Stars!
Scandal!
Truth!
The magazine,
and the man,
who whetted
the public appetite
for celebrity secrets
JOYCE RAVID
RANDOM HOUSE
Sometimes the past is prologue. That is what
Henry E. Scott ’ 73 learned about the contemporary celebrity-gossip culture by writing
about a magazine that ceased publication a lifetime ago.
His recent book, Shocking True Story: The Rise
and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most
Scandalous Scandal Magazine,” has a wonderfully
lurid cover appropriate to the subject matter. It
might also suggest Scott to be a bit on the
seamy side as an author. But Scott — who
graduated with a degree in political science and
has had a successful career in publishing and
other professions — is a serious scholar. It is
Scott’s subject, magazine publisher Robert
Harrison, who had an appetite for the seamy.
Scott’s research brings Harrison back to life
more than three decades after he died, and his
exploits seem ripped from the headlines during
this 21st-century era of celebrity gossip.
Growing up in Fayetteville during the 1950s,
Scott knew nothing about Confidential or about
the sociology of celebrity gossip. Scott’s fascination with those realms blossomed much later,
1997 to be precise, when on a flight from New
Just like the magazine that inspired his book, Henry E. Scott ’ 73 names names while examining the way Confidential chased gossip about celebrities in the 1950s, including Marilyn
Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sammy Davis Jr. and scores of others.
York to Istanbul, he began reading the James
Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential, a crime thriller
that fictionalized the magazine. He became so
engrossed, he says, that “I landed in that exotic
city and spent the next two days in my hotel
room, unable to pull myself away” from the
book.
Returning to New York, Scott searched for a
book about Confidential. “Not finding one, I
decided to write my own,” he says. The magazine’s cover motto blared, “Tells the facts and
names the names.” Scott’s book does the same.
Scott located all issues of the magazine, which
yielded unending controversy from 1952 through
1957. He enhanced his research from the issues
of the magazine by finding Al DeStefano, a
lawyer for and friend of Harrison; Sherry
Britton, a burlesque performer who dated
Harrison; Ted Gottfried, who tape-recorded and
retained interviews with Howard Rushmore, a
controversial writer-editor at Confidential; and
Susie Schrenck, who shared materials she collected while researching a thesis about the magazine. In addition, Scott located information in
libraries and archives from New York to Los
Angeles, including Chicago, Washington, D.C.,
and Mexico, Mo.
