The Godfather of Tabloid by Jack Vitek

Author:Jack Vitek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

You have to put yourself back. That stuff doesn’t sound that thrilling now, but at the time it was, like Katharine Hepburn coming out of her apartment after she had her face lifted. Now we’re so immune to celebs pumping gas and in their bikinis. But Pope had the first pictures of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on a yacht. The pictures were shot from a high angle, and they’re lying on the boat and she’s in her bikini, and that was a big deal. Pope loved Jackie O pictures, and he bought a lot of Ron Gallela’s stuff. Pope ran a picture of Frank Sinatra sitting on the beach in Cannes—that was where everybody got nailed—and he was fat. There was a time of his life when Sinatra was fat. The headline was “Old Big Belly” instead of “Old Blue Eyes.”4*

Celebrities simply didn’t ordinarily talk to or cooperate with the Enquirer. But then they hardly talked to any journalists except in carefully arranged pieces that did them some good, when they had just released a record, book, or film. Celebrity quotes in Enquirer stories were mostly “as told to a friend,” a hearsay standard of truth too sloppy for the mainstream press. Anyone who reads ten or twenty Enquirer celebrity stories of the era would see that the wording of these quotes is remarkably the same. As Jay Gourley wrote in his account of how he was thrown out of a Madison Avenue bar for photographing Harry Reasoner next to a beautiful bosomy blonde, “with the pictures in hand, obtaining the usual quotes about how Harry’s new love had changed his life would be a snap.”5 “Obtaining” would likely involve fashioning an “as-told-to-a-friend” story.

As celebrity stories were a staple of the Enquirer, many reporters dreaded being sent out on short notice to the West Coast, where for weeks, far from friends and family, they would be put under enormous pressure to troll for celebrity scandal. They were put up at the Chateau Marmont, the already famous hotel made more famous by John Belushi, who chose it for his final overdose in 1982. Considering that pressure, it’s not surprising that some reporters resorted to desperate and dubious means. By the eighties the paper was a pariah to TV and film stars, with a few notable exceptions, so reporters, according to a carefully crafted legend, relied on a network of personal trainers, hotel doormen, maids, butlers, and ordinary people who worked in small jobs on TV and film sets. Pope often boasted about the Enquirer’s “little people” network, and it was the core of his claim that his reporters got celebrities’ stories “whether they talk to us or not.” There was truth to Pope’s claim, as many of the paper’s best stories came from fired butlers and maids, who would also earn tens of thousands of dollars for their memoirs of celebrity service. In fact, $40,000 was about right for a resentful servant with a juicy inside story.

But sometimes the little people only seemed to talk.

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