Edition: U.S. / Global

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Stop the Presses! Not Enough Alien Corpses!

Published: July 26, 2004


My 20 Years Running The National Enquirer

By Iain Calder

314 pages. Miramax. $24.95.

Iain Calder's memoir recalls the innocent times when invading celebrities' privacy was unusual, diet stories never made it onto magazine covers, O.J. Simpson was best known as an athlete and Charo, ''the curvy coochie-coochie girl,'' qualified as an A-list guest at a Las Vegas party. In those days The National Enquirer's mixture of gossip, ghoulishness, human interest stories and weird science seemed tailor made for the lunatic fringe. Then the format was copied so zealously that versions of it cropped up everywhere.

Here is Mr. Calder's opportunity for a great big I-told-you-so. ''The Untold Story'' is his chance to boast about the paper's bag of tricks. Nobody paid more bribes to ''the hungriest locust'' or more eagerly planted a camera in a cummerbund (at one of Elizabeth Taylor's weddings) than The Enquirer's irrepressible reporters. Thirty years ago, when such stunts were barely a gleam in Michael Moore's eye, these guys were eagerly playing tricks on public servants: Mr. Calder has a story about sending a fake sheik to dupe certain senators. ''It was hard to keep a straight face, but it really wasn't funny,'' he writes. ''Security for the Senate was obviously non-existent.''

The Enquirer format conception dates back to around 1957. The book cites a Eureka moment for Mr. Calder's hero and inspiration, Generoso Pope Jr. ''Gene was caught in a traffic jam and observed motorists rubbernecking to see the mangled bodies of crash victims,'' Mr. Calder explains. ''If that's what they want, he thought, that's what I'll give them.'' So he did. And he threw in psychics, U.F.O.'s and strange diseases for good measure.

''The Untold Story'' would not be worth telling if it were just a litany of Enquirer grave-robbing exclusives. (Capturing a photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin was, by Mr. Calder's lights, one of the publication's greatest achievements. The fake priest with the camera in his Bible couldn't get the shot, but the Enquirer, with its famous largess, paid one of Elvis's cousins to help.)

But this book earns a legitimate, if small, place in journalism's history as it connects the dots between Enquirer tactics and those of the mainstream press. There was a time when only the Enquirer would have been excited by a little-known fatal illness (progeria) that caused children to age prematurely and struck two little victims in the same family. ''To this day, when I think of these good people, I get emotional,'' writes Mr. Calder. Ever the professional, he never got too emotional to exploit their tragedy.

By the time of O.J. Simpson's murder trial, though, The Enquirer could be counted on for reliable information and bona fide detective work. Other papers admitted it, and many other print and television outlets struggled to follow suit. Why did a salesman at Ross Cutlery in Los Angeles tell only The Enquirer that he had sold Mr. Simpson a knife that matched the murder weapon? Well, $17,500 changed hands over that one. And in the clerk's own words, citing the indefatigable tactics of one Enquirer bloodhound, ''Because Mr. Alan Smith would not leave me alone.''

Leaving out the sickening parts, Mr. Calder tells a jaunty tale of journalistic innovation. Long before supermarkets, there were runaway trucks that might well crash into newsstands refusing to sell this tabloid. Mob connections were evident in those early ''Mom Uses Son's Face as Ashtray'' days. And the paper's definition of a ''great story'' also gave it novelty. Judy Garland's body left in a temporary crypt, long after a supposed burial? How astrology helped to make Peter Falk a star? Exclusive photos of Burt Reynolds with his new baby? All of these are cited among the paper's major hits.

''The Untold Story'' dates back to the days when pictures had to be not only snapped on the sly but also flown or driven straight to Lantana, Fla., The Enquirer's home base. The mechanics of these stunts make for lively anecdotes, as does the Enquirer method of holding sources captive to keep them away from other reporters. ''Tell our guys it's not serious unless he's shooting at people,'' said Mr. Calder, when the farmer who had witnessed Princess Grace's auto accident began to go stir-crazy under tabloid house arrest.

''The Enquirer exists because celebrities do stupid things they later regret,'' Mr. Calder writes. He provides a bookload of anecdotal evidence to support this claim and he makes no apologies for it, though he has been asked to do so. When John F. Kennedy Jr. interviewed Mr. Calder for his magazine George, ''at one point he asked if I had trouble sleeping at night,'' the book recalls. ''My answer: Of course not.'' This despite his paper's having chased Liberace's hearse, scuttled the political career of Gary Hart, left no celebrity AIDS deathbed undisturbed and published ''Amazing Honeymoon Swimsuit Pictures'' of Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr.

''I used to go to bed at night praying for your safety,'' an Enquirer staff member once told Ms. Barr, as she became the tabloid equivalent of a goose laying golden eggs. Meanwhile Mr. Arnold took secret payoffs from the paper to deliver stories about his spouse, and when he indignantly denied this, The Enquirer just displayed a canceled check to Mr. Arnold to prove its case. In fending off the charge that not every Enquirer claim is as solid as that one, Mr. Calder writes: ''Show me the publication that hasn't goofed.'' Unfortunately, he has a point.

The cheerful amorality of ''The Untold Story'' has more to recommend it than, say, glimpses into the personal lives of staff members, even when the latter are written in fluent Enquirer-ese. That lingo proves irresistible to Mr. Calder, even when he is describing the death of his mentor. ''Wearing only a skirt and a bra, she walked out of her dressing room toward the bed,'' he writes of Lois Pope at the time of her husband's death. ''Now for the first time, she is allowing the minute-by-minute details of the tragedy to be revealed publicly, in this book.''

Photo: Iain Calder (Photo by Steve Gold/Miramax Books)