Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  But what no one—not Coz nor Perel nor editor-in-chief Iain Calder nor anyone else at the National Enquirer—realized the day the news of the murders broke was that the O.J. Simpson murder story would not only take over their lives, entirely dwarfing the Michael Jackson story, and for that matter any other event the tabloid had covered, but that it would also change the very nature of the American media. As a result of the O.J. Simpson story, tabloid values, tabloid techniques, and tabloid standards would become the values, techniques, and standards accepted by the mainstream media. The tabloid version of reality would prevail, but with the ultimate irony that the tabloids themselves would suffer for it, for when the mainstream press went tabloid, the tabloids began to look irrelevant.

  As the story unwound, the appetite of readers for continuing coverage surprised, and then astounded, the Enquirer’s editors. “Elvis dying was absolutely immense,” Iain Calder said. “Chappaquiddick was absolutely immense. Princess Grace dying was absolutely immense. But nothing has come close to the tremendous staying power of this.” The Enquirer’s sales, which had fallen about 15 percent since 1990, increased 10 percent in the wake of the murders. Editors at the other tabloids, the Globe, the Star and the Examiner, saw similar results. “With times being bad in papering, O.J. has taken care of us,” said reporter Ken Harrell of the Globe, where sales were also up 10 percent. “After this is over, we’re going to send him a letter of thanks.”

  Readers punished editors for straying from the story. In August, three months after the murders, when the Enquirer acquired pictures of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley’s wedding, Calder thought he had an irresistible tabloid scoop, but when he put it on the cover of the August 23, newsstand sales actually dropped. His readers were interested in nothing but O.J. “Who would have thought that wouldn’t be the number one story for the Enquirer?” said Calder. “Never in my wildest dreams could you have told me … that O. J. Simpson would be bigger than that.”

  Once they realized the scope of the story, Iain Calder and Steve Coz and David Perel spared no expense; they assigned twenty Enquirer reporters to knock on doors and whip out their checkbooks if a good source was reluctant to talk for free. The National Enquirer ended up spending more than $150,000 on tips that resulted in one scoop after another, including $12,500 to the dealer who sold O.J. his hunting knife and $18,000 to Nicole’s housekeeper, who said that O.J. would abuse his wife and then send her flowers. The Enquirer’s practices earned its reporters and editors the familiar criticism about ethical compromises. But something unprecedented also took place; the establishment media began grudgingly to concede that the tabloid was beating them on the story. “Many of us in the established media have discovered just how good the Enquirer can be,” said Ted Koppel. “They’ve been strong and in there on this story,” said Bill Boyarsky who covered the trial for the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve had a lot of stuff first.” The Columbia Journalism Review, which had published Oz Elliot’s essay denouncing tabloids as a “force of evil” twenty years earlier, actually called Steve Coz and David Perel “the Woodward and Bernstein of tabloid journalism.” And the New York Times ran a lengthy article praising the tabloid for its “aggressiveness and accuracy.” Iain Calder was stunned by the Times’s benediction. “It took my breath away,” he said. Others at the tabloid were more wary. “It was one of the worst things that ever happened to us,” groused one reporter who had worked at the tabloid since the Elvis story. “It was like the kiss of death for us.”

  Indeed, even as it was accruing these accolades, the Enquirer had begun to encounter a problem that had to do with the reality that the O.J. Simpson story riveted not just tabloid readers but the entire nation. Ninety-five million people had watched the Bronco chase on television. Economist Bernard Lentz of Ursinus College in Collegetown, Pennsylvania, estimated that workers were so distracted by watching and talking about the trial that businesses lost more than $25 billion. The elite were just as fascinated; Congressional hearings and the daily State Department briefings were scheduled around the important developments in the O.J. case. Foreigners were also obsessed. When Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, visited Los Angeles and was asked who she would like as dinner guests, she requested Marcia Clark and Robert Shapiro. And President Clinton said that when Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the United States in 1994, his first comment to Clinton was “Do you think O.J. did it?”

  The media both responded to and generated this interest. More than a thousand journalists from around the world descended on Los Angeles to cover the trial. A huge $1 million media encampment of tents and transmitters served by caterers and garbage collectors, was erected around the courthouse. An Advertising Age survey found that in 1994, more magazine covers were devoted to the O.J. Simpson case than any other subject.*

  And in the quest for exclusives, previously fastidious print outlets sunk to and sometimes below the standards of the tabloids. When the New Yorker, now edited by Tina Brown of Vanity Fair fame, teased a controversial O.J. story on its cover, newsstand sales went up by 50 percent. The magazine—which had published an influential essay during the 1977 Son of Sam hysteria castigating the tabloids for unethically involving themselves in the unfolding story—also published photographs of a shirtless Kato Kaelin and of Paula Barbieri posing seductively while clad only in a shirt. And its correspondent Jeffrey Toobin—who said at the time, “Some of us in so-called respectable journalism get a lascivious charge out of saying how good the Enquirer is, but it’s unreliable crap, and it’s important to remember that”—reported in its pages the defense theory that the murders were a Colombian drug hit and a Los Angeles police detective had planted the bloody glove on Simpson’s property. “That story was a blatant plant by the defense, and printing it was the height of irresponsibility,” said the Enquirer’s David Perel.

  The Enquirer’s editors grew alarmed about the number of publications crowding in on their turf. “Fifteen years ago we would have been out there alone, or with two or three other reporters,” groused Calder. “Now we’re elbowing the New York Times and the Washington Post out of the way. ABC News is camping out on the lawn and running after people with cameras.” Indeed, the O.J. Simpson story had an even greater impact on television than on print. Inside Edition and American Journal, produced by King World, shored up their Los Angeles bureau of twenty by more than fifty additional staffers. The eleven network magazine shows were all in bitter competition, and they pursued the story as well. NBC’s Dateline featured O.J.’s two children from his first marriage. CBS’s Eye to Eye with Connie Chung interviewed Simpson’s mother; 20/20 and PrimeTime Live had interviews of various members of Nicole’s and Ron Brown’s families; and Barbara Walters interviewed O.J.’s personal assistant. The news departments of CBS and NBC each spent about $30,000 a week just on the trial. ABC, which scaled back coverage, spent a mere $20,000 a week. ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news ran 1,392 stories on the Simpson case in 1995—almost twice the number of stories as the second-place subject—which was Bosnia, with 762 stories. In an ABC News poll, 84 percent of those questioned said they weren’t interested in hearing about O.J. But when the network cut away from coverage of Simpson’s preliminary hearing in July 1994, ratings instantly dropped.

  As Dan Rather explained at the time: “In every newsroom in the country—and that includes ours—there’s somebody, usually several somebodies who say, ‘You know, Dan, you can love the Balkans story all you want … you can say it’s of great, lasting historical significance … and you can argue all you want that it ought to lead the broadcasts, and I’m gonna tell you, in a tight ratings fight, O.J. spikes it up there and you better keep that in mind. The average local news director is a guy with his back to the wall, his shirttail on fire, the bill collector at the door and a guy with a straight razor right at his throat. If his ratings don’t get up, he may be out of a job in three months, six months, nine months. So when somebody says O.J. gets the ratings, even if his better sense or his cons
cience tells him to go with something else as the lead, he’s gonna go long and strong with Simpson.”

  Once the trial began, however, cable television owned the O.J. Simpson story. CNN’s ratings went up an astonishing 600 percent. It jacked up the cost of a commercial accordingly: from $3,000 for a typical thirty-second spot to $24,000. Ed Turner, executive vice president of CNN, put fifty staffers on the story and declared that the network would cover every minute of the trial. “We have paid our dues with plenty of Nigerias and Somalias and Bosnias over the years,” he said. “But you can’t get fifteen people to sit down and watch that if you put a gun to their heads.”

  The effect of the scandal on viewership patterns was profound—and permanent. “Whenever there’s a big migration from one medium to another,” noted media analyst Ed Atorio of Dillion Reed, “there’s never a 100 percent migration back.” More and more, the nation was turning to cable, which in turn was devoting itself more and more to scandal. Geraldo Rivera gave over his CNBC show Rivera Live almost exclusively to the Simpson trial and in so doing became the first cable show to beat CNN’s Larry King in the ratings. “From that time on,” noted Vanity Fair, “all cable networks focused obsessively on scandals.”

  As the mainstream media leaped over what was a quintessential tabloid story, something ironic happened: circulation fell dramatically at the tabloids. People didn’t need to buy the National Enquirer to find out what was going on in the O.J. case: it was all over the evening news and the New York Times. The tabloids not only lost whatever gains they had made in the early months of the scandal, circulation fell below what they had been in the pre-O.J. days. By the fall of 1995, when the trial began, the O.J. story had turned into a disaster for the tabloids. Circulation at the Enquirer fell to an average 2.7 million a week from 3.15 million in 1994. Its parent company went from operating in the black to losing money: in the three months ended in June 1995, it had a net loss of $880,000, versus a $7 million profit in the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue in that period dropped from $80.3 million to $73.5 million.

  Tabloid TV was going through a similar crisis. Gavel to gavel coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was on CNN, so viewers no longer had to tune in to A Current Affair or Hard Copy for tabloid stories. A Current Affair decided it would try to go in the direction of 60 Minutes, and in 1995 the show’s producers fired the man who personified tabloid TV, Steve Dunleavy. “As soon as it was decided that the show was going to go another direction,” Dunleavy said, “it was fairly clear that whatever skills I do or do not have would not necessarily be there for the show.”

  To boost circulation, the Globe, the Enquirer’s chief competition, resorted to the time-tested tabloid strategy of taking sides. And the side it chose to take was Simpson’s. The Globe, founded in 1954 by Joe Azaria, an Iraqi who immigrated to Canada before World War II, was the bête noir of supermarket tabloids, an outcast among outcasts. With a circulation of about 1 million in 1994, much smaller than that of the Enquirer, it had customarily made its mark by running stories that no other tabloid would touch. The Globe had first published the name and pictures of Patricia Bowman, the woman who claimed she was raped by William Kennedy Smith; it had published bizarre stories about satanic orgies that were held during fund-raisers for California Governor Jerry Brown. It had run an article claiming that Bill Clinton had fathered a child with a black prostitute—a story that was later disproved when the Star paid the alleged child to take a blood test.*

  The Globe’s Los Angeles bureau was located on Wilshire Boulevard and Bundy Drive, a mere two blocks away from where Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman had been killed, and it had surpassed the Enquirer in its tabloidy approach to the O.J. story. Budgeting $20,000 to $40,000 each week to cover the story, it hired a lip reader to decipher what O.J. whispered to his lawyers, it paid a genealogist to trace O.J.’s family history, and it used a lie detector test to determine whether Simpson was telling the truth in the audio edition of his book. It paid $30,000 for a seven-year-old photo of Simpson brandishing knives and wearing combat fatigues.

  And then it declared O.J.’s innocence. “World Exclusive: OJ was Framed” the tabloid declared. “America writes to OJ: You’re Innocent” said another headline. “Shocking New proof O.J. Didn’t Do It!” Then, in the ultimate tabloid tactic, the Globe offered a $ 1 million reward for anyone who could provide conclusive evidence that Simpson was framed. It was marketing genius and a journalistic travesty. Circulation shot up about fifty percent to 1.4 million, and the tabloid beat People magazine—which that week put Axl Rose on the cover—for the first time ever. Nearly 200,000 readers wrote or called the Globe to give the tabloid information about the “real killer.” Phil Bunton, the Globe’s editorial director, admitted that the tabloid’s position on the story was pandering to its readers. “It’s amazing how many people out there don’t think O.J. really did it, or don’t want to believe O.J. did it,” he said.

  Over at the Enquirer, the editors and reporters reacted in horror. The Globe was giving supermarket tabloids a bad name. “I don’t think they’ve done any real reporting,” sniffed the Enquirer’s David Perel. “I’ve yet to read anything with credibility in that publication.” When the Boston Herald wanted to do an article on the Globe and the National Enquirer’s coverage of the case, Iain Calder refused to be interviewed unless he could be assured that photographs of his publication wouldn’t appear alongside those of the Globe. “I don’t want us to appear next to a magazine that runs headlines about alien babies from outer space,” he said. After all, he had the tabloid’s reputation to think about.

  By the peak of the O.J. story, Iain Calder was growing weary. The National Enquirer had been sold in 1988, after its owner, Gene Pope, died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-one. (“National Enquirer Owner Goes to Meet with Elvis,” ran the headline in the New York Post.) The new owner, Peter Callahan, proudly described himself as cheap and pronounced that there were plenty of excesses that could be eliminated from the National Enquirer’s budget. The first thing to go was Pope’s beloved “World’s Tallest Christmas Tree.”*

  Iain Calder had stayed on under the new ownership with a stunning salary of $600,000, but by 1995, the work was no longer fun. He was fifty-six years old, and was still working sixteen-and eighteen-hour days. He had started having dizzy spells. To relax, he and his wife of forty-one years, Jane, took a visit to his hometown in Scotland. There, thousands of miles away from OJ. and Jackson and Tom Cruise and Donald Trump, the dizzy spells stopped. When Calder got back to the United States in November 1995—in the midst of the biggest tabloid story of the century—he declared that he would retire. “It’s an epic moment in tabloid history,” said Dan Schwartz, an Enquirer alum who was working at the competing Globe at the time.

  To replace Calder, Callahan chose Steve Coz, the thirty-eight-year-old who had been heading up the O.J. coverage. Coz was, in many ways, the polar opposite of Calder. He was the product of an exclusive New England prep school—and he looked it. He had a square, aristocratic chin and wore tortoiseshell glasses and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. He had been hired by the Enquirer in 1982, shortly after graduating from Harvard cum laude with an English major. His mother was always embarrassed that he worked for the tabloid—”He’s smarter than that,” she would insist—but Coz was impressed by the aggressiveness and intelligence of the reporters, and, he argued, the mainstream media was every bit as tabloidy as the Enquirer. “The other night, I’m watching television and there’s Mike Wallace, hosting a show called ‘20th Century’ and it’s all about the cover-up of UFOs,” Coz said. “So here I have a 60 Minutes correspondent telling me about visitors from outer space! The next morning, I’m listening to an ad on the radio and it’s saying ‘Tonight! On the Discovery Channel! The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies!’ And then I open our local newspaper and there’s a story on page two, underneath all the celebrity news, that says, “Lobster Boy Dies…. It’s so close to our stuff,” Coz said, “I can’t believe it.”

  Becaus
e the rest of the media had embraced tabloid topics, those subjects were now considered mainstream. And what that meant, in Coz’s view, was that the Enquirer had become in effect a mainstream publication. But for every seven people who looked at it in the supermarket, only one bought it. “People are still embarrassed,” Coz said. “So we’re trying to change the common perception of the Enquirer.” In the wake of the Simpson trial, he hoped to reposition the magazine, to establish it as a legitimate, even celebrity-friendly publication. He had celebrities sing the praises of “the new Enquirer” in the pages of the tabloid. “I love the new Enquirer,” celebrities such as Montel Williams would declare. “It is the tabloid of integrity!”

  The strategy appealed to the corporate owners of the Enquirer, who figured they could make up in advertising revenue what they had lost in newsstand sales. Being a “good” tabloid had another advantage as well. Focus groups repeatedly showed that one reason that people weren’t buying tabloids was because readers found them hostile toward the celebrities they revered. If Coz could establish the Enquirer as celebrity-friendly, he figured, he could reverse the circulation losses. He set out to accomplish this on January 16, 1997, a year after the Simpson trial ended, when Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis, was shot and killed on a Los Angeles freeway.

  Bill Cosby, who in several surveys was ranked the most-loved man in America, had long had a complicated relationship with the tabloids. The Enquirer’s detractors claimed that the tabloid had “blackmailed” Cosby. In 1989, a woman had called the Enquirer’s Los Angeles offices, claiming Cosby had an illegitimate daughter and she had the photos to prove it. The tabloid had approached Cosby and promised not to go with the story, according to several people familiar with the arrangement, if Cosby could cooperate with it on other stories. Cosby, according to the sources, agreed, but resented the tabloid’s intimidation and intrusiveness. When his son was murdered, he blasted the tabloid practice of paying sources, and challenged the tabloids to use the money instead to offer a reward for information about his son’s killer. At that time, the Globe revealed that they, too, had been pursuing the story of Cosby’s alleged illegitimate daughter. After Ennis’s murder, according to Globe editor Tony Frost, people at the Globe became suspicious and revealed that they had been negotiating with Autumn Jackson to pay her $25,000 for the story that she was Cosby’s illegitimate daughter.