Hollywood Confidential is the first truly in-depth look at the sexy, humorous, violent, and tragic history of the mob in Hollywood from the 1920s, when Joe Kennedy decided to buy a motion picture company, to the 1980s when the last vestiges of mob influence were revealed through investigations of former Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan and his union backers. The revelations continue into the 1980s when the major studios were no longer important, the independents were on the rise, and it was no longer possible to buy, bribe, or blackmail in a meaningful way. There were deals and bad guys, but the mob as it existed was finished in Hollywood.
In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, 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. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday 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 is Confidential'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, Confidential exploded 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, and true. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.
L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors. (124,000 words)
In May 2003, I became involved in a doomed book project with reporter Anita Busch about the federal investigations of Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano, the "Sleuth to the Stars," who had targeted Busch, among others. Directly or indirectly, usually working through a group of prominent Los Angeles attorneys, Pellicano had represented a wide variety of Hollywood celebrities, including actresses Rosanne Barr, Farrah Fawcett, and Elizabeth Taylor; actors Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and James Woods; corporate executives Brad Grey, Kirk Kerkorian, Michael Nathanson, Michael Ovitz, and Don Simpson, as well as Michael Jackson, George Harrison of The Beatles, and television personality Jerry Springer, among many others. My two years of "volunteer" work with Busch serves as a testament to the old adage, "No good deed goes unpunished." In fact, the fallout from this experience, especially Busch's thirteen-year smear campaign against me, continues to this day-even after Pellicano's convictions in 2008 for conspiracy and racketeering. . . . I have described this situation to friends and colleagues as "The Book Project from Hell." Hollywood Confidential is a true story about friendship and betrayal, as well as loyalty and greed-along with an offbeat new dimension to what is known about one of Hollywood's most-publicized scandals: the federal prosecution of Anthony Pellicano and his illegal wiretapping activities.
Describes the life of the Hollywood personality who led a double life as a spy for Israel involved in secret negotiations for that country's nuclear arsenal while he was working as a Hollywood producer for high-profile movies.
A 1950s matinee screen idol speaks about the scandals, successes, and sacrifices he experienced as the pin-up boy for millions of teenage girls and how he dealt with the reality of hiding his homosexuality. Reprint.
Tinseltown has always been the mecca for image and ego, the Babylon of outlandish wealth and outrageous acts. Now, "Hollywood Confidential" dishes out the dirt on all of our favorites, from Demi, Sharon, and Arnold to Quentin, Keanu, and Winona, including a detailed graph of "just-who-had-which-plastic-surgery". Photos.
Humphrey Bogart said of Confidential: “Everybody reads it but they say the cook brought it into the house” . . . Tom Wolfe called it “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world” . . . Time defined it as “a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction, and plain smut . . . dig up one sensational ‘fact,’ embroider it for 1,500 to 2,000 words. If the subject thinks of suing, he may quickly realize that the fact is true, even if the embroidery is not.” Here is the never-before-told tale of Confidential magazine, America’s first tabloid, which forever changed our notion of privacy, our image of ourselves, and the practice of journalism in America. The magazine came out every two months, was printed on pulp paper, and cost a quarter. Its pages were filled with racy stories, sex scandals, and political exposés. It offered advice about the dangers of cigarettes and advocated various medical remedies. Its circulation, at the height of its popularity, was three million. It was first published in 1952 and took the country by storm. Readers loved its lurid red-and-yellow covers; its sensational stories filled with innuendo and titillating details; its articles that went far beyond most movie magazines, like Photoplay and Modern Screen, and told the real stories such trade publications as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter couldn’t, since they, and the movie magazines, were financially dependent on—or controlled by—the Hollywood studios. In Confidential’s pages, homespun America was revealed as it really was: our most sacrosanct movie stars and heroes were exposed as wife beaters (Bing Crosby), homosexuals (Rock Hudson and Liberace), neglectful mothers (Rita Hayworth), sex obsessives (June Allyson, the cutie with the page boy and Peter Pan collar), mistresses of the rich and dangerous (Kim Novak, lover of Ramfis Trujillo, playboy son of the Dominican Republic dictator). Confidential’s alliterative headlines told of tawny temptresses (black women passing for white), pinko partisans (liberals), lisping lads (homosexuals) . . . and promised its readers what the newspapers wouldn’t reveal: “The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce” . . . How “James Dean Knew He Had a Date with Death” . . . The magazine’s style, success, and methods ultimately gave birth to the National Enquirer, Star, People, E!, Access Hollywood, and TMZ . . . We see the two men at the magazine’s center: its founder and owner, Robert Harrison, a Lithuanian Jew from New York’s Lower East Side who wrote for The New York Graphic and published a string of girlie magazines, including Titter, Wink, and Flirt (Bogart called the magazine’s founder and owner the King of Leer) . . . and Confidential ’s most important editor: Howard Rushmore, small-town boy from a Wyoming homestead; passionate ideologue; former member of the Communist Party who wrote for the Daily Worker, renounced his party affiliation, and became a virulent Red-hunter; close pal of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and expert witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, naming the names of actors and writers Rushmore claimed had been Communists and fellow travelers. Henry Scott writes the story of two men, who out of their radically different pasts and conflicting obsessions, combined to make the magazine the perfect confluence of explosive ingredients that reflected the America of its time, as the country struggled to reconcile Hollywood’s blissful fantasy of American life with the daunting nightmare of the nuclear age . . .
A star-studded guided tour of Palm Springs, California, where some of Hollywood's best-loved movie stars have lived and died. It lifts the lid on the secret lives of the rich and famous individuals who have resided in this world-renowned tourist resort during the last century.
Liz Smith says it best in her advance praise: "SEX, SCANDAL and sensationalism. Libel suits and humiliations. Idols with feet of clay. Think it's anything new? Not at all. Slip into the compulsively lurid and exhaustively researched pages of 'Mr. Confidential' which tells the tale of publisher Robert Harrison and his magazine, Confidential. That forerunner of celebrity dirt quite literally changed the face of entertainment journalism. It reads like a house afire in a sultry swamp. Nobody did 'down and dirty' like Mr. Harrison and today's beleaguered stars, politicians and others owe him a sock in the jaw. An illuminating, fun read!"
