Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine [Hardcover]

  In the 1950s,Confidentialmagazine, America’s first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars’ secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities’ carefully constructed images and built a media empire.Confidentialbecame the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassingTime,Life, and theSaturday Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial.
   This isConfidential’s story, detailing how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines, and tawdry stories,Confidentialexploded the candy-coated image of movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, andtrue.Confidential’s success marked the end of an era ofhush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.

“Before the National Enquirer and TMZ,Confidentialfascinated readers with its claims to tell the ‘truth’ about the rich and famous. In her investigation of Confidential’s lurid allegations about 1950s celebrities, Samantha Barbalã)