Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  “I love it,” the Confidential publisher declared. “I’ve already told my lawyers to be prepared to subpoena every big-name star who ever appeared in the magazine.” Confidential had turned its fifty-three-year-old publisher into a shameless publicity seeker. Harrison, nicknamed the King of Leer, was an effusive man who looked and spoke like a Broadway promoter. He had hooded eyes that darted back and forth, slicked-back black hair, a perpetual tan, and large, very white teeth. Harrison lived in a lavish Manhattan apartment off Fifth Avenue that he decorated to look like the nightclubs he frequented “with checkered tablecloths, a long bar and zebra stripes just like El Morocco,” he boasted. He wore $250 tailor-made suits, a white fedora, and white polo coat, and drove around in a huge white custom-designed Cadillac Eldorado convertible. His flamboyance was his way, he insisted, of responding to suggestions that he go underground after getting death threats for articles his magazine had published. The Confidential trial would make him even richer and more famous, he insisted. “Can you picture that parade up to the witness stand?” Harrison loved a good scandal—even if it was about him. Like the time he was hunting for a male potency drug in the Dominican Republic and got shot by big-game hunter Richard Weldy. Earlier, Confidential had run an article that Weldy was a cuckolded husband. “No Wonder John Wayne Was the Topic of the Tropics,” reported that while John Wayne was visiting his old friend Weldy in Lima, Wayne stole the hunter’s wife, Pilar Palette. The jilted husband got into several public shouting matches with Harrison about the article. Eventually, Weldy took a rifle and shot at the publisher. The bullet hit Harrison in the shoulder, causing only a flesh wound. “Weldy is a nice fellow,” John Wayne said after the incident, “but I deplore the fact that he is such a poor shot.”

  Weldy and Harrison both later claimed that the shooting was an accident, but it made headlines and the publisher happily posed for pictures from his hospital bed. Harrison even went on television where an aggressive reporter named Mike Wallace accused Harrison of faking the incident for publicity.

  “[Mike Wallace] starts after me right away,” said Harrison. “He’s very sarcastic: ‘Why don’t you admit it, Harrison, that so-called shooting in the Dominican Republic was a fake, a publicity stunt, wasn’t it? You weren’t shot at all, were you?’ ”

  “Would you know a bullet wound if you saw one?” Harrison asked.

  Wallace insisted he would. The show was live and Harrison, a born showman, seized the moment; he took off his shirt in front of the stunned television crew. “Everybody is running around the studio like crazy!” Harrison recalled. “Those guys didn’t know what to do, die or play organ music.” The cameraman didn’t notice the small puncture in Harrison’s shoulder and instead zoomed in on a nickel-sized birthmark on his back. “On television, it must have looked like I’d been shot clean through with a cannon!” Harrison hooted. “That was funny! They never heard the end of it, about that show!” That was great publicity, Harrison said, but putting Confidential on trial—he declared—now that was going to be a headline bonanza.

  Harrison hired private detective Fred Otash and his team of ten investigators to subpoena the biggest names in the movie industry: people like Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, and Mike Todd, the high-profile producer of Around the World in Eighty Days, who was married to Hollywood’s hottest star, Elizabeth Taylor. “Can you imagine those stars on the witness stand?” Harrison asked. “They’ll have to testify that the stories about them are true!” He cackled.

  “Hollywood’s jitters have mounted toward hysteria,” noted the New York Daily News. “Defense attorney Arthur J. Crowley says he is prepared to parade up to 200 movie colony greats including the ‘king’ himself Clark Gable before Judge Herbert V. Walker in an attempt to prove that Confidential magazine’s exposés were true but not malicious.” Crowley estimated that the trial would last at least six months. As the court date drew near, however, a funny thing happened in Hollywood: It emptied out. Frank Sinatra hid out in Las Vegas and put up other celebrities Confidential was trying to subpoena. Cary Grant stayed there and nervously kept tabs on the court proceedings. Clark Gable fled to Hawaii. Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor left the country for a yachting cruise. Errol Flynn, Dean Martin, Joan Crawford, and others were all hiding in various parts of the country. Stars were going to ridiculous lengths to avoid being subpoenaed. One day, Otash and his team cornered popular crooner Dan Daily at the Hollywood Bowl while the singer was giving a concert there. Otash posted detectives with subpoenas at all the stage door exits. “Daily walked boldly into a process server’s ambush and escaped—without the dreaded summons—through an athletic display worthy of the elder Douglas Fairbanks,” reported the New York Daily News. At the end of the concert, Daily took a deep bow and then shocked the fans as he “vaulted over the footlights when the curtain fell. Then as the surprised detectives gave chase, Daily snake-hipped through the aisles, jumped into a friend’s car at a street entrance to the amphitheater, and rolled away.”

  Stranger things still happened to the witnesses. In the days before the trial, many of them disappeared, too. Some left the state. One, actress Francesca de Scaffa, who was also a defendant and a source for Confidential, fled to Mexico, where she hid in the trunk of her white Jaguar while deportation officials were in hot pursuit. Two other witnesses who were expected to testify died under suspicious circumstances. Polly Gould, a woman detective who gathered scandalous—but unpublished—details about Joan Crawford’s sex life for Confidential, was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates. Police said it was an accident. A former featherweight boxer named Albert “Chalky” White, an ex-lover of Mae West who was the source of an article about the star’s “Open Door Policy,” was also found dead. He was drowned in his bathtub. Police said that that, too, was an accident. Insurance companies canceled Confidential staffers’ policies, deeming them “poor risks.” Otash and his detectives were able to subpoena only about one hundred stars. By this point, the once cocky Harrison had gotten nervous. He refused to go to California to be tried—fighting off several attempts by the prosecution to extradite him. The only defendants Brown’s office was able to haul into court were Harrison’s niece and her husband, Marjorie and Fred Meade, who ran the Los Angeles-based Hollywood Research, Inc., a small operation that gathered information for Confidential. The Confidential trial was held without Robert Harrison.

  Even without the key defendants and witnesses, the Confidential trial was a great show for scandal fans; that became obvious from the moment Ronnie Quillan was called to testify. A collective gasp rose from the courtroom as Quillan, wearing a form-fitting white dress and gold sling-back heels, was sworn in. She ran her fingers through her shoulder-length red hair and gave her occupation as “prostitute.” Ronnie Quillan was Hollywood’s most notorious madam. What’s more—she testified—she was also a paid informant for Confidential. “Mr. Harrison told me that he wanted stories concerning the activities of celebrities,” Quillan testified in a bored, world-weary voice. “The more lewd and lascivious, the more colorful for the magazine.” So Ronnie Quillan gave Confidential magazine the lowdown on television’s most adorable husband—Desi Arnaz.

  “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?” Confidential asked. “Arnaz is a Latin Lothario who loves Lucy most of the time but by no means all of the time,” the magazine reported. “He has, in fact, sprinkled his affections all over Los Angeles for a number of years. And quite a bit of it has been bestowed on vice dollies who were paid handsomely for loving Desi briefly but, presumably, as effectively as Lucy.” Confidential paid Quillan $1,200 for the information, she testified. She knew the story was true, she said, because she and two of her “girls” had serviced Arnaz. Arnaz angrily denied Quillan’s story, calling it “baloney,” adding, “I don’t remember meeting the lady.” Despite Arnaz’s denial, America was shocked. Los Angeles, which had never read the Arnaz story because of Brown’s ban of the magazine in California, was agog. The prosecutors had called Quillan as a witness against Confidential* b
ecause they hoped her revelations would prove that Robert Harrison ran a sleazy operation. The prostitute’s story turned out to be far more embarrassing to Arnaz and to Hollywood, however, than it was to Confidential magazine.

  Quillan was just the opening act. Actress Maureen O’Hara angrily testified that the article about her alleged “necking session” at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was inaccurate and libelous; O’Hara had the passport stamps to prove she was out of the country at the time the incident was supposed to have occurred. But Confidential produced three witnesses to the disputed event, including James Craig, the former assistant manager of Grauman’s, who testified that he asked O’Hara and her companion to leave the theater when things between them got too intimate. “The gentleman was facing the screen and Miss O’Hara was lying across the seats, across his lap,” Craig told the jury in an impeccable British accent. “Her blouse was undone.” Craig fixed his flashlight on the twosome, he said, and eventually O’Hara and her boyfriend “got back in their natural positions.” Before long, however, Craig received a complaint that “they’re at it again!” He returned, he testified, to find “Miss O’Hara sitting on his lap … I told myself ‘This can’t go on.’ And I politely told them that I thought it best to leave.” Craig drew charts and diagrams of the alleged incident and a female court employee was recruited to re-create the various positions that O’Hara had allegedly assumed atop her boyfriend. The jurors then requested a trip to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where they got a first-hand look at the seats where O’Hara reportedly had her necking session.

  Dorothy Dandridge, the elegantly beautiful star of Carmen Jones and the first black ever nominated for an Academy Award as best actress, also testified against Confidential. Dandridge had filed a $2 million lawsuit against the tabloid over the article, “What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods.” The case was settled out of court—Dandridge received an apology and $10,000. The actress told the jurors that the settlement proved that the story about her was a lie. Confidential’s lawyer, however, insisted that Dandridge was given the relatively small sum of money because settling was much cheaper than a court fight would have been. What’s more, the defense argued, by discussing the case, Dandridge had violated the terms of the agreement and Confidential wanted its money back. Even worse for Dandridge, the defense produced the source of the story, bandleader Dan Terry, and an affidavit from him declaring that he had the romp with Dandridge described in Confidential. Terry had been paid $200 for his story.

  During the trial, a Confidential editor testified that the magazine got stories on Clark Gable because one of its regular sources was having an affair with the actor. The source, actress Francesca de Scaffa, was on the lam in Mexico, where she had attempted suicide. Reporters couldn’t locate de Scaffa, but when they tracked down Gable in Hawaii for comment, he, like Arnaz, developed a memory problem. “I think I would remember her,” Gable said, “but to my knowledge I never met the lady in my life.” Confidential editors also claimed that Mike Todd was a big source for the magazine; Mr. Elizabeth Taylor at first denied the story, but then, when presented with detailed evidence of his participation in stories, he issued a “no comment.” Scandals came out from stories that Confidential had decided not to publish, such as how one of Joan Crawford’s adopted children ran away from home because the actress was “cruel to them.”

  The prosecution’s star witness was former Confidential editor Howard Rushmore, a former Communist turned “anti-Red” crusader who had worked with Senator Joe McCarthy. Rushmore had resigned from Confidential in a huff over a number of disputes, including Harrison’s decision to kill a lurid story Rushmore wrote about Eleanor Roosevelt’s sex life. During the trial, it was revealed that several New York City and Los Angeles cops were on Confidential’s payroll. A well-known Texas DJ had supplied the magazine with stories about Elvis Presley’s outrageous sexual appetite.

  The testimony in the trial was so ribald that newspapers around the country grappled with how to cover it. Some tabloids exploited the revelations with lurid banner headlines like: “Elvis Wriggled on Mag’s Hook,” “V-Girl Tells of Desi Smear” and “Clark Gable Linked to Vice Mag Party Girl.” In Los Angeles—where many readers were getting the details of the stories for the first time—the conservative Los Angeles Times played down the story, but Hearst’s bawdy Examiner put the story on the front pages and the paper sold out almost every day. Some editors, however, refused to publish details about the trial. Particularly in the South and in the Midwest, stories about the Confidential trial were heavily censored or banned altogether; the tales of nude parties and interracial romps were just too salacious for family newspapers. Even the tabloids that covered the trial in detail often expressed shock and outrage over the “sleaze mongers” and “dirt diggers.” Some of the umbrage, however, was posturing. One reporter who was covering the trial for the New York Daily News was taken off the story after it was revealed that she contributed to Confidential under a pseudonym. Lee Mortimer, a gossip columnist for the New York Daily Mirror who wrote articles attacking Confidential and its publisher, was privately friendly with Harrison, according to the publisher. “Mortimer wanted to keep the controversy going,” Harrison said. “We would meet at a phone booth in a little hotel on East Fifty-second Street and exchange information so that he could keep writing about Confidential. It was a big help to me.”

  The trial was turning out to be devastating to the Hollywood image that it was intended to protect. By the time Gloria Wellman, the adopted daughter of famed director William Wellman (A Star is Born and Beau Geste) and a self-described “naked model” and prostitute, testified that she was the source for a story on a “Naked Canapé” party attended by some of the movie industry’s biggest names, stars were openly complaining that the strategy had backfired; stories that had been dismissed as tabloid trash were being confirmed on the witness stand by the sources. “Now that the whole world is reading what first appeared only in Confidential, it looks to me as if it were a mistake to bring this action into court,” lamented singer John Carroll. “There is one thing for sure. Folks aren’t going to be thinking from now on that we show people are like the boys and girls next door.”

  So, on August 19, when a sultry young singer and actress named Mylee Andreason took the stand and began to testify about a “star-studded naked rug party,” she got only as far as identifying herself as a participant in the raunchy festivities before the prosecution interrupted her. The District Attorney’s office appealed to Judge Walker, who was, himself, a former child actor and was sympathetic to the film community. Walker made a ruling that completely undermined the defense’s strategy: he said that any new testimony had to relate to the few articles that the prosecution had already read into the record. Judge Walker’s decision thwarted Harrison’s plan for a parade of celebrity witnesses, or at the very least, an open discussion about their accuracy.

  Then came another devastating blow to the magazine’s credibility. Paul Gregory, producer of The Naked and the Dead, testified that Harrison’s niece, Marjorie Meade, had tried to blackmail him. Gregory, the subject of a stinging Confidential exposé, produced a tape recording of a woman claiming to be Meade’s secretary. In the recording, the woman demanded that Gregory meet Meade at a restaurant called Sherry to give her $10,000—or Gregory would be the subject of a scathing article in Confidential. The defense, however, proved that the restaurant Sherry wasn’t even around at the time of the alleged blackmail attempt. What’s more, they produced a witness who said Meade was out of town visiting a friend that day—and they had the tickets and receipts to prove it.

  On September 16, after 6 weeks, 2,000 pages of testimony, and 164 exhibits—the case went to the jury. Attorney General Brown, however, wasn’t finished with Confidential. While the jury was locked away in its deliberations, Brown announced that he was preparing new charges against the magazine. The prosecution vowed that Confidential and Robert Harrison would be “reindieted, regardless of the pending verdict.” And th
is time, Brown vowed, Harrison would not be able to escape extradition to Los Angeles. Hollywood circled the wagons to make sure nothing like Confidential would ever publish again; the Motion Picture Industry Council formed a permanent committee to combat scandal magazines. “What we are trying to do,” said a spokesman for the group, “is expose people connected with smear magazines and to alert the industry of their presence whenever they come around. Now that the wraps are off, we will act.” Ronald Reagan headed up the board.

  On October 1, the jury—exhausted by thirteen days of contentious deliberation, a rumor of jury fixing, screaming fights over where to have lunch, and smog that got so bad that one day several jurors collapsed—reported that it was “hopelessly deadlocked.” Harrison, who had spent more than $400,000 defending Confidential—was emotionally and financially wiped out. Rather than go through another trial, he reached a plea bargain with Brown’s office. The Attorney General would drop the charges if Confidential would change its editorial policy and publish only flattering stories about movie stars and politicians. Harrison was required to take out ads in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles newspapers, announcing that Confidential was going to “eliminate exposé stories on the private lives of celebrities.” Most of the stars dropped their suits against the magazine—although Liberace ended up getting a $40,000 settlement for the article suggesting he was gay. After several issues of celebrity-friendly articles, Confidential’s circulation plummeted and Robert Harrison sold the magazine. Confidential limped along under various incarnations for over a decade.