"Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine"
By Henry E. Scott

Consider these titillating titles: “Robert Mitchum…the Nude Who Came to Dinner!,” “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?,” “The Strange Death of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s RED Sweetheart,” and “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy!’” Ladies and gentlemen, Confidential magazine. In Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine” (New York: Pantheon, 2010), Henry E. Scott offers an informative, and immensely entertaining, history of the tawdry Fifties tabloid.

Founded in late 1952, Confidential—boasting the subtitles “Uncensored and Off the Record” and “Tells the Facts and Names the Names”—provided a heady mix of celebrity gossip and Communist-baiting politics. Time described Confidential as “a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction, and plain smut,” while Humphrey Bogart called the salacious semimonthly’s owner, Robert Harrison, “the King of Leer.” Recurring themes included “miscegenation, homosexuality, and the sexual indiscretions of the powerful in Hollywood and Washington.” Articles such as “The Truth About Tab Hunter’s Pajama Party,” “The Untold Story of Van Johnson,” and “What Makes Ava Gardner Run for Sammy Davis, Jr.?,” aroused readers’ curiosity. Such pieces, Scott contends, “were good for sales because they pandered to popular fears and preconceptions.” He asserts that Confidential, “a minor irritant” when initially established, “couldn’t be ignored by 1955, when its average circulation of two million copies made it one of the best-selling newsstand publications in the nation.”

An intriguing cast of characters made the lurid magazine a massive success. Harrison, its “flamboyant and gregarious” founder, loved starlets and showgirls, expensive white suits, custom-made Cadillac Eldorados, and nightclub life. Before Confidential, he published such “girlie” magazines as Wink, Titter, and Eyeful. Harrison sought, and won, the support of veteran newsman Walter Winchell, who called Confidential his “pet mag.” Harrison hired a crack team of informants and investigators, including Hollywood madam Veronica Quillan, actress Francesca de Scaffa—alleged paramour of Orson Welles, Clark Gable, and the Shah of Iran—and Fred Otash, “a former L.A. vice squad cop with a lust for celebrity and a skill at wiretapping.” (Both Harrison and Otash claimed that Confidential “was a force for good, helping to clean up Hollywood.” Defending the magazine’s mission, Otash insisted: “Kick all the Communists out of Hollywood, kick out the homosexuals, enforce [fidelity] on both husbands and wives, and you won’t have any scandal—and no scandal magazines.”) Harrison also depended on the services of fact-checker Michael Mordaunt-Smith and attorney Albert DeStefano. (Scott avers that the tabloid’s “stories were, for the most part, true.”) Harrison’s editors included former Police Gazette employees Edythe Farrell and A. P. Govani, Jay Breen, who had written for the United Press, and zealous anti-Communist Howard Rushmore, an “imposing figure” whose social acquaintances included Winchell, Roy Cohn, and William F. Buckley, Jr.

Scott begins each chapter with a juicy excerpt from Confidential. Readers thus come away with a real feel for the magazine. Consider this example. In “Why Joe DiMaggio Is Striking Out with Marilyn Monroe!” (August 1953), Confidential declared that Joltin’ Joe “kept swinging at and missing those lovely curves in his world series of the heart—that gallant attempt to make Marilyn Monroe his wife…For months on end, the bosomy beauty made much of the fact that she hadn’t even been asked for her hand and what came with it. Many a baffled male thought that this was bedrock proof that DiMaggio was cracking up.”

Confidential inspired a number of imitators. These scandal-packed publications included On the QT, Hush-Hush, Exposed, Uncensored, Dare, and Suppressed. Obviously, thousands of Americans were “ever eager for a titillating peak at the shenanigans of the rich and famous,” Scott maintains. In a 1955 series for the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “Titans of Trash,” journalist Jack Olson analyzed the impact of Confidential and its spawn on the Los Angeles film community. “Overnight, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been tagged as deviates, rakes, nymphomaniacs, lunatics, drunks, and hopheads,” observed Olson. “Theater bookings have been canceled because of certain ‘exposes’…[An] actress, heretofore cast a sweet-young-thing…will never again play such a role because of ‘expose’ publicity about her nighttime escapades. Other actors, similarly tarbrushed, have silently slipped away.”

Confidential punctured the innocent image of filmland promoted by movie publicists and fan magazines. In “stripping away layer upon layer of Hollywood puffery,” Scott argues, Confidential and its clones “left a legacy of skepticism and cynicism that was quickly embraced by Americans who had come to doubt the oh-so-wholesome image of life they saw projected endlessly on the silver screen.” According to critic Camille Paglia, “Half-fictionalized as they are, the tabloids…tell the lurid pagan truth about life.” Today, descendants of Confidential include the National Enquirer, E! True Hollywood Story, Access Hollywood, TMZ, and Vanity Fair.

Shocking True Story is skillfully written, well illustrated, and impressively researched. Journalism students and Fifties enthusiasts, particularly those interested in pop culture and politics, will enjoy Scott’s engaging study.