Headline of the Week

In the New York Journal-American:

REPORT U.S. GRANT OFFERED TO ISRAEL

Gutterdammerung?

For tabloid editors last week, every day was good nudes day. At the Wilma Montesi manslaughter trial in Venice, a black-haired beauty known as the Black Swan said that in her set, boys and girls always stripped for tea. Jayne Mansfield dropped her shoulder straps to show photographers considerable acreage of a "head-to-toe" poison-ivy rash. And a New York censor ruled that an art-movie producer would have to banish his surrealist Muse or put some clothes on her.

There was even good dialogue to go with the pictures. In New York, Call Girl Nella ("Don't Call Me Madam") Bogart went on to brag about how the buyers she entertained for a General Electric wholesaler responded by ordering "carloads" of appliances (TIME, March 4). In Washington, Seattle Madam Ann Thompson told senators (see below) that even with support from the Teamsters' Union (membership: 1,400,000), a bawdyhouse chain would not pay in Portland, Ore.

The Art of Smut. The most significant tattle of the week came, however, straight out of journalism's dirty glass house. In Los Angeles, a parade of witnesses told a state senate investigating committee how Confidential magazine and its competitors (TIME, July 11, 1955) perform the keyhole-peeping routine that makes a heap of money out of homebreaking.

Spicy tabloid headlines and the senators own publicity-minded staging almost obscured the inquiry's intent: for the first time steps are under consideration to impose curbs on the salacious magazines. The senators were hoping to build a case for legislation that would dam the gutter press at its principal source--the Hollywood bedroom--by making it illegal for private eyes to hawk their dirty discoveries to publishers (for prices as high as $1,500 a story).

Detective Fred Otash testified that Hollywood Research, Inc., a listening post manned by a niece of Confidential Publisher Robert Harrison, the king of leer, paid him more than $30,000 a year for his services. Among Otash's assignments: spying from bushes on Anita Ekberg, and taking telephoto-lens movies of her and her husband-to-be, Anthony Steel; "checking" some 200 Hollywood expose stories in two years for Harrison and others.

Chest a Bust. Another private eye told a story of going with Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, on Nov. 5, 1954. to raid a building where Marilyn Monroe was spending the night (they broke into the wrong apartment). The detective's report, stolen or sold from the files, matched in every detail a leering account of the fiasco in the September 1955 issue of Confidential. (Also called. Sinatra denied under oath that he had participated in the actual raid.) Hollywood brass was so worried by the peephole press, said a third private eye, that major studios once considered raising a $350,000 war chest to fight the scandal magazines.

The legislative probing came at a troublesome time for Confidential. The latest circulation report (3,269,954) showed a drop of almost 200,000 since last June. The bimonthly faces four libel suits* for a total of $5,000,000. The California attorney general's office is considering steps to prosecute Confidential for criminal libel and distribution of lewd material. There was good reason to doubt that the klieg-lit legislators would effectively police bedroom journalism, or indeed should. In fact, by emphasizing the zeal with which the leer-and-smear brigade sifts its dirt, the senate hearings lent some support to the smut-peddlers' argument that scurrility can be justified if it is accurate. Nevertheless, few responsible editors could agree with Publisher Harrison that "the truth never smears anybody." The issue that was largely ignored last week is whether truth a la Confidential is defensible in terms of the instincts it gratifies, the unhappiness it causes or the sneak-thief means by which it is obtained.

*Filed by Errol Flynn, Doris Duke, Father Divine, and Sugar Ray Robinson's manager, George Gainford.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.