The Godfather of Tabloid: Generoso Pope Jr. and the National Enquirer

6. A Second Start

When Pope made the move from the New York area—his editorial offices were in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, from 1962 to 1971, aside from a brief time on Madison Avenue—to Florida, he dumped practically his whole editorial staff and started over.1 As noted, Pope never had trouble firing people. Iain Calder recalls Pope firing his whole editorial staff, except for his two top executives, after he heard reports that his employees were interested in unionizing . Pope was so trigger-happy, so much of a godfather, it was considered unlucky to even look him in the eye when passing him. According to legend he once fired a man for stepping into an elevator ahead of him, only to be told, “I don’t work for you—I was just delivering lunch.”2 In his tabloid memoir Calder describes the atmosphere in the Madison Avenue offices as “Stalinesque.” In Florida Pope began a new cycle of hiring and firing. Calder, who followed Pope to Florida, said that by the late seventies and early eighties the Enquirer’s pool of fired employees “could have filled Carnegie Hall, maybe Yankee Stadium.”3 Pope even helped establish a small British colony in South Florida—his own little Fleet Street—because he soon began hiring and firing reporters from London who liked Florida so much they stayed on. He inadvertently created a pool of tabloid talent that his competitor Mike Rosenbloom decided to exploit by moving his Enquirer clones from Montreal to the 61 A฀SECOND฀START SIX THE GODFATHER OF TABLOID 62 West Palm Beach area. It was also Rosenbloom’s way of escaping a union drive in Montreal, and he, too, left nearly all his editorial employees behind. Those who followed him into the Sunbelt got no moving expenses, aside from a few key people, like John Vader, a former Montreal taxi driver who founded the Examiner and, eventually, the Sun for Rosenbloom.*There was certainly something fly-by-night about tabloids, and tabloid journalists seemed to be regarded as a renewable resource that could be “churned and burned,” as the lively inside Enquirer slang described Pope’s process of strip mining their ofThe chain-smoking publisher and editor strides through the Enquirer newsroom, cigarette in hand. (Photo by Ken Steinhoff / Palm Beach Post) * When the transvestite Devine in John Waters’s underground classic Pink Flamingoes summons America’s tabloid editors for a press conference, Vader is one of the editors depicted and mentioned by name. Waters was one of the few people to have a mail subscription to the Enquirer; in his memoir, Crackpot, he said it made him feel closer to the mainstream. A SECOND START 63 ten considerable talents. For several months his Globe and Examiner paid his new staff on a daily freelance rate—until the Internal Revenue Service stepped in and required management to start withholding taxes. Thus was created Florida’s “Tabloid Triangle,” where all six supermarket tabloids came to roost, eventually even including the Star, whose editorial offices had been in Tarrytown , New York. If the transfer to a small town in Florida wasn’t a stroke of genius, it was certainly a typical Gene Pope masterstroke, right down to the eccentricity of it. There were solid reasons for the move as well. He was having trouble with his unionized Teamster truckers, and his son Paul is probably right that he wanted to sever all connections with the mob, possibly including pressures to launder money through the paper. The powers of his Mafia protector, Frank Costello, had been on the decline for years. The bonus was that living was cheap and sweet in Lantana, basically a working-class town of about seven thousand. Across the drawbridge over the Intracoastal Waterway was South Palm Beach, where a three-mile stretch of beachfront was being developed for condos for retirees from the North. South Palm and Manalapan formed the southern tip of the barrier island that farther north was the real Palm Beach, the wealthy enclave developed by Henry Flagler, who built his railroad resort there in the twenties. Also across the narrow waterway from Lantana was the favorite bar of Enquirer employees, at an old beach motel that had been grandfathered in amidst the condo zoning. The Hawaiian was always crowded with Enquirer reporters at happy hour, and on weekends it served them as a country club, with...