Dish (20 page)

People
was rewarded for its kindness. Stars lined up to appear in the magazine. One of them was Elizabeth Taylor.
People’s
original cover girl, Stolley discovered, sold every time she appeared on the cover. One of the things that the
People
editors realized was that a celebrity didn’t sell well just because he or she was famous; the star had to be
doing
something to be newsworthy. “Elizabeth Taylor was always doing
something
—getting married, getting divorced or having medical emergencies,” said Stolley. “She had a great sense of drama about herself… and she regularly made herself available” to
People
in the early days. “Readers loved her,” says Stolley. “She represented tough American glamour at its best.”

Early on,
People
wasn’t always reverential to old stars. In its second issue, the magazine ran an interview with Lucille Ball. “She looked, but did not act, her age,” noted the writer, who reported the sixty-three-year-old actress’s diatribes against contemporary films (she blasted them as “a marathon of sex and perversion”), Marlon Brando, who was starring in the sexually provocative
Last Tango In Paris
(“I’ll hit him when I see him,” Ball said. “I’ll punch him right in the nose, and I hope I have these rings on.”), and her loose false eyelashes. (“Goddamn this thing won’t stay on!”) Angry letters to the editor followed.

When Joan Crawford died,
People
commissioned gossip columnist Doris Lilly to write an article about her. Lilly, who lived in the same building as Crawford and was quite friendly with the actress, believed that the Hollywood legend had committed suicide and had compelling evidence to support the theory.
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Lilly
also had delicious anecdotes about Crawford’s eccentricities.
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“The last time I saw her was two weeks before she died,” Lilly wrote. “She had hurt her back scrubbing floors. We gossiped. Joan Crawford
loved
to gossip. She said, ‘The so-called actresses of today look like they don’t bathe and they don’t memorize their lines. I think most of them took acting lessons from the A&P.’ ” Lilly also wrote that Joan Crawford had a love affair with Clark Gable—which would have been a big scoop for
People.
It, and much of the rest of the article for which Lilly was paid $500, was cut.
People
wasn’t interested in the Golden Age of Hollywood and it wasn’t interested in exposing love affairs or other scandals.

Even during this honeymoon period, however,
People
clashed with a few celebrities. Warren Beatty was one. Beatty had a peculiar relationship with the press. During the filming of his breakthrough 1961 movie,
Splendor in the Grass,
Beatty was living with Joan Collins, whom he had recently convinced to get an abortion, and co-star Natalie Wood was married to Robert Wagner, in what was widely believed to be one of the film world’s happiest marriages. Then columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Beatty and Wood were “staying up nights rehearsing their next day’s love scenes.” Hollywood was shocked.
†
Around that time Beatty had another unpleasant media experience when he was interviewed by Joe Hyams for
Show Business Illustrated.
Beatty rambled almost incoherently during much of the conversation, pausing only to scratch his head or pick his nose. Hyams was shocked by the number of times “fuck” erupted from Beatty’s mouth at a time when movie stars didn’t talk like that. Hyams was not impressed and said so in the article.

After that, Beatty, for the most part, refused to give inter
views. “Most of what I say is unprintable, anyway,” Beatty told Rex Reed. “Most movie stars are not interesting, so to sell papers and magazines in the fading publications field, a writer has to end up writing his ass off to make somebody more interesting than he is, right? What do I need with publicity?”

But in 1975, Beatty was releasing
Shampoo
and very much wanted publicity.
People
was the perfect outlet. “I wanted to challenge the assumption that a hypersexual character with women, a Don Juan, is a misogynist or a latent homosexual,” said Beatty, who had been linked with Michelle Phillips, Julie Christie, Jean Seberg, Susannah York, Leslie Caron, and others. “Even the promiscuous feel pain.” The profile was mostly flattering, but reporter Barbara Wilkins reported an alleged encounter in which Beatty tried to seduce a photographer on one of his movies, unzipping her pants on the set of the film and getting her fired when she rebuffed his advances. After the story appeared, Beatty called Stolley, furiously denying that any such incident occurred and demanding a retraction.

“We had several screaming conversations,” says Stolley. “I tried to calm him down, tried to do damage control.” Stolley refused to run a retraction, and got ready to be blackballed by the power elite of Hollywood. It didn’t happen. “I think Warren was more isolated than we thought at this point,” Stolley said. “No one in Hollywood would believe his story, and I think we worried unnecessarily.” Eventually, Beatty dropped the issue, and the two men ran into each other at a Hollywood party, shook hands, and chatted about politics. “Being on the cover of
People
was a pretty big deal then,” said Stolley. “No one was going to alienate himself from the magazine entirely.”

People
was on its way to becoming one of the most successful magazines in the history of publishing. Stolley quickly realized that he had to cater to public tastes, not dictate them as
Life
had done. The strategy was a radical departure for upscale magazines. It was also a survival tactic.

In a further effort to avoid the same fate as
Life, People
avoided the high price of postage and in its early years, was available only on newsstands. It lived or died, therefore, on the appeal
of its cover. A dud meant a $1 million drop in ad and newsstand revenue. Choosing a cover was the most important decision for each issue, and Stolley carefully studied patterns of what worked and what didn’t. “We were very pragmatic,” said Stolley. “If someone didn’t work well on the cover, that person didn’t make the cover again.” Some would call it a movement toward populism, but many in the industry blasted it as shameless pandering. Stolley remained unapologetic. “A cover is not a benediction,” he bristled. “It’s a marketing tool.”

Early on, Stolley found that imaginative or artistically compelling covers weren’t necessarily good sellers.
People’s
second cover depicted eccentric billionaire John Paul Getty. It was a stunning photo, taken by famed
Life
photographer Alfred Eisenstadt, in which Getty was backlit, his craggy, deeply lined face in stark contrast to a perfect, delicate daffodil he was holding. It bombed on the newsstands.

Celebrities were just about the only subjects that could be counted on to sell well. Politicians almost always sold poorly. Much to everyone’s surprise, Teddy Kennedy was one of the first year’s worst sellers. He was beaten by Joan Kennedy. Even Watergate, the hottest political story in the country, didn’t interest readers.
People
ran three Watergate covers during its early years. “They didn’t sell worth a damn,” said Stolley. Ideally, the cover subject had to be recognized by eighty-five percent of Americans—which ruled out most politicians and many actors. “Liv Ullman is an example,” said Stolley. “She had acted in mostly art house films. She may have
deserved
a
People
cover, but she didn’t belong there.” Once, when
People
was doing an issue on celebrity gardening, Stolley realized that none of the actors in the story was a big enough star for the cover. He called his good friend, actress Ann-Margret. “I’m in a jam,” he told the actress. “Do you ever garden?”

The actress was somewhat perplexed. “I have a gardener,” she said.

Stolley was desperate. “Didn’t you ever plant a seed when you were a kid?”

“Yes,” Ann-Margret said.

“That’s good enough for me,” Stolley declared. “I’m going to have you photographed in the next twenty-four hours.”

Common wisdom held that singers and musicians didn’t sell well on covers, but when an Olivia Newton John cover nearly sold out, the editors reconsidered the rules. Television actors, surprisingly, usually sold better than movie stars. Themes emerged and Stolley developed what is known as “Stolley’s Formula.” It went:

The findings, which critics considered the ultimate triumph of marketing over journalism, turned on its head the conventional hierarchy of news, where nothing was more sacred than politics, and television was perhaps the lowest order. Beyond Stolley’s Formula, he devised what he called the X Factor. Some people just fascinated the readers. Mary Tyler Moore, much to his surprise, didn’t. “Under my formula, she should have sold through the roof,” said Stolley. “The public loved her, but they had no curiosity about her. There was no X factor.”

Then, in 1977,
People
discovered a Pandora’s Box. Tony Orlando was having troubles and he didn’t want
People
to censor them; he wanted the world to know what he was going through. A few years earlier, Orlando had been very hot, with his own television series and several number one hit songs, but he had suffered a nervous breakdown and dropped out of television for a while. The singer’s publicist called
People
to say Orlando wanted to talk, so the magazine sent reporter Judy Kessler to interview him. Once Orlando started talking, he didn’t seem able to stop. He told about being unfaithful to his wife, about his cocaine abuse, and about the suicide of his dear friend, Freddie Prinze. The story ran with the headline: “Tony Orlando’s Breakdown.”
It became one of the magazine’s all-time best-sellers. As a result,
People
began exploiting what Stolley called O.P.P.—Other People’s Problems. “We realized that for a number of reasons, a lot of prominent people would talk to us about these problems if we sent a sympathetic reporter and photographer,” said Stolley. “They felt this was helpful to them to tell America who they were and what was happening in their lives.” And they discovered that America loved reading about it.
People
started out as a feelgood magazine, but by the late 1970s, melodramatic stories about the traumas suffered by stars became its staple. Karen Carpenter’s anorexia, Drew Barrymore’s drug problems, the breakdown in Farrah Fawcett’s marriage appeared regularly. The stories all came from the stars themselves, and
People
treated O.P.P.s with extraordinary sympathy.

People’s
greatest innovation was packaging tabloid content in an upscale package with the imprimatur of a reputable publisher. Circulation hit 1 million in less than a year and 2 million within three years. In the first several issues, advertisers stayed away, but as the magazine caught on with readers, advertisers flocked to buy pages. Within eighteen months,
People
was in the black, a record;
Sports Illustrated,
by comparison, had taken ten years to turn a profit.
People’s
advertising pages shot up from 601 pages in 1974 to more than 3,000 pages in less than four years. It went on to become the most successful magazine in the history of publishing. The rest of the publishing world didn’t know whether to throw stones or follow suit.

Other celebrity publications sprang up. Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, who had been having huge success with tabloids in England, was trying to enter the American market. Murdoch had tried to buy the
National Enquirer
from Pope, and got Pope’s buddy Roy Cohn to try to broker the deal. Talks fell through. Around this time, Pope told associates that he turned down an offer to buy the paper for $50 million—and Murdoch was used to buying on the cheap. So in 1974, the same year that Time-Life launched
People,
Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch started publishing the
National Star.
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It was somewhat slicker
than the
Enquirer,
though less slick than
People,
and Murdoch promoted it with a million-dollar ad campaign.

In 1976, the tabloidization of the mainstream press went into high gear when Murdoch bought the intellectually elite but financially beleaguered
New York Post.
Murdoch transformed the tabloid with screaming headlines and a full page of gossip, and went after the
Daily News’
s blue collar readers, ridiculing its competitor for trying to be like the
New York Times.

The
Daily News
hired Igor Cassini’s former assistant, Liz Smith, to write a daily gossip column. “I said, ‘Well, I just don’t think people want to read gossip anymore,’ ” she said. “I guess I just thought the Winchell thing had ended.” She was wrong; New York’s tabloid wars had begun.

Within three years after
People
was founded, virtually every publisher in the country had entered into the field. While Dick Stolley was getting credit—or blame—for being a pioneer of celebrity journalism, he was, in fact, just traveling over territory that Gene Pope had blazed long ago. Stolley didn’t invent—or even rediscover—personality journalism. He just made it respectable.

“They stole our idea,” said
National Enquirer
columnist Mike Walker. “They ripped us off.” Stolley maintained that
People
was in no way inspired by the
National Enquirer,
but it’s hard to believe that Time Inc. didn’t at least notice the
National Enquirer,
which in 1974 had a circulation that was nudging 4 million—and climbing. “If not the mother or father” of
People
magazine, said
National Enquirer
editor Iain Calder, “we’re certainly the midwife.”

In the three years since
People
was founded, gossip had gone from virtual extinction to a renaissance, and the trend was lamented by journalists everywhere. Outraged cover stories appeared in magazines like
Esquire, Newsweek,
and
New York
magazine. “Gossip columns, which had all but vanished with the deaths of Winchell, Kilgallen, Hopper and Parsons—not to mention their papers—are back in bolder typeface than ever,” noted a
Newsweek
cover story in May 1976. “Not since the giddy old days of American journalism has so much space been devoted to so little.”