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.