Putting the Papers to Bed

Having rattled most of the skeletons in Hollywood's closet and even planted some hand-fabricated new ones, five-year-old Confidential (circ. 3,269,954) started blabbing its own secrets. In a green-and-gold Los Angeles courtroom, where bimonthly Confidential ("Tells the Facts and Names the Names") and its sister-in-smut Whisper ("The Stories Behind the Headlines") are being tried on charges of criminal libel and conspiracy to publish obscenity, prosecution witnesses gradually yielded answers to a question that has long vexed Hollywood and intrigued scandalmag readers. How do the bedroom-beat boys and girls get their stories?

In Confidential's first two years, ambitious, profit-hungry Publisher Robert Harrison blew up most of his stories out of news clips, police records, or from material supplied by columnists or reporters. But the King of Leer became increasingly insistent on boudoir reporting that, as one associate testified, "would make readers say. 'This was something I never knew until now.' " In 1954, testified Hollywood Prostitute Ronnie Quillan. Harrison told her: "The more lewd and lascivious the story, the more colorful for the magazine."

Smut Station. One result, testified lanky (6 ft. 4 in.) Howard Rushmore, 45, onetime Daily Worker movie critic, onetime New York Journal-American Redhunter and onetime (until October 1955) Confidential editor, was that "newspaper friends of mine" who had freelanced for the magazine were dropped by Harrison or scared off by his demands for "hot, inside material." Among the reporters named on the stand by Rushmore (but not in Los Angeles press accounts of the trial) was United Press Hollywood Reporter Aline Mosby, who was replaced in the press gallery (for reasons of "illness") after a defense attorney declared that she had written 24 stories for Confidential. Rushmore also testified that New York Daily Newshen Florabel Muir and husband Dennis Morrison had been on a retainer to supply stories. Reporter Muir,' who had been covering the trial single-handed in sprightly fashion, was joined by a New York staffer after denying to the News that she had ever worked for Confidential.

By the net of the prosecution testimony, sleek-haired Robert Harrison finally decided to mine his own lode of dirt for some 60 stories a year on show folks, and in 1955 set up a West Coast smut station called Hollywood Research Inc. (TIME, March 11.) Man-and-womaned by Harrison's niece, icy-faced, flame-haired Marjorie Meade and husband Fred.* H.R.I, handed out checks at the rate of $10,000 a month in one six-month period to keep pay dirt oozing into Harrison's shabby Manhattan headquarters.

Sighs at 60 Paces. Tips for stories were handed the Meades for the crudest motives--cupidity, jealousy, publicity-hunger--by a shadowy legion of informants who ranged from call girls and press-agents to the free-lance writer who testified last week that he earned $150 from Harrison by reporting the amorous escapades of an actor neighbor. Story leads came from ex-husbands or wives, or embittered lovers like the small-time movie actor who in 1955 told Confidential a story of the sexual eccentricities of a fast-rising young actress who jilted him.

A Negro star whose affair with a white actress was a bannered smirk in Confidential last year discovered that the story developed from snapshots of the couple that were filched by an acquaintance. The private files of detectives have been rifled for stories such as Confidential's account of Joe DiMaggio's famed "wrong-door" raid on Marilyn Monroe. Newspaper and magazine morgues also have been raided by scandalmag agents. To backstop his bedroom exclusives. Harrison retained a squad of private eyes with such electronic sleuths as a fast, small, noiseless camera, wrist-attached microphones that can pick up a sigh at 60 paces.

Skeletons to Order. To newsmen, the most startling evidence last week concerned the scandalmags' original contribution to journalism: exposes to order. Madam Quillan testified that when Harrison wanted to run a story on the homosexuality of a top-ranking movie actress (not mentioned in the testimony), he asked her to "get verification in any way possible, to go out to lunch with her, to use a Minifone to record the conversation. " La Quillan, who herself was once featured in Whisper as "Hollywood's Number One Madam," also said that she baited Bandleader Desi (I Love Lucy) Arnaz with two girls in order to "bring up to date" a story she had sold the magazine about a night she had spent with him in 1944. Rushmore said that Francesca de Scaffa. ex-wife of Actor Bruce Cabot, not only passed on a tip she had obtained in bed with one star but offered to have an "affair with any man" to swell the magazine's story list.

To editors, the "super-colossal bedroom extravaganza." as Hearst's New York Mirror billed it, was a rare opportunity for a slew of headlines, salaciousness and tch-tching that would have been too hot to print under any other guise. When the state read into testimony a dozen whole stories from the magazines, it was the wire services' turn to drool. The wire-room machines gushed juicy details from such Confidential stories as "Eddie Fisher and the Three Chippies," "Mae West's Open-Door Policy!" "Here's Why Frank Sinatra is the Tarzan of the Boudoir." "Why Tony Steel Chuckled When Anita Ekberg Said 'I Do,' " "It Was the Hottest Show in Town When Maureen O'Hara Cuddled in Row 35.''*

One of the newspapers that drew the line was the San Diego Union, which heavily edited its wire copy, explained to readers that it considered the full-leshed story too gamy for a family newspaper. Regardless of the trial's outcome or of Confidential's eventual fate, daily press coverage of the case and the increase in newsstand sales seemed to indicate that millions of readers like to have a spade of dirt called a spade of dirt--as Dirt Spader Harrison has insisted all along.

*The only defendants of eleven under indictment to concede the state's jurisdiction in the case. Harrison, who claims that he is not on trial, is fighting extradition to California.

*Actress O'Hara retorted to the press that she was not in Hollywood but in Europe at the time of the Nov. 9, 1953 incident described by Confidential, said her passport would support her story, produced airline pictures that showed her leaving for Europe in October 1953 and returning the following January.

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