Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  By the early eighties, 20/20 had hit its stride. It was using broadcast news for the sorts of stories hitherto confined to the tabloid press. In the process it became adept at what some considered staging real news. In 1980, for example, in an exercise that recalled New York Post editor Steve Dunleavy’s appeal to the Son of Sam to surrender to him, Barbara Walters persuaded radical fugitive Abbie Hoffman to “surrender” to her on camera. They met on two boats in one of the lakes in upstate New York. While the story generated incredible publicity for Walters, Hoffman had already made a decision to turn himself in, and, critics observed, his real motive in granting the interview was to promote his new book, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture. In other words, the purported “surrender” was simply another Abbie Hoffman publicity stunt in which Walters had willingly participated.

  Walters, however, always seemed to get away with such behavior. It wasn’t just her regal bearing and poised, dry, at times intimidating, style. Nor was it her vast array of friends and contacts. Barbara Walters was a team player in a way that Geraldo never was. Despite her often tabloidy topics, she was clearly a member of the establishment, and she would back off a topic when she was told to. Geraldo basked in his bad-boy reputation, but by the mid-eighties Roone Arledge, the former sports producer who, having established the success of ABC News, now began to yearn for establishment approval, began to see his former protégé as a liability. “Geraldo had become a symbol in many people’s minds of how the line had been blurred between news and entertainment,” Arledge said to his biographer, Marc Gunther. He complained that people would say, “Yeah, they’re good, but they’re not really serious or they wouldn’t have Geraldo on.”

  Arledge began distancing himself from his former star reporter. He stopped returning Geraldo’s calls. He began looking for an excuse to dump him. Then, in late 1985, he got one. In October, 20/20 put together a segment that promised to be a blockbuster. Correspondent Sylvia Chase and producer Stanhope Gould had a twenty-six-minute piece that linked Marilyn Monroe to the Kennedys and the mob. Based largely on Anthony Summers’s well-documented book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the segment also included an on-camera interview with Fred Otash, the detective who worked for Confidential and who claimed to be involved in tapping Marilyn Monroe’s house for Jimmy Hoffa. Sylvia Chase was one of the show’s most respected reporters; TV Guide once called her “the most trusted woman on TV.” She was responsible for a segment on flaming gas tanks on Ford’s subcompact Pinto that revealed that Ford had tested a safer gas tank but never used it. Producer Gould was also respected in the industry, and had won an Emmy for his work. “I’ve never seen anything comparable in shock value,” Milo Speriglio, a private detective who worked on the program as a consultant, said of the program. “I believed it would not just change our way of looking at a notorious real-life Hollywood drama, but our thinking about the Camelot years.”

  There was some concern that Arledge, who had dated Ethel Kennedy, would kill the piece because of his ties to the Kennedy family. His links to the Kennedys went beyond Ethel. His top aide, David Burke, was a former high-level aide to Teddy Kennedy.* Ethel’s daughter Courtney Kennedy had married Arledge’s longtime assistant Jeff Ruhel. Ethel’s son Michael Kennedy was married to Vicki Gifford, the daughter of Frank Gifford, one of Arledge’s closest friends. And Arledge was quite close to Stephen Smith, a Kennedy brother-in-law. Roone had earlier killed a piece on Chappaquidick, but he insisted that his numerous ties to the Kennedy clan didn’t influence his coverage of the family. “Ethel Kennedy is a friend of mine like hundreds of people we do stories on,” Arledge said. “That has never affected our judgment.”

  The Marilyn Monroe story was originally scheduled to air on the season premiere, September 26, 1985. At the last minute, however, Arledge declared that the segment “needed work” and bumped it to the next week. The segment was also cut from twenty-six minutes to seventeen. On October 3, while Sylvia Chase was getting her makeup done to go on the air with the Kennedy story, she learned that it would be delayed again. It was replaced by a piece on sniffer dogs and was cut down again, from seventeen minutes to thirteen. The next week, it was bumped again, and finally, ABC announced that the piece would not run at all. “It was gossip-column stuff,” said Arledge, and “did not live up to its billing.”

  Inside ABC, there was outrage. 20/20 co-anchor Hugh Downs said that he thought the story had “air-tight” documentation. “All of us felt jolted by this preemptive strike against what we considered a balanced and revealing piece of television journalism,” Downs said. “I honestly believe that this is more carefully documented than anything any network did during Watergate.”

  No one was more infuriated than Geraldo. “This is a fucking outrage,” he declared to his colleagues. “Arledge should resign.” He went to Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs and argued passionately that they should join forces and publicly protest the decision. Walters and Downs low-keyed their complaints, but Geraldo took his protest where he knew it would be most read: to People magazine and to Liz Smith’s gossip column. “The decision smacks of cronyism,” Rivera told People. “We were appalled that the head of this network would suddenly show such an interest in a particular story when he hasn’t shown interest in so many others we’ve done,” he told Liz Smith.

  “My objection to the piece as it stands is that it’s a piece of sleazy journalism,”* Arledge told Smith. “It’s just not good enough for us.”

  The piece was killed and so were any chances Geraldo had for staying at ABC. Soon after the Monroe flap, Geraldo’s girlfriend, C. C. Dyer, who was also his associate producer and would later become his wife, was accused of using an ABC messenger to pick up an ounce of marijuana from a friend at CNN. Dyer claimed that the marijuana, which had been hidden in a package containing news videotapes, was not for her but for another friend. Dyer resigned and Roone Arledge, seeing the incident as an opportunity to get rid of her boyfriend as well, called Geraldo at home to tell him it was time for him too to part company with the network.

  “I want you to quit,” Arledge told his former star reporter.

  “Bullshit,” Rivera said. “I’m not quitting.”

  “Show me the contract, Geraldo,” Arledge said. He knew that Rivera hadn’t been given a new contract and had been working for ABC—at $1 million a year—based on a verbal agreement and a handshake. He was now being told that the agreement wasn’t binding. “Where’s the contract?” Arledge kept saying to him. “We have no contract.”

  “Are you saying I’m fired?” Rivera asked.

  “You can use whatever words you want,” Arledge said. “But I don’t think you’re going to work here anymore.”

  Like Mike Wallace nearly twenty years before him, Geraldo had been hired by ABC to create controversy and was then fired for creating controversy. The Marilyn Monroe story in particular and ABC’s overall experience with Geraldo epitomized the dilemma the networks faced when dealing with tabloid news. They craved the ratings and the publicity, but flinched at the disapproval. Once Geraldo succeeded in helping establish 20/20, he became an embarrassment.

  “Geraldo did two interesting things for ABC News,” Roone Arledge told Marc Gunther. “He helped us tremendously up to a point, in our early growth. And he helped ABC News immensely by leaving.”

  * In her contract was a clause forgotten by NBC that stipulated that if Frank McGee ever left the show she could co-host. “Nobody expected Frank to leave the show, I guess,” Walters said. “Then he died and I remember they put out all kinds of statements saying they were looking for a new host.” Her agent pointed out the clause, and Walters became co-host of the Today Show.

  * During this period, Liz Smith called Walters and suggested the two get together. Walters eagerly accepted Liz’s offer. Walters not only enjoyed gossiping—she long counted irrepressible gossips Roy Cohn and columnists Sidney Skolsky and Jack O’Brien among her confidantes—but she also recognized the importance of having a columnist lik
e Liz Smith on her side. The two went to Cafe des Artistes, where they started an old girls club that helped counterbalance the old boys club headed by Reasoner. “Instead of it being a professional lunch, we were very friendly and dishy and had a lot of fun,” Smith said, according to Walters’s biographer Jerry Oppenheimer. “Afterwards, she invited me to her parties and introduced me to people like the Kissingers…. There’s a difference between writing a column and having any kind of social acceptance. While I wasn’t really looking for social acceptance, because of Barbara, I got a lot of it.” Liz became a loyal friend and supporter of Walters, but Aileen “Suzy” Mehle, a bitter rival of Liz, refused to write about Walters—much to the detriment of her own career.

  * Rivera had, from time to time, tried to Anglicize his name, including Jerry Rivers, but the news director at WABC advised him to use the ethnic Geraldo Rivera. He has long been hounded by rumors that his real name is Jerry Rivers but, in fact, his father’s name was Cruz Rivera.

  * Burke officially recused himself from the piece, but privately is said to have called it “sleazy.”

  * Arledge later denied using the world sleazy, but Smith, who considered Arledge a friend, stood by her report. “I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what he said to me,” Smith said. “I even asked him, ‘is that really what you want to say?’ … He probably didn’t mean it as a reproach to his people, [but] he did use the word sleazy and even I was sort of taken aback.”

  12

  celebrities fight back

  “I feel like Rocky,” Carol Burnett declared. The comedienne stood on the steps of the Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 11, 1981, surrounded by photographers, camera crews, and fans. Her usually elastic face was fixed in an expression of steely determination; her bright red hair had faded into its natural gray-streaked brown. Burnett was about to slug it out in court with the National Enquirer, the tabloid bully that no one else in Hollywood would dare fight. “I have gone the distance,” she told the throng of admirers. The crowd cheered.

  “We love you!”

  “We’re behind you!”

  “We hope you win!”

  Carol had endured sleepless nights, years of depositions and subpoenas and disastrous negotiations, and had spent more than $200,000 in legal fees in her $10 million lawsuit against the Enquirer over an item that appeared on March 2, 1976. The 66-word story said that a “boisterous” Burnett had an argument with Henry Kissinger at a Washington restaurant and then later “traipsed around the place” offering diners a taste of her food. Then, according to the item, Burnett “accidentally knocked a glass of wine over one diner—and started giggling instead of apologizing.”

  Burnett was furious. “I was lied about and I don’t think anyone has the right to do that,” Burnett said. “It portrays me as being drunk. It portrays me as being rude. It portrays me as being uncaring. It portrays me as being physically abusive. It is disgusting and it is a pack of lies.”

  The Enquirer had tried to keep the case from going to trial. It had run a retraction and apology, but the apology had done nothing to mollify Burnett. “It’s like you’re hit by a hit-and-run driver,” she said, “and you’re in the hospital and they send you a bouquet of crabgrass.”

  Lawyers for the National Enquirer also tried to offer the actress an out-of-court settlement. Burnett had settled a similar case before. In 1971, Inside TV and Movie World published stories that quoted sources saying the star would condone the use of marijuana by her children. After suing the magazines for $2 million each, the actress eventually settled out of court. This time, however, Burnett wasn’t interested in a deal. “Every time they tried to settle, I said, ‘No. I want to go to trial. You are the bad guys,’ ” Carol said. “If this sucker goes on fifty years, I’m going to be there in a rocking chair facing the jury.”

  Then the Enquirer apparently considered playing dirty. Talk reached Burnett that some tabloid reporters were snooping around her daughter, Carrie, who was having drug problems. Burnett’s friends were worried that the Enquirer was going to blackmail her by threatening to run the dirt on her daughter. Carol made a preemptive strike and, like Tony Orlando had done two years earlier, gave the entire story to People magazine, which put it on the cover. “Carol Burnett’s Nightmare,” read the October 1, 1979 headline. “For the first time, she reveals her daughter’s battle to conquer drugs.”

  “It was a wrenching story, and Carol told us everything,” said People editor Dick Stolley. “It only enhanced Carol’s standing in the film community. It was a big seller for us and it helped establish People as a place to go if you had a terrible secret to tell. We would handle it gracefully and sympathetically.”*

  By the late seventies, the National Enquirer had lost the virtual monopoly on gossip it had enjoyed only a few years earlier due to Time Inc.’s launch of People in 1974, followed that same year by the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s Star, a tabloid like the Enquirer except with four-color photography. The upscale papers were also venturing into gossip. In 1977—over the objections of Bob Woodward—the Washington Post added a gossip column, written by Nancy Collins. “You can write about anyone but Mrs. Graham’s friends,” her editor once instructed her. Soon after violating that rule, “The Gossip Column” was axed.†

  Even the New York Times Company entered the fray. In 1977—much to the dismay of many Times editors and writers—the company spent $3 million to launch Us magazine, a blatant rip-off of People. The publisher himself seemed embarrassed by the venture. “It’s not going to be my favorite dish of tea,” publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said. “But it’s the kind of thing people want to read.” The magazine was doomed to failure by the antigossip culture of the company that produced it. An editor’s letter in the premiere issue noted, somewhat condescendingly, that the magazine was “created for a generation that has grown up in an era of visual communication.” Us magazine went through $10 million and five editors in ten years, but didn’t turn a profit. The New York Times Company was so desperate to unload it that at one point, executives at the company offered to give the magazine to Generoso Pope if he would assume the debt and subscription list, according to someone familiar with the negotiations. After investigating, Pope passed.*

  The competition among all these publications became fierce. Since they were targeted for women, and since they depended on newsstand sales rather than subscriptions, they tended to be bought and displayed at supermarket checkout counters. By the late seventies there were more publications than there was space at many checkout counters. If a new arrival was to succeed, it would literally have to displace one of its competitors on the racks. “A magazine really has to move briskly to hold its own at the checkout,” the New York Times noted in 1979. “The competition is so fierce that some checkouts are magazine saturated. If a new publication gets on display, a slow mover must be booted out to make room for it.”

  Space at the checkout counter wasn’t the only thing the tabloids were competing for; they were fighting one another for stories, too. Since a magazine earned its place on the checkout counter racks by delivering more celebrity gossip than its competitors, and since all these publications were writing about the same narrow world of movie and television personalities, the scramble for the scandalous scoop intensified tremendously. At the National Enquirer the dozen or so articles editors were each required to submit thirty story ideas every day. The story ideas were reviewed at a weekly editorial meeting called The Hour of the Jackals, according to former articles editor P. J. Corkery: “It was usually not held in the offices, but in a Holiday Inn on the beach where dozens of martini pitchers, beer mugs, brandy glasses, and Bloody Mary mugs with the celery untouched littered the table. A couple of editors would follow their cheese smothered steaks with hot fudge sundaes. ‘I want to be buried in a piano case,’ said one as he plunged into his second sundae…. Why hold the meetings on Fridays? ‘Because,’ I as told, ‘that gives the janitor time to wash the blood from the walls.’ ”

  After the embarras
sing and expensive Carol Burnett suit, however, the Enquirer also established more rigorous procedures for verifying what it published. Pope hired a former Time Inc. employee named Ruth Annan to head up a twenty-six-person fact-checking team. Annan instituted a fact-checking system which—although it would do little to raise the credibility of the tabloid in the eyes of its critics—would make the National Enquirer one of the most strictly verified publications in America. Annan required three sources for most stories, including one who was on tape. “They’re so concerned about scrubbing up their image,” complained one reporter, “that I was actually asked to get somebody on tape for a story about how to spruce up leftovers.” Enquirer reporter R. Couri Hay complained: “Gossip is so documented now it’s not even gossip anymore. I know people in hospitals dying of complications from face-lifts, but I can’t print it unless I know the name of the doctor, the time of the operation, the room number in the hospital, and have two eyewitnesses.”

  The rigorous fact-checking led to huge clashes between the freewheeling reporters and Annan’s staff, which was sometimes referred to internally as the Secret Police or the IRS. In fact, some would allege, the fact-checking process was so strict that it encouraged reporters to fudge not facts but sources. To get the requisite three sources, according to some Enquirer foes, reporters would often give tip fees to people who hadn’t actually given them stories. The canceled checks would be “proof that they had sources. Sometimes reporters used even more elaborate tricks to get around the rigorous fact-checkers. Once, according to P. J. Corkery, a reporter had a story about a cow who glowed in the dark because a UFO had contaminated it with some alien substance that gave it a neon effect. Pope wanted a credible scientist on the record discussing the glowing cow. The reporter produced a taped interview with a Nobel Prize winner, clearly declaring he was “baffled” by the story. Ruth Annan was suspicious. She was right to be. The reporter did, in fact, interview the Nobel Prize winner, but when he identified himself as being with the National Enquirer, the scientist said he was “baffled and confounded that you would have the effrontery to call me up and waste my time.” The reporter took what he wanted from the professor’s taped comments, and, with a little editing, inserted his own questions. When the truth came out, the reporter was fired.