Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Then, Andrew Heiskell, the chairman of the board at Time Inc., came up with a proposal for a magazine devoted exclusively to covering people. No events, no issues, just people. The idea was not warmly received. The MBAs who were consulting to the Magazine Development Board called it “one of the stupidest publishing ideas we’d ever heard of.” Members of the group ridiculed the idea and dragged their feet, but because the idea came from Heiskell, it was pushed through. The Time chairman would periodically pop by, asking “How you doing with my People idea?” When a test issue was put together, it was widely held in contempt at Time Inc. “The consensus [on People] was powerfully negative,” recalled one member of the Committee. “The words most often used were ‘sleazy’ and ‘cheap.’ ”

  A copy was sent to Henry Luce’s unsentimental widow. She liked it. More important, she showed the magazine to her manicurist, secretary, maids, cook, and hairdresser. They loved People—and they were the potential readers. “Please let me know how you make out with the advertisers,” Clare Booth Luce wrote. “If you make out well, nothing can stop People.”

  In 1973, Dick Stolley was considering getting out of the journalism business. “The death of Life was a terrible experience,” he said. “When one magazine has broken your heart,” he said, “why give another one the same chance?” Stolley had fallen in love with journalism at a very early age; he became the sports editor of his hometown paper in Pekin, Illinois, when he was fifteen years old; he would rise at 5 A.M. and head to the newspaper office before going to high school. After attending Northwestern’s journalism school, he had a few newspaper jobs before he ended up at Life, where he spent nineteen years. Stolley was one of Life’s brightest stars. He ran the magazine’s biggest bureaus, including those in Los Angeles, Washington, and Paris. It was Dick Stolley who negotiated the famous, if somewhat controversial, deal to pay $150,000 for the exclusive rights to the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination. When Life folded, Time executives were eager to keep Stolley and parked him on the Magazine Development Committee. Stolley wasn’t sure he’d stay. He was considering quitting the business altogether, going back to Illinois and running for political office, or possibly becoming a professor or getting a degree in law. Anything but journalism, which seemed to be a dying industry.

  Then Stolley saw the test issue for People magazine. The cover featured a grinning Liz Taylor, decked out in a denim cap and an embroidered denim jacket. Inside were grainy photographs of Taylor and Burton, who had just been through one of their many very public battles, attempting a reconciliation at Sophia Loren’s villa. The pictures looked as if they’d been shot with a paparazzo’s telephoto lens; the short, jagged text seemed to have been hammered out on an ancient typewriter in somebody’s basement. Other articles in the issue peeked at Ali McGraw’s romance with Steve McQueen and at Faye Dunaway’s various escapades. There was even a shot of Barbara Carrera, then the Chiquita Banana Girl, topless. The entire package was appallingly cheap and obvious. “It looked,” Stolley recalled, “like a whore house magazine.”

  As Stolley thumbed through the tawdry, vulgar magazine that was so unlike his beloved Life or anything that the distinguished Time Inc. had ever published, his spirits lifted and the bounce returned to his step, because he realized that maybe there was a future for print journalism after all.

  In August 1973, Time Inc. tested its Liz Taylor issue in eleven cities; the results were startling. In some areas, it sold 38.4 percent of issues on newsstands, which is quite respectable, but in cities where People was promoted on television, it sold an almost unheard of 85.2 percent. The message was clear: People was aiming for the television audience.

  “I said, ‘I want to run this magazine,’ ” Stolley said. “I liked it, but I really wanted to redesign it, because it looked like a piece of shit … In that form it seemed sleazy, shocking. To make it work, you had to encase it in a comfortable, conventional format.” The first thing to go was the topless motif; several distributors refused to carry the test issue of People because of the risqué Chiquita Banana photo. “Boy, I learned my lesson on that one,” Stolley said. “You could print hair-raising information about people’s relationships, sex lives, and finances … but no breasts.”

  Stolley had to figure out what the magazine would be. “It’s hard to understand, today, in this celebrity-saturated world, how revolutionary People was. Newspapers and news magazines were totally ignoring personalities,” said Stolley. Women’s magazines still had cakes and crochet on their covers. “There wasn’t a niche. There was a wide open crevice.”

  Although newspapers and magazines across the country were closing or cutting back, investigative reporting was going through an almost unprecedented vogue. Watergate dominated the papers. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were stars, role models that just about every other journalist in the country followed. There were more students enrolled in journalism schools than there were journalism jobs. In the mid-1970s, journalism was serious business. “It was a time when individuals got submerged, buried,” Stolley recalled. “For the most part, the news was depressing.” People would not be. People made no pretensions to being an in-depth magazine. Many items were very short, a few paragraphs, and the upper limit for most stories was 1,500 words. The entire issue would be limited to 13,000 words. Stolley would actually sit there counting them. “This was going to be a quick, easy read,” said Stolley, “which most of the magazines were not.”

  People was done on the cheap; Time Inc. wasn’t completely committed to the project, and didn’t want to get caught up in the expensive news-gathering operation that Life had become. The entire editorial staff numbered only thirty-four, a minuscule number for a weekly magazine. Life, at its peak, had more than ten times as many. Most of the reporting was done by a staff of sixty-six stringers, often newspaper reporters who were paid $7.50 an hour. The articles were usually rewritten by editors in a snappy, chatty style. Stolley—determined not to make the magazine a reincarnation of Life—didn’t want to hire too many of his colleagues from the recently folded magazine. It wasn’t a problem. Not many wanted to join. In fact, very few people from inside the Time-Life corporation wanted to be part of the new enterprise.

  The first year was rough. Ad pages were cheap, $4,550 for black and white, $5,800 for color—slightly more than one-tenth what Life had charged. Nevertheless, the first several issues of People were quite thin. The first issue carried twenty pages of ads, and there were only 601 advertising pages that year. “The advertisers remembered Confidential,” said Stolley, “and it scared the hell out of them.”

  The cover of the first regular issue, dated March 4, 1974, featured Mia Farrow, who was starring in The Great Gatsby, nibbling on a strand of pearls. Inside was a little something for everyone: profiles of authors Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Clifford Irving, as well as pieces on porn star Linda Lovelace, Exorcist author and producer William Blatty, kidnapped socialite Patricia Hearst, gymnast Cathy Rigby, actresses Debbie Reynolds and Joanne Woodward, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow, Marina. The magazine was still clearly trying to find its market, but wanted to make it clear that it was not Confidential revisited. “We think of People as a very contemporary magazine,” Stolley noted, “one attuned to the free-wheeling seventies and its mood of burning curiosity, wry detachment, and tolerance for other people’s manners and morals. We want People to reflect the times.”

  People was greeted with hoots of derision and howls of protest. It was referred to as “Peephole.” It was parodied in Esquire and in National Lampoon. It was called “celebrity pap” and “fluff and puff.” Newsweek predicted that it would run out of people to profile. “We were universally scorned and put down by our journalistic colleagues,” former executive producer Jim Seymore recalled. His friends at serious publications would mock People at cocktail parties, but as soon as they were alone, they would corner him and ask him what various celebrities were really like.

  William Safire, the esteemed columnist for the New York Times, was per
haps the harshest critic. “By the choice of topics, the Time editors … give us their frank assessment of [People’s] audience: A collection of frantic, tasteless fadcats, deeply concerned with social climbing and intellectual pretensions, panting for a look at celebrities in poses that press agents staged back in the thirties,” he wrote. “Maybe there is money in this sort of thing; if so, publishing empires whose executives harrumph about social responsibility should leave the field to upstart publishers more adept at grubbiness.” Stolley tacked Safire’s essay to his bulletin board. Whenever he got tired or discouraged, he’d read Safire’s sneering putdown, start seething, and he’d find the energy to go on.

  The reaction inside the Time-Life building was even more hostile. “It was very tough in those first few years,” said one former reporter. “We were putting in these eighty-and ninety-hour weeks, working until four or five three nights a week, and you’d hear people joking in the elevator about how we weren’t really journalists. If they knew you were with People, they’d just sort of be quiet and move away, as if they were afraid they might catch something. I dreaded taking the elevators.”

  “Do you know the word pariah?” Stolley said. “Well, that pretty well describes how we were regarded…. There was great concern—especially with the distinguished Life having recently died and the body hardly cold—that we were cheapening the precarious coin of the Time Inc. realm.” Then one day, Stolley rode down in the elevator with a Time writer, who turned to him and said, “I know you’re taking a lot of crap about this magazine, but I’m telling you, it’s getting better. I like it.” He paused then added, “More important, it’s going to pay my pension some day.”

  In the early issues, People editors were still trying to figure out exactly what sort of celebrity stories America was interested in reading. The common wisdom was that contemporary stars were all unglamorous and boring and that the public was more fascinated by the Golden Age of Hollywood. As an experiment to gauge the public’s interest in that period, People located one of the great old gossip columnists to contribute to the first issue. Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons were all dead, but the great Sheila Graham was still alive. Graham, who sometimes was lumped together with Louella and Hedda as “The Unholy Trio,” was the least famous of the three, but toward the end of their careers, Graham was actually syndicated in more newspapers than either of her rivals. She also had the most fascinating life. Born Lily Sheil, Graham grew up in an orphanage in London’s East End. She wanted to become a writer, but was terribly insecure about her lack of a proper education and took jobs as a domestic, a toothbrush demonstrator, and a showgirl in London before she came to Los Angeles, with hopes of launching her writing career. “No one there could embarrass me with erudite conversation,” she later explained. “Hollywood was notorious even in London for the ignorance of the people who made the films.” Within three years, she had a syndicated column that, she claimed, earned $5,000 a week. She had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose career was on the skids and who tutored Graham, giving her lists of books to read and quizzing her on them afterward. They had a tortured relationship, however; he refused to leave his institutionalized wife Zelda, and he frequently went on drunken rages during which he would mock Graham relentlessly about her ignorance and her Jewish background. Fitzgerald used Graham as the inspiration for Kathleen from The Last Tycoon, and he died in her arms. She wrote about their relationship in Beloved Infidel, which in 1959 was made into a movie.

  People asked Graham, who had recently retired and moved from Hollywood to Palm Beach, to write an article for its first issue, comparing the film community she had left with the old money society she had recently entered. When Graham handed in her manuscript, the editors were shocked. “It turned out that the poor woman couldn’t put two words back to back,” according to Hal Wingo, the editor who oversaw the piece. “She was almost illiterate. It was almost comical. Here she was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mistress and this fabled writer of columns all these years and she could hardly construct a sentence.”

  Buried deep inside the piece was a startling bit of information: In discussing how someone with an unsavory past could make it in Hollywood, Graham wrote “you can be a illegitimate, as Marilyn Monroe was” you could “have a juvenile delinquency record, as Steve McQueen did,” or you could be a call girl, “as I was.” “I remember very clearly when I read this my jaw dropped,” said Wingo. “I said, Well this is an interesting admission on her part anyway.’ ” Wingo rewrote much of Graham’s story, but, he said, he carefully read back the entire text to her—including the explosive “call girl” sentence.

  When the issue hit the newsstands, Graham went ballistic. She had never, she insisted, written that she was a former call girl. It was a typo, she maintained, and should have read “J” was a former call girl—”J” was the anonymous author of the best-selling book, The Sensuous Woman. The article was libelous, Graham said, and she hired lawyer Edward Bennett Williams to sue People. Getting sued for such a howler of an error in its first issue—by the person who ostensibly wrote the article—would have given People’s many critics additional ammunition. “The whole joke about People from the beginning was that we would have a staff of three writers and ten lawyers, so this was not good for our first issue,” said Wingo. People paid for Graham to come to New York, during which time she was treated like a star, and ran a “clarification” in the “Chatter” section of the magazine. “From Sheila Graham comes word that the eyebrow-raising phrase in her by-lined story … should have read “former ‘chorus’ girl,” the item explained. It went on to quote Graham, “As I have written in several of my books, I have always believed in love. I was so busy in this area that I didn’t have time to consider the financial aspects.”*

  One of the truly startling things about the Sheila Graham debacle is that hardly anyone noticed. People had accidentally called one of the most famous gossip columnists of her time a call girl, and no one seemed to care. It was a clear sign that People shouldn’t cater to a nostalgia for Hollywood. What many other editors had long interpreted as a lack of interest in gossip was in fact, merely boredom with the old stars they continued to write about.

  The public’s apparent aversion to gossip was also, at least partially, the result of a more than decade-long vilification of gossip columnists. It was a crusade that went into full throttle at the Confidential trial and was continued through the 1960s by some of the nation’s most popular stars, such as Frank Sinatra, and beloved politicians, like the Kennedys. By the mid-1970s, the idea of gossip was repugnant to most Americans, but they had never lost their appetite for juicy tidbits about celebrities. Readers liked gossip best, People realized, if it wasn’t served up by gossip columnists.

  Readers weren’t the only ones hungry for celebrity news. The celebrities themselves were starved. “Stars clamored to be profiled,” remembered one reporter. “We could really call the shots. We’d set these conditions back then that we had to be allowed into the celebrity’s home, they had to tell us personal and private things. There were so many stars wanting to be interviewed, that once, in a single day, I had breakfast with Nelson Rockefeller, lunch with Gloria Swanson, and dinner with Sophia Loren.”

  Dick Stolley worked hard to ensure the notion that People’s brand of gossip was harmless fun. “I think it was important that the magazine established a reputation for not only fairness and decency but also kindness,” he said. “People is a good cheer magazine and always has been. It is also a magazine that has tended to be kind to people—not to say it hasn’t embarrassed people and hurt people.” Nevertheless, People staffers were continually shocked by the confessions celebrities would make.

  Celebrities, and even politicians, were so unfamiliar with dealing with the press that they used to blurt out things that they never would have a decade later. “Sex and money were two of the things no one had asked celebrities about before,” said Stolley, “and damned if they didn’t answer.” Rosalyn
n Carter told People about her plastic surgery. Gloria Steinem caused an uproar when she posed for photographers in a bubble bath.

  “The awfulest things about them would come out of their own mouths and they often had no idea what they were saying,” said Stolley. “There was a kind of wonderful innocence then. Particularly when it came to people talking about themselves or their spouses, children and all the rest—we were very, very careful about what we let people say.”

  People was rewarded for its kindness. Stars lined up to appear in the magazine. One of them was Elizabeth Taylor. People’s original cover girl, Stolley discovered, sold every time she appeared on the cover. One of the things that the People editors realized was that a celebrity didn’t sell well just because he or she was famous; the star had to be doing something to be newsworthy. “Elizabeth Taylor was always doing something—getting married, getting divorced or having medical emergencies,” said Stolley. “She had a great sense of drama about herself… and she regularly made herself available” to People in the early days. “Readers loved her,” says Stolley. “She represented tough American glamour at its best.”

  Early on, People wasn’t always reverential to old stars. In its second issue, the magazine ran an interview with Lucille Ball. “She looked, but did not act, her age,” noted the writer, who reported the sixty-three-year-old actress’s diatribes against contemporary films (she blasted them as “a marathon of sex and perversion”), Marlon Brando, who was starring in the sexually provocative Last Tango In Paris (“I’ll hit him when I see him,” Ball said. “I’ll punch him right in the nose, and I hope I have these rings on.”), and her loose false eyelashes. (“Goddamn this thing won’t stay on!”) Angry letters to the editor followed.