Success in the Sewer

In a little more than two years, a 25-c- magazine called Confidential, based on the proposition that millions like to wallow in scurrility, has become the biggest newsstand seller in the U.S. Newsmen have called Confidential ("Tells the Facts and Names the Names") everything from "scrawling on privy walls'' to a "sewer sheet of supercharged sex." But with each bimonthly issue, printed on cheap paper and crammed with splashy pictures, Confidential's sale has grown even faster than its journalistic reputation has fallen. It has also spawned a dozen guttery imitators, e.g., Hush Hush, The Lowdown, Exposed, Uncensored, On the Q.T. In Hollywood Cinemactor Humphrey Bogart reports that "everybody reads it, but they say the cook brought it into the house." In Chicago a society matron summed up the simultaneous appall and appeal that she feels for the magazine: "I've read it from cover to cover, and I think it ought to be thrown out of the house."

This week Confidential's latest issue was on its way to newsstands all over the U.S. ("Loaded with sizzling exclusives"), and the magazine trumpeted its success: "Over 4,000,000 and going up." Like everything about the magazine, the circulation claim was excessive. Confidential has applied for membership in the Audit Bureau of Circulations; if accepted, it will come in with a circulation of about 2,230,000, its average for the first six months of 1955. But its newsstand growth has been so fast (only 30,000 readers subscribe by mail) that Confidential expects to reach its circulation claim in next year's audit.

A Fake. By sprinkling grains of fact into a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction and plain smut, Confidential creates the illusion of reporting the "lowdown" on celebrities. Its standard method: dig up one sensational "fact" and embroider it for 1,500 to 2,000 words. If the subject thinks of suing, he may quickly realize that the fact is true, even if the embroidery is not. Confidential has four libel suits pending against it (including two started by Cinemactors Errol Flynn and Robert Mitchum). But few of its subjects are inclined to go to court over what the magazine prints. Said one Hollywood star: "You've got to have guts or your skirts have to be awfully clean before you mess around legally with these people."

There is an even bigger reason why Confidential has had so few libel suits. Most people damaged by Confidential do not want to draw attention to the article and the magazine by suing, thus spreading the storm. They would rather try to ignore it than be entangled in the dirty fight that a libel suit would bring.

Many a Confidential story is based on facts that newsmen know and could print, e.g., "The Astor Testimony the Judge Suppressed." The magazine specializes in finding one black mark in a subject's distant past, and hammering him with it, e.g., Cinemactor Rory Calhoun's youthful prison record. Sometimes Confidential drops the pretense of reporting altogether, once concluded an article about a Hollywood director and an actress causing a scene in a nightclub with the last line: "It's all a fake."

In Hollywood, whose movie colony supplies most of the subjects for its articles, the "Confidential treatment" has become such a threat that confidence men have tried to collect $500 to $1,000 by offering "to keep your name out of Confidential." The magazine gets its tips from bellhops, call girls, private detectives and paid tipsters, writes all its articles in its shabby Manhattan offices on Broadway. Though it offers up to $1,000 an article, few working newsmen will write for it, and almost all its bylines are pseudonyms of Confidential's editors.

A Boss. Confidential's publisher, Robert Harrison, 51, would make a racy subject himself for an article in the magazine. A sleek-haired, gruff-talking showoff, Bachelor Harrison drives a white Cadillac, making the rounds of New York City nightclubs "wherever romance beckons me." Manhattan-born, Harrison started out in publishing after working as a writer for movie trade papers, bringing out such magazines as Beauty Parade, Wink, Titter and Flirt.

Short of cash but obviously enjoying his work, Harrison often modeled for pictures himself, posing as everything from a white slaver (with pith helmet) to an irate husband spanking his wife. On one project for one of his magazines, Harrison was picked up by New Jersey police (and released) for taking pornographic pictures: he had driven a carload of models to a Jersey golf course and had started taking pictures of them cavorting across the fairways half-nude.

The Post Office Department has made Harrison clean up his magazines before putting them in the mails, and New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice filed a complaint against them. But he was undeterred. When he saw the popularity of the Kefauver crime hearings on TV, he decided that "inside stuff" was even better than cheesecake.

A Smear. In the first issue of Confidential, Harrison ran an article buttering up Hearst Columnist Walter Winchell. It paid off. Winchell promptly became a one-man promotion agency for the magazine, fired with new enthusiasm for it every time Confidential ran another article praising him or attacking his enemies. (Harrison obligingly became a contributor to Winchell's Damon Runyon Memorial Fund.) Harrison also found a way to use Confidential articles over and over again in another of his magazines, Whisper ("The Stones Behind the Headlines").

Confidential's small staff works under Editor Howard Rushmore, onetime Communist who was fired as a Hearst reporter (TIME, Nov. 1), partly for contributing in his spare time to Confidential. The editors write Confidential's articles in breezy, breathless tabloid prose, always promising more than they give ("This article will shock you"). One of the best descriptions of the kind of reporting in Confidential and its imitators came from one of the imitators, Top Secret. Said Top Secret: "How cunningly the smear is constructed. It says nothing with finality. It doesn't come right out and claim . . . Everything is left neatly up in the air, letting the heavy steel wrecking ball swing freely, hit as it may and where."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.