Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Gene Pope smiled and drank some champagne. He knew Joe McCarthy. They were part of the same crowd, and they never did anything in moderation. Gene Pope was a big man, six foot four and bulky, with wavy, slicked-back hair, heavy eyebrows, a thick jaw, and cherubic lips. He spoke in a laconic baritone—a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart; his deliberate manner masked his stunning intellect. Pope had attended Horace Mann, the exclusive New York City boys school where he became best friends with Roy Cohn. He went on to attend MIT, graduating at nineteen with a degree in engineering, and briefly attended Columbia Law School. Gene’s friend Cohn went on to become McCarthy’s chief counsel and was brought down in disgrace when his tactics and nepotism were exposed by Democratic counsel Robert Kennedy during a televised Senate hearing.

  Don’t destroy yourself like McCarthy and Cohn did, Costello was telling Pope. “Like I always say,” Costello said, “you got to do things in moderation. Too much of anything is no good.” The mob boss may have been directing the comments toward himself as well, for that evening Costello had also learned that he was probably going back to jail—though he said nothing of the bad news to his friends. Costello picked up the $75 dinner tab, and the crowd went to Monsignore, further east on Fifty-fifth Street, for drinks. They ordered Scotches, except for Costello, who had coffee and two glasses of anisette. Pope wanted to go to the Copa to catch a show; Costello begged off. It was 11 P.M. and he needed to be clear-headed for an early morning meeting with his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams. Costello bid his friends good night and took a taxi to his apartment building on Central Park West. There, a beefy thug walked up to Costello, put a gun up to his face, and said “This is for you, Frank” and shot the Prime Minister of the Underworld point blank.

  The Costello hit was big news throughout the summer of 1957—occasionally knocking the Confidential trial off the front pages of the tabloids. Physically, Costello recovered, but he would never regain his old power.

  Few were as shaken by the Costello shooting as Gene Pope. He was questioned by a grand jury about the shooting for fifty minutes, but repeatedly said he knew nothing. The interrogation wasn’t what bothered Pope. The failed hit marked the end of an era—the young publisher’s strongest remaining link to the world of political and financial power and corruption in which he had been raised. Pope had been jockeying for a solid position in that world, and had been counting on Frank Costello and the New York Enquirer to secure it for him. Now, after the shooting, he had only the Enquirer.

  With the New York Enquirer, Pope was trying to achieve the same sort of political clout that his father had built up with his media empire. It was a tough act to follow. Generoso Pope Sr. had left his family in Pasquarielli, Italy, in 1906 to come to America when he was twelve years old and had $4 in his pocket. He quickly got a job hauling water at a sand and gravel outfit called Colonial; within five years he became a foreman. By 1918 he was half owner and a few years later, he took over the entire business. Colonial Sand and Gravel became one of the country’s largest construction companies, helping to build some of New York City’s most important landmarks, including Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall.

  Pope Sr.’s business clout led to political connections—and vice versa. In 1925, he organized Italian Americans to back Tammany Hall politician Jimmy Walker for mayor; in gratitude, Walker appointed Pope Sr. to several high-level positions, including chairman of the newly formed Aviation and Airports Program, which planned the construction of airports. Such appointments gave Pope both social prestige and political power. The cozy relationship between Walker and municipal contractors like Pope prompted an investigation by the Seabury Commission in 1931, but no charges were filed against Colonial.

  It wasn’t Pope’s construction company or his political appointments that gave him real status, however. That came from his media holdings. In 1928 Pope bought Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the country’s largest and oldest Italian-language daily newspaper. Pope paid $2 million for Il Progresso, which had a circulation of 90,000. Some thought the cost was too high, but the clout that came with it was priceless. Pope went on to buy most of the Italian newspapers in New York, including Il Bollettino della Sera and Il Qorriere d’America, and by 1930, he essentially controlled the Italian press in New York. He added to his holdings by buying radio station WHOM in 1946. Pope used his papers to encourage his readers to learn English, become American citizens, and vote. He was honored by Francis Cardinal Spellman and began organizing the Columbus Day Parade, an important celebration of ethnic pride for Italian-Americans in New York. Pope became an important ally and friend of Franklin Roosevelt.

  Some of Pope’s causes, however, got him in trouble. II Progresso supported Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who invited Pope to Italy. Pope was accused of hiring thugs to intimidate anti-Fascist editors and in 1931, someone tried to kill the publisher with a mail bomb, which blew up prematurely, taking the lives of two postal workers. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Pope used his considerable clout with Roosevelt, urging him to maintain neutrality in the war. He came under increasing fire as Mussolini drew closer to Hitler, but redeemed himself by blasting Fascism in 1941 and working for the American War effort—organizing an Italian-American war bond drive. When the feds came after Frank Costello, Il Progresso ran a series of articles and editorials defending the mob leader. Suspicions arose that Pope was connected to the Mafia, and he came under FBI surveillance, but no link was ever proved. Frank Costello, however, did become a loyal friend and ally.

  Generoso Pope Sr. personified the immigrant dream. Through hard work and ruthless ambition—as well as some dubious political connections—he acquired incredible wealth and power. Like an Italian Joe Kennedy, he hoped to pave a path of respectability for the next generation. Pope had married the beautiful and aristocratic-looking Catherine Richcichi in 1916, and together they had three sons, Fortune, Anthony, and on January 13, 1927, Generoso Jr., the youngest. His sons were handsome and well educated; he had dreams that one them would become president.

  Gene was chauffeured to school at Horace Mann from the family’s lavish sixteen-room apartment at 1040 Park Avenue. His best friend, Roy Cohn, who lived several blocks north at 1165 Park Avenue, would sometimes ride in the limousine with him. Roy’s two other best friends at Horace Mann would also go on to become important people in the world of media: publishing scion Si Newhouse, and the future New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, whose father Kassel Lewis—originally Kassell Oshinsky—and his brothers owned Crown Fabrics, one of the leading firms in the garment center. The four young men formed a clique of boys who were fascinated by power, the media, and politics.*

  Roy and Gene would visit Roy’s father, the influential liberal Bronx Judge Al Cohn, at his courthouse. They liked to drop by City Hall, where they met politicians and became friendly with fixers like Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio and Sammy DeFalco, who got appointed a judge through Costello. Gene’s father arranged for the boys to visit the White House, where they met President Harry S. Truman. By the mid-1940s, they were hanging out at the Stork Club with people like J. Edgar Hoover and Damon Runyon and other members of Cafe Society. It was an exclusive world, an informal club in which the members shared their power and traded secrets.

  Gossip columnists in that era were among the most powerful journalists in the country; they were valued by their papers and followed religiously by their readers. “It was a different time, a golden age for gossip columnists,” recalled Igor Cassini, who wrote Hearst’s widely read Cholly Knickerbocker column. “We were treated like royalty. We were always coining words and fighting over scoops.” In addition to Cassini, there was Dorothy Kilgallen, Earl Wilson, Doris Lilly, Leonard Lyons, George Sokolsky, Nancy Randolph, Louis Sobol, Ed Sullivan, Danton Walker, and, of course, Walter Winchell, who took credit for having introduced Roy Cohn to his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

  Gene Pope Jr. and Roy Cohn were big men in this world. Cohn edged out the promising young Robert Kennedy for th
e highly coveted job of McCarthy’s chief counsel and would leak stories praising McCarthy and digging at Kennedy to his buddies like Winchell and Hearst columnist George Sokolsky. Gene Jr. was being groomed to take over his father’s media empire. The sand and gravel business, young Pope said, “didn’t intrigue me,” but he loved working at WHOM and at Il Progresso, which he started running in 1947 when he was twenty years old. He basked in the power that the media gave him. Then, on April 28, 1950, at the age of fifty-nine, Generoso Pope Sr. died of a heart attack.

  When Pope Sr. died, Frank Costello got Mayor Bill O’Dwyer to give Pope Jr. several high-profile appointments. The elder Pope had been the treasurer of O’Dwyer’s election campaign; after Pope Sr. died, O’Dwyer made Pope Jr. an honorary deputy police commissioner and gave him a seat on the prestigious Board of Higher Education. Pope Jr. started running the city’s Columbus Day Parade like his father had. That summer, however, O’Dwyer was forced to resign amid charges that he was connected to the mob. Then, in October, Pope Jr. ruffled feathers during a radio broadcast of the Columbus Day celebration by praising his political friends and being dismissive of his political enemies. “Whatever his merits or failings, Gene Pope Jr., ex-Mayor O’Dwyer’s 23-year-old appointee to the Board of Higher Education, isn’t going to win any popularity contests,” noted the New York Herald Tribune. “His political elders, who have been smarting under Gene’s arrogance since he took over the enterprises of his late father, are doing a brand new slow burn over his antics at the Columbus Day Parade.”

  Another controversy erupted later that month when Pope was accused of being a front for Frank Costello. Pope was stripped of his position as honorary deputy police commissioner. “I highly value my commissionership,” Pope said, “but I gladly give it up rather than compromise my freedom of expression.”

  Then Gene’s world collapsed even further. His brothers, resentful, he said, that he was running the family empire that had been left in a trust for all three of them, voted Gene out of the business. “I was supposed to run the company,” Pope later said. “My brothers decided I was going to work for them. I told them to take a walk.”

  By the end of 1950, Gene Pope had lost his father, his career, and his position in New York politics. His next move was a peculiar one: he went to Washington to work for the CIA. There, Pope worked in a department specializing in psychological warfare. He quit after about eighteen months. “I got fed up with the bureaucracy and the red tape,” he once said. “You’d spend weeks trying to get something done, and then they wouldn’t let you do it.” Some who knew Pope, however, believe he never completely severed his ties with the agency.

  Gene Pope cast about a bit, trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. In 1952, while hanging out at a Greenwich Village nightclub, he heard that the New York Enquirer was going on the block. The newspaper had a peculiar history. William Griffin, a newspaper advertising man, founded the tabloid as a New York Sunday afternoon paper in 1926 on a loan from his mentor, William Randolph Hearst. In return, Hearst used the paper as a testing ground for new ideas. Hearst used the good ideas for his own papers; the Enquirer was free to keep the bad ones. It was New York’s only Sunday afternoon newspaper—and thus had a brief moment of glory when it scooped the other publications in town with New York’s first published account of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The paper’s credibility was badly undermined, however, by Griffin’s tirades against U.S. involvement in World War II. These attacks were so vitriolic that Griffin was accused of being a Nazi and was indicted on charges that he used the New York Enquirer to undermine the morale of U.S. troops.

  By 1952, the New York Enquirer was a mishmash, carrying sports scores, theater profiles and news, and racing statistics. Its circulation had dwindled to a mere 17,000, and it had only one full-time employee. Griffin by then had died and his son was hoping to sell the tabloid for $75,000. Most people thought the asking price was exorbitant. Pope was nearly broke, but he was so eager to get back into the publishing business that he borrowed $10,000 from Frank Costello and another $10,000 from Roy Cohn. After taking a taxi to close the deal, he realized he didn’t have the cash to pay the cab fare, so he paid it with a lucky silver dollar he had carried around for years.

  Before long, Pope turned the New York Enquirer into a scandal magazine. He hired an aggressive seventeen-year-old police reporter named John J. Miller* and used a network of stringers, often ones who worked at other papers and wrote for the New York Enquirer under pseudonyms. Using his government and mob contacts, Pope began exploiting the seamy underworld of New York. Three topics, however, were taboo: staffers were forbidden to write anything negative about the mob or the CIA. And they were not allowed to write anything remotely negative about actress Sophia Loren, with whom Pope was infatuated.

  Pope got the circulation up to 250,000, but still had trouble making ends meet. “I couldn’t pay the rent,” he later recalled. “I spent ninety percent of my time in the first six years borrowing from one guy to pay off the other guy. I was thrown out of banks because all the checks used to bounce.” He turned to his Uncle Frank for help. Each week, Costello would lend Pope $10,000 to meet operating expenses, and Pope would repay the loan the next week as money from newsstand sales came in. “Although Mr. Pope spent most of the day at the paper, he rarely left his office,” according to former writer Reginald Potterton. “He was accessible only to key executives, to his barber who called once a week, and to an intermittent procession of pinkie-ringed male visitors who arrived in twos and threes wearing white-on-white and expensive shot-silk suits.”

  By 1957, government officials were cracking down on scandal magazines, and Pope was considering taking the New York Enquirer in a new direction. One day, while passing the scene of a grisly car crash, Pope watched a crowd gather. Although the onlookers recoiled in dismay and disgust, they also strained their necks for a better view. People were drawn to gore, Pope realized, so he gave it to them, hiring an editor named Carl Grothman, who boasted, “If a story is good, no matter how vile, we’ll run

  Pope and Grothman packed the New York Enquirer with grisly stories and bloody photographs about horrific crimes, deformed children, and tragic accidents. Mothers who went berserk and killed their babies, spurned lovers who tortured the women who rejected them, hapless horses that were decapitated when they stuck their heads out of moving trailers, and random violence and senseless tragedy were the New York Enquirer’s fare. “Mom Uses Son’s Face as Ashtray!” blared one headline. “I’m Sorry I Killed My Mother, but I’m Glad I Killed My Father!” declared another. “Teenager Twists Off Corpse’s Head to Get Gold Teeth.” Sometimes, exploitative articles were disguised as altruism, such as the time the tabloid tracked down the “World’s Ugliest Little Girl—she’s so ugly that she’s not allowed to go to school!” The Enquirer paid for her plastic surgery and plastered her haunting face across its pages for weeks.* More often, however, the tabloid’s subjects had died horribly. If they had already been hauled off to the morgue, a New York Enquirer photographer would have to “raid a morgue,” according to a former reporter. “When you ‘raid a morgue’ you pull the corpse out of a special drawer, photograph the deceased, then return the body to where you found it,” explained ex-Enquirer staffer George Bernard. “Imagine the anguish, the despair and the hatred generated towards the Enquirer by the family and friends of the deceased when they saw their loved ones plastered through the pages of what was then the most terrifying tabloid in the country. Not a very pleasant business.”

  Nonetheless, the formula was a success. The circulation skyrocketed to about 1 million. Pope decided to take his grisly publication national and in 1957, he changed the name of the New York Enquirer to the National Enquirer. Pope became the pioneer of gore exploitation magazines, much as Robert Harrison discovered the scandal market several years earlier. Soon, imitators sprang up. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than forty titles catered to a macabre taste for gore; tabloids with names like National Expos
ure, National Mirror, and National Limelight saturated the newsstands. Their combined circulation was estimated at 7 million. “In view of this popularity, it is surprising that tabloids have been so widely ignored by serious commentators on the press,” noted Reginald Potterton, a mainstream reporter who went to work for the Enquirer in 1963 during the newspaper strike. “They represent a significant condition in our culture, yet few people talk about them.”

  Indeed, gore magazines were the demented cousins of the publishing industry. Pope’s outrageous formula for the National Enquirer worked wonders for circulation, though it didn’t help him much in the prestige department. The National Enquirer, Gene Pope quickly learned, wasn’t going to open doors for him the way Il Progresso did for his father. Quite the opposite. Pope’s children were once asked to leave the Catholic school they attended when the mother superior discovered what their father did for a living.* New York City administrators were worried that the National Enquirer and magazines like it were taking over the newsstands and tainting the minds of the young. The tabloid was banned in some areas and Pope was forced to resign his position on the Board of Higher Education because of the Enquirer. Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy refused to give Pope’s staff the police press cards they needed. Pope sued Kennedy in New York Supreme Court, charging him with “restricting freedom of the press.” He didn’t win the case.

  To stay ahead of the competition, Pope, who actually grew faint at the sight of blood, kept upping the gore quotient on the cover of his paper because the gorier it was, the better the sales. But he also continued to tinker with the mixture, and by the late 1950s, included other ingredients in his formula. One was heartwarming stories about common folks that made readers feel good about themselves. Pope also rediscovered celebrities. After Confidential folded, there was a void for stories about celebrities. Scantily clad women had long been featured in the Enquirer, but by the late 1950s, they were mostly starlets like Angie Dickinson and Gina Lollobrigida. “Wolf Whistles Are Music to Any Girl’s Ear,” Angie Dickinson supposedly told the tabloid for a July 5, 1959, cover story. “The ultimate purpose of a girl is to make a man feel like a man—all over,” Dickinson, said, adding that she “can’t understand why girls get angry when they’re referred to as a ‘broad.’ … Long as they talk about girls, what’s the difference?”