Purveyor of the Public
Life
UP THERE IN THE OFFICE
AT BROADWAY AND 52ND STREET during the last days of Confidential, the old Confidential (1952–58), the most scandalous scandal
magazine in the history of the world, everybody seemed to be
ricocheting around amid the dolly lights and cracking up.
Everybody, save one, namely, Robert Harrison himself, the
publisher. Jay Breen’s liver had gone into its last necrotic,
cirrhotic foliation. Jay Breen used to write half the magazine, but
it had gotten to the point where Breen couldn’t stand to listen to
the Reader anymore. Breen and his wife would come in and sit in the
next room while the Reader read the stories for the next issue out
loud. The Reader, whatever his name was, had a truly great voice,
like Sir Ralph Richardson reading Lear soliloquies at a Bauhaus
Modern lectern under a spotlight. Great diction, great resonance,
etc. Harrison hired him just to read out loud. Harrison had a
theory that if you read the stories out loud, every weak spot in a
story would stand out. So there would be the Reader with a voice
like Sir Ralph Richardson enunciating such works as “Errol Flynn
and His Two-Way Mirror,” “White Women Broke Up My Marriage” [to a
Negro entertainer], and “How Mike Todd Made a Chump of a Movie
Mogul.” One of the writers would be in there muttering away because
he claimed that the Reader had it in for him and was blundering
over his best-turned phrases on purpose, thereby causing Harrison
to throw whole stories out. But Jay Breen was long, long past all
that, and presently he died, of cirrhosis of the liver. Meanwhile,
Howard Rushmore, the editor, was beginning to look awful. He used
to be such a big robust guy, and now he looked like a couple of eye
sockets mounted on a piece of modern solder sculpture. Rushmore was
an ex-Communist and a complex person. He had a talent for gossip
stories, but somehow it was all wrapped up with the anti-Communist
crusade he was carrying on. There came a day when Rushmore and his
wife were riding in a cab on the Upper East Side and he took out a
revolver and shot her to death and then shot himself to death.
Harrison was the publisher of Confidential
and he remembered that day very well. He had just come into
Idlewild Airport from someplace and gotten into a cab. The first he
heard about Rushmore was when the cabdriver said, “Hey, did you
hear that? The publisher of Confidential
just shot himself!”
“The publisher of Confidential,” says Harrison, the publisher of
Confidential. “Where did the publisher of
Confidential shoot himself?”
“In the head, in a cab,” says the
cabdriver. “He shot himself through the head, right in the back of
a cab!”
Harrison remembers that, well, here he
was, right in the back of a cab, and he didn’t have the slightest
inclination to pull a gun on anybody inside or outside a cab. It
had been wild for a while, forty million dollars’ worth of libel
suits, the whole movie industry had been after him, jukebox
gangsters or somebody like that had hung him upside down by his
heels out his office window, Congressmen and half the newspapers in
the country were crucifying him, some guy from Chicago was going to
fly in and break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers
and toes—but that was all pressure from outside. Inside, he wasn’t
drowning in his own turbulent juices like Breen or Rushmore. He was
serene, and Confidential was beautiful. This
may be a hard idea to put across—the way Harrison found
Confidential beautiful. But the fact is, the
man is an aesthete, the original aesthete du
schlock.
AT THE OUTSET ALL I KNEW ABOUT HARRISON WAS
THAT HE was living under an assumed name in a place called the
Hotel Madison. To imagine the kind of picture that brought to mind,
all you have to think of was the libel suits, the outrage, all the
big people who were after him in 1957 when he sold Confidential and dropped from view. They must have
crushed him like a Phrygian sacrifice. So the picture I had of
Robert Harrison, the ex-publisher of Confidential, in someplace called the Hotel Madison, was
of a skulking fifty-nine-year-old man holed up in a hotel room
where the view was a close-up of the air-conditioning duct of the
short-order restaurant out back, hung with heavy-duty New York lint
in clots like Spanish moss. That was until I saw the Madison,
Reggie, Lately Miss BMC of Canada, and Harrison’s
cravat.
The Madison, on East 58th Street,
between Fifth and Madison, turned out to be a fairly posh and
conservative old place full of big cooperative apartments and a
lobby with plum and umber walls and servitors in white dickies.
Harrison’s sister, Helen, a polite, quiet woman with gray-blond
hair who has been his personal secretary all these years, opened
the door, and there was what I later learned was the very same
apartment he had lived in during the heyday of Confidential. It has a thirty-foot living room all
buttressed with yards of faceted mirrors, a bar with hilarious
novelties on it, a pygmy tropical tree with a wooden ape hanging in
the branches, ochre-colored neo-Moloch art objects, black and tan
furniture, the total effect being the decorator style known as
Malay Peninsula Modern. Pretty soon, out of one of the two side
rooms, came Harrison, trampling through the wall-to-wall and tying
the cravat.
“Have you had breakfast yet?” he says.
It was one in the afternoon. “I’ve been on this goddamned diet.
Let’s go to Lindy’s, I can’t stand it anymore. I lost two pounds. I
got to have something to eat, some of that fish or something; you
know, lox.”
Judging from his 1957 pictures,
Harrison, now fifty-nine and grey-haired, may have a little more
heft in the bags above and below the eyes, and a little more
erosion in the jowls, but he is wearing his hair combed back long
and on the rakish side, like Jon Hall in The
Hurricane, and he has this silk cravat debouching like mad
from the throat of his sports shirt. Furthermore, he still has a
Broadway promoter’s accent, the kind that seems to be created by
hidden pistons, and one of those voices that come from back in the
throat as if it has been mellow-cured like a Dr. Grabow
pipe.
And then, from exactly where I forget,
materializes Reggie, a blonde. Reggie is one of these girls who
strike you as more of an ensemble, a chorus, a tableau, an opulent
colonial animal, than as one person. She has great blonde bouffant
hair, a coat of white fur whose locks fluff out wider than she is
tall, and a dog, a toy greyhound named Tessie. Reggie and Helen get
into a discussion about the dog’s recent alimentary history to see
if it will be safe to leave it in the apartment with Helen while
Reggie, Harrison and I go off to Lindy’s. The dog looks just like a
racing greyhound except that it is two feet long and wears a town
coat.
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 1958. 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, Schopenhauer 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.
“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 blasé 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 4000 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 snapbrim police reporter’s hat, circa 1924, and an
overcoat with the collar turned up. He’s scanning the room, like
Wild Bill Hickok 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 walks 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
maître 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.”
Nobody says anything for a minute, then
Harrison says, sort of moodily,
“I’m not putting out Inside News for the money. I just want to prove—there
are a lot of people say I was just a flash in the pan. I just want
to prove I can do it again.”