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In Hollywood, whose movie colony supplies most of the subjects for its articles, the "Confidential treatment" has become such a threat that confidence men have tried to collect $500 to $1,000 by offering "to keep your name out of Confidential." The magazine gets its tips from bellhops, call girls, private detectives and paid tipsters, writes all its articles in its shabby Manhattan offices on Broadway. Though it offers up to $1,000 an article, few working newsmen will write for it, and almost all its bylines are pseudonyms of Confidential's editors.
A Boss. Confidential's publisher, Robert Harrison, 51, would make a racy subject himself for an article in the magazine. A sleek-haired, gruff-talking showoff, Bachelor Harrison drives a white Cadillac, making the rounds of New York City nightclubs "wherever romance beckons me." Manhattan-born, Harrison started out in publishing after working as a writer for movie trade papers, bringing out such magazines as Beauty Parade, Wink, Titter and Flirt.
Short of cash but obviously enjoying his work, Harrison often modeled for pictures himself, posing as everything from a white slaver (with pith helmet) to an irate husband spanking his wife. On one project for one of his magazines, Harrison was picked up by New Jersey police (and released) for taking pornographic pictures: he had driven a carload of models to a Jersey golf course and had started taking pictures of them cavorting across the fairways half-nude.
The Post Office Department has made Harrison clean up his magazines before putting them in the mails, and New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice filed a complaint against them. But he was undeterred. When he saw the popularity of the Kefauver crime hearings on TV, he decided that "inside stuff" was even better than cheesecake.
A Smear. In the first issue of Confidential, Harrison ran an article buttering up Hearst Columnist Walter Winchell. It paid off. Winchell promptly became a one-man promotion agency for the magazine, fired with new enthusiasm for it every time Confidential ran another article praising him or attacking his enemies. (Harrison obligingly became a contributor to Winchell's Damon Runyon Memorial Fund.) Harrison also found a way to use Confidential articles over and over again in another of his magazines, Whisper ("The Stones Behind the Headlines").
Confidential's small staff works under Editor Howard Rushmore, onetime Communist who was fired as a Hearst reporter (TIME, Nov. 1), partly for contributing in his spare time to Confidential. The editors write Confidential's articles in breezy, breathless tabloid prose, always promising more than they give ("This article will shock you"). One of the best descriptions of the kind of reporting in Confidential and its imitators came from one of the imitators, Top Secret. Said Top Secret: "How cunningly the smear is constructed. It says nothing with finality. It doesn't come right out and claim . . . Everything is left neatly up in the air, letting the heavy steel wrecking ball swing freely, hit as it may and where."