem could be a publisher and a reporter, a citizen reporter—as Drudge called himself. He looked forward to the day, he said, when everyone in America would have an equal voice and the country would be vibrating with the din of small voices. The Internet was going to save the news, he declared: It’s freedom of participation absolutely realized.

Many journalists in the crowd were unimpressed. It was that elitism, those rules, they maintained, that had long kept lurid, irresponsible stories like Drudge’s out of the press. The real reason that Matt Drudge had come to Washington that day, most of them knew, was that he was being forced to testify in his own defense in a $30 million libel lawsuit. Drudge had inaccurately reported that Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist who had become an aide to President Clinton, had beaten his wife. Soon after he posted the erroneous item, Drudge posted an apology and correction. But he had made plenty of other bloopers, as well: He had posted items saying that Clinton had a bald eagle tattoo in his genital region, that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had seventy-five pictures of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky together, and that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted. He once estimated that he is accurate eighty percent of the time.

Could you succeed as a journalist, someone in the crowd wanted to know, if you worked for an organization which required an accuracy rate of one hundred percent?

I don’t know what organization that would be, Drudge shot back.

There was some embarrassed laughter, and then applause. Despite Harbrecht’s pronouncements about high standards of journalists, Matt Drudge and everyone else in the room knew that by the late 1990s, the media was in a state of absolute crisis. The always fuzzy line between news and gossip had become a complete blur. Tabloid topics and sensationalism repeatedly overshadowed serious news. It wasn’t Drudge’s mistakes that angered many in the crowd; it was the stories he got right: Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky; the semen-stained dress; the infamous cigar. With the Internet, characters like Drudge could pursue—without the constraints and rules imposed by editors and institutions—scandals that were too juicy to ignore and too tawdry to explore. Matt Drudge was the future of journalism. And everyone else in the room was being forced to follow him.

The publication and dissemination of scandalous information about the rich and powerful has existed almost as long as the written word. Cuneiform tablets from the fifteenth century B.C. discuss allegations that a Mesopotamian mayor was committing adultery with a married woman. But the commercial publication of scandal and gossip as we understand it today began in the 1830s, with the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the penny press. Although these papers were filled with scandal, their information usually came from official sources, such as court proceedings and arrest records. The late nineteenth century saw the debut of the Society column, which contained information—descriptions of yacht trips, guests lists at debutante balls—that was usually sanctioned by the subjects.

Walter Winchell is often credited with inventing the modern gossip column by printing private and sometimes salacious information about famous people. Although some of the tidbits in Winchell’s gossip column was the stuff of the old society columns, Winchell mixed in scandalous, unofficial information about pregnancies, divorces, and liaisons that riveted his readers. When Winchell’s column first appeared in the 1920s in the struggling New York Graphic—a newspaper that would make modern-day tabloids look respectable—other editors saw what Winchell’s column did for circulation and were quick to start up their own gossip columns. Soon, most newspapers in the country were carrying at least one gossip column and many had four or more. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, gossip columns were an integral part of the news, and gossip columnists were loved and even respected by the public. At his peak in the 1940s, Winchell reached an estimated ninety percent of the American public through his columns and radio broadcasts, and was said to be, outside politics and religion, the most powerful man in the world.

So it is no wonder, perhaps, that Drudge would style himself after Winchell. Drudge was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., not far from where he addressed the National Press Club that day. His mother was a lawyer and his father was a social worker; he would later describe his parents as liberal hippies. He was a lonely only child, a stutterer and a latchkey kid who put on puppet shows under sheets and would sit in his bedroom narrating imaginary radio talk shows into a tape recorder. He constantly cut class, and was a D student. I stopped learning at school at age twelve, he told the Los Angeles Times. They were not able to stuff me like a sausage. Even then I didn’t play by society’s rules. I was a rebel all the way.

He was not so much rebel as outcast—so much so that he, rather prophetically, began throwing rocks at his classmates. Once, when someone threw stones back, he needed stitches. When Matt was in junior high school, his mother was hospitalized for schizophrenia; his parents got divorced not long afterward. The extent of his alienation and bitterness is evident from a mock last will and testament Drudge wrote when he graduated from high school in 1984: To my only true friend Ms. thing VickyB I leave a night in Paris, a bottle of Chaps cologne and hope you find a school with original people—and to everyone else who has helped and hindred [sic] me whether it be Staff or students, I leave a penny for each days [sic] I’ve been here and cried here. A Penny rich in worthless memories. For worthless memories is what I have endured. It reminds me of a song, ‘The Funeral Hyme.’

Drudge didn’t go to college. Instead, he bummed around Paris for a month, then moved to New York City for a year, where he worked in a grocery store. Still failing to find himself, he moved back to the Washington area and became the night manager at a 7-Eleven in Takoma Park. Matt Drudge hung out with a crowd of promiscuous, openly gay men and dated several of them. He was a freak, but that’s why we liked him, said Dan Mathews, a friend from that period who would later go on to be a highly visible activist for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). He had a dark, brooding quality, but you never worried if he was going to snap, because it was like he already had.

He loved to do wild, provocative things to draw attention to himself, according to David Cohen. Once, when Drudge and Cohen were dating, they went to a nightclub, and by Cohen’s account, Drudge got kicked out for throwing a pitcher of beer into the air that came raining down on everyone around them. He loved to freak me out by telling me gossip that he found out about me, said Cohen. It was very personal stuff and I have no idea how he found these things out about me. Cohen said that Drudge seemed very comfortable and open with his sexuality, though they never talked about it. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think we had a serious, in-depth conversation. It was always gossipy or shallow stuff. We were very young.

At twenty-two, desperate to start a new life for himself, Drudge moved across the country to Los Angeles. He moved into a grimy $600-a-month one-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a run-down apartment building near Hollywood and Vine. He lived there with a six-toed cat named Dexter. Drudge hoped to get a job in the entertainment business or writing for Variety. Instead, he got a $5-an-hour job as an errand runner for The Price Is Right. From there, he landed a job at the CBS gift shop in Studio City where he worked for five years.

Sensing that Matt was directionless, his father flew from Washington to Los Angeles to visit his son and dragged him into a Circuit City store on Sunset Boulevard to buy him a cheap 486 Packard Bell computer. Oh yeah, Matt told his father. What am I going to do with that?

Drudge had long been an irrepressible gossip. He loved the way that knowing things made him more popular, made people want to talk to him, and, quickly figuring out what to do with his computer, he began to surf various web sites for gossip. Using the computer, it was easy to read foreign publications and wire news. Drudge got his information from places other than his computer, however. He eavesdropped on people’s conversations, he volunteered in the CBS mailroom and intercepted memos, he fished around in the garbage and found discarded Nielsen ratings and confidential box office numbers.

Soon, he had so much gossip that he wanted a better way to spread it. Going to an established newspaper was out of the question. He had no experience and no college degree. "If I’d knocked on the door of the Los Angeles Times they’d have laughed at me, he recalled. So, in 1995 he set up a web site and began e-mailing his tidbits to friends, calling it The Drudge Report. He began with only a few readers, then a couple of dozen, and within no time, one thousand. Drudge thought it had peaked there, but he kept adding more subscribers. In 1996, he was getting 10,000 hits a day and soon America Online offered him $36,000 a year to carry The Drudge Report." Matt quit his job to work on his web site full time. By the summer of 1997, he was averaging 15,000 hits a day.

In many ways, Matt Drudge was still a loner, still working out of his crummy Hollywood apartment, which by now was furnished with a tattered rug, cheap couch, a satellite dish, and a police scanner that was on at all times. But his name was becoming well-known among his readers. He was getting hundreds of E-mails a day. His rogue status gave him a freedom and flexibility that more established journalists didn’t have. It takes ABC News twenty minutes to post a headline to their web site. It takes me ten seconds, Drudge once boasted. I had Diana dead seven minutes before CNN did.

Some believed that one of the ways Drudge got his information was a high-tech version of the way he intercepted memos at CBS. Although Drudge insisted that he got the information from sources within the various news organizations, some editors began suspecting that Drudge had figured out how to hack into their computer systems. Editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times were alarmed that Drudge got stories that weren’t available on its web site and then posted stories just as they would be sent to the news organizations that subscribed to their wire service—with certain key words and phrases intact. Our presumption is that Drudge has someone who has access to the news service wire, and that’s what he’s put out, according to John Geddes, deputy managing editor of the New York Times. On other occasions, however, he posted stories well before they were released to the wires, and some media people suspected that he discovered a way to hack into the paper’s computers. At one point, the Times considered legal action against Drudge, but decided that would be good publicity for him. Hacking into News-week’s computer system is how, some believed, Drudge in July 1997 scooped Newsweek on its own story by reporter Michael Isikoff that Clinton allegedly groped Kathleen Willey. A furious Isikoff blasted Drudge for rifling through raw reporting, like raw FBI files, and disseminating it. Drudge maintained that he had a source at Newsweek—not Isikoff but one of his co-workers—who tipped him off about the story.

The Willey story, however, was nothing compared with the story that Drudge got on Saturday, January 16: Clinton was having an affair with an intern. Again, it was a story reported by Isikoff and again Drudge had the details from an unreleased story. Drudge hammered out the story in his typical hysterical fashion:

NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR-OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE

INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.

At 6 P.M. on Saturday evening, Newsweek magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

It was Sunday morning, January 17, when Drudge finished writing his story. The sun still hadn’t come up. Drudge paused as he stared at his Packard Bell computer and his eyes began to fill with tears. My life won’t be the same after this, he thought, and he hit the Enter button.

For the next four days, no mainstream publication touched the story. A petrified Drudge hid out in his apartment, wearing boxer shorts, his chair jammed up against the door. Over 400,000 people tried to log on to The Drudge Report, sending it crashing. To calm his nerves, he periodically did push-ups or scrubbed his bathtub. Finally, Newsweek published an on-line version of the story, confirming everything the cybercolumnist had written. Soon, it appeared on front pages of newspapers around the country.

Matt Drudge was being profiled in major newspapers and discussed on the television news. Then, on January 25, something astonishing occurred: NBC’s Tim Russert invited Matt Drudge to appear on Meet the Press. The program was one of the oldest and most respected news shows on television. The other guests on the segment were some of the most revered journalists in the country: William Safire of the New York Times, Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, and Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff. Isikoff was still furious that this cybercolumnist had scooped him on his own story. He not only poisoned the atmosphere for real reporting, Isikoff had said of Drudge, he was reckless and irresponsible and he did a disservice to everybody involved. But, explained Russert, he’s part of the story. The show had its highest rating since the Gulf War.

When Drudge exited the Washington offices where Meet the Press was shot, he was met by a cluster of reporters, television and print, who wanted to interview him. He launched into a lecture about the responsibilities of journalism. What does this say about you—all you people here with all your resources—that a story like this can break out of a little apartment in Hollywood? he said. What are you guys doing here besides interviewing yourselves? There’s a new paradigm here. That I can do this out of my stinky apartment and you’ve got your fancy newsrooms with your fancy rules!

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.

2

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 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.

I love it, the Confidential publisher declared. I’ve already told my lawyers to be prepared to subpoena every big-name star who ever appeared in the magazine. Confidential had turned its fifty-three-year-old publisher into a shameless publicity seeker. Harrison, nicknamed the King of Leer, was an effusive man who looked and spoke like a Broadway promoter. He had hooded eyes that darted back and forth, slicked-back black hair, a perpetual tan, and large, very white teeth. Harrison lived in a lavish Manhattan apartment off Fifth Avenue that he decorated to look like the nightclubs he frequented with checkered tablecloths, a long bar and zebra stripes just like El Morocco, he boasted. He wore $250 tailor-made suits, a white fedora, and white polo coat, and drove around in a huge white custom-designed Cadillac Eldorado convertible. His flamboyance was his way, he insisted, of responding to suggestions that he go underground after getting death threats for articles his magazine had published. The Confidential trial would make him even richer and more famous, he insisted. Can you picture that parade up to the witness stand? Harrison loved a good scandal—even if it was about him. Like the time he was hunting for a male potency drug in the Dominican Republic and got shot by big-game hunter Richard Weldy. Earlier, Confidential had run an article that Weldy was a cuckolded husband. No Wonder John Wayne Was the Topic of the Tropics, reported that while John Wayne was visiting his old friend Weldy in Lima, Wayne stole the hunter’s wife, Pilar Palette. The jilted husband got into several public shouting matches with Harrison about the article. Eventually, Weldy took a rifle and shot at the publisher. The bullet hit Harrison in the shoulder, causing only a flesh wound. Weldy is a nice fellow, John Wayne said after the incident, but I deplore the fact that he is such a poor shot.

Weldy and Harrison both later claimed that the shooting was an accident, but it made headlines and the publisher happily posed for pictures from his hospital bed. Harrison even went on television where an aggressive reporter named Mike Wallace accused Harrison of faking the incident for publicity.

[Mike Wallace] starts after me right away, said Harrison. He’s very sarcastic: ‘Why don’t you admit it, Harrison, that so-called shooting in the Dominican Republic was a fake, a publicity stunt, wasn’t it? You weren’t shot at all, were you?’

Would you know a bullet wound if you saw one? Harrison asked.

Wallace insisted he would. The show was live and Harrison, a born showman, seized the moment; he took off his shirt in front of the stunned television crew. Everybody is running around the studio like crazy! Harrison recalled. Those guys didn’t know what to do, die or play organ music. The cameraman didn’t notice the small puncture in Harrison’s shoulder and instead zoomed in on a nickel-sized birthmark on his back. On television, it must have looked like I’d been shot clean through with a cannon! Harrison hooted. That was funny! They never heard the end of it, about that show! That was great publicity, Harrison said, but putting Confidential on trial—he declared—now that was going to be a headline bonanza.

Harrison hired private detective Fred Otash and his team of ten investigators to subpoena the biggest names in the movie industry: people like Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, and Mike Todd, the high-profile producer of Around the World in Eighty Days, who was married to Hollywood’s hottest star, Elizabeth Taylor. Can you imagine those stars on the witness stand? Harrison asked. They’ll have to testify that the stories about them are true! He cackled.

Hollywood’s jitters have mounted toward hysteria, noted the New York Daily News. "Defense attorney Arthur J. Crowley says