The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  While they’re talking, Harrison shows me a copy of his latest enterprise, a newspaper he started last year called Inside News.

  “What do you think of it?” he says.

  Obviously, from the tone he is not asking if I felt all informed by its inside news or was even entertained by it. It is an aesthetic question, as if he were showing me a Hiroshige print he just bought. The front-page headline in the newspaper is set in a great burst of red and says: “Castro’s Sex Invasion of Washington.” The story postulates— that seems to be the word for it—that Castro is planning to smuggle a lot of Christine Keelers into Washington to ruin the careers of prominent officials—and features a picture of a girl in a checkerboard bikini and these odd shoes: “The Castro cutie who could change Capitol Hill into Fanny Hill. Pics smuggled from Cuba by writer,” one “Marc Thorez.” The picture reveals mainly that Castro has stockpiled a pair of six-inch spiked-heel shoes of the sort that turned up in the girlie magazines Harrison used to publish in the Forties.

  “This is going to be bigger than Confidential,” says Harrison. “The keyhole stuff is dead. The big thing now is getting behind the news. This is going to be big. What’s his name, the big Hollywood producer, he drives up here to the newsstand every week in a limousine just to get Inside News. I see him every week. He comes up in a limousine and he doesn’t reach out for it. He gets out of the car and goes over and picks it up himself. Now, I think that’s a goddamned compliment!”

  From Harrison’s face you can see that here is a man who is still trying to free his features from the sebaceous stickum of having just woke up, but he is already on the move. The old aesthetique du schlock is already stirred up and he is already thinking about his own story, the story about him and Confidential.

  “I think I’ve got a story angle for you,” he says. “The angle I like is, ‘Now It Can Be Told.’ You know? Of course, you guys probably have your own ideas about it, but that’s the way I see it—‘Now It Can Be Told.’”

  And as the day wore on, you could see the first splash of red with a montage of photographs, tabloid headlines and feverish brush script over it, saying something like “Now It Can Be Told—‘Inside’ Confidential!” Harrison always liked to begin a story like that, with a layout with a big stretch of red and a lot of pictures and lettering and type faces exploding on top of it. Actually, he would probably see it not as an article but a whole one-shot. A one-shot is a magazine, or a book in magazine form, that is published just once, to capitalize on some celebrity or current event. James Dean, the movie actor, dies and a lot of one-shots come out, with titles like The James Dean Story, The Real James Dean, James Dean Lives! or just James Dean. One-shots have been among Harrison’s enterprises since he sold Confidential in 1957. He has put out one-shots like Menace of the Sex Deviates, New York Confidential, That Man Paar, as well as Naked New York. You can almost see Harrison putting together the stories for “Now It Can Be Told.” The lead piece would no doubt be called: “How Confidential Got Those ‘Prying’ Stories—from the Stars Themselves!” And there would be another big one entitled, “Why I’ve Started Inside News—To Prove I Can Do It Again!” by Bob Harrison.

  And along about then Helen comes into the living room from the room they use as an office. She has a worried look on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Harrison says.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Helen says. “Why are you bringing up all that?”

  “It’s all the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s all over. That’s the past. It’s finished. Confidential is over. I don’t know, I just don’t like to bring it all up again.”

  “Why not?” said Harrison. “I’m not ashamed of anything I ever did!”

  Helen says in a weary voice, as if to say, That’s not even the point, “But what about ?”

  “He was a nice guy,” Harrison says. “I liked him.”

  “What do you mean, was,” Helen says. “What is he going to say if he reads about this. You had an agreement.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Harrison says. “Anyway, he admits it. He’s writing a book and he admits I gave him his real start in his career, the publicity he got in Confidential. He admits it.”

  “What about Mike Todd, and Cohn, that was part of the agreement.”

  “They’re both dead,” says Harrison. “Besides, that was a very amusing story. Nobody got hurt.”

  “Still …” says Helen, and then she just sighs.

  Then he says, “Let’s go to Lindy’s. You go to Lindy’s much?” I had never been in there. “How long have you been in New York? You ought to start getting around to places like that. That’s where everybody is.”

  A couple of minutes later we all—Harrison, Reggie and the dog, and myself—get into a cab, and Harrison sinks back and says, “Lindy’s.”

  The cabbie gets that bemused, Jell-O-faced look that New York cabdrivers get when they are stumped and they have to admit it.

  “Let’s see,” he says, “where is that, again?”

  “Where is Lindy’s!” Harrison says in his Dr. Grabow voice. “What the hell is happening in this goddamned town!”

  At Lindy’s there is trouble right away about the dog. Harrison and Reggie were counting on it being Sunday and things are slow. But the maître d’ at Lindy’s says it is true that this is Sunday and things are slow and he still can’t let any dogs in; there is a law. One trouble, I think, is that the dog has this fey grin on his face. Harrison weighs the whole thing on the scales of life and does not protest. Reggie leaves in her remarkable profusion of hair, fur and toy greyhound to take the dog back to the apartment, but she will be back. Well, that is just a setback, that is all. Harrison gets a table where he wants it, over to one side where everything is orange curves decorated with stylized emblems of such things as martinis, trombones, and pretty girls, all set at a swingy angle that reminds you of the Busy City music from the opening montage of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. Harrison takes a seat where he can see the door. One of the waiters comes up and says, “Mr. Harrison! How are you? You look like a million dollars!”

  “I must be living right,” says Harrison. “I’ve been on this goddamned diet. I can’t stand it anymore. That’s why I came over here. Has Walter been in?”

  Walter hasn’t been in.

  “Do you know Winchell?” Harrison asks me. “No? You ought to meet him. He’s a terrific guy. He’s the one who really put Confidential over.”

  The waiter is saying, “Now all you need is a couple of good-looking broads and it will be just like old times.”

  Harrison says, “Well, you just keep your eyes open in a minute.”

  The great pink-orange slabs of lox, the bagels, the butter and the cups of coffee start coming, and Harrison pitches in, and to hell with the diet. Lindy’s is not crowded, but people are starting to crane around to look at Harrison. A lot of people remember Confidential, if not Harrison himself, and in any case the word is going around the restaurant that the publisher of Confidential in its most notorious days is there, and everyone has a look on the face that says, in indignation or stupefaction, How did that guy get out from under the deluge and come in here to feast on all that orange-blossomy lox?

  “You want to know what happened to the libel suits?” Harrison says. “Nothing happened, that’s what happened.” [Harrison has a tendency toward oversimplification. Some suits against Confidential resulted in substantial settlements.] “Forty million dollars and nothing happened. It was all a show. They loved it. I was the one who took all the responsibility. I was the one who got crucified. I was terribly condemned. And all the time some big shots were giving me the stories themselves!”

  “The movie stars were giving you scandal stories about themselves?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Harrison says. “That’s how we used to get them! From the big shots! And I was the one who always took the rap. I couldn’t tell the world then, because it would jeopardize someone’s standing
. I’ll tell you, sat right there in my living room and gave me two stories about himself. We had already run one about him and an actress, I forget where we got that one. But he was up in my living room. The deal was, he would give me the stories, but ‘I’ll deny the whole thing,’ he says.

  “And Mike Todd. I knew Mike. I’ll tell you a funny story about him. Mike Todd called me up from California to give me a story about Harry Cohn. Cohn was a big producer at Columbia Pictures. Mike Todd says, ‘I’ll meet you at the Stork Club, I’ll meet you tonight, I’ve got a great story for you.’ So he flew all the way to New York and he gave me this story about Harry Cohn.

  “There was this girl who wanted to break into the pictures, and Mike Todd wanted to help her out, but he really didn’t have any use for her, so what he did was, he started raving to Cohn about this girl he’d discovered and told him he was getting ready to sign her up, but for $500 a week he’d lend her to him. So Cohn decided to outsmart Mike Todd and without saying anything he puts her under contract himself and she has her job.

  “Well, you should have heard Mike Todd telling me that story. He howled! He almost died! And you know, he was so interested in that story, he came over and he worked on it with us. We almost had the story done, but we were having trouble getting a last line, and Mike Todd had to go back to Hollywood. Well, that night, in the middle of the night, he called me up from Hollywood and he said, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got that last line for you!’ Here was a guy who was one of the busiest guys in Hollywood, he was doing a million things, but he called me up in the middle of the night just to get that story right. My respect for him went up a million per cent!”

  There it was again! The aesthetique du schlock! There is only one Mike Todd in Harrison’s book. More bagels, more lox, more coffee; Harrison is going strong now—names, names, names. The names Confidential was built on keep bubbling up. He used to meet these people in the damnedest places, he says. He was too hot to be seen with. He used to meet Lee Mortimer, a writer, in some damned telephone booth. Both of them would get right in there in the same booth and talk, and Mortimer would give him stories, for Christ’s sake. “Then we’d glare at each other at some nightclub that night.” Other people Harrison remembers because they were supposed to be mad as hell at him but all of a sudden were acting very friendly when they met him. Harrison tended to overestimate the world’s store of goodwill for him, but the fact was that even when Confidential was at its most notorious peak, people would meet Harrison for the first time, brace themselves for the worst, talk to him for a while and come away telling about his “curious charm.” Well, practically everybody seemed to like him in varying degrees, as Harrison recalls it, but there was only one Mike Todd. Mike Todd was not only friendly, he not only provided stories about himself, but he saw the beauty of Confidential as usually only Harrison could see it, he participated in it, he understood the aesthetique du schlock!

  “I get along fine with all those people,” Harrison is saying. “The only one who never liked me was _____. Did you ever read that story we did about _____, about how he ate Wheaties? That was a fabulous story. That was the best story Breen ever did. Here is this girl, and she told me the story herself. She just told it to me when we were sitting in some place, I forget the name of it, it might have been Harwyn’s, that was a big place then. Anyway, in this story, here is this girl, and every time she hears the ‘crunch crunch crunch’ of the Wheaties, she knows is coming back in the room. He thinks Wheaties are good for, you know, virility, and every time he goes out in the kitchen for the Wheaties and this girl can hear the ‘crunch crunch crunch’—it was a fabulous story. You’ve got to read it. And that’s the funny thing, he is the only one who never liked me. I ran into him one night in the Copacabana and he just looked right past me—and that was the best story we ever did!”

  Yes! The aesthetique du schlock! Schlock, which is Yiddish for a kind of “ersatz,” is the New York publishing-trade term for the sort of periodical, known academically as subliterature, in which there is a story about, say, bars where young women from Utica and Akron are lured, seduced, hooked and shanghaied as call girls, and the title is “Sin Traps for Secretaries!” and there is an illustration made up of half photograph, of models with black censor bars across their eyes and a lot of thigh and garter strap, and half superimposed drawing, of a leering devil in a silk topper, all on a layout that the editor has returned to the art department with a crayon notation that says, “Make devil red.” Harrison would fret and enthuse over a schlock tale like the Wheaties one with the same flaming passion for art as Cardinal Newman or somebody dubbing a few oxymorons and serpentinae carminae into his third draft. Well, even schlock has its classics. All during the mid-fifties, the outrage was building up about Confidential, the sales were going up to more than four million at the newsstands per issue, the record for newsstand sales, and everybody was wondering, outraged, how such a phenomenon could crop up in the middle of the twentieth century after the lessons of the war, hate and all, and what kind of creature could be producing Confidential. That was because no one really knew about Harrison, the “air business,” and the Cézanne, the Darwin, the Aristotle of schlock—the old New York Graphic.

  Harrison’s father, he was saying, had wanted him to have a trade. Like plumbing, he says, that being the worst trade Harrison can imagine on short notice. The thing was, Harrison’s father had been an immigrant, from Mitau. Harrison doesn’t know where that is. His father and he were as different as black and white, he was saying. His father had the Old World idea of having a trade so inculcated in him that he was suspicious about any job that wasn’t a trade. Harrison says he was about fifteen or sixteen when he got a job in an advertising agency, and he was getting seventy-five bucks a week. His old man went right down to the office of the place to see what kind of funny stuff his son had gotten mixed up in. Even after he found out it was legit, he wrote it off as “air business.” “This air business,” he kept saying.

  But the air business to end all air business was the New York Daily Graphic. Harrison went to work for the Graphic as an office boy, or copy boy, when the paper was the hottest thing in New York. It was one of those Xanadus of inspired buncombe in the twenties. The Graphic blew up scandal and crime stories like pork bladders. When the Graphic wanted to do a sensational story, they had writers, photographers and composograph artists who could not only get in there and milk every gland in the human body—but do it with verve, with patent satisfaction, and, by god, celebrate it and pronounce it good with a few bawling red-eyed rounds after work. The Graphic’s ghost writers developed the knack of putting a story, first-person and sopping with confession, into a famous person’s mouth until it seemed like the guy was lying right out there on the page like a flat-out Gulliver. And those composograph artists. The composograph was a way of developing photographs of a scene at which, unfortunately, no photographers were present. If a gal were nude when the action took place but was uncooperatively fully clothed when the Graphic photographers zeroed in, the composographers had a way of recollecting the heated moment in tranquillity with scissors, paste and the retouch brush. These were wild times all around. These were the days of Texas Guinan and all that kind of stuff, Harrison was saying. Harrison was only sixteen or seventeen when he went to work on the Graphic, and he was only an office boy, or copy boy, but this piece of air business fixed his mind like an aspic mold. Okay, it was bogus. It was ballyhoo. It was outrageous. Everybody was outraged and called the Daily Graphic “gutter journalism”—that’s how that one got started—and the Daily Pornographic. But by god the whole thing had style. Winchell was there, developing a column called “Broadway Hearsay” that set the style for all the hot, tachycardiac gossip columns that were to follow. Even in the realm of the bogus, the Graphic went after bogosity with a kind of Left Bank sense of rebellious discovery. Those composographs, boy! Those confession yarns!

  By 1957 people were starting to rustle through all the cerebral fretwork of Freud, Schopenhau
er and Karl Menninger for an explanation of the Confidential phenomenon, when all the time they could have found it in some simpler, brighter stuff—that old forgotten bijou, the aesthetique du Daily Graphic. That was a long-faced year, 1957. Hate? Venom? Smut peddling? Scandal mongering? All those long faces floated past Harrison like a bunch of emphysematous investment counselors who had missed the train.

  After his days on the Graphic, Harrison worked for a long time for Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Daily and the Motion Picture Herald. Then, as he puts it, a funny thing happened. He got canned. He got canned for publishing the first of his girlie magazines, Beauty Parade, in Quigley’s office after hours. “Quigley fired me and it was on Christmas Eve, I want you to know,” says Harrison. “Yeah! Christmas Eve!” But Beauty Parade clicked, and by the late forties Harrison was publishing six girlie magazines, among them being Titter, Wink and Flirt. Harrison’s first great contribution to the art, sort of like Braque coming up with the collage at a crucial point in the history of painting, was the editorial sequence. Which is to say, instead of just having a lot of unrelated girlie shots stuck into a magazine of, say, Breezy Stories, the way it used to be done, Harrison arranged the girlie shots in editorial sequences. A whole set of bust-and-leg pictures would be shot around the theme, “Models Discover the Sauna Baths!” Class. Harrison’s second great contribution was really the brainchild of one of his editors, an educated gal who was well-versed on Krafft-Ebing. It was she who sold Harrison on the idea of fetishism, such as the six-inch spiked-heel shoes, and the eroticism of backsides or of girls all chained up and helpless, or girls whipping the hides off men and all the rest of the esoterica of the Viennese psychologists that so thoroughly pervades the girlie magazines today. She once put a volume of Krafft-Ebing on Harrison’s desk, but he never read it. Apparently, life in the Harrison offices was memorable. There are commercial artists in New York today who will tell you how they would be quietly working away on some layout when a door would open and in would tramp some margarine-faced babe in a brassiere, panties and spike heels, with a six-foot length of chain over her shoulder, dragging it over the floor. Harrison, who half the time slept in the office and worked around the clock, would be just waking up and out he would charge, fighting off the sebaceous sleepers from his eyes and already setting up the day’s shots, with his piston-driven Dr. Grabow voice, as if the sound of the dragging chain had been the gong of dawn.