Humphrey Bogart said of Confidential: “Everybody reads it
but they say the cook brought it into the house” . . . Tom
Wolfe called it “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the
history of the world” . . . Time defined it as “a cheesecake
of innuendo, detraction, and plain smut . . . dig up one
sensational ‘fact,’ embroider it for 1,500 to 2,000 words.
If the subject thinks of suing, he may quickly realize that
the fact is true, even if the embroidery is not.” Here is
the never-before-told tale of Confidential magazine,
America’s first tabloid, which forever changed our notion of
privacy, our image of ourselves, and the practice of
journalism in America. The magazine came out every two
months, was printed on pulp paper, and cost a quarter. Its
pages were filled with racy stories, sex scandals, and
political exposés. It offered advice about the dangers of
cigarettes and advocated various medical remedies. Its
circulation, at the height of its popularity, was three
million. It was first published in 1952 and took the country
by storm. Readers loved its lurid red-and-yellow covers;
its sensational stories filled with innuendo and titillating
details; its articles that went far beyond most movie
magazines, like Photoplay and Modern Screen, and told the
real stories such trade publications as Variety and the
Hollywood Reporter couldn’t, since they, and the movie
magazines, were financially dependent on—or controlled
by—the Hollywood studios. In Confidential’s pages, homespun
America was revealed as it really was: our most sacrosanct
movie stars and heroes were exposed as wife beaters (Bing
Crosby), homosexuals (Rock Hudson and Liberace), neglectful
mothers (Rita Hayworth), sex obsessives (June Allyson, the
cutie with the page boy and Peter Pan collar), mistresses of
the rich and dangerous (Kim Novak, lover of Ramfis Trujillo,
playboy son of the Dominican Republic dictator).
Confidential’s alliterative headlines told of tawny
temptresses (black women passing for white), pinko partisans
(liberals), lisping lads (homosexuals) . . . and promised
its readers what the newspapers wouldn’treveal: “The Real
Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce” . . . How “James Dean
Knew He Had a Date with Death” . . . The magazine’s style,
success, and methods ultimately gave birth to the National
Enquirer, Star, People, E!, Access Hollywood, and TMZ . . .
We see the two men at the magazine’s center: its founder
and owner, Robert Harrison, a Lithuanian Jew from New York’s
Lower East Side who wrote for The New York Graphic and
published a string of girlie magazines, including Titter,
Wink, and Flirt (Bogart called the magazine’s founder and
owner the King of Leer) . . . and Confidential ’s most
important editor: Howard Rushmore, small-town boy from a
Wyoming homestead; passionate ideologue; former member of
the Communist Party who wrote for the Daily Worker,
renounced his party affiliation, and became a virulent
Red-hunter; close pal of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and
expert witness before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, naming the names of actors and writers Rushmore
claimed had been Communists and fellow travelers. Henry
Scott writes the story of two men, who out of their
radically different pasts and conflicting obsessions,
combined to make the magazine the perfect confluence of
explosive ingredients that reflected the America of its
time, as the country struggled to reconcile Hollywood’s
blissful fantasy of American life with the daunting
nightmare of the nuclear age . . .
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