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

15. Star Wars: Hollywood Versus the Enquirer

By the mid-seventies the National Enquirer was routinely feeding on Hollywood ’s underbelly. The film factories manufactured the dreams and created leading ladies and men, and the Enquirer poked a hole and deflated the fantasies , revealing the warts, wrinkles, and sags in the idols, not to mention trumpeting their offscreen bad behavior. The idols were stalked and caught off guard in unglamorous private moments by the new legion of paparazzi supported by Pope’s tabloids and their clones. Pope made it known that he would pay $250 for a story tip that panned out, significantly more for one that turned into a cover story—to journalists, to agents ratting out their rivals, or to simple civilian rodents. In at least one bizarre instance, the Enquirer ’s source was the subject of the item as well. Before Tom Arnold married Roseanne Barr, he tipped off the paper on his girlfriend’s activities, behind her back, because being her lover enhanced his status in Hollywood. Pope and his senior editors vigorously defended their paid anonymous sources as just as good as anyone else’s anonymous sources. Of course, defending the anonymity of a paid source would have looked absurd in court, though it never came to that in the trivial world of gossip journalism. While studio flacks constructed romances for their glamorous stable of stars, the Enquirer fed on the celebrities’ infidelities, divorces, alcoholism, sui177 STAR฀฀ WARS:฀฀HOLLYWOOD฀ VERSUS฀฀ THE฀฀ENQUIRER FIFTEEN THE GODFATHER OF TABLOID 178 Pope kept his finger on the popular pulse. His exclusive cover featuring Elvis’s coffin kicked off the rock-and-roll king’s swift rise to iconic status after a long fall from grace. (Photo by Nick Borgert / Palm Beach Post) cide attempts, and romantic peccadilloes. There seems little doubt that Pope enjoyed his paper’s role as Hollywood’s spoiler, but there’s no doubt at all that his five million readers had a voracious appetite for the stories. Together Hollywood and the Enquirer created opposing binaries, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful; and the American public, the consumers of Hollywood ’s product, seemed to relish the whole story. There’s really little evidence that Pope’s star bashing did much harm in the box office. Perhaps in the end the Enquirer served Hollywood by intensifying the public’s interest in its product, but it infuriated the tarnished angels, and they plotted revenge. The first salvo in the most decisive battle in the war between the Enquirer and the stars followed a seemingly inconsequential gossip item of some sixty-five words and four short sentences that ran in the first week of March STAR WARS 179 1976. The Enquirer’s editorial apparatus routinely assembled its gossip items and columns out of tips and leads too minor or weak for a full story and sometimes on almost nothing at all. After a libel suit that called fifteen witnesses and presented eight depositions, as well as a retraction published by the Enquirer, this one turned out to be definitely of the latter category: “At a Washington restaurant, a boisterous Burnett had a loud argument with another diner, Henry Kissinger. Then she traipsed around the place offering everyone a bite of her dessert. But Carol really raised eyebrows when she accidentally knocked a glass of wine over one diner and started giggling instead of apologizing. The guy wasn’t amused and ‘accidentally’ spilled a glass of water over Carol’s dress.”1 Unfortunately for the Enquirer the item wasn’t complete fiction, because there was a real city called Washington, a former secretary of state named Henry Kissinger, and a restaurant in the city where plausibly those elements might have combined with the real Carol Burnett. While most stars found it possible to ignore inconsequential items of this sort, however annoying, and while most of those items floated in a gray area where it was difficult to imagine grounds for a libel suit, Carol Burnett decided to sue, with a vengeance. Both her parents were alcoholics, she said, and she was practically a teetotaler; she deeply resented the insinuation that she was drunk. It seemed a libel suit highly unlikely to succeed. She was a public figure who under the prevailing case law would have to meet a tougher standard of damages where it seemed difficult to imagine any damages...