Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  In 1975, Rona Barrett was hired by ABC, becoming the first gossip columnist to appear in a national newscast. Again, she raised the ratings, but the serious news people resented her presence. “I hear Elmer Lower, the head of ABC News, sends memos daily to get me fired,” Rona said shortly after she was hired by the network. “But I don’t care. I mean, it annoys me, but I don’t care. … I am a very big moneymaker that gives the station a very enormous rating. Elmer Lower’s ratings stink.”

  The truth is, Rona did care. After joining the national network, she decided she wanted to be taken seriously. “It grieves me that they categorize me as a gossip,” she said in 1977. “I have brought the business of entertainment to the American public.” She also informed people that they should no longer call her “Miss Rona.” And she began making demands. She considered celebrity news, which the network was increasingly emphasizing, to be her exclusive territory. She liked to maintain that she had pioneered the format of the long celebrity interviews, and she became resentful at the growing number of such assignments being given to a woman who was politically shrewder than she was, Igor Cassini’s former assistant and Roy Cohn’s former “girlfriend,” Barbara Walters, whom ABC had lured away from NBC with a salary of $1 million.

  Rona was a regular on Good Morning America, but she complained that Barbara Walters was upstaging her and that all of her good ideas were being given to Walters. “I’m smarter than Barbara and I do a better job than she does on the specials,” Rona complained. “She has invaded my turf.” The ever diplomatic Walters knew better than to get into a catfight with Rona. “Rona is entitled to her opinion,” Walters said. “I have great respect for her.”

  Rona wasn’t calmed. In April 1980, she poured her heart out to Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show. “I feel raped!” she told him. “I can’t watch my ideas be given to somebody else. There’s an old expression, you can steal my wife, but don’t steal my ideas…. There is nothing worse than feeling raped. You feel sick. And you feel violated.” Rona quit ABC in 1980 and was hired by NBC, where she was paid $1 million a year and teamed up with Tom Snyder. “This is not a ploy to get more money,” Rona declared. “It’s an artistic decision.”

  With Snyder broadcasting from New York and Barrett from Los Angeles, NBC had great hopes for the show, but it was a disaster from the beginning. For Rona’s debut episode, she had taped an interview with Mary Tyler Moore. Shortly before the segment was to air, however, Moore’s son killed himself. Moore’s estranged husband, Grant Tinker, the former head of NBC, advised Moore that it would be unseemly for her to appear gossiping and giggling with Rona Barrett on national TV shortly after her son committed suicide. Barrett begged Moore to help her update the segment, but the actress refused. Barrett then threatened to run the interview without Moore’s approval, introducing it by noting that the actress was devastated by the tragedy. “Mary said that if Rona did that, she would issue a public statement blasting Rona,” according to a source. “Snyder sided with Moore against Barrett.” So, on her heralded Tomorrow debut, Rona Barrett discussed politics.

  The second show went even worse. Rona was scheduled to interview Victor Navasky, author of the McCarthy era chronicle Naming Names, but Snyder, according to sources, was unhappy because he felt Barrett was invading his territory by tackling such a serious subject. When the broadcast began, Snyder told viewers that Rona would not be part of that evening’s show because of “communications difficulties.” In truth, he simply refused to turn any part of the show over to his West Coast co-host. Barrett was left stranded in her Hollywood studio with Navasky, humiliated and furious.

  “He told me I was trying to steal his program,” Barrett later said. “I was stunned.” It was her understanding, Barrett said, that she and Tom were supposed to be equals on the show. That was not Snyder’s understanding. “It’s Tom Snyder’s show, not hers,” Snyder’s agent, Ed Hookstratten said. “She can be an integral part of it, but she can’t be co-host. It’s not her show.”

  Snyder wasn’t Rona’s only enemy. The critics were also vicious. “Poor little Miss Ro-Ro,” wrote the Washington Post’s Tom Shales, referring to the “one blessed night” when Snyder refused to throw the show over to her. “Yesterday only a few people knew about The Rona Syndrome. It used to be known as biting off more than you can chew, even if you have a very big mouth. Miss Rona reached—for the stars! And not just Burt Reynolds, either. She wanted more than glamour, more than fame, more than daily morning exposure on television with her tattered Tinseltown tidbits. She wanted RESPECT. But Rona and Tom together was one shrieking peacock too many even for the peacock network.”

  Although NBC’s executives valued the viewers that Barrett brought to the show, they balked at giving her celebrity reports equal billing with the “hard news” that was Snyder’s beat. The feud continued to escalate until one day in June 1981, Rona simply refused to show up for work. “I don’t want to be on any show with Tom Snyder anymore,” she said. “No matter who I got as a guest, no matter how important, they never put me first up. If NBC doesn’t like what I have to say I’m really sorry.” She insisted on hosting her own show, declaring, “I won’t play second fiddle to [Snyder] or anybody else any longer.” She had hoped to stay with NBC, but left the network entirely not long afterward. “It’s really mind-boggling the way NBC has treated me,” she said, “and I’m tired of being the good little girl.”

  In 1985, Rona was hired by Entertainment Tonight, the all-celebrity nightly newscast started by Paramount in 1981. She was reportedly making $700,000 a year and her contract stipulated that if her segments ran longer than eighteen minutes, she was to be paid an extra $1,200 per minute. But the show’s producers soon realized that Barrett’s reports contained no greater revelations, and drew no more of an audience, than the pieces by the junior reporters, who were paid much less and who were less difficult to work with. The audience was tuning in for information about celebrities and didn’t particularly care who reported it. Rona and Entertainment Tonight parted company after nine months. She tried doing an industry newsletter, “The Barrett Report” but at $1,200 a year, it was considered overpriced for information that could be found in other places, and it soon folded. Rona tried a number of TV and radio shows, including a shortlived return to NBC, but nothing worked. Her personal life wasn’t going much better. She had split from her husband. The form of celebrity news that Rona had given birth to had outgrown her. “Hedda and Louella had it easier,” Rona complained in 1986. “Today, if Ingrid Bergman got pregnant, it would be lucky to make the inside pages.”

  That same year Macmillan announced that it was canceling the sequel to Barrett’s best-selling Miss Rona and asked for the return of the $300,000 advance. By the end of the eighties, Rona finally acknowledged that her brief reign as America’s premiere gossip columnist was over. “As Walter Cronkite once said, now and then there’s a fabulous story and I go for my fireman’s hat and I say, ‘Where’s the fire?’ ” Rona said in 1989. “And that’s when I remember that I don’t have the forum.”

  Rona Barrett’s legacy, however, was lasting. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she had proved—against all odds and despite the contrary feelings of so many newspaper editors—that the public was still interested in celebrity news, and that for fledgling television stations, gossip was the surest, quickest route to profitability. Once that had been established, it wasn’t long before the “legitimate” print press would rediscover the formula was well.

  * A newspaper article from January 1949 gives her age as nineteen.

  * Both sides eventually dropped the suits.

  † The opening line of Cindy’s follow-up book, My Friend the Dictator, did little to dispel the rumors: “The simplest way to describe Sukarno is that he is a great lover.” She then, however, went on to write, “He loves his country, he loves his people, he loves women, he loves art, and best of all, he loves himself.” She also wrote about fending off his ham-handed advances. “Listen, honey, face the facts,”
Cindy claims she told Sukarno while wiping her lipstick off his mouth after he planted an uninvited kiss. “With all the legal and illegal love affairs you’ve got going for you, you’re getting more than enough exercise for a fella your age.”

  * Cindy’s grande dame shtick wasn’t going over well, either. “Because Sukarno ordered every Indonesian embassy and consulate to buy copies of Mrs. Adams’s biography of him, 425,000 hardcover copies are sold,” Leonard Lyons wrote in the New York Post. “As a result, she has a chauffeur-driven white Rolls Royce.” Lyons chided Adams for leaving the Rolls parked outside WABC-TV’ s offices when she went in to cover a poverty program.

  * Doris Lilly caused a flap when she sold some love letters in 1988. The letters were bought by Malcolm Forbes, who is said to have given them to his friend Nancy Reagan. She, word has it, promptly destroyed them.

  † After the release of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a woman named Holly Golightly sued, saying that the book invaded her privacy. Lilly testified on behalf of Capote, who said the book was based on her. Capote privately said that Holly Golighdy was also inspired by Carol Marcus and Oona Chaplin.

  * During the trip, she met Barbara Walters for the first time. “I have to tell you the truth about Barbara, she didn’t make an impression on me,” said Lilly. “As I understood it at the time, she was his secretary. … Later I understood they had some kind of romance.”

  * The Washington Post’s Maxine Cheshire actually had the story before Doris Lilly, but her editor, Ben Bradlee, killed the story. “I really don’t believe it,” Cheshire recalled Bradlee saying. “I don’t believe she’s going to do it.” When it became obvious that he was wrong, Bradlee was outraged. “That goddamn greasy Greek gangster,” he bellowed as he punched his fist against an office wall.

  * The effect of L S D on Grant was peculiar. Whereas he once assiduously avoided the press, after taking the drug he actively pursued gossip columnists and would pour out his heart to them, which may explain his brief romance with Doris Lilly.

  * She wrote an item about two groupies who lived in a car outside Avalon’s house. In July 1961, when one of the women hit Avalon with a paternity suit, Rona helped him keep the scandal under wraps. When the story of Avalon’s paternity suit got out, Avalon cut Rona out of his life, she said, because “I knew too much.”

  * “I don’t read movie magazines because I don’t care about all that,” Burnett was quick to explain. “I watch Rona from a comedic standpoint, not to learn who’s doing what to whom.”

  7

  tabloid glory days

  Late at night on July 29, 1975, Secret Service agents spotted a slim young man with a mustache and aviator glasses behind the Georgetown home of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The man was in the process of heaving five green plastic garbage bags into the trunk of his 1968 Buick. The agents confronted the man and ordered him to return the trash. He refused. They argued with the man and tried to reason with him, but he held fast. He was, he said, keeping the garbage. The Secret Service agents were puzzled—they had been trained to deal with terrorists, but not with garbage thieves—and they called their supervisor, who ordered them to bring the man in for questioning.

  At Secret Service headquarters, the agents interrogated the man, a twenty-seven-year-old named Jay Gourley. The theft of the trash seemed so bizarre that the agents were at pains to establish the man’s mental stability. But Gourley was quite sane, even lucid and articulate. He argued that garbage, by definition, had been abandoned by its owner, and therefore he couldn’t be accused of stealing anything. After two-and-a-half hours, the Secret Service concluded that, indeed, Gourley had not broken the law. Since they couldn’t charge him with any crime, they took his photograph and reluctantly released him. Gourley had neglected to tell the Secret Service that he was a reporter on assignment for the National Enquirer, but as soon as he was free he telephoned his editors in Lantana, Florida. “Operation Trash,” he reported, was accomplished.

  Most of Kissinger’s garbage, as the tabloid reported the following week, was simply garbage: an empty vichyssoise can, used packages of antacids, empty yogurt containers, two unread copies of the New York Times, a lot of empty cigarette packs (his wife, Nancy, was a smoker), and a prescription for a bottle of Seconal. The Enquirer also found what it boasted were “hundreds of Secret Service documents.” Among the booty were copies of Kissinger’s daily agenda, including appointments with corporate leaders that weren’t on the official agendas distributed to the media. One classified document explained a coded light signal system that was being tested by the Secret Service for use in all of its limousines. Another detailed the amount and kind of ammunition carried by each Secret Service limousine.

  When the National Enquirer published its findings, the story made headlines around the world. Kissinger was outraged, “Really revolted,” he said. His wife Nancy was in “anguish.” The article so alarmed the Hollywood community, that in Beverly Hills an ordinance was passed forbidding garbage theft. And when furious officials at the Secret Service complained that sensitive information like that should never have been made public, the Enquirer turned the admonishment into vindication. Generoso Pope, the Enquirer’s editor-owner, insisted that the tabloid wasn’t violating the Secretary of State’s privacy; it was performing a service to the American public—indeed to Henry Kissinger himself—by showing how easy it would be for an assassin or a Communist spy to get his hands on the classified documents that were in Kissinger’s trash. Then, using the classic tabloid tactic of moralizing about prurient detail in order to justify serving it up, the Enquirer followed up its initial story with the headline: “Secret Service Admits: Confidential Documents That Enquirer Found in Kissinger’s Trash Was a ‘Breach of Security.’ ”

  For most of its twenty-year history under Gene Pope Jr., the Enquirer had been beneath notice, as far as the establishment press in America was concerned. But after the headlines generated by “Operation Trash,” its audacity—or shamelessness, depending on one’s point of view—as well as its success began to receive attention.

  Since Pope had moved the tabloid to Florida in 1971, housing it in a nondescript low-level office building in an area near the coastal town of Lantana that became known as Tabloid Valley, circulation had climbed from 2 million to over 3 million in 1975, giving it the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. Its gross earnings for 1974 were reportedly $41 million, versus $17 million a year earlier. It received nearly 2 million pieces of mail a year and had its own zip code. And according to one study, the 20 million people who read the Enquirer every week were not, as was commonly believed, “trailer park trash” at the very bottom of the demographic chart, but women aged twenty-five to forty-nine with high school or college educations.

  The man who had created this wildly successful handbook of the middle class, middle American housewife was unrecognizable as the New York power broker who had fled the Northeast in terror in 1971. The man who had dined with mobsters, hobnobbed with political fixers, whose arrogance infuriated the city reformers had come to distrust and loathe the powerful crowd he once personified. The MIT grad had become an anti-intellectual. He was worth an estimated $150 million, but he drove a beat-up white Chevy and ate brown bag lunches of lettuce, tomato, and American cheese on rye. His clothes—short-sleeved shirts and baggy work pants in either blue or gray—came from Sears. New hires at the Enquirer often mistook him for the janitor because he spent so much time checking the thermostat in the company’s offices (it had to be at exactly seventy-five degrees) and tending to the grounds (the grass, which he would measure with a ruler, had to be exactly three inches high). Generoso Pope Jr. was a man intent on controlling his environment.

  The only indication of his tremendous fortune was the fourteen-room mansion he had built on a bluff overlooking the ocean in Manalapan, a five-minute drive away from the National Enquirer’s offices. It was largely a concession to his wife, Lois, a former Broadway showgirl and cabaret singer who had not taken to li
fe in the swamplands of Florida quite as easily as her husband. Within a few years, however, Lois came around and eventually she and several of Gene Pope’s six children were working for the National Enquirer.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, his publication’s relentless investigations into the private lives of the famous, Pope himself liked to remain anonymous. In fact, his name didn’t appear on the tabloid’s masthead. But there was no question that Gene Pope was the National Enquirer. He worked incessantly. He chainsmoked Kents and came into the office six days a week, usually bringing piles of work home with him each evening. Pope approved or killed every story idea—about six to nine hundred were submitted every week—and read each page proof, signing off with a rubber stamp: “Passed. G.P.” He never took vacations, and since moving to Lantana, which was just outside of Palm Beach, the farthest he had traveled was to one of his printing facilities in the next county to the south.

  As a manager his behavior alternated between astonishing generosity and tyranny. He quietly paid for an expensive operation for the local barber; when one editor needed an expensive bone marrow transplant, Pope assigned a researcher to find the best specialist in the country and footed the bill. Then he turned around and fired half a dozen staffers a few days before Christmas.