The Scandal Rag that Started it All
Upon reading James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, former journalist Henry E. Scott developed a deep fascination of Confidential magazine (fictionalized in the novel as Hush-Hush magazine). The result, Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine” (Pantheon, 240pgs), delineates the history of the original scandal rag that gave birth to today’s purveyors of titillating tales, such as Us Magazine, Entertainment Tonight and TMZ. Publisher Robert Harrison introduced the bi-monthly magazine in 1952, its blazing yellow and red masthead and catchy headlines gleefully exposing the infidelities, sexual orientation and political leanings of the day’s biggest stars. Through his research, Scott was surprised to find that each published article was carefully fact checked, and most of the stories reported the facts accurately. Though more respectable publications, like Time, derided the scandal sheet as “a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction, and plain smut”, the public devoured every issue and circulation soon rose to more than 3 million.
Before Confidential, celebrity journalism consisted mainly of puff pieces, approved by the studios and paced in glossy magazines such as Look. We have Harrison to thank (or curse?) for exposing the seedy sides of the rich and famous, and changing the public views of celebrity and the right (or lack there of) to privacy. By 1957, the studio heads had corralled the support of California’s government, and brought several million dollar libel lawsuits against the magazine. The publication was shut down a few years later. But, Pandora’s Box had been opened, and by the time of Confidential’s demise, numerous copycat tabloids had been spawned, thus ushering in our current obsession with all things celebrity.
