Dish (26 page)

“My objection to the piece as it stands is that it’s a piece of sleazy journalism,”
*
Arledge told Smith. “It’s just not good enough for us.”

The piece was killed and so were any chances Geraldo had for staying at ABC. Soon after the Monroe flap, Geraldo’s girlfriend, C. C. Dyer, who was also his associate producer and would later become his wife, was accused of using an ABC messenger to pick up an ounce of marijuana from a friend at CNN. Dyer claimed that the marijuana, which had been hidden in a package containing news videotapes, was not for her but for another friend. Dyer resigned and Roone Arledge, seeing the incident as an opportunity to get rid of her boyfriend as well, called Geraldo at home to tell him it was time for him too to part company with the network.

“I want you to quit,” Arledge told his former star reporter.

“Bullshit,” Rivera said. “I’m not quitting.”

“Show me the contract, Geraldo,” Arledge said. He knew that Rivera hadn’t been given a new contract and had been working for ABC—at $1 million a year—based on a verbal agreement and a handshake. He was now being told that the agreement wasn’t binding. “Where’s the contract?” Arledge kept saying to him. “We have no contract.”

“Are you saying I’m fired?” Rivera asked.

“You can use whatever words you want,” Arledge said. “But I don’t think you’re going to work here anymore.”

Like Mike Wallace nearly twenty years before him, Geraldo had been hired by ABC to create controversy and was then fired for creating controversy. The Marilyn Monroe story in particular and ABC’s overall experience with Geraldo epitomized the dilemma the networks faced when dealing with tabloid news. They craved the ratings and the publicity, but flinched at the disapproval. Once Geraldo succeeded in helping establish
20/20,
he became an embarrassment.

“Geraldo did two interesting things for ABC News,” Roone Arledge told Marc Gunther. “He helped us tremendously up to a point, in our early growth. And he helped ABC News immensely by leaving.”

“I feel like Rocky,” Carol Burnett declared. The comedienne stood on the steps of the Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 11, 1981, surrounded by photographers, camera crews, and fans. Her usually elastic face was fixed in an expression of steely determination; her bright red hair had faded into its natural gray-streaked brown. Burnett was about to slug it out in court with the
National Enquirer,
the tabloid bully that no one else in Hollywood would dare fight. “I have gone the distance,” she told the throng of admirers. The crowd cheered.

“We love you!”

“We’re behind you!”

“We hope you win!”

Carol had endured sleepless nights, years of depositions and subpoenas and disastrous negotiations, and had spent more than $200,000 in legal fees in her $10 million lawsuit against the
Enquirer
over an item that appeared on March 2, 1976. The 66-word story said that a “boisterous” Burnett had an argument with Henry Kissinger at a Washington restaurant and then later
“traipsed around the place” offering diners a taste of her food. Then, according to the item, Burnett “accidentally knocked a glass of wine over one diner—and started giggling instead of apologizing.”

Burnett was furious. “I was lied about and I don’t think anyone has the right to do that,” Burnett said. “It portrays me as being drunk. It portrays me as being rude. It portrays me as being uncaring. It portrays me as being physically abusive. It is disgusting and it is a pack of lies.”

The
Enquirer
had tried to keep the case from going to trial. It had run a retraction and apology, but the apology had done nothing to mollify Burnett. “It’s like you’re hit by a hit-and-run driver,” she said, “and you’re in the hospital and they send you a bouquet of crabgrass.”

Lawyers for the
National Enquirer
also tried to offer the actress an out-of-court settlement. Burnett had settled a similar case before. In 1971,
Inside
TV and
Movie World
published stories that quoted sources saying the star would condone the use of marijuana by her children. After suing the magazines for $2 million each, the actress eventually settled out of court. This time, however, Burnett wasn’t interested in a deal. “Every time they tried to settle, I said, ‘No. I want to go to trial. You are the bad guys,’ ” Carol said. “If this sucker goes on fifty years, I’m going to be there in a rocking chair facing the jury.”

Then the
Enquirer
apparently considered playing dirty. Talk reached Burnett that some tabloid reporters were snooping around her daughter, Carrie, who was having drug problems. Burnett’s friends were worried that the
Enquirer
was going to blackmail her by threatening to run the dirt on her daughter. Carol made a preemptive strike and, like Tony Orlando had done two years earlier, gave the entire story to
People
magazine, which put it on the cover. “Carol Burnett’s Nightmare,” read the October 1, 1979 headline. “For the first time, she reveals her daughter’s battle to conquer drugs.”

“It was a wrenching story, and Carol told us everything,” said
People
editor Dick Stolley. “It only enhanced Carol’s standing in the film community. It was a big seller for us and it helped establish
People
as a place to go if you had a terrible secret to tell. We would handle it gracefully and sympathetically.”
*

By the late seventies, the
National Enquirer
had lost the virtual monopoly on gossip it had enjoyed only a few years earlier due to Time Inc.’s launch of
People
in 1974, followed that same year by the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s
Star,
a tabloid like the
Enquirer
except with four-color photography. The upscale papers were also venturing into gossip. In 1977—over the objections of Bob Woodward—the
Washington Post
added a gossip column, written by Nancy Collins. “You can write about anyone but Mrs. Graham’s friends,” her editor once instructed her. Soon after violating that rule, “The Gossip Column” was axed.
†

Even the New York Times Company entered the fray. In 1977—much to the dismay of many
Times
editors and writers—the company spent $3 million to launch
Us
magazine, a blatant rip-off of
People.
The publisher himself seemed embarrassed by the venture. “It’s not going to be my favorite dish of tea,” publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said. “But it’s the kind of thing people want to read.” The magazine was doomed to failure by the antigossip culture of the company that produced it. An editor’s letter in the premiere issue noted, somewhat condescendingly, that the magazine was “created for a generation that has grown up in an era of visual communication.”
Us
magazine went through $10 million and five editors in ten years, but didn’t turn a profit. The New York Times Company was so desperate to unload it that at one point, executives at the company offered to
give
the magazine to Generoso Pope if he would assume the debt
and subscription list, according to someone familiar with the negotiations. After investigating, Pope passed.
*

The competition among all these publications became fierce. Since they were targeted for women, and since they depended on newsstand sales rather than subscriptions, they tended to be bought and displayed at supermarket checkout counters. By the late seventies there were more publications than there was space at many checkout counters. If a new arrival was to succeed, it would literally have to displace one of its competitors on the racks. “A magazine really has to move briskly to hold its own at the checkout,” the
New York Times
noted in 1979. “The competition is so fierce that some checkouts are magazine saturated. If a new publication gets on display, a slow mover must be booted out to make room for it.”

Space at the checkout counter wasn’t the only thing the tabloids were competing for; they were fighting one another for stories, too. Since a magazine earned its place on the checkout counter racks by delivering more celebrity gossip than its competitors, and since all these publications were writing about the same narrow world of movie and television personalities, the scramble for the scandalous scoop intensified tremendously. At the
National Enquirer
the dozen or so articles editors were each required to submit thirty story ideas every day. The story ideas were reviewed at a weekly editorial meeting called The Hour of the Jackals, according to former articles editor P. J. Corkery: “It was usually not held in the offices, but in a Holiday Inn on the beach where dozens of martini pitchers, beer mugs, brandy glasses, and Bloody Mary mugs with the celery untouched littered the table. A couple of editors would follow their cheese smothered steaks with hot fudge sundaes. ‘I want to be buried in a piano case,’ said one as he plunged into his second sundae…. Why hold the meetings on Fridays? ‘Because,’ I as told, ‘that gives the janitor time to wash the blood from the walls.’ ”

After the embarrassing and expensive Carol Burnett suit, however, the
Enquirer
also established more rigorous procedures
for verifying what it published. Pope hired a former Time Inc. employee named Ruth Annan to head up a twenty-six-person fact-checking team. Annan instituted a fact-checking system which—although it would do little to raise the credibility of the tabloid in the eyes of its critics—would make the
National Enquirer
one of the most strictly verified publications in America. Annan required three sources for most stories, including one who was on tape. “They’re so concerned about scrubbing up their image,” complained one reporter, “that I was actually asked to get somebody on tape for a story about how to spruce up leftovers.”
Enquirer
reporter R. Couri Hay complained: “Gossip is so documented now it’s not even gossip anymore. I know people in hospitals dying of complications from face-lifts, but I can’t print it unless I know the name of the doctor, the time of the operation, the room number in the hospital, and have two eyewitnesses.”

The rigorous fact-checking led to huge clashes between the freewheeling reporters and Annan’s staff, which was sometimes referred to internally as the Secret Police or the IRS. In fact, some would allege, the fact-checking process was so strict that it encouraged reporters to fudge not facts but sources. To get the requisite three sources, according to some
Enquirer
foes, reporters would often give tip fees to people who hadn’t actually given them stories. The canceled checks would be “proof that they had sources. Sometimes reporters used even more elaborate tricks to get around the rigorous fact-checkers. Once, according to P. J. Corkery, a reporter had a story about a cow who glowed in the dark because a UFO had contaminated it with some alien substance that gave it a neon effect. Pope wanted a credible scientist on the record discussing the glowing cow. The reporter produced a taped interview with a Nobel Prize winner, clearly declaring he was “baffled” by the story. Ruth Annan was suspicious. She was right to be. The reporter did, in fact, interview the Nobel Prize winner, but when he identified himself as being with the
National Enquirer,
the scientist said he was “baffled and confounded that you would have the effrontery to call me up and waste my time.” The reporter took what he wanted from the professor’s taped comments, and, with a little editing, inserted his own questions. When the truth came out, the reporter was fired.