Confidential was an American magazine considered a pioneer in scandal, gossip and exposé journalism. Founded by Robert Harrison, it was published quarterly from December 1952 to August 1953 and then bi-monthly until it ceased publication in 1978. Competitors included: Whisper, Dare, Suppressed, The Hollywood Lowdown, Hush-Hush, and Uncensored.
Origins
New York Graphic Following World War II, Robert Harrison, a New York City publisher of men's magazines, decided to return to investigative journalism. He was previously a reporter on the New York Evening Graphic (1924–1932), an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s. Called "The Porno-Graphic" by detractors for its emphasis on sex, crime and violence, it provided many of the themes that Harrison would use as publisher of Confidential. When Harrison started as a copyboy at the paper, he met the theater critic, Walter Winchell, who would later promote the future magazine.
Motion Picture Herald After the New York Evening Graphic shut down, Harrison moved to the editorial staff of the Motion Picture Herald, a film trade publication whose conservative Catholic owner, Martin Quigley, Sr., helped create the Motion Picture Production Code. Though Harrison was more interested in Broadway and New York social life, his tenure at the Herald would bias the direction of the future Confidential toward Hollywood.
Having learned from Quigley what he could get away with legally, Harrison struck out on his own with a series of non-pornographic "cheesecake" magazines. His first was Beauty Parade (1941–1956), started in October 1941. Using the facilities of Quigley Publishing surreptitiously at night, Harrison used publicity photos collected from a visit to the company's Hollywood offices to paste together his Galley proofs. When he was caught and fired on Christmas Eve 1941, his sisters Edith Tobias and Helen Studin rallied around him and raised several thousand dollars in capital, $400 of it from his favorite niece, Marjorie Tobias, who would later become a central figure in his most famous enterprise... Harrison had great success with Beauty Parade and five sister magazines, but their circulation declined in the post-war years. Harrison had a distaste for full nudity and refused to follow the trend of magazines such as Playboy. By early 1952. his accountant told him that he was broke.
Eyewitness In 1947, Harrison "mocked up a 'fact' magazine called Eyewitness," which was never published. It would not be until 1952 that financial pressure forced Harrison to put serious effort in a new magazine. Harrison spent six months reworking the format of another factual magazine. He would later say: "I must have ripped that thing apart three times before I published it, and it still wasn't right.". Supposedly inspired by Virginia Hill's testimony to the Kefauver Committee hearings, Harrison finally launched his tabloid-style gossip magazine: Confidential. "The name came from a series of exposé books by Lee Mortimer and Jack Lait.". As with the earlier New York Graphic, it concentrated on exposing the substance abuse habits, criminal records and hidden political and sexual preferences of celebrities. Though Harrison would publish non-show business stories involving "racketeering, consumer scams and politicians' peccadilloes," like Quigley Publishing that he previously worked for, the emphasis was Hollywood, but with a twist—"exposés of star secrets" became Confidentials prime focus.
Early years Begins publication
The first Confidential issue was dated December (released November) 1952 under the caption "The Lid Is Off!" Its circulation was 250,000 copies. But when the breakup of Marilyn Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio was reported in the August 1953 issue ("Why Joe DiMaggio Is Striking Out with Marilyn Monroe!"), the circulation jumped to 800,000. The quarterly magazine then became bimonthly and was the fastest growing magazine in the United States at the time. Harrison would claim its circulation reached four million, and because every copy was estimated to be read by ten persons, it might have reached a fifth of the US population.
"The Confidential house style was laden with elaborate, pun-inflected alliteration and allowed stories to suggest, rather than state, the existence of scandal." But if Harrison had sworn affidavits or photographic/audio proof, the story would go beyond innuendo (unlike an earlier Hollywood scandal publisher, Frederic Girnau of the Coast Reporter—who was tried for libeling Clara Bow—Harrison usually protected himself with signed affidavits). Film historian Mary Desjardins described Confidentials editorial style as using "research methods and writing techniques that recycled old stories or created 'composite' facts as the basis of new ones." Robert Harrison himself described it thus: "Once we establish the star in the hay and that's documented, we can say anything we want and I think we make them a hell of a lot more interesting than they really are. What's a guy gonna do, sue us and admit he was in the hay with the dame, but claim he didn't do all the other things we dress the story with?" After the "facts" of an article were assembled, a staff of four (headed by associate editor Jay Breen) would rewrite it several times to achieve Confidentials "toboggan ride" style: "racy and free of embroidery, keeps the reader on the edge of his seat." The final product would be read aloud at a staff meeting for euphony..
When Harrison published "Winchell Was Right About Josephine Baker!", he came out in support of his childhood mentor at the Graphic during the Stork Club controversy. Winchell returned the favor by mentioning Confidential in his newspaper column and television and radio broadcasts..
Harrison would rent 4,000 square feet of office space at 1697 Broadway in New York City, but never had more than 15 staff members,. mostly family relations of whom the most important were his sisters Edith Tobias and Helen Studin. He would also move into an even more luxurious apartment at the Hotel Madison cooperative on East 58th Street.. From his two new headquarters, Harrison developed a Hollywood network of informants—prostitutes, hotel employees, down-on-their-luck actors and vengeful celebrities.—working with local detective agencies such as the Fred Otash Detective Bureau and H. L. Von Wittenburg's Hollywood Detective Agency. Among the informants were minor actresses such as Francesca De Scaffa. (ex-wife of Bruce Cabot) and Ronnie Quillan. (ex-wife of screenwriter Joseph Quillan). According to Harrison, Barbara Payton would stop by Confidentials Hollywood office and sell a story whenever she was short of cash. However, the informants could rise to the level of prominent Hollywood columnists such as Florabel Muir Muir was exposed as an informant during the 1957 Harrison trial. and in some cases, all the way up to a producer such as Mike Todd. Mike Todd wanted Harrison to publish a hit-piece on Columbia's Harry Cohn. or even a studio head such as Harry Cohn. Harry Cohn allegedly suppressed the Confidential story about himself in exchange for rumors regarding Columbia contractee Kim Novak. Money, publicity, revenge or blackmail was the lure.
Contrary to the popular legend that the magazine double-checked its facts before publishing its articles, as well as being vetted by Confidentials lawyers as "suit-proof," the later 1957 court case would show otherwise.. Despite spending over $100,000 a year having a Manhattan law firm, "Becker, Ross, and Stone to vet each story,". Harrison would still ignore the lawyers' warnings, as in the case of the article on Maureen O'Hara. But Harrison had further safeguards in place. In addition to articles being vetted by lawyers and sworn affidavits or photographic/audio proof of claims, Harrison compartmentalized both the printing and distribution channels. Though the editorial content was prepared in the New York offices, the magazine itself was printed in Chicago by an independent contractor (Kable Publishing of Mount Morris, Illinois). The copies were sold before they came off the presses and neither Confidential Inc. nor the printer had any corporate connection to the chain of "distributors, wholesalers and retailers that provided Confidential to all those people who claimed they only read it at the beauty parlor or the barbershop."
Success Harrison soon started making approximately $500,000 per issue. By 1955, Confidential had reached a circulation of five million copies per issue with larger sales than Reader's Digest, Ladies' Home Journal, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, or Collier's. That year Harrison shut down all his men's magazines except Beauty Parade and Whisper. Beauty Parade would cease the next year and Whisper would continue as Confidentials sister publication, which recycled variants of Confidentials stories.
Rushmore A former film reviewer for the communist Daily Worker, Howard Rushmore was fired for a too-favorable review of Gone With The Wind. He moved to the New York Journal-American and became an active anti-communist. He later became director of research for Senator Joseph McCarthy's Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. After a dispute with the subcommittee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, Rushmore resigned. At the Journal-American, Rushmore criticized Cohn in print and was fired from the paper. Then his mentor, Walter Winchell, gained for him a new editorial job. Under Winchell's sponsorship, Howard Rushmore became the chief editorAnonymous, (September 1955), table of contents, Confidential, (New York City, New York), p. 4 of Confidential.
Rushmore provoked the enmity of newspaper editors and publishers who supported McCarthyism such as those who worked for the Hearst chain. He found himself cut off from his usual employment. Rushmore hoped to use Confidential as a new venue to expose communists, though he often had to settle for suspected Hollywood fellow travellers,. who were implied in stories to be sexual "deviates." Dietrich at time was rumored to be married to a Soviet agent, Otto Katz. Scott starred in the anti-McCarthy Western Silver Lode (1954). While his anti-communist hit pieces were bylined under his own name, he used a host of pseudonyms for Hollywood exposés, such as "Juan Morales" for "The Lavender Skeletons in TV's Closet" and "Hollywood—Where Men Are Men, and Women, Too!", or "Brooks Martin" for the Zsa Zsa Gabor story "Don't Be Fooled by the Glamour Pusses." Aside from Rushmore-authored pieces unmasking communists and homosexuals in Washington and Hollywood, he also wrote how-to articles on filing for divorce and conducting extra-marital affairs, echoing his experiences with his two wives.
In January 1955, Rushmore flew to Los Angeles to confer with old Harrison informants like De Scaffa and Quillan. He also recruited new ones like Mike Connolly of the Hollywood Reporter and Agnes Underwood of the Los Angeles Herald Express.. One of Rushmore's most prolific discoveries was United Press columnist Aline Mosby.. Mosby was nationally known at the time for doing a story at a nudist camp, naked. Later she covered the "Kitchen Debate" between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon and was the first American journalist to interview Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow. FBI memo notes that United Press fired Mosby for the Confidential leaks. Despite his high salary, Rushmore was repelled by the informants and Harrison. Rushmore considered his employer a "pornographer," though Rushmore himself was a collector of erotica. Harrison communicated with his West Coast network by telegram and phone. But in the rising face of legal threats from the film industry, Harrison would make his boldest move yet.
Hollywood Research Inc.