Throughout the Thirties and Forties, the major Hollywood studios were meticulous and hammer headed about protecting privileged stars from outside scandal.
The studio machinery, notably at MGM, could sweep anything — sleazy affairs, nasty divorces, boozing, drug addiction, nasty auto accidents, outright criminality and even murder — under the rug. The stars were big money makers, and their just HAD to be protected.
By the Fifties, the studios’ grip on movie making began to significantly loosen. The same could be said of the collective studio ability to control and shush up unwanted scandal. This was especially true with the advent of a then little-known publication in New York, Confidential, published by a miscreant by the name of Robert Harrison.
We were inspired to these recollections by the publication of Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story Of Hollywood’s Scandal Magazine by Samantha Barbas (Chicago Review Press), which will disclose perhaps more than you wanted to know about this prototypical publication.
Confidential prided itself on telling readers what the gossip columnists and show biz journalists couldn’t or wouldn’t. The result was traumatic for studio publicity machines. They could no longer protect even the biggest stars. They and their handlers (agents, managers, etc.) were pretty much on their own. The wheeling and dealing began.
For example, Rory Calhoun at one point in his career found himself embroiled in the effort to hide the homosexuality of Rock Hudson. Calhoun’s agent was Henry Willson, who was gay. His biggest client prize was Hudson, and Willson went to great lengths to prevent the actor from having his career ruined by being outed.
When Confidential sniffing around Hudson’s personal life in the mid-Fifties, Willson supposedly bargained information about Calhoun’s jailbird past in exchange for dropping the Hudson sizzler. The subsequent disclosures about Rory’s less than admirable past — he spent several years in a Federal prison — actually helped reinforce his career his bad boy image.
Some tidbits from Confidential:
Red Skelton was in the Fifties and beloved movie and tv actor/comedian of protean gifts and a wide following. By 1953, though, reports began to seep out of personal and marital problems. Confidential smoked out the real story: Skelton was an alcoholic, who has violent arguments with his wife. Several times in the past year, Skelton has galloped through the house, waving (a) gun and staggering…. And, as per author Barbas, another thing: he liked to watch ‘dirty movies.’
Operatic leading man Mario Lanza, star of 1951’s The Great Caruso, was revealed to be a real handful. According to author Barbas, depressed, alcoholic, reclusive, wildly temperamental and a binge eater.
Confidential decreed that Lanza was such an emotional problem child that many of his friends have expressed the belief a psychiatrist should slow him down. His ego is astounding.
Song and dance man Dan Dailey was in the late Forties and early Fifties having his share of mental and marital hurdles. By 1951 he decided to seek admission to the Menninger Clinic for psychiatric problems. The conventional Hollywood fan magazines reported about his journey to recovery aided by religion. “Modern Screen described Dailey as a devout Christian and “man of faith,” writes author Barbas.
Confidential expressed another view. Daily was ambivalent sexually and was a cross dresser. Writes Barbas: (The magazine) was right that Dailey was a cross dresser. According to film historian William Mann, Dailey’s habit of wearing women’s clothes — whether for gags or otherwise — was legend in Hollywood.
Barbas writes that Confidential didn’t say outright that Dailey was gay, but it implied as much.
Soon, stars who felt themselves wronged by Confidential (notably Maureen O’Hara and Dorothy Dandridge) fought back — in court. By the late Fifties, the magazine was gone, out of business. The studio publicity machinery could relax a bit.
Joe & Frank have given us a very good precise article on CONFIDENTIAL magazine based on the book Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story Of Hollywood’s Scandal Magazine by Samantha Barbas, but it’s not quite the true story…
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on economic warfare, preventive direct action and PROPAGANDA.
Later that year Wisner established OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, a program to influence the domestic American media.
Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”
CONFIDENTIAL magazine, like the National Enquirer and all the other scandal sheets that followed, were CIA assets too.
They say you will find more truth in the National Enquirer, hidden in between the UFO/Alien baby type stories than you will in the New York Times.
Truth that is often hidden in plain sight, but of course being hidden in a scandal sheet, who would take it seriously?
Henry Luce the owner of a large media empire that included TIME magazine, was another key player in OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, as were all your famous journalists and TV news anchors, from the likes of Walter Winchell, Walter Cronkite to just about anyone you can name.
Now the public at large, you and I… We don’t idolize BANK$TER$, industrialists and the filthy rich… Instead, we look up to and are inspired by HOLLYWOOD movie stars, music stars. They have a great affect on our everyday boring lives…
And to break the boredom, to give our lives some spice we need a SCANDAL fix.
CONFIDENTIAL magazine was just a natural progression of the scandal ridden newspapers that went before it, only by the 1950’s the sexual exploits of the stars was also something the CIA could use for political, social engineering purposes or simply distraction.
It is even admitted by the US government, that 2 million people work for the intelligence community, almost double that of the entire military… You say to yourself, WHAT!
In the 1970’s, they admitted that some 20,000 businesses were FRONTS for the intelligence community, with most employees never knowing they were doling the CIA’s bidding. You can only imagine what that number is today?
The incredible irony of the HOLLYWOOD studios protecting their stars, their ‘assets’ from the likes of CONFIDENTIAL magazine, is that with all things in the corrupt paranoid world of intelligence, is that the elite ‘families’ that control them, always play both sides… They create their own opposition, and profit from both, whether in war or peace.
And so, in opposition to the so-called Mainstream Media, they also created the “Alternate Media” which as CIA Director William Casey said, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
Which really means, you’ll be so confused, so bewildered, you won’t know and won’t even care, what is true or false…
And that, is the situation we have today, it’s CONFIDENTIAL magazine taken to the ultimate level, a society that totally worships celebrity, a society that always needs to know what’s “trending now” rather than what’s REALLY happening…
And as long as the masses are content to be robbed blind and lied to from the cradle to the grave… As long as they are content to remain ignorant and indifferent…
The BANK$TER$ or whatever name you want to give the filthy rich that rule and control us, couldn’t be happier… As their scandals, their massive, murderous crimes will NEVER, EVER get exposed!