Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Several months later, Wallace received a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter asking about the incident. Wallace was able to persuade the reporter that there was no story. The 60 Minutes correspondent then called the bank, complaining that the Journal was trying to “destroy” him and asking the bank to erase the tapes. “Look,” Wallace reportedly said, “I know this is not a very good thing to ask in this era of erased tapes [but] I would be exceedingly grateful if you would excise them for me.” Wallace had almost forgotten about the incident—and, some say, the segment—when the New York Times called. Again, Wallace talked the paper out of writing about the incident. Then, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called. Under the same sort of aggressive questioning he himself employed, Wallace admitted that he has a “penchant for obscenity and for jokes,” and he tried to justify his comments about “tacos” and “watermelons” by arguing that the remark had been partly tactical, intended to elicit “some hint of [Carlson’s] feeling toward the minority community.”

  On other occasions, Wallace was accused of conflicts of interest, such as when he accepted a speaking fee from Amway, a company he had recently investigated, or when he put pressure on his colleague, Ed Bradley, to go soft on an investigation of Haiti, where his then wife had family and business concerns.

  Hewitt and Wallace also had reputations as incorrigible womanizers. When Hewitt was called in to rescue Sally Quinn during her disastrous stint as co-host of CBS Morning News, he informed her they were going to have an affair. Quinn declined, explaining that she was dating Ben Bradlee. “Don’t give me that shit,” Hewitt told Quinn, according to her account in We’re Going to Make You a Star. When she continued to rebuff him, he stopped helping her show, but told her: “Well, if you won’t sleep with me, I’ll sleep with Barbara Walters.” According to one report—which Hewitt vehemently denied—he once pinned a subordinate against a wall and stuck his tongue down her throat. She freed herself by kneeing him in the groin. Hewitt’s star reporter, Mike Wallace, also had a reputation for unwelcome sexual friskiness with coworkers: slapping their bottoms, undoing or snapping their bra straps, or putting his hands on their thighs. “One producer said that basically, Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt thought this was their right,” according to Mark Hertsgaard, who wrote about 60 Minutes for Rolling Stone. Hertsgaard later claimed that after Hewitt called and complained to editor Jann Wenner, the most shocking details of the piece were cut. “Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation,” according to Hertsgaard, “it was just so pervasive at the time that you couldn’t miss it.”

  “I’m just an old fashioned guy,” Wallace said in his defense. “I come from a time when joking about that sort of thing was commonplace. And that’s what I was doing. Joking.” Hewitt chose not to comment on the allegations.

  Despite Hewitt’s reputation as a womanizer, he apparently had few qualms about broadcasting a segment in which Kathleen Willey accused President Clinton of groping her in a manner much less offensive than Hewitt’s own alleged advances. “It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times,” Hertsgaard later noted. “He’s talking about what [Clinton allegedly did to Willey], and I just thought of that old Dylan song [lyric], ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve.’

  Critics charged that Hewitt’s team had coached Willey and edited the tape to make her look good. Some said it was to make the story stronger. Some said Hewitt was motivated by revenge. Several years earlier, when Bill Clinton’s candidacy was nearly derailed by Gennifer Flowers’s charges that they had been sexually involved, it was a 60 Minutes segment that put his campaign back on track. “They came to us because they were in big trouble in New Hampshire,” Don Hewitt reportedly said later. “They were about to lose right there and they needed some first aid. They needed some bandaging. What they needed was a paramedic. So they came to us and we did it and that’s what they wanted to do.” According to columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Don Hewitt told Bill Clinton just before the interview: “The last time I did something like this, Bill, it was the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and it produced a President. This will produce a President, too.” Hewitt heard afterward that Hillary Clinton was upset because she didn’t like the way the segment had been edited. Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald complained to Hewitt that the candidate and his wife had wanted to discuss politics. “I said to Mandy, ‘You know, if I’d edited it your way, you know where you’d be today? You’d be sitting up in New Hampshire looking for the nomination.’ He became the candidate that night.” To Hillary, he says, he wrote a letter. “Sore losers I understand. Sore winners are beyond me. What are you sore about?” Although he says he never doubted Gennifer Flowers’s story, it had already been out. Good television had to be a revelation—even if you didn’t believe what was behind the revelation.

  Despite the personal and professional behavior of Hewitt and his star reporter Wallace, 60 Minutes became both one of the most profitable programs in the history of network television and was celebrated as a model of journalistic integrity. It climbed from seventy-second in the ratings in its 1968 debut to fifty-second in 1975, to eighteenth in 1977 and to number four in 1978. By the late 1970s, 60 Minutes was the envy of the other networks. “As the most honored show on television, with dozens of Emmys, Peabodys and Polks to its credit, ‘60 Minutes’ has added immeasurably to its network’s prestige,” the New York Times noted in 1979. “‘60 Minutes’ is CBS’s only regular entry in the top 10 and as such is able to charge as much as $215,000 per commercial minute. Since the show is, by television standards, comparatively inexpensive to produce, coming in at around $200,000 a week, and since each show offers six commercial minutes, the profit margin is significant.”

  “There’s nothing tabloidy about ambush journalism,” Mike Wallace insisted. “Unless you’re doing it for drama, in which case it’s to be deplored…. After a while, we realized that we had become, to a degree, caricatures of ourselves because we were paying more attention to the drama than to the illumination of an issue.”

  Through shrewd packaging and an uncanny understanding of which targets to aim for, Don Hewitt had created a news magazine that escaped the label of tabloid, but it was, in fact, exactly that: entertainment disguised as news. By the late 1970s all of Don Hewitt’s past transgressions had been forgiven or forgotten and the man who staged interviews and paid sources for stories was lecturing at colleges and journalism centers about the evils of tabloid television and the relentless quest for ratings.

  “I think that sensationalism is a wonderful word,” said Wallace, “if by sensationalism you mean, ‘Hey! Holy shit! I didn’t know that!’ That’s really what we do.”

  From time to time, Hewitt also acknowledged his role in the tabloidization of television news. “‘60 Minutes’ has single-handedly ruined television,” he once admitted. “No one can report news today without making money.”

  9

  gossip goes mainstream

  Cher was the sort of celebrity, Dick Stolley knew, who sometimes needed to be protected from herself. It was 1976, two years after Time Inc. had launched the much-maligned but wildly popular People magazine with Stolley at the helm, and Cher was one of the magazine’s favorite cover subjects. During the 1970s, Cher and People would work to serve each other well—both riding that decade’s rediscovery of celebrity voyeurism. It was a symbiotic relationship, one that depended on reciprocal cooperation. Cher would appear on the cover of People magazine more than any other star in the 1970s—and nearly every issue became that year’s best-seller. Over the years, People frequently came across—and ignored—embarrassing information about the flamboyant singer, including the time she and Sonny had his-and-her nose jobs and how Cher had her breasts lifted and they had become infected from the surgery. Although Cher had a neurotically shy side, she also was an exhibitionist who loved publicity; back before she was famous she would stand in front of a mirror and practice telling paparazzi and autograph hounds to leave her alone. “There are too many of you,” she wou
ld tell the imaginary crowds. “I just don’t have time for all of you.” Cher had the conflicting feelings toward fame that is so common among celebrities—she would complain about invasions into her privacy while telling reporters details about her latest est session. She loved saying outrageous things to the press. “Feel my ass,” she once told boyfriend David Geffen while a journalist was just trying to interview him. “Hard as a rock.” Then, still in full view of the reporter, she ran her tongue all over Geffen and stuck it in his mouth.

  By September 1976, Cher had dumped Geffen, had a Vegas wedding to Gregg Allman, whom People called a “coked-out cracker of a rock star,” had an on-air reunion with Sonny while she was pregnant with Allman’s baby, and encouraged Allman to testify against his friends in a very messy drug trial. “Our whole world as we knew it was shot to ratshit,” Cher complained. “I ought to write a soap opera.” Instead, she decided to tell all to People. “The Hollywood community was a little appalled that someone would talk so openly about her husband’s drug problems,” said a People editor, who decided that the drama would make a good cover story. A reporter visited Cher at the Beverly Hills house she had shared with Allman, who had swelled from reed-thin to two hundred pounds and bopped around the house during the interview wearing sandals. “Why do you feel so strongly about this drug issue?” the reporter asked Cher.

  “Because,” Cher matter-of-factly told the reporter, “my father was a heroin addict.”

  Back at the Time-Life building, top People editors had a meeting to discuss what to do with this explosive bit of information. They decided, first, to make sure it was accurate. They located Cher’s father, John Sarkisian, who was living in a retirement community. “The story was true and would have been very big news at the time,” said Stolley. “Everybody in this man’s retirement community knew that he was Cher’s dad, but nobody knew about his history with addiction. He most definitely did not want it made public.”

  Stolley consulted with People’s lawyer. “He said we could go with it,” said Stolley. “We had it nailed. It wasn’t libel. The privacy issue was a close call, but we could probably get away with it.” Stolley had the information edited out of the story. “I was not going to ruin that old man’s life,” he said, “just for the sake of gossip.”*

  Stolley said he has no regrets. “I think gossip can be the enemy of civilization,” Stolley declared. He actually banned the word gossip from the pages of People when he was the editor there. “I think the dissemination of cruel, mean-spirited information which is fundamentally disturbing to a human being, to his family, to his friends, is a blow to civilized society.” Such sentiments may sound surprisingly high-minded coming from the founding editor of People magazine—the publication that brought tabloid topics out of Tabloid Valley and into the mainstream—but Stolley wasn’t motivated solely by the moral issue at hand; there was also a strong element of pragmatism in his philosophy. At the time Cher told People about her father’s addiction, she was happy for the magazine to use it. But, Stolley knew, such spontaneous revelations often came back to haunt celebrities. In its early days, People protected its subjects from such self-destructive disclosures.

  The Cher episode was not an isolated incident. There was the time that a then wildly popular country and western singer told People that the only reason he married his wife was because he got her pregnant. Or the time Truman Capote, fresh out of an alcohol rehab center, invited People to accompany him to a gym to do an article on his new healthy lifestyle. During the interview, Capote downed two glasses of vodka and kept falling over, but the People reporter helped prop the writer up on a Nautilus machine long enough to get pictures.

  “Celebrities were very naive back then,” said Stolley. “We had to be very, very careful about what we would let them say. They would talk about their problems or their ex-husbands or ex-wives in the most scurrilous ways. They were venting. It was like they were talking to their psychiatrist. We constantly had to censor them to protect them from themselves.”

  Stolley knew that if People magazine started to burn its subjects—even if it was with the star’s own words—celebrities would stop coming to the magazine with their stories. It would mean the end of a cozy relationship that had made People magazine the publishing phenomenon of the decade. “People will never stoop to the cheap thrill,” Stolley vowed when the magazine was launched in 1974. “We will not pander to baser instincts.” Of course, he wasn’t about to fill People with articles about Vietnam or Watergate, either. He had already worked for a magazine that did that, and it all ended in one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.

  That December morning in 1972 was still vivid in Stolley’s mind. He was an assistant managing editor of Life magazine, and had been summoned with three hundred other journalists to the eighth floor auditorium of the Time-Life Building that cold, overcast Friday to listen as a succession of men in gray suits struggled to justify the inevitable. The crowd was filled with some of the most world-weary photographers and editors in the country, but sometimes even they succumbed. Faces were streaked with tears, and occasionally a body here or there would heave with stifled sobs. Even the men at the podium, the bean counters and the top corporate editors who made the decision, were so distraught that their voices cracked in midsentence:

  “… I deeply regret to tell you that after this issue, Life magazine will be no more….”

  “… the emotional agony behind this move …”

  “… we did everything possible …”

  “… this painful decision …”

  It was a wake for what many believed to be the absolute best that the world of journalism had to offer. Life was only thirty-six years old, but it had the aura of an immortal. One by one, the other great picture magazines had died: the esteemed Saturday Evening Post succumbed in 1969, and Look fell in 1971. For months rumors had swirled that Life magazine was next, but no one believed them. Then, on that Friday, December 8, 1972, came the official word that those terrible rumors were true.

  Life was still a great magazine. It ran intelligent articles and important photographs on the issues of the times: shocking picture essays of Vietnam and the My Lai massacre, revealing photos of Woodstock, horrifying shots of race riots in Birmingham. Life was an expensive operation, with a huge staff and bureaus around the world. Circulation was still very high: 5.5 million, but the figure was misleading; Time Inc. was so eager to keep the number up that it was charging readers less than it cost to publish Life. Almost all the magazine’s sales came from subscriptions, and Time Inc. offered deals so that many people were getting Life for about ten cents an issue; it cost twenty-six cents an issue to produce and mail. The difference was supposed to be made up in ad revenue, but by 1971, a one-page color ad in Life cost $50,000— more than a one-minute commercial on prime time television. Advertisers had been deserting the magazine for television, and if Life tried to increase revenue by hiking its ad rates, it would lose even more advertisers. Life magazine had lost more than $47 million over the previous three years.

  Not everyone mourned the death. “It’s no great loss,” said an ad executive from Ted Bates & Co. “Life didn’t die of a sudden heart attack, but rather of hardening of the arteries.” Wall Street applauded the move: The day of the announcement, Time-Life’s stock went up $6.50. The next day it was up again, a total of ten points for the two days, to $59.

  The hardest thing, some thought, would be breaking the news to Clare Booth Luce, the feisty widow of Time-Life founder Henry Luce. She was a big champion of Life in its early years and continued to be a brilliant cultural arbiter. Reached at her home in Honolulu, Luce said, “I was wondering when you fellows would get around to it.”

  The still-shaken Life staff headed back to their offices to put together a farewell issue. “We have this last issue to cling to,” said Stolley, “and suspend belief that it’s all over.” Then, a reporter from a local television station came in and started nosing around with his camera crew, trying to intervie
w people. Most turned their backs or left the area to avoid the intruder, but famed photojournalist Co Rentmeester feared no one. When the TV reporter approached the photographer, and asked a question or two, Rentmeester hauled off and belted the television man squarely in the jaw. Some Life staffers cheered him on, others tried to hold him back. Everyone, however, knew that no matter who won the fight, Life had lost the battle. “I have that same terrible feeling you have when you hear a declaration of war,” said Jozefa Stuart, editor of Life’s entertainment department. “It’s that feeling you get when you know that there’s going to be a terrible change in your life.”

  By 1973, the world was changing, and Time Inc wasn’t. The company had faltered in several attempts to break into the television industry, and efforts to come up with new print titles weren’t faring much better. Time Inc. hadn’t successfully launched a weekly magazine in twenty years. Executives there put together a team of experts—dubbed the Magazine Development Group—whose sole purpose was to come up with a magazine that the public wanted to read. They analyzed spending patterns, devised flow charts, contemplated social trends, and quizzed demographic groups without success. They proposed a magazine for liberated women, a fitness and health magazine, an upscale photography magazine, but none of their ideas tested well in the marketplace. At the time, the two best-selling weeklies in the country were the National Enquirer and TV Guide, but Time Inc. was considered a reputable publisher that didn’t traffic in that sort of fare.