Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  When Joan Crawford died, People commissioned gossip columnist Doris Lilly to write an article about her. Lilly, who lived in the same building as Crawford and was quite friendly with the actress, believed that the Hollywood legend had committed suicide and had compelling evidence to support the theory.* Lilly also had delicious anecdotes about Crawford’s eccentricities.* “The last time I saw her was two weeks before she died,” Lilly wrote. “She had hurt her back scrubbing floors. We gossiped. Joan Crawford loved to gossip. She said, ‘The so-called actresses of today look like they don’t bathe and they don’t memorize their lines. I think most of them took acting lessons from the A&P.’ ” Lilly also wrote that Joan Crawford had a love affair with Clark Gable—which would have been a big scoop for People. It, and much of the rest of the article for which Lilly was paid $500, was cut. People wasn’t interested in the Golden Age of Hollywood and it wasn’t interested in exposing love affairs or other scandals.

  Even during this honeymoon period, however, People clashed with a few celebrities. Warren Beatty was one. Beatty had a peculiar relationship with the press. During the filming of his breakthrough 1961 movie, Splendor in the Grass, Beatty was living with Joan Collins, whom he had recently convinced to get an abortion, and co-star Natalie Wood was married to Robert Wagner, in what was widely believed to be one of the film world’s happiest marriages. Then columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Beatty and Wood were “staying up nights rehearsing their next day’s love scenes.” Hollywood was shocked.† Around that time Beatty had another unpleasant media experience when he was interviewed by Joe Hyams for Show Business Illustrated. Beatty rambled almost incoherently during much of the conversation, pausing only to scratch his head or pick his nose. Hyams was shocked by the number of times “fuck” erupted from Beatty’s mouth at a time when movie stars didn’t talk like that. Hyams was not impressed and said so in the article.

  After that, Beatty, for the most part, refused to give inter views. “Most of what I say is unprintable, anyway,” Beatty told Rex Reed. “Most movie stars are not interesting, so to sell papers and magazines in the fading publications field, a writer has to end up writing his ass off to make somebody more interesting than he is, right? What do I need with publicity?”

  But in 1975, Beatty was releasing Shampoo and very much wanted publicity. People was the perfect outlet. “I wanted to challenge the assumption that a hypersexual character with women, a Don Juan, is a misogynist or a latent homosexual,” said Beatty, who had been linked with Michelle Phillips, Julie Christie, Jean Seberg, Susannah York, Leslie Caron, and others. “Even the promiscuous feel pain.” The profile was mostly flattering, but reporter Barbara Wilkins reported an alleged encounter in which Beatty tried to seduce a photographer on one of his movies, unzipping her pants on the set of the film and getting her fired when she rebuffed his advances. After the story appeared, Beatty called Stolley, furiously denying that any such incident occurred and demanding a retraction.

  “We had several screaming conversations,” says Stolley. “I tried to calm him down, tried to do damage control.” Stolley refused to run a retraction, and got ready to be blackballed by the power elite of Hollywood. It didn’t happen. “I think Warren was more isolated than we thought at this point,” Stolley said. “No one in Hollywood would believe his story, and I think we worried unnecessarily.” Eventually, Beatty dropped the issue, and the two men ran into each other at a Hollywood party, shook hands, and chatted about politics. “Being on the cover of People was a pretty big deal then,” said Stolley. “No one was going to alienate himself from the magazine entirely.”

  People was on its way to becoming one of the most successful magazines in the history of publishing. Stolley quickly realized that he had to cater to public tastes, not dictate them as Life had done. The strategy was a radical departure for upscale magazines. It was also a survival tactic.

  In a further effort to avoid the same fate as Life, People avoided the high price of postage and in its early years, was available only on newsstands. It lived or died, therefore, on the appeal of its cover. A dud meant a $1 million drop in ad and newsstand revenue. Choosing a cover was the most important decision for each issue, and Stolley carefully studied patterns of what worked and what didn’t. “We were very pragmatic,” said Stolley. “If someone didn’t work well on the cover, that person didn’t make the cover again.” Some would call it a movement toward populism, but many in the industry blasted it as shameless pandering. Stolley remained unapologetic. “A cover is not a benediction,” he bristled. “It’s a marketing tool.”

  Early on, Stolley found that imaginative or artistically compelling covers weren’t necessarily good sellers. People’s second cover depicted eccentric billionaire John Paul Getty. It was a stunning photo, taken by famed Life photographer Alfred Eisenstadt, in which Getty was backlit, his craggy, deeply lined face in stark contrast to a perfect, delicate daffodil he was holding. It bombed on the newsstands.

  Celebrities were just about the only subjects that could be counted on to sell well. Politicians almost always sold poorly. Much to everyone’s surprise, Teddy Kennedy was one of the first year’s worst sellers. He was beaten by Joan Kennedy. Even Watergate, the hottest political story in the country, didn’t interest readers. People ran three Watergate covers during its early years. “They didn’t sell worth a damn,” said Stolley. Ideally, the cover subject had to be recognized by eighty-five percent of Americans—which ruled out most politicians and many actors. “Liv Ullman is an example,” said Stolley. “She had acted in mostly art house films. She may have deserved a People cover, but she didn’t belong there.” Once, when People was doing an issue on celebrity gardening, Stolley realized that none of the actors in the story was a big enough star for the cover. He called his good friend, actress Ann-Margret. “I’m in a jam,” he told the actress. “Do you ever garden?”

  The actress was somewhat perplexed. “I have a gardener,” she said.

  Stolley was desperate. “Didn’t you ever plant a seed when you were a kid?”

  “Yes,” Ann-Margret said.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Stolley declared. “I’m going to have you photographed in the next twenty-four hours.”

  Common wisdom held that singers and musicians didn’t sell well on covers, but when an Olivia Newton John cover nearly sold out, the editors reconsidered the rules. Television actors, surprisingly, usually sold better than movie stars. Themes emerged and Stolley developed what is known as “Stolley’s Formula.” It went:

  Young is better than old

  Pretty is better than ugly

  Rich is better than poor

  TV is better than music.

  Music is better than moines

  Moines are better than Sports

  And anything is better than politics.

  The findings, which critics considered the ultimate triumph of marketing over journalism, turned on its head the conventional hierarchy of news, where nothing was more sacred than politics, and television was perhaps the lowest order. Beyond Stolley’s Formula, he devised what he called the X Factor. Some people just fascinated the readers. Mary Tyler Moore, much to his surprise, didn’t. “Under my formula, she should have sold through the roof,” said Stolley. “The public loved her, but they had no curiosity about her. There was no X factor.”

  Then, in 1977, People discovered a Pandora’s Box. Tony Orlando was having troubles and he didn’t want People to censor them; he wanted the world to know what he was going through. A few years earlier, Orlando had been very hot, with his own television series and several number one hit songs, but he had suffered a nervous breakdown and dropped out of television for a while. The singer’s publicist called People to say Orlando wanted to talk, so the magazine sent reporter Judy Kessler to interview him. Once Orlando started talking, he didn’t seem able to stop. He told about being unfaithful to his wife, about his cocaine abuse, and about the suicide of his dear friend, Freddie Prinze. The story ran with the headline: �
�Tony Orlando’s Breakdown.” It became one of the magazine’s all-time best-sellers. As a result, People began exploiting what Stolley called O.P.P.—Other People’s Problems. “We realized that for a number of reasons, a lot of prominent people would talk to us about these problems if we sent a sympathetic reporter and photographer,” said Stolley. “They felt this was helpful to them to tell America who they were and what was happening in their lives.” And they discovered that America loved reading about it. People started out as a feelgood magazine, but by the late 1970s, melodramatic stories about the traumas suffered by stars became its staple. Karen Carpenter’s anorexia, Drew Barrymore’s drug problems, the breakdown in Farrah Fawcett’s marriage appeared regularly. The stories all came from the stars themselves, and People treated O.P.P.s with extraordinary sympathy.

  People’s greatest innovation was packaging tabloid content in an upscale package with the imprimatur of a reputable publisher. Circulation hit 1 million in less than a year and 2 million within three years. In the first several issues, advertisers stayed away, but as the magazine caught on with readers, advertisers flocked to buy pages. Within eighteen months, People was in the black, a record; Sports Illustrated, by comparison, had taken ten years to turn a profit. People’s advertising pages shot up from 601 pages in 1974 to more than 3,000 pages in less than four years. It went on to become the most successful magazine in the history of publishing. The rest of the publishing world didn’t know whether to throw stones or follow suit.

  Other celebrity publications sprang up. Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, who had been having huge success with tabloids in England, was trying to enter the American market. Murdoch had tried to buy the National Enquirer from Pope, and got Pope’s buddy Roy Cohn to try to broker the deal. Talks fell through. Around this time, Pope told associates that he turned down an offer to buy the paper for $50 million—and Murdoch was used to buying on the cheap. So in 1974, the same year that Time-Life launched People, Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch started publishing the National Star.* It was somewhat slicker than the Enquirer, though less slick than People, and Murdoch promoted it with a million-dollar ad campaign.

  In 1976, the tabloidization of the mainstream press went into high gear when Murdoch bought the intellectually elite but financially beleaguered New York Post. Murdoch transformed the tabloid with screaming headlines and a full page of gossip, and went after the Daily News’s blue collar readers, ridiculing its competitor for trying to be like the New York Times.

  The Daily News hired Igor Cassini’s former assistant, Liz Smith, to write a daily gossip column. “I said, ‘Well, I just don’t think people want to read gossip anymore,’ ” she said. “I guess I just thought the Winchell thing had ended.” She was wrong; New York’s tabloid wars had begun.

  Within three years after People was founded, virtually every publisher in the country had entered into the field. While Dick Stolley was getting credit—or blame—for being a pioneer of celebrity journalism, he was, in fact, just traveling over territory that Gene Pope had blazed long ago. Stolley didn’t invent—or even rediscover—personality journalism. He just made it respectable.

  “They stole our idea,” said National Enquirer columnist Mike Walker. “They ripped us off.” Stolley maintained that People was in no way inspired by the National Enquirer, but it’s hard to believe that Time Inc. didn’t at least notice the National Enquirer, which in 1974 had a circulation that was nudging 4 million—and climbing. “If not the mother or father” of People magazine, said National Enquirer editor Iain Calder, “we’re certainly the midwife.”

  In the three years since People was founded, gossip had gone from virtual extinction to a renaissance, and the trend was lamented by journalists everywhere. Outraged cover stories appeared in magazines like Esquire, Newsweek, and New York magazine. “Gossip columns, which had all but vanished with the deaths of Winchell, Kilgallen, Hopper and Parsons—not to mention their papers—are back in bolder typeface than ever,” noted a Newsweek cover story in May 1976. “Not since the giddy old days of American journalism has so much space been devoted to so little.”

  “The doleful fact is that the celebrity industry has reached the point at which the demand is outstripping the supply,” according to another article. “There is hardly a major newspaper in the nation that hasn’t launched its own gossip or names-in-the-news column.”

  “To everything there is a season, and if this seems to be the season for anything at all, then that thing is gossip,” Esquire noted. “You can bet that Time Inc. isn’t publishing People as a public service.” The magazine went on to report the gossip on gossip columnists. (Louella Parsons used to wet herself in restaurants, Rona Barrett’s real name is Rona Burstein.) “So what is it with you? Why, all of a sudden, are you so interested in this stuff?” Esquire asked. “Are you ashamed of yourself? Should you be? … Does anybody care? DOES ANYBODY CARE!”

  Readers not only cared, they cared a great deal. They cared more than they did about Watergate or Vietnam or race riots, and any publisher who ignored what people really cared about—and tried to tell them what they should care about—was headed toward extinction. Life magazine had found that out, but if Esquire or anyone else needed further proof, it came one hot August day in 1977. It was the ultimate tabloid event.

  * John Sarkisian died in 1985.

  * Graham’s disclaimer was slightly disingenuous. Graham was obsessed with money and once confessed that she often used sex to get what she wanted. Her first marriage was to a man twenty-five years her senior, who would arrange dates with wealthy men, and he and Graham sometimes lived off the proceeds of the “gifts” the dates gave her.

  * Such as the way that Crawford sent away her beloved dog, from whom she was never separated, the weekend that she died. The theory has since been put forward by recent biographers.

  * During a sanitation strike, for example, Crawford had her trash put in Bergdorf Goodman boxes complete with big purple bows before she had them taken out. Despite rumors that her house was all carpeted in white, Crawford had all her carpets thrown out because she could never get them entirely dirt free. She also had all her furniture and even her walls coated in plastic so she could clean them better.

  † Louella Parsons declared it the greatest tragedy since Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks split. Elizabeth Taylor, who had recently busted up Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, claimed that the scandal had traumatized her so badly that she had to sedate herself with tranquilizers and take to bed.

  * Later shortened to simply the Star.

  10

  the death of a king

  Shortly after midnight, on August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley drove his Stutz-Bearcat through the music-sheet-inspired iron gates in front of 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Fans were waiting at the gates as usual, and one of them snapped the singer’s picture with a $20.95 instamatic camera. When Elvis got home, he sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Unchained Melody,” ate some cookies and a bowl of ice cream, and then played racquetball until 6 A.M. He changed into gold-colored pajama bottoms, and, clutching some reading material—friends maintain it was a book on the Shroud of Turin, others say it was actually pornography—Elvis went to a second floor bathroom. There, the forty-two-year-old, two-hundred-sixty-pound performer took a handful of pills. Moments later, he collapsed.

  Elvis’s fiancée, Ginger Alden, was asleep in the next room and heard nothing, but at 2:15 that afternoon, she said, she went into the bathroom and discovered Elvis’s body sprawled on the red shag carpet. She called for help. Al Strada, a bodyguard, was next on the scene, then came Elvis’s road manager, Joe Esposito. Soon, the bathroom was filled with members of the “Memphis Mafia,” some of them sobbing hysterically, others desperately trying to revive him.

  “Don’t die!” Presley’s guitarist cried as he knelt over the singer’s body. “Please don’t leave us!” Elvis’s elderly father Vernon was having heart troubles and collapsed on the floor beside his son. Nine-year-old
Lisa Marie stood at the doorway. “What’s wrong with my daddy?” she asked, but no one answered.

  At 2:33 P.M. the dispatcher for the Memphis Fire Department notified paramedics. “Unit Six, respond to 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Party having difficulty breathing. Go to the front gate and go to the front of the mansion.” Paramedic Ulysses S. Jones Jr. tried to resuscitate Presley while Charlie Crosby drove the ambulance the seven miles to the Baptist Memorial Hospital; there a “white male, approximately forty, under CPR, no response” was admitted to the emergency room at 2:56 P.M. On the admittance form, he was listed as Mr. John Doe and across the top were the words: NO PUBLICITY.

  At 3:30 P.M. Elvis’s personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, came out of the emergency room with a grim expression on his face. “He’s gone,” Dr. Nichopoulos told the sobbing entourage. “He’s no longer here.”

  August 16 was a sweltering hot, otherwise slow news day when National Enquirer Executive Editor Iain Calder called his closest aides into an office and closed the door. It was about 3 P.M. “Elvis Presley is dead,” Calder said. The news hadn’t been announced—even the family hadn’t been given the official word—but the Enquirer had a source inside Graceland. A reporter was on his way to the mansion before the ambulance got there. The announcement would be delayed for at least half an hour so that Elvis’s father Vernon could be notified.

  This was no time for mourning. This wasn’t just a big story, it was the biggest. Elvis Presley’s death—more than any other story in the National Enquirer’s history—was monumental to tabloid readers. To the masses who read the National Enquirer, it was what John Kennedy’s assassination was to the New York Times’s readers.

  The staff of the Enquirer began to mobilize. Calder had already chartered a Cessna Citation jet to take a team of four reporters and a photographer to Memphis. Sixteen more would be flown in from around the country to join them. Operation Elvis would have an unlimited budget and a simple mission: get the story, get it first, and get it exclusively. Calder needed a commander to oversee the effort. He turned to Tom Kuncl, an aggressive 6-foot 2-inch, 215-pound former war correspondent with a caustic sense of humor and a booming voice. “Tom, what have you got going right now that’s important?” Calder asked. The editor had just killed a story that Kuncl had worked on for months, and the reporter was in a sulk. “Nothing,” Kuncl mumbled. “You,” Calder ordered Kuncl, “go to Memphis.”