In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal
magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and
transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network
of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including
sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert
Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a
media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American
newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday
Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing
multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of
California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for
obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los
Angeles trial.
This is Confidential's story, detailing how the magazine
revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and
beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines,
and tawdry stories, Confidential exploded the candy-coated image of
movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It
transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly
people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It
shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and
make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, and true.
Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush--of
secrets, closets, and sexual taboos--and the beginning of our age of
tell-all exposure.
