You probably need to be an octogenarian like my husband, Joe to remember Confidential, the granddaddy of celebrity scandal magazines.
I certainly don’t remember the magazine which had its heyday in the 1950s although I do remember its progeny like Silver Screen, Modern Screen, and Screenland.
These were American fan magazines which I could buy in London way past their publication dates. They were sold in a small, newsagent’s shop in Ealing located on my route home from school (Tube ride from the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith to South Ealing station, then a half-mile walk to my house.) I was 11, and journeyed to school and back on my own. I had plenty of time to linger at magazine racks.
Inside Story
The clickbait headlines about glamorous movie and TV stars in glitzy, sunny Hollywood called out to me every time I stepped into the grimy little shop. I bought the outdated publications and studied them at home, practicing how to write news stories about movie stars — which, back then, was what I wanted to do when I grew up. It was an “ambition” I fulfilled eventually when I joined Star magazine in 1980 — after being employed by more serious newspapers!
So, of course, when I discovered there was a book, recently published, about Confidential, the first successful celebrity tabloid magazine, I just had to read it. The book, Confidential, Confidential, The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Notorious Scandal Magazine is not cheap ($18.99 for the e-book version) but it is a thoroughly researched and immaculately-sourced work by law professor and movie historian, Samantha Barbas.
It is also a highly informative, yet entertaining read for anyone who has ever wondered how and why Star, People, and the National Enquirer have sold millions of copies at supermarket checkouts, and why these days a website like TMZ.com boasts of more than 87 million views a month.
Assembling Army of Informants
Launched by New York publisher, Robert Harrison, in 1952 as a girlie magazine, Confidential switched to focusing on Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner a year or so later.
Harrison assembled an army of informants in Los Angeles — prostitutes , valets , maids , bartenders , waiters , hairdressers , unemployed extras , and screenwriters. He sent his niece Marjorie Meade and her husband, Fred, to Hollywood and installed them to head Confidential’s gossip-collection operations. The company called “Hollywood Research Incorporated” or HRI paid informants handsomely for tips — “and the juicier the better.”
The Meades also worked on hundreds of “verification” assignments for Confidential. They searched material in the public record — land titles , birth and death records , criminal records — to confirm Confidential articles.
The magazine used private detectives to watch love nests, and if a tail “couldn’t get close enough to a house to find out when a car left, he’d put a Mickey Mouse watch under the back wheel. When the car pulled out, it would crush the watch, recording the time.”
Legal Vetting
Harrison hired top-notch lawyers to vet every salacious feature. One of the most fascinating chapters for me is titled The Legal Department, and describes how scrupulously the publication’s lawyers vetted every major story (something we also did at the Star.)
One legal tidbit refers to the publication’s lawyers advising Harrison to “always print less than he knew.” Why? Because “the threat that the whole story would come out in court was enough to deter most libel suits.”
Exposing the Stars
The book regurgitates dozens of stories that Confidential published about hearthrobs of the day. These stories generated screaming headlines, and shocked readers at the time. The writing style was also hugely entertaining. In one expose, a private detective followed Swedish actress, Anita Ekberg (generally described then as a “blonde bombshell”) and two-time Oscar winner, Gary Cooper to a bungalow on the Pacific Coast Highway.
This is how the magazine reported the story:
“To tell the truth, it was so quiet the whole morning long of Sunday, August 7th that in spite of the fact that Gary’s car was still in the garage , he received a mysterious phone call between about two and four in the afternoon . Cooper answered the phone — the number is GLenwood 7-2475 , in case you’re interested — and drawled his globally famous “Yup?” into the mouthpiece .
High Society Capers
Confidential also covered high society scandals. Its reporters sought out court transcripts for the testimony of billionaire John Jacob Astor’s third wife, and reported the divorce case as follows:
“Here , for the first time , is the sizzling story — the actual testimony — that made [ the judge ] gasp.” Astor’s ex – wife testified how “Jakey wanted movies of them taken in their most intimate moments to amuse him when she wasn’t around , and how he ate like a savage, spent hours staring at his fat, naked body in a mirror, and loved to be beaten.”
Grossest Story?
Perhaps one of the grossest stories in the book is one that Confidential published about Robert Mitchum taking a “pretty young dish” (not his wife) to a masquerade party where he proceeded drunkenly to take off all his clothes and squirt tomato ketchup over himself saying he had come as a “hamburger.”Entertaining & Fascinating
The book, however, is more than a mere regurgitation of scandals which seem quaint by today’s standards — when not downright homophobic or racist (Confidential thrived on outing gay actors like Tab Hunter (pictured) and Liberace, and decrying interracial romances).
Barbas has produced a scholarly yet entertaining account, analyzing the success of the scandal magazine in a historical and social context. As in the case of the Star which followed onto the scene some twenty years later, no-one ever admitted reading Confidential, and yet it was selling more than four million copies a week by June 1955.
Equally fascinating is the author’s account of how much the stars feared the publication — but feared the idea of litigating against it much more. (“This problem would trouble the [movie] industry for the next three years : how to bring down Confidential without revealing to the public that many of its stories were actually true.”)
Barbas, a University of Buffalo law school professor, provides a solid account of the legal battles — not just for libel, but also for obscenity — that eventually caused Harrison to change the format of the magazine, and so lose its readers.
But, in the final chapters, she points out that Confidential was just the beginning because “sex sells and there’s always a market for scandal.” Or, quoting an editor, she writes: “Confidential’s success was the public’s fault. Blame the [ editors ] as much as you like, but do not blame them alone. Millions of [ readers ] . . . make those [ magazines ] possible. Sad commentary that . . . there is a vast market for this commodity [but] Gossip magazines exist because people want them.”