Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  “For two reasons,” he said. “Professionally, to report and record your death. And, second, because you are an astonishing lady who often confuses me but always intrigues. It is an event I could not miss.” At Diana’s funeral, distraught mourners carried hand-painted signs blasting the press. “You murdering bastards,” a middle-aged woman wept at she spat on a photographer. “You killed her, you pigs. You murdered her.” Two people who knew Whitaker, however, told him that they enjoyed a tribute he wrote to Diana. When the third person told him that she knew he had loved the Princess, Whitaker burst into tears.

  Although no one could bring back Diana—the press and the public seemed to agree on one thing: Diana’s tragic fate should not be passed on to the sons she loved and protected so desperately. The consensus was clear: leave the boys alone. The public was shocked and outraged; therefore, when the day after the funeral, a photograph appeared in almost every national paper in England showing the young princes and Charles in a car heading to the funeral. Newspaper switchboards lit up across London as horrified readers protested the media’s continuing tasteless intrusiveness. Some of the editors were too embarrassed to tell the grieving callers that the photo op had been arranged by Buckingham Palace.

  * In fact, Murdoch had the Squidgy tapes for eighteen months before publishing them. He was afraid of public backlash—afraid that he would be accused of trying to destroy the monarch. Finally, they were leaked to the National Enquirer, then picked up by the Sun. Many suspect the leak was orchestrated by Murdoch’s camp, which Murdoch vehemently denies.

  * Some of these women, including Winona Ryder and Julia Roberts, have denied that any relationship ever existed.

  * Diana also had a bit of a crush on President Clinton. “I think he’s dishy,” she told gossip columnist Taki Theoracoupolos. “And tall, too.” Diana was also said to be smitten with John Kennedy Jr. There were also reports— which Diana denied—that she had a crush on Tom Hanks and pestered him with phone calls.

  † Stories circulated that Diana was ten weeks pregnant with Dodi’s child when she had only known him for eight weeks. What’s more, a friend who was close enough to Diana to be familiar with her bodily rhythms said it would have been “biologically impossible” for her to have been pregnant as reported.

  * Mohammed Al Fayed later revealed that the gift was an ornate silver platter inscribed with a love poem; when a former girlfriend heard that, she was outraged, telling friends that it sounded suspiciously like a platter she bought him when they were dating.

  * Liz Taylor was a distant second with fourteen covers.

  * * People has paid sources on several occasions. The magazine paid Donna Rice’s friend Lynn Armandt. In 1991, it paid Elizabeth Taylor $175,000 for photos of her wedding. Star and People reportedly joined forces to spend $400,000 for pictures of Lisa Marie Presley’s first child. According to a New York Post reporter, he was turned down for an interview with a woman who survived two weeks at sea because she had sold the story exclusively to People for $10,000.

  EPILOGUE

  The members of the media were so mortified at being implicated in the death of Princess Diana that it seemed possible that finally gossip columnists and scandal rags—as well as the mainstream press that had come to follow their lead—would be shamed, or legislated, into behaving themselves. Six months after Diana died, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch introduced the Personal Privacy Protection Act. The law would make it a crime to persistently follow or chase a person in order to film or record them for commercial purposes. It also allowed celebrities to bring suit against photographers who use high-powered lenses, microphones, and other devices to invade people’s privacy. “If Senator Feinstein is able to steer this bill through the Senate, we owe her a great debt of gratitude,” said Pat Kingsley

  “The bill will be passed,” said Feinstein, “we owe it to the memory of Princess Diana.” Michael J. Fox and Paul Reiser testified on behalf of the bill. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone, Ed Asner, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith, and Whoopi Goldberg also threw their weight behind the bill. While the celebrity support was not surprising, the mainstream media, for the most part, also supported the bill. In late 1998, state legislation containing many of the provisions of the federal bill sponsored by Feinstein and Hatch was signed into law by California Governor Pete Wilson.

  In the year since Diana’s death, it seemed as if the industry had come full circle since the Confidential scandal forty years earlier. Just as had happened in 1957, politicians and celebrities, with the support of the public and the establishment press, were working together to curb the power of the paparazzi and the tabloid publications that employed them.

  And, indeed, they seemed to be succeeding, for the tabloid press at large, both print and broadcast, was suffering. The National Enquirer, with its circulation continuing to fall, was sold again in 1999 to a group that included former Treasury secretary Robert Altman, and in a wild effort to demonstrate its increasingly deferential attitude to celebrities invited Roseanne, who had once sued the publication, to guest-edit an issue. The same group also bought the Enquirer’s nemesis, The Globe.

  People had so alienated top-tier stars that it was publishing mostly tabloid-style write-arounds and cover stories on ordinary people in extraordinary situations. To fill the void, Time Warner had started up In Style, a celebrity magazine that did no reporting. Utterly fawning, it took the place that People had occupied when that magazine was celebrity friendly, and it was a stunning success.

  The situation was, if anything, even more grim in the broadcast field. Faced with increasing competition from the proliferation of new network news magazine shows like 48 Hours and Dateline NBC, and from softer-edged syndicated programs like Access Hollywood, both Hard Copy and A Current Affair tried to reposition themselves in the mid-nineties as serious news shows. Neither succeeded. Ratings continued to fall. Fox, in desperation, fired Steve Dunleavy, the “ringmaster of the media circus,” from A Current Affair in 1996. When that didn’t work, Fox canceled the show altogether in 1997. Hard Copy managed to hang on for another two years but in the fall of 1999 it, too, was taken off the air.

  At the same time, many of the figures instrumental in the “tabloidization” of the media had fallen by the wayside. Rona Barrett left the gossip business altogether and spent the 1990s selling real estate in Los Angeles, quite successfully by most accounts. Doris Lilly was less fortunate. She died in 1991, destitute and forgotten, screaming from her hospital bed, “Call the newspapers! Call Richard Johnson [of Page Six]! Call Cindy Adams!” Others were trying to create post-tabloid incarnations for themselves. Geraldo Rivera, who had joined NBC with a serious news show on CNBC, declared his hopes to establish himself as the “anchorman for the new millennium.” His co-host was former Hard Copy reporter Diane Dimond. Cindy Adams and Liz Smith ended up at the same tabloid, the New York Post, and although the rivalry between them was still keen, they no longer fought the great tabloid wars that they had when they were at competing papers. Gossip foes, such as Anthony Pellicano, were back in business. Although the White House has denied it, the private detective reportedly was working for the Clinton administration, and is said to have been a major source for unflattering stories on Monica Lewinsky. Tina Brown left the New Yorker and launched Talk magazine. But the articles—like a cover story in which Liz Taylor and Michael Jackson gushed over each other—seemed like a tired formula.

  Richard Stolley, who had paved the way for celebrity journalism to enter the mainstream, had long retired from being an editor, and was spending much of his time lecturing crowds about the evils of gossip. “I think gossip can be the enemy of civilization,” he told a group of journalists in 1998. “I think the dissemination of cruel, mean-spirited information which is fundamentally disturbing to a human being, to his family, to his friends is a blow to civilized society.”

  There
will always be a complicated dance among the public, the media, and the rich and famous and powerful. Celebrities, whether politicians or movie stars, crave certain types of controlled publicity but detest uninvited airings of their foibles and excesses. The media, which profit by selling celebrity, require both access to the celebrated and the freedom to publish unflattering details of their private lives if that serves either a journalistic or commercial purpose. The public, for its part, is indisputably titillated by celebrity gossip but also disapproves of the media for the invasion of privacy required to provide them with the gossip it finds so fascinating.

  The tensions within this triangular relationship can never be overcome more than temporarily. Any attempt at voluntary restraint by the media will always be undone by some shameless outsider, from Confidential’s Robert Harrison to the Enquirer’s Gene Pope to Internet maverick Matt Drudge, who believes that society at large, and his own bank account, is best served by placing no limits on what the public has a right to know. Whenever the “legitimate” media swears off gossip, another medium comes along to fill the void.

  And by 1999, that medium was clearly the Internet. That year Matt Drudge, who had once preached that journalists should not earn too much money, was making more then $4,000 a day (or more than $1 million a year) from his column, according to a well-placed source. In addition to launching his own Fox TV talk show, he ditched his beat-up Geo Metro and bought a Porsche. He angrily left his talk show in late 1999, after Fox officials refused to let him show a photo of a fetus on air. He had, he declared, been “spoiled” by the freedom of the Internet. “The Internet,” Drudge insisted in his talk to the Washington Press Club, “is going to save the news business.”

  It may not save the news business, but it had certainly rescued Druge from a life of obscurity. It had also given new life—for better or worse—to gossip. By killing certain stories and editing or cutting others, the power of the establishment media to control what information reached the public had been virtually extinguished by the Internet. And that, rather than the fear of yet another lurid scandal, may have been what made the mainstream journalists at the Press Club shudder when Drudge, in conclusion, declared, “Let the future begin.”

  SOURCES

  A note on sources: In the course of reporting this book, I conducted hundreds of interviews, recorded transcripts from scores of television shows, and read hundreds of books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. As it would be too daunting a task to name all the sources consulted, I have listed the most important books, articles, and television shows in the bibliography. Some sources were especially essential to the reporting; I have listed those in the chapter notes.

  1 “Citizen Reporter”

  Matthew Drudge’s address before the National Press Club, 2 June 1998. Also author’s interview with Doug Harbrecht, 23 April 1999.

  For an account of the penny press, see Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium. Also see Frederick Allen, “Up from Humbug,” Columbia Journalism Review.

  For a fascinating history of the gossip and society in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Nicholas Lemann, “Confidence Games.” See also Mitchell Stephens, A History of News.

  For the definitive account of Winchell’s power and influence, see Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. For further discussions of Winchell, see also Lehman and Herman Klurfeld, Winchell: His Life and Times.

  I interviewed a number of people who know or knew Matthew Drudge, including Dan Mathews and David Cohen. Other sources consulted for this chapter include Howard Kurtz, “It’s Ten Past Monica, America. Do You Know Where Matt Drudge Is?”; Janet Wiscombe, “What Hath the Web Wrought?”; Michael Finley, “Drudging up Change on the Internet”; Robert B. Gunnison, “Drudge Dredges Up the Dirt.” The notion that Drudge hacked into computers is based on reports from several sources as well as William Powers, “Punctured Franchise.”

  2 The War Against Confidential

  The description of the courtroom setting and trial was taken from a variety of contemporary news accounts as reported in the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, the New York Mirror, Time, and Newsweek. In addition, the author interviewed scandal magazine expert Alan Betrock and publisher Lyle Stuart.

  Among the profiles of Harrison consulted were Tom Wolfe’s “Public Lives: Confidential Magazine. Reflections in Tranquility by the Former Owner, Robert Harrison, Who Managed to Get away with It”; Mike Wallace’s “The Man Behind Confidential”; a 1957 series on Harrison in the New York Mirror. Neal Gabler also discusses the relationship between Harrison and Winchell.

  For more on Fred Otash, see his book Investigation Hollywood! See also Bill Davidson, “The Dick”; Howard J. Rutledge, “Gossipy Private Peeks at Celebrities’ Lives Start Magazine Bonanza. Confidential’s Racy Exposés Crack Newsstand Records.”

  3 Mike Wallace—Shaking the Building

  The material in this chapter is based on an interview with Mike Wallace as well as interviews with a number of people who work for him, many of whom asked not to be identified. See also Wallace’s autobiography, Close Encounters; the excellent Edward Klein, “Hidden Mike”; Vanity Fair and a collection of his early interviews, published in Mike Wallace Asks. In addition, these published sources were consulted: “Mike Wallace: In the Spotlight”; Marvin Barrett, “Turnabout on Mike Wallace, Newsweek”; the series on Mike Wallace in the New York Post, 13–18 February 1957; William A. Coleman, “Mike Wallace’s Sunday Punch,” Parade. For Oliver Treyz’s visit to ABC, see Leonard Goldenson, Beating the Odds.

  4 The Birth of a Tabloid

  Details of the Enquirer’s early years are based on a number of interviews with Generoso Pope Jr.’s son, Paul Pope, with John Miller’s son, John Miller Jr., and with Igor Cassini. Also, an unpublished interview with Lois and Paul Pope by Noel Botham and Brian Hitch, provided to the author by Paul Pope.

  Details of the Costello dinner are taken from a variety of newspaper accounts at the time of the hit, as well as Leonard Katz’s excellent Uncle Frank: The Biography of Frank Costello. Also see George Wolf with Joseph DiMona, Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld, and Kenneth Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City.

  For a biography of Generoso Pope Sr., see Philip Cannistraro’s Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, and Pope’s obit, “Generoso Pope, 59, Publisher, Is Dead,” New York Times, 29 April 1950.

  Details on the relationship between Roy Cohn and Pope are based on a number of interviews, but particularly one with his friend and biographer, Sidney Zion. See also Zion’s book, The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, as well as Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn and Roy Cohn, A Fool for a Client.

  For a rousing account of the early years at the National Enquirer, see George Bernard, Inside the National Enquirer: Confessions of an Undercover Reporter. See also Reginald Potterton, “I Cut Out Her Heart & Stomped on It!,” Playboy.

  Other important printed sources for this chapter include William R. Amlong, “Pope: The High Priest of Lowbrow,” Tropic; “Goodbye to Gore,” Time; and Sid Kirchheimer’s “Enquiring Minds Want to Know the Man Behind the National Enquirer,” Fort Lauderdale News Sun-Sentinel. See also Kent A. MacDougall’s “Going Straight: The National Enquirer Finds Gore Doesn’t Pay but Reassurance Does,” Wall Street Journal.

  5 “They’ve Got Everything on You …”

  Information in this chapter came from interviews with Benjamin Bradlee, Igor Cassini, Lawrence J. Quirk, and Sidney Zion. I also consulted the Dorothy Kilgallen collection at the New York Public Library.

  Among the most startling accounts of Ben Bradlee’s relationship with the Kennedys is in his own words in Conversations with Kennedy and in A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.

  J. Edgar Hoover being a source for Winchell is documented in several places, but see
especially Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover; Zion, The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, and Herman Klurfeld, Winchell: His Life and Times.

  For further details of Kennedy’s manipulation of the press, see Klurfeld; Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy; Wesley O. Hagood, Presidential Sex; Earl Wilson, Show Business Laid Bare; Sidney Skolsky, Don’t Get Me Wrong—I Love Hollywood; Lee Israel, Kilgallen; and Lawrence J. Quirk’s The Kennedys in Hollywood.

  For more information about the Cassini episode, see Peter Maas, “Boswell of the Jet Set,” Saturday Evening Post; Cassini’s “Personal Lives: When the Sweet Life Turns Sour; A Farewell to Scandal,” Esquire; and “Igor Cassini Indicted as Failing to Register as Trujillo Agent,” New York Times, 9 February 1963.

  For biographical information on Fred Otash, see Anthony Cook, “The Man Who Bugged Marilyn Monroe,” GQ; Bill Davidson’s “The Dick,” Los Angeles magazine; Otash’s Investigation Hollywood! and his obituary by Myrna Oliver, “Fred Otash, Colorful Hollywood Private Eye and Author,” Los Angeles Times. The account of Otash’s bugging of the Kennedys was taken from a variety of sources, including Robert Welkos and Ted Rohrlich, “Marilyn Monroe Mystery Persists,” L.A. Times. A similar account is in Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. See also James Spada, Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

  6 The Divas

  I conducted interviews with a number of people who dealt with the subjects, including Dan Shaw, Patricia Bosworth, Eleanor Lambert, John Springer, and Mimi Strong. Published sources consulted include Paul O’Neil, “The Little Queen that Hollywood Deserved,” Life; George Eell, Hedda and Louella; and Richard Lemon and Mary Ann Norbom’s “The Warrior Queens of Gossip,” People. Several of Sheila Graham’s books, particularly Hollywood Revisited; Lawrence Laurent, “Telling Tales: Still Rewarding,” Newsday; Nikki Finke, “Miss Rona Ready for Another Run at TV,” Los Angeles Times; Tom Shales, “Some Enchanted Rona: The Woman Who Made TV Safe for Hollywood Gab,” Washington Post; John Hallowell, “Miss Rona Barrett Gossips,” New York Times; and Joanne Wasserman, “Miss Rona’s Snit Over Barbara Plums,” New York Post. The dishiest source of information on Rona Barrett is probably her autobiography, Miss Rona.