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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: exposés 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.