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The San Diego Union-Tribune

Snoop dog

Mr. Confidential' captures a cheery huckster's ride with a scandalous magazine

January 14, 2007

For a brief five years, Confidential was the hottest magazine in the world. From a standing start in 1952, it was selling around 5 million copies an issue in the mid-1950s, until its creator and editor, Robert Harrison, bailed out in 1958.

Confidential succeeded by writing semi-scandalous stories about celebrities that tended to be true, mixed with trendy anti-communism that tended to be false. Another staple was miscegenation; Confidential was always running stories about the cross-racial sexual exploits of Sammy Davis Jr., Billy Daniels, Dorothy Dandridge or Marlon Brando. Today, it can be seen that the magazine lived off a working-class distrust of crazy Hollywood types and their leftie friends that still thrives in the environs of Fox News.


Mr. Confidential: The Man, His Magazine and the Movieland Massacre that Changed Hollywood Forever
Samuel Bernstein; Walford Press, 377 pages, $22.95
Like Spy in the 1980s, it was the right magazine at the right time. It constituted a busting loose from the movie studios' rigid control over information that had held sway since the 1920s. Nobody knew that Spencer Tracy was a drunkard or that Marlene Dietrich liked women as well as men, because the studios controlled access. Beyond that, there was the question of the advertising spigot that could be shut off at a moment's notice if any journalist got a little too frisky.

But Confidential was a feisty independent, and its advertising was generally low-end; it made it on circulation alone, which is why the layout was a lurid mix in screaming reds and yellows.

Confidential didn't call Liberace a homosexual, exactly; it just headlined its story, “Why Liberace's Theme Song Should be 'Mad About the Boy'?” Among those the magazine outed were Van Johnson, Walter Chrysler Jr., undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, Tab Hunter and Johnny Ray.

Likewise, the actress Lizabeth Scott wasn't called a lesbian; she was a “baritone babe,” a fabulous locution that Walter Winchell might have envied.

Harrison's sources were bartenders, governesses, mistresses and the occasional professional such as Barbara Payton, who starred with James Cagney and Gregory Peck, and who ended up as a $10 hooker. Harrison's staff writers included people on the way up (Ernest Tidyman, who would go on to win an Oscar for the screenplay of “The French Connection”) or on the way down (Howard Rushmore, an alcoholic, wife-beating Red-baiter who would end up killing his wife and then committing suicide.)

The movie studios couldn't control the magazine, so they had to learn to play a new game. When Confidential was planning on outing Rock Hudson, his agent gave up the juvenile prison record of Rory Calhoun, also a client but a much less important star. Hudson's career was, for the moment, safe.

Samuel Bernstein's biography of Harrison churns along with admirable gusto, although he adopts an oddly benign view of the damage the magazine wrought, probably because his sources were Robert Harrison's relatives, who were mostly supported by him.

Harrison, in Bernstein's telling, was a bumptious huckster with the soul of a racetrack tout who loved blondes and good times. “It so happens I have three white polo coats,” he said. “I love them. What the hell's wrong with that? Any guy with a little showmanship would go for it.” Oddly, Harrison never married, but then, he never had another success like Confidential either.

Bernstein understands the dual nature of the scandal transaction. Everybody instinctively knew that, to take one flamboyant example, Liberace was gay. But at the same time, everybody pretended not to know.

For Liberace's fans, “it was a strange kind of knowing, embedded with lots of denial, and genuine as well as slightly feigned ignorance. But trafficking in the myths of Hollywood, reading about them and exchanging stories, helped take one's mind off life's inconsistencies. ... People in the '50s enjoyed believing in Rita Hayworth's skills as a mother, in June Allyson's wholesomeness, in Rock Hudson's heterosexual virility. It is entirely possible to lose oneself in the fantasy of idealized belief while still knowing deep down that the essential truth of that belief is about as sturdy as Jell-O.”

What finally slowed the merry-go-round were lawsuits. Jerry Geisler sued the magazine on behalf of Robert Mitchum for $1 million, Lizabeth Scott for $2.5 million. When Harrison lost, he didn't lose big, but the legal grind wore him down. Then, California Attorney General Pat Brown got into the fray under the guise of battling smut, and that changed the equation considerably. Since Harrison had been making as much as $500,000 profit per issue, he took his money and sold the magazine. Confidential limped on into the early 1970s. Harrison himself died in 1978.

Bernstein's book contains a lot of information, and it also does the inestimable service of reprinting every cover of Confidential and a generous sampling of the stories themselves.

Together, they provide a window into an alternate view of a supposedly tranquil time – the neurotic underpinnings of the American dream.

© Cox News Service

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