Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  That issue’s hodgepodge content revealed the paper’s transition from a hard-boiled men’s tabloid to a celebrity gossip sheet targeted at middle America: It included a ‘Who’s Sexier’ competition, based on an alleged feud between Jayne Mansfield and future Gilligan star Tina Louise; a series of photographs of a toddler getting his first hair cut; a racing column; a photograph of a blood-soaked woman crumbled on the floor of her mobile home after a game of dominoes turned ugly; a political column updating readers on Richard Nixon and Jimmy Hoffa; gossip columns telling about Cary Grant and Gina Lollobrigida holding hands and Fernando Lamas showing up nude at a party; a boxing column; and news of Liz Taylor’s outrage over a bootlegged film of her wedding to Eddie Fisher.

  The mixture, however odd, was working. In 1958, the National Enquirer was in the black and by 1959, it was turning a solid profit. Generoso Pope Jr. was well on his way to creating a publishing empire that would rival his father’s—but would turn him into a pariah in New York’s social and political circles.

  By then, Gene Pope’s eldest brother, Fortune, had emerged as a respectable and powerful figure in New York. He had inherited his father’s position—the one Gene had expected to—and was running the family business and overseeing the Columbus Day Parade. Fortune had brought Colonial public and was, according to press accounts of the time, both “fabulously wealthy” and “incredibly powerful.” “Fortune Pope is regarded by many in this country—and by nearly everyone in Italy—as the spokesman for the Italian-American community,” the New York Times wrote in 1960. “If you want to import Italian lace, or sell machinery to Italy, or just would like to have an appointment with the President of Italy while you’re there on a visit, Fortune Pope is the first person you go to see.”

  Meanwhile, the authorities were closing in on Gene Pope. Censors were trying to shut down the Enquirer. He was being investigated by the FBI. Pope’s mother blamed it on his continued association with members of the mob, especially Pope Sr.’s old friend, Frank Costello. “Some company you keep,” Catherine Pope told Gene when she heard that he had dined with Costello the night the mobster was shot. “The sins of the father will be visited upon the children,” she warned her youngest son, “and your father has sinned so, therefore, you keep this up, and you’ll ruin your life as well as he did.”

  Catherine Pope’s prediction was directed to the wrong son. In July 1960, Fortune and Anthony Pope were indicted by a special grand jury. The twelve-count charge against them included allegations of corporate theft and fraud. The two brothers were accused of taking more than $375,000 from the publicly held Colonial Sand and Stone and diverting the money to their privately held companies. They were also charged with billing the city for $176,599 worth of rock salt that they never delivered. The two brothers initially denied the charges, but eventually pleaded guilty to five of the counts against them, and no contest to five more counts. They were fined $500,000 and began a slow fade from their prestigious public life.

  Generoso Pope Sr.’s dream of a political dynasty ruled by his sons foundered, just as Gene Pope Jr.’s publishing empire was taking off. The timing was not coincidental. The charges against Fortune and Anthony were gathered by Costello’s ally, Judge Sammy DeFalco. The source of much of the information used in the indictment, according to several members of the family, was Gene Pope. “He was bitter about being edged out of the family business,” said his son Paul.

  By 1966, Pope started phasing the gore out of the Enquirer. “I didn’t want to be with that crowd,” he said. “I wanted to put out a paper a woman, say, at the supermarket, would pick up and take home, expecting to find something in it that would mean something—that would be of some practical or educational value to her in this life of decency most of us are trying to live.” The real reason Pope cleaned up his act was that the market for gore was leveling off. Circulation hit 1 million and would go no further. “There are only so many libertines and neurotics,” Pope observed.

  Another reason for the Enquirer’s flat sales was that there was, at the time, a radical drop in the number of newsstands, which had been run out of business by newspaper strikes that had shut down publications across the country. With so many newsstands closing down, Pope looked for a new sales rack and found it in the nation’s 50,000 supermarkets. Pope had to find a new place to peddle his ware; he was impressed with Reader’s Digest’s circulation of 17.9 million. One of its primary outlets was grocery stores, but there was no way that supermarkets would carry the National Enquirer’s mix of cheesecake and gore. Pope began to think about repositioning the paper yet again, this time focusing on celebrity gossip, real-life heroics, and self-help and medical stories. “I decided to clean up the Enquirer and turn it into a condensed version of Reader’s Digest,” Pope said in 1969.

  Around this time, Pope ran into his good friend Frank Costello. “Stay away from me,” the once powerful mobster cautioned him. “You must stay away now. Don’t be seen with me. You’ll get hurt. Stay away. Don’t come near me anymore. It won’t be good for you, my son.” The incident spooked Pope. Shortly afterward, he moved from New York City to Englewood, Cliffs, New Jersey. But he didn’t feel safe there either.

  In 1969, Pope was badly shaken by another event. The young publisher identified with Rupert Murdoch who, like him, was the son of a media magnate and was drawing the contempt of the media elite. That year, Murdoch and his wife went home to Australia for Christmas and left their Rolls Royce back in London for their executives to use. One day, the wife of one of Murdoch’s executives was kidnapped while she was driving the car. The kidnappers thought that she was Murdoch’s wife, Anna, and when they realized their mistake, killed the woman and fed her body to some pigs.

  The following year, another incident occurred that would forever close the door for Pope on New York and the world in which he had grown up. The delivery trucks that distributed the Enquirer were distributing fewer papers than he was sending out. Pope suspected that someone—possibly the Teamsters—was trying to cheat him. He called on an old contact named Angie La Pastornia, who had recently been released from prison. Angie agreed to ride on one of the trucks that Pope suspected was stealing from him. The next day, when the truck came back, Angie was inside, dead. A note attached to the knife that was stuck in his chest read simply, “Don’t fuck with us.”

  Pope packed up his house and his office and told his family and staff to meet him at the train station, where he handed out tickets and boarded a train for Florida. Pope had a printing press in Pompano Beach, and he was moving his entire operation to nearby Lantana. Shortly after he arrived, he got his friend Roy Cohn to set up a meeting with Richard Nixon. On the promise of favorable press from the Enquirer, Nixon invited the heads of fourteen supermarket chains to the White House and talked them into selling the now cleaned up National Enquirer at their checkout stands. Pope would no longer be dependent on newsstand sales, which meant he would not be beholden to the Teamsters.

  “It’s politics,” Pope later said of his deal with Nixon. “One hand washes the other.” Pope would rule over the area around Lantana, Florida, population 8,000, and it would become known as Tabloid Valley, a place where a certain type of journalism was allowed to take root, to grow and flourish.

  * Lewis later had an ideological break from his friend Cohn over Robert Kennedy.

  * Father of WNBC reporter John Miller Jr. Miller was also with Costello the night he got shot, as was Miller’s wife, who was nine months pregnant with the future T V reporter.

  * The child, unfortunately, looked the same in the “before” and “after” photographs.

  * Pope had a total of six children by three wives. His first wife, socialite Patricia McManus, was institutionalized. His second marriage was brief and ended badly. In 1963, Pope wed a beautiful former actress and show girl named Lois Berrodin, the young widow of MC A agent George Wood, who was allegedly connected to the mob. Lois and Gene stayed married until his death.

  5

  “they’v
e got everything on you …”

  “How can I take this kid seriously?” Walter Winchell said when John F. Kennedy was running for President. “He spends half his time screwing every girl that comes around. I’ve seen lots of nothings like him around the Stork Club and other places where the sons of rich men go and waste their time and money.” By then, Winchell’s power was declining, but he was still the most powerful gossip columnist in the country, and he thought that if John F. Kennedy really wanted power, he would eventually have to bow to him. Winchell had reason to believe that he had some power over Kennedy. Although Winchell was past his peak, he had the dirt on the young politician. Joseph Kennedy had once hired Winchell to get the goods on a woman John Kennedy was dating. One of Winchell’s all-time best sources, J. Edgar Hoover, regularly gave Winchell files on Kennedy. So did Bobby Kennedy’s nemesis, Roy Cohn, who was another big source for Winchell.

  But during the election, Winchell was quite evenhanded and invited Kennedy to appear on his foundering television talk show. When Kennedy, who could nurse a grudge and who was also aware of Winchell’s ratings, turned him down and instead went on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, Winchell was furious. He saw it as a snub, which it was—a very portentous snub. It foretold the decline of gossip columnists and the rise of celebrity-friendly TV talk shows. After Kennedy was elected, Confidential, which since the 1957 libel trial had ironically taken to attacking gossip writers, chortled about the slight. “President Kennedy has no time to waste on gossip columnists,” the former scandal magazine declared. “As soon as he took office, the White House welcome mat was withdrawn as far as WW was concerned. And Walter, longing to share the confidences of the great and powerful, was out in the cold.”

  Winchell began to attack the President in his column. Some attacks were legitimate, such as the stories he reported linking Kennedy to organized crime, but most were hysterical, personalized attacks, accusing Kennedy of being soft on Communism and calling the White House the “Pink House” or the “oddministration.” Irritated, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Hearst executive Richard Berlin and put pressure on him to delete anti-Kennedy comments from Winchell’s column. When the gossip columnist found out about the meeting, he went on a tear. “I say the Administration’s attempt to transform the American press into a propaganda weapon is as iniquitous as it is perilous,” Winchell wrote.

  The aging gossip columnist didn’t stand a chance against the charismatic young president. Winchell lost his television show, and by the early 1960s, his column, which was once syndicated in 2,000 papers, was now printed by only 150. Within a few years, the man who had been the most powerful gossip columnist in history was taking out ads, begging some publication to print his column. “Never claimed being a newspaperman, Mr. Editor. Always called myself a newsboy,” he said in a 1967 ad in Variety. “Peddling papers. Why not audition the column for one month?” There were no takers.

  The gossip industry has always involved a struggle between journalists and the wealthy and powerful—be they politicians or movie stars—for control of information about their private lives. During the sixties, the Kennedy family, through a variety of tactics, prevailed in that struggle. While it’s true that politicians have always tried to control what is said and written about them, the Kennedys’ success in doing so was unparalleled before or since. In fact, their willingness to retaliate against reporters who tried to probe behind the mediagenic family myth goes a great distance in explaining why the gossip industry—which had thrived in the 1930s and 1940s with several gossip columns in most major newspapers and during the 1950s with the aggressive tabloid magazines like Confidential, Hush-Hush, and On The QT—withered in the sixties. During the Kennedy administration, gossip largely disappeared from the establishment press.

  The mood of the times played an important role in this development. The national optimism of the early 1960s made the public reluctant to read unflattering details of the lives of political leaders. The decline of the print media and the rise of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s—particularly in its scandal-shy early years as experienced by Mike Wallace—were also factors in the suppression of gossip published about the family. But the power of the Kennedy family and the Kennedy charisma cannot be underestimated.

  It wasn’t that John Kennedy disliked gossip; to the contrary, he was obsessed with it, a connoisseur of gossip. He understood its power to make or to destroy people. He pumped his Hollywood contacts for the lowdown on celebrities; he quizzed his society friends for the latest scandals; and he regularly debriefed his friends in the press for inside information on the news business. He knew individual reporters’ strengths and weaknesses, their jealousies, even their salaries. “It is unbelievable to an outsider how interested Kennedy was in journalists and how clued in he was to their characters, their office politics, their petty rivalries,” Kennedy’s friend, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee once wrote. “He soaked up newspaper gossip like a blotter.”

  Kennedy used his knowledge of journalists to court, seduce, and co-opt them. He granted access in exchange for what amounted to partisan loyalty, and no journalist had more access or was more loyal than Bradlee. Bradlee had lived in Europe from 1951 until 1957; when he moved back to the United States and became the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, he felt like an outsider in a city in which contacts meant everything. “I had fewer politicians as friends than most of my colleagues and all of my competitors,” Bradlee admitted, “and I worried about it.”

  So when Jack Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jacqueline befriended Bradlee, who with his wife Toni Meyer Bradlee lived near the young Senator in Georgetown, the journalist latched on to the politicians and clung to the relationship at the expense of his own integrity. He wrote only flattering things about Kennedy and ignored anything potentially damaging or embarrassing. Bradlee, for example, was the only journalist allowed to spend the evening of the West Virginia primary with Kennedy, which they spent watching a pornographic movie called Private Property about a housewife who is seduced and then raped by hoodlums. Bradlee didn’t mention the film in the otherwise highly detailed account of Kennedy’s West Virginia campaign that he wrote for Newsweek. He wouldn’t have written anything, he has admitted, that would have hurt Kennedy’s chances of getting into the White House. “I wanted Kennedy to win,” Bradlee once wrote. “I wanted my friend and neighbor to be President.”

  After Kennedy was elected, Bradlee became the envy of the Washington media world because of his access to the President. The President had weekly dinners with Bradlee, telling him what subjects Newsweek should cover and which reporters it should hire. They went sailing together, and Kennedy had highly personal conversations with the journalist, confessing, for example, that he had always been embarrassed by his rather pronounced mammaries, which he called the “Fitzgerald breasts.” Bradlee told Kennedy what was in upcoming issues of Newsweek, and Kennedy would let Bradlee know what was going to be in future issues of Time magazine, where he also had contacts. Kennedy was often an off-the-record source for Bradlee—and the President even gave Bradlee items for the magazine’s gossipy “Periscope” section and would advise him on tactics for his political coverage. When Bradlee told Kennedy that Newsweek was working on a profile of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom the president expected to be his opponent in the next election, Kennedy said, “You ought to cut Rocky’s ass open a little.”

  In addition to rewarding Bradlee when he was obedient, Kennedy would punish him when he was disobedient. The journalist temporarily lost his treasured position in Kennedy’s inner circle, for example, when he was quoted in Look magazine discussing Kennedy’s manipulation of the press. Bradlee insisted that his comments to Look were supposed to have been off the record, but Kennedy banned him from the White House and refused to speak to him for months.

  In the fall of 1962, however, Kennedy needed Bradlee’s services again. At the time, a story was making the rounds—and had appeared in print in some
disreputable publications—that before John Kennedy married Jackie, he had been wed to a socialite named Durie Malcolm. The “other wife” story wouldn’t go away—largely because the White House refused to directly deny it. Kennedy’s spokesman, Pierre Salinger, made Bradlee a proposition: The administration would give Bradlee access to classified government documents if he would write an article for Newsweek discrediting the “other wife” story. But Bradlee was presented with a remarkably restrictive set of conditions: He could not copy the government papers, he could not say he saw them, and if he or Newsweek was sued, they would not have access to the documents again. What’s more, Salinger insisted that Kennedy would have the right to edit or kill Bradlee’s story before it ran. Bradlee—eager to get back into Kennedy’s graces—agreed. After the article appeared, when any reporters pursued the story, the White House referred them to Newsweek. Bradlee’s article, Kennedy later told him, essentially killed the “other wife” story.*

  Bradlee later insisted that he—unlike just about every other reporter in Washington—was unaware of Kennedy’s infidelities. He even claimed that he didn’t know that Kennedy was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. “Extracurricular screwing was one of the few subjects that never came up” in his conversations with Kennedy, Bradlee later wrote, “and in those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend.”