The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  “And then a funny thing happened,” Harrison is saying, “one day my accountant calls up and asks me to meet him down at Longchamps. So I am talking to him in Longchamps and he informs me that I am broke. Broke! After making all that money! I couldn’t believe what he was telling me! I think the thing was, we had six magazines, and if six magazines start losing money for a few months, you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars and not even know what happened.

  “Now, listen to this, I think this is a hell of a story. He told me I was busted, so I was looking for an idea. And that same week, I thought up Confidential. That same week. I think this is a hell of a story, because I’m not a rich man’s son. I’m not one of these guys like Huntington Hartford who can start one thing, and if that flops, so what, start something else.

  “Anyway, we put together the first issue of Confidential. It must have taken about six months to do it.

  “But that first issue of Confidential was lousy. I must have ripped that thing apart three times before I published it, and it still wasn’t right. The first one went for 250,000 copies. That was in December, 1952. Those first issues were terrible. If you saw them and then you saw what we did later, you wouldn’t even think it was the same magazine.”

  In point of fact, to the unpracticed eye they look precisely alike; but, then, the unpracticed eye does not comprehend the aesthetique du schlock.

  “But in that second issue we had a story about Winchell, and he really liked that story. That was what really—”

  And here comes Reggie. She’s back, as bouffant blonde and furred out as ever, bereft only of the dog, and in Lindy’s all these necks are sloshing around in the shirt fronts watching her progress to the table. Harrison is blase about the whole thing. Reggie settles in. The dog is all right. Reggie wants some lox, too. Harrison goes on about Winchell.

  “I took the magazine over to Winchell and showed it to him. We had this story called, ‘Winchell Was Right About Josephine Baker.’ Josephine Baker had made a scene in some club, I forget which one, she said she was being discriminated against because she was a Negro or something like that, and Winchell said she was exploiting the race thing, and there was a lot of criticism of Winchell over what he wrote. So we ran this story, ‘Winchell Was Right About Josephine Baker,’ and he loved it.”

  Just then there is a page call for Harrison to go to the telephone, so he gets up and I get to talking with Reggie. For such a visual phenomenon, she has a small voice and a quiet manner. She is telling me how she met Harrison. Her family had fled Eastern Europe after the war and had settled in Canada. Reggie had done a lot of modeling and been Miss this and that, such as Miss BMC, but she really wants to act. Anyway, a couple of years ago somebody had gotten her a job doing some modeling for something Harrison was working on.

  “But as soon as I met him,” Reggie says, “I wasn’t interested in the job. I was interested in him. He’s a very, you know, a very exciting guy.”

  Well, Reggie was having some problems with the immigration people over her status in the U.S.A., and one day there is a knock on the door of the apartment where she is staying with this girl friend, and it is the immigration people. They ask her all these questions about what she’s doing, and then one of them tells her that she has been seen quite a bit in the company of this elderly man.

  “That was Bob they were talking about!” Reggie says. She certainly does laugh at that. “I told Bob that he was The Elderly Man. He didn’t like that too much, I don’t think.”

  But everything had been straightened out and it was an exciting life. Just the other day Bob had called up Winchell’s office to ask about something, and his secretary said she would take the message.

  “And do you know,” Reggie says, “in a little while Winchell called back himself. Bob was happy about that. They were good friends, you know. Bob comes over here to Lindy’s quite a bit. He’d like to, you know, he kind of hopes he’ll run into Winchell and sort of see if they’re still friends. You know.”

  Harrison comes back to the table and says, “That was Helen.”

  Reggie says, “Is Tessie behaving?”

  Harrison says, “Yeah.” He seems a little distracted.

  “I was telling him,” Reggie says, “about how you were The Elderly Man.”

  Reggie laughs. Harrison finesses the whole subject and looks up toward the door.

  “Winchell hasn’t been in,” Reggie says.

  Harrison looks back. The cloud passes.

  “Anyway,” Harrison resumes, “Winchell liked that story so much, he plugged it on the air. Winchell had this program on, I forget what network, it was the hottest thing on television then. One night he held up a copy of Confidential, right on television. And I’m telling you, from then on, this thing flew. That was what really made Confidential, the publicity.

  “Well, we started running a Winchell piece every issue. We’d try to figure. out who Winchell didn’t like and run a piece about them. One of them was ‘Broadway’s Biggest Double Cross.’ It was about all the ingrates who Winchell had helped to start their careers who turned their backs on him and double-crossed him or something. We had one in every issue. And he kept on plugging Confidential. It got to the point where some days we would sit down and rack our brains trying to think of somebody else Winchell didn’t like. We were running out of people, for Christ’s sake!

  “Pretty soon everybody believes we have a deal going with Winchell or that he owns a piece of Confidential. I think they called him in over at the Mirror and asked him about it. They thought he was investing in the magazine. But there was never anything like that. We never offered Winchell anything, and it wouldn’t have been any use anyway. A lot of people tried to buy their way into his column, and they never got to first base. You can’t buy Winchell. With Confidential, he was just crazy about the stuff we were printing, and he kept plugging it on television. Well, we had advance word once that he was going to plug one issue on television, and I happened to tell the distributor about it. And this guy sends out a notice to the dealers all over the goddamned country to stock up on a lot of this issue because Winchell is going to plug it on television. That was a stupid thing for this guy to do, because it makes it look like we have a deal with Winchell. Well, somehow, Winchell heard about this, and he really blew his stack. Luckily, none of this ever got in the papers, but by now even Winchell himself is wondering what’s going on. One day he meets me in here, in Lindy’s, and he sits down and says, ‘Bob, you’ve got to tell me one thing. How the hell did I ever get involved with Confidential, I can’t figure it out.’ I had to laugh over that.”

  Well, the money was pouring in, Harrison is saying. Confidential opened a big office, about 4,000 square feet, at 1697 Broadway, but they never had more than about fifteen people on the staff.

  “After we got going, people would come to us with stories about themselves, or their families, like I was telling you.

  “Breen wrote half the stories himself. That guy was a fabulous writer! But you know what ruined Breen? He was making too much money, and that started him drinking. He must have been making forty or fifty thousand a year, and he never had money like that before, and he was living high and he started drinking. The trouble was, I guess, he had it too good! After a while he was drunk all the time. I remember we put out one whole issue up in Memorial Hospital, I think that was the name of it. He was in one room, for treatment, and I took the room next to it, and we put out the whole goddamned issue up there.

  “Anyway we were selling five million. There’s never been anything like it. And the real thing behind it was, we had a definite style. Nothing was just thrown together. Sometimes we would work on a layout for days. And those stories were beautifully written. They were superb! We were asked by many schools of journalism to come and lecture. Yeah! They wanted to know how we did it.”

  Pretty soon, though, for the aesthetes du schlock, life began to get too goddamned much with them.

  “There was all this indignation,”
Harrison is saying, “and it got so the insurance companies canceled everybody’s life insurance who worked for Confidential. We were supposed to be ‘poor risks.’ One of the columnists ran a story saying I had been taken for a ride by some gangsters. It was a completely phony story, but when Winchell read about it, he was mad as hell and he called up and said, ‘What’s the idea of not giving me that story first?’ I told him there was nothing to it, it never happened, but he didn’t believe it.

  “Some guys did start to take me for a ride one night, though, right out here on Broadway, some gangsters, we had run some story about the jukeboxes or the garment industry, I forget which one. They pushed me in this car, and they said, ‘This is it, Harrison, this is where you get yours,’ or something like that, I don’t remember. So I said, ‘Let’s get it over with. You’ll be doing me a favor.’ ‘A favor?’ this guy says. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I have cancer, it’s incurable, I’m in pain all the time, I’m living on morphine, but I haven’t got the guts to shoot myself. You’ll be doing me a favor. I haven’t got the guts.’ So they throw me back out of the car on the sidewalk and this guy says, ‘Let the bastard suffer!’ I always had to use psychology with those guys.

  “That’s one thing everybody forgets about Confidential. We ran a lot of stories exposing the rackets, the jukebox rackets, the garment rackets, gambling, this deal where they had a regular casino going in an airplane. We drove that operation out of New York. I covered that one myself and took pictures in the airplane with a concealed camera. When those guys want to get you, that’s a compliment. We ran stories exposing how children were dying from eating candy-flavored aspirin, and how boric acid was poison, and a lot of things like that. But we had to have the other stuff, the gossip, to sell the magazine, or we could have never run these stories at all. Nobody remembers that part of it, but that magazine was a goddamned public service.”

  Another time, Harrison was saying, somebody’s goons, the jukebox mob he believes it was, came in his office and hung him out the window by his heels, head down. They wanted a retraction. He didn’t remember what psychology he used then, but anyhow they pulled him back up. Another time he ran into a big mobster, he forgets what his name was, happened to be sitting at the table next to him in one of the nightclubs with his lawyer, and he tells Harrison, “One night, buddy, you’re liable to find yourself in the East River with a concrete suit on, you know that, don’t you?” They really talk like that, Harrison is saying. So he just tells the guy, “You know what the circulation of Confidential is?” The guy says, What. Six million, says Harrison. He ups it a million or so for good measure. He’s right, the lawyer says. Better lay off. It would create too big a noise. Psychology.

  “But the wildest thing was Izzy the Eel. One day I walk in here, in Lindy’s, and here is this girl I know. She’s sitting with this guy, a very well-dressed guy, and I think I know him from someplace. He looks like a garment manufacturer I knew on Seventh Avenue. ‘Don’t I know you?’ I says to him. ‘Yeah, and don’t I know you?’ he says. And the girl introduces us.

  “So we’re talking, and this guy is very friendly, he asks me where I live. So I tell him, it’s the same place I live in now, the Madison. ‘Oh, yeah,’ the guy says, ‘the Madison, a nice place, I’ve been in apartments in there, it’s nice, where is yours in there?’ So I tell him, in fact, I practically give him a blueprint of the place, how the rooms are laid out, everything. So we talk a little more, and then I leave and I don’t think any more of it.

  “Well, the next day I get a call from this girl, and her voice is shaking. She’s really upset. ‘Bob,’ she says, ‘I got to see you. It’s urgent. You’re in trouble.’ So I meet her someplace and she says, ‘You know who that guy was you were talking to with me yesterday?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ And she says, ‘That was Izzy the Eel!’ ‘Izzy the Eel?’ I says. And she says, ‘Yeah, and he’s planning to kidnap you, for ransom. He thinks you and him were in Dannemora together, and now that you’re making a lot of money from Confidential, he’s going to get some of it.’ ‘He’s out of his mind,’ I said, ‘I’ve never been in a prison in my life.’

  “Well, this was one of those times I was lucky again. About a week after that I pick up the papers and Izzy the Eel has been picked up in a shooting case. Eventually they put him away for fifteen years.

  “All this time I was getting all these phone calls. They’d say something like ‘You’re gonna get it tonight,’ and hang up. Sure. I was scared, but I couldn’t stay locked up in the apartment all day. So I used some psychology. I bought the biggest white Cadillac convertible they make, it was like a goddamned Caribbean yacht, and I drove all over New York, telling the world I didn’t give a damn and I wasn’t scared of anybody.”

  Well, there was that time when Harrison got shot in the Dominican Republic. But that was different. He says he was down there doing a story on a drug the Dominicans developed, called Pego-Palo, that was supposed to do great things for virility. He was out in the wilds when he got shot under “mysterious circumstances.” There were headlines all over the United States saying “Confidential Publisher Shot.”

  “Anyway, that thing brought us tremendous publicity. Not long after that I was on the Mike Wallace show on television. Wallace was known as the great prosecutor then or something like that.” Inquisitor? “Yeah, one of those things. There was nothing prearranged on that show. All I knew was that he would really try to let me have it. So he starts after me right away. 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?’ So I said to him, Would you know a bullet wound if you saw one?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ So I start taking off my shirt right there in front of the camera. Those guys didn’t know what to do, die or play organ music. I can see the cameramen and everybody is running around the studio like crazy. Well, I have this big mole on my back, a birthmark, and the cameramen are all so excited, they think that’s the bullet hole and they put the camera right on that. Well, that mole’s the size of a nickel, so on television it looked like I’d been shot clean through with a cannon! That was funny. They never heard the end of it, about that show!”

  All these things kept happening, Harrison said. His life was always full of this drama, it was like living in the middle of a hurricane. It finally wore him out, he is saying. “It wasn’t the libel suits.

  “Some of these people we wrote about would be very indignant at first, but I knew goddamned well it was a beautiful act. What they really wanted was another story in Confidential. It was great publicity for them. You couldn’t put out a magazine like Confidential again. You know why? Because all the movie stars have started writing books about themselves! Look at the stuff Flynn wrote, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all of them. They tell all! No magazine can compete with that. That’s what really finished the Confidential type of thing.”

  So Harrison retired with his soap-bubble lawsuits and his pile of money to the sedentary life of stock-market investor.

  “I got into the stock market quite by accident,” Harrison is saying. “This guy told me of a good stock to invest in, Fairchild Camera, so I bought a thousand shares. I made a quarter of a million dollars the first month! I said to myself, ‘Where the hell has this business been all my life!’”

  Harrison’s sensational good fortune on the stock market lasted just about that long, one month.

  “So I started putting out the one-shots, but there was no continuity in them. So then I got the idea of Inside News.”

  Suddenly Harrison’s eyes are fixed on the door. There, by god, in the door is Walter Winchell. Winchell has on his snap-brim police reporter’s hat, circa 1924, and an overcoat with the collar turned up. He’s scanning the room, like Wild Bill Hickock entering the Crazy Legs Saloon. Harrison gives him a big smile and a huge wave. “There’s Walter!” he says.

  Winchell gives an abrupt wave with his left hand, keeps his lips set like bowstrings and wal
ks off to the opposite side of Lindy’s.

  After a while, a waiter comes around, and Harrison says, “Who is Walter with?”

  “He’s with his granddaughter.”

  By and by Harrison, Reggie and I got up to leave, and at the door Harrison says to the maître d’:

  “Where’s Walter?”

  “He left a little while ago,” the maitre d’ says.

  “He was with his granddaughter,” Harrison says.

  “Oh, was that who that was,” the maître d’ says.

  “Yeah,” says Harrison. “It was his granddaughter. I didn’t want to disturb them.”

  In the cab on the way back to the Madison Hotel Harrison says, “You know, we’ve got a hell of a cute story in Inside News about this girl who’s divorcing her husband because all he does at night is watch the Johnny Carson show and then he just falls into bed and goes to sleep and won’t even give her a tumble. It’s a very cute story, very inoffensive.

  “Well, I have an idea. I’m going to take this story and show it to Johnny Carson. I think he’ll go for it. Maybe we can work out something. You know, he goes through the audience on the show, and so one night Reggie can be in the audience and she can have this copy of Inside News with her. When he comes by, she can get up and say, ‘Mr. Carson, I see by this newspaper here, Inside News, that your show is breaking up happy marriages,’ or something like that. And then she can hold up Inside News and show him the story and he can make a gag out of it. I think he’ll go for it. What do you think? I think it’ll be a hell of a cute stunt.”