Dish (5 page)

The trial was turning out to be devastating to the Hollywood image that it was intended to protect. By the time Gloria Wellman, the adopted daughter of famed director William Wellman
(A Star is Born
and
Beau Geste
) and a self-described “naked model” and prostitute, testified that she was the source for a story on a “Naked Canapé” party attended by some of the movie industry’s biggest names, stars were openly complaining that the
strategy had backfired; stories that had been dismissed as tabloid trash were being confirmed on the witness stand by the sources. “Now that the whole world is reading what first appeared only in
Confidential,
it looks to me as if it were a mistake to bring this action into court,” lamented singer John Carroll. “There is one thing for sure. Folks aren’t going to be thinking from now on that we show people are like the boys and girls next door.”

So, on August 19, when a sultry young singer and actress named Mylee Andreason took the stand and began to testify about a “star-studded naked rug party,” she got only as far as identifying herself as a participant in the raunchy festivities before the prosecution interrupted her. The District Attorney’s office appealed to Judge Walker, who was, himself, a former child actor and was sympathetic to the film community. Walker made a ruling that completely undermined the defense’s strategy: he said that any new testimony had to relate to the few articles that the prosecution had already read into the record. Judge Walker’s decision thwarted Harrison’s plan for a parade of celebrity witnesses, or at the very least, an open discussion about their accuracy.

Then came another devastating blow to the magazine’s credibility. Paul Gregory, producer of
The Naked and the Dead,
testified that Harrison’s niece, Marjorie Meade, had tried to blackmail him. Gregory, the subject of a stinging
Confidential
exposé, produced a tape recording of a woman claiming to be Meade’s secretary. In the recording, the woman demanded that Gregory meet Meade at a restaurant called Sherry to give her $10,000—or Gregory would be the subject of a scathing article in
Confidential.
The defense, however, proved that the restaurant Sherry wasn’t even around at the time of the alleged blackmail attempt. What’s more, they produced a witness who said Meade was out of town visiting a friend that day—and they had the tickets and receipts to prove it.

On September 16, after 6 weeks, 2,000 pages of testimony, and 164 exhibits—the case went to the jury. Attorney General Brown, however, wasn’t finished with
Confidential.
While the jury was locked away in its deliberations, Brown announced that he was preparing new charges against the magazine. The prosecution vowed that
Confidential
and Robert Harrison would be “reindieted,
regardless of the pending verdict.” And this time, Brown vowed, Harrison would not be able to escape extradition to Los Angeles. Hollywood circled the wagons to make sure nothing like
Confidential
would ever publish again; the Motion Picture Industry Council formed a permanent committee to combat scandal magazines. “What we are trying to do,” said a spokesman for the group, “is expose people connected with smear magazines and to alert the industry of their presence whenever they come around. Now that the wraps are off, we will act.” Ronald Reagan headed up the board.

On October 1, the jury—exhausted by thirteen days of contentious deliberation, a rumor of jury fixing, screaming fights over where to have lunch, and smog that got so bad that one day several jurors collapsed—reported that it was “hopelessly deadlocked.” Harrison, who had spent more than $400,000 defending
Confidential
—was emotionally and financially wiped out. Rather than go through another trial, he reached a plea bargain with Brown’s office. The Attorney General would drop the charges if
Confidential
would change its editorial policy and publish only flattering stories about movie stars and politicians. Harrison was required to take out ads in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles newspapers, announcing that
Confidential
was going to “eliminate exposé stories on the private lives of celebrities.” Most of the stars dropped their suits against the magazine—although Liberace ended up getting a $40,000 settlement for the article suggesting he was gay. After several issues of celebrity-friendly articles,
Confidential’s
circulation plummeted and Robert Harrison sold the magazine.
Confidential
limped along under various incarnations for over a decade.

Howard Rushmore, the former
Confidential
editor who was the key witness for the prosecution, briefly worked for other scandal magazines, but after
Confidential’s
collapse, the exposé business wasn’t the same, and Rushmore became depressed. One day, while riding up Madison Avenue in a taxi with his wife, Rushmore took a gun and blew out her brains, and then his own.

Robert Harrison disappeared from the headlines. When he ran into Walter Winchell on the street or at a nightclub, his old
ally would practically run away from him. “How did I get mixed up with
Confidential?”
Winchell used to complain to friends. “I still don’t understand it.” Harrison tried to launch a few other magazines, including an “investigative journalism” newsletter called “Inside News,” but none of his new ventures was very successful and he died virtually forgotten in 1978.

“This keyhole stuff is dead,” Harrison glumly said several years after he lost
Confidential.

He was wrong.
Confidential’
s legacy had just begun.

“The name of this program is
Night Beat,
and here’s what it is all about,” Mike Wallace said. It was 11
P.M
. on October 9, 1956, the night of the debut of his new television talk show, and Wallace was sitting on a four-legged stool in the studio of WABC in New York. The room was dark except for an unforgiving spotlight; smoke from his cigarette curled up and encircled his face, which had been ravaged by acne when he was a teenager. The scars were now an asset, however; they made him seem tough as well as handsome, as if he’d been through a battle. “It’s about
people
—people we think you will be curious about because they
are
news and because they
make
news,” he went on. “Even if
Night Beat
must occasionally step on some toes, we will try to get you stories of success and sorrow, trial and error, hope, folly, and frustrations.”

At the time, talk shows were tame, tepid chat fests. “They were pap, pabulum,” said Wallace. “You’d put the microphone and the flowers on the table between the interviewer and the interviewee and the interviewee would say ‘I wrote or sang or appeared in.’ It was basically that. There was obviously a thirst
for a different kind of interview.” And Wallace delivered it. He set out to grill his subjects, and
Night Beat,
broadcast locally four nights a week from eleven to midnight, soon became a citywide sensation. Every morning, blurry-eyed New Yorkers were abuzz over what some stumbling, stuttering movie star or government official or society swell had confessed under Wallace’s relentless interrogation. “Mike Wallace, a dark-haired 39-year-old with a prizefighter’s face and the velvety voice of a musical-comedy performer has become one of TV’s most talked about performers,” noted
Newsweek.
“For his guests’ pains, he has been called a muckraker and scandal monger; the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie of interviewers, as well as the bravest man on TV.”

Wallace did do some important political interviews—but it was the scandals and salacious revelations he managed to produce that generated the most attention. His show became a forum for sex and scandal. It made headlines when social arbiter Elsa Maxwell blurted out: “Sex is the most tiring thing in the world. I was never interested for one minute, ever.” Wallace asked society designer Mr. John why the fashion world attracted so many homosexuals. “That’s not worth talking about,” Mr. John snapped. When Jayne Mansfield was a guest, Wallace asked, “Are you irritated by the theory of evolution?” Of Zsa Zsa Gabor, he asked: “Tell me, Zsa Zsa, what are clothes
really
for?”

“As soon as Mike Wallace began his relentless prying and probing into the pasts, the actions, and the attitudes of the celebrities on his TV ‘hot seat,’ ”Nightbeat” exploded into a television sensation that delighted and sometimes shocked New Yorkers,” noted
Parade.
“The candor of Wallace’s approach, the daring of his caustic questions, and the frankness of his victims’ answers have started a revolution in television interviewing.”

Most journalists sneered and scoffed. “Mike Wallace, the television inquisitor with a liking for blondes, became famous by cross-examining celebrities on embarrassing intimate matters,” noted
Uncensored,
which, like
Confidential
and many other tamed scandal magazines, had taken to attacking sensationalism in journalism. “Sex has figured so largely in Wallace’s questioning of men and women famous in Hollywood, and Broadway, on Park Avenue and in industry that loud-mouthed labor leader Mike
Quill once emerged from Wallace’s verbal torture to call him ‘the Peeping Tom of TV.’ ” Critics maintained that Wallace, whose previous credits included hosting game shows, serving as the announcer on
The Lone Ranger
and
The Green Hornet,
and starring in the Broadway musical
The Reclining Figure,
was more of a performer or entertainer than a reporter. “Wallace burst into the Tinker Toy world of timorous TV like a young bull storming into a china shop,” noted
Hush-Hush.
“A moderately successful announcer even a few years ago, he became a national celebrity virtually overnight by getting answers to some rude questions no one else dared to ask on television. His wasn’t the cliché interview program, plugging a star’s upcoming epic or a delicatessen mogul’s new king-sized franks. Mike’s gimmick was to club his guests with queries on video’s four taboo subjects—religion, politics, sex, and personal habits.”

Wallace was accused of being a “muckracker and a scandal monger,” and of having a prurient focus on sex. “Why be afraid of it,” Wallace shot back. “As one of the basic drives in all human beings, it is a perfectly legitimate interest.”

It was also a real ratings grabber: by 1957, the year of the
Confidential
trial,
Night Beat
had captured a then astonishing audience of more than 1.5 million New Yorkers a night and ABC asked him to take the show—the young medium’s first real foray into the world of tabloid journalism and the true precursor to the “tabloid television” of the eighties—national.

Myron Leon Wallace was raised in what he would describe as a “Jewish/Irish section of Boston.” Brookline, Massachusetts, was hardly a working-class neighborhood; Wallace’s neighbors included John F. Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein. Both of Wallace’s parents had immigrated from Russia as children; his father Frank, who changed his last name from Wallik, was a wholesale grocer and later an insurance broker. Wallace, the youngest of four children, was a B-minus student with a fairly happy childhood, marred primarily by his severe acne, which scarred his ego as well as his skin. “In some strange way [it] helped form my personality and character,” he said. “You look into the mirror and you don’t like what you see.” Wallace’s brother, Irving, recalled that Mike
“was a moody kid, very self-centered, an egoist who was always searching for the purpose in life.”

Wallace graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939, married his college sweetheart, Norma Kaplan, and had two children, Peter and Chris. He held a number of jobs as a radio announcer, including one at a 500-watt station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the unlikely call letters WOOD-WASH—it was owned jointly by a furniture store and a laundry service. In 1946, after serving in naval communications during World War II, he moved to Chicago, where he did regular newscasts for the
Chicago Sun-Times
and appeared on leading daytime radio dramas, including
Road of Life, Ma Perkins,
and
The Guiding Light.
In 1948, he and Norma were divorced. “I married too young,” he said. His second wife was the beautiful and socially prominent actress Buff Cobb, whose grandfather was the humorist Irvin S. Cobb. In Chicago, he was the host of a number of television and radio shows, including
There’s One in Every Family
and
I’ll Buy That,
and, before their divorce in 1955, he and his wife co-hosted a breakfast-time television program called
The Mike and Buff Show.