Before TMZ, Twitter, and Gossip Girl, there was New York scandalmonger Liz Smith, a feisty woman from the South who spent the majority of her life defining modern gossip news.
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And in 2016, the scandalmonger doesn't even need candid video and secret recordings; all it takes to stir folks into a political frenzy is a screenshot of an email and an online highlighter tool.
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Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 202 When Harrison refused, Rushmore quit. By early February 1956, Rushmore was reportedly an editor at the National Police Gazette.
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Hollywood Research Inc. was the new intelligence-gathering front of Confidential, run by Marjorie Meade, Robert Harrison's now 26-year-old niece. Despite her youth and red-headed beauty, she was one of the most feared persons in Hollywood after her arrival in January 1955.Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p.
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2 Meanwhile, Rushmore tried to get Harrison to publish a story about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt having an alleged affair with her African American chauffeur.Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 202 When Harrison refused, Rushmore quit. By early February 1956, Rushmore was reportedly an editor at the National Police Gazette.
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Despite her youth and red-headed beauty, she was the one of the most feared persons in Hollywood since her arrival in January 1955.Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 200 The Harrison enterprise had evolved into a "quasi-blackmail operation."David Ehrenstein (Harper Perennial, May 16, 2000), Open Secret: Gay Hollywood—1928–2000, p.
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Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 200 Once a proposed story was assembled, usually either she or an agent visited the subject and presented a copy with a "buy-back" proposal.Darden Asbury Pyron (University Of Chicago Press, June 1, 2001), Liberace: An American Boy, p. 216 But instead of paying the magazine not to publish the article, Scott sued.
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UP (Thursday, March 8, 1956), "Court Quashes Actress' Suit," Idaho State Journal (Pocatello, Idaho), p. 9 Lawsuits from other actors against the magazine were piling up. Meanwhile, Rushmore tried to get Harrison to publish a story about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt allegedly having an affair with her African- American chauffeur.Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p.
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The Sunday Times (London), 13 May 2012 Sunday Edition 1; "National Edition Fleet Street's crusading villain; The Victorian editor whose love of sensationalism set the tone for the tabloids for a century Scandalmonger", 40–42. During the following year, he managed to persuade the British government to supply an additional £5million to bolster weakening naval defences, after which he published a series of articles. Stead was not a hawk, instead believing Britain's strong navy was necessary to maintain world peace.Stead, Estelle (1913).
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Having quit the Journal-American after 11 years, she became an account executive for Klingman & Spencer, a prominent Manhattan public relations firm.AP (Saturday, January 4, 1958), "Former Editor of 'Confidential' Kills Wife and Himself," The Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune (Chillicothe, Missouri), p. 1 Meanwhile, Rushmore tried to get Harrison to publish a story about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt having an alleged affair with her African American chauffeur.Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p.
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Following World War II, Robert Harrison, a New York City publisher of men's magazines, decided to return to investigative journalism. He was previously a reporter on the New York Evening Graphic (1924–1932), an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s. Called the "Pornographic" by detractors for its emphasis on sex,Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 194 crime and violence, it provided many of the themes that Harrison would use as publisher of Confidential.
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Thomas Cheesman, after Samuel De Wilde Thomas Gilliland (fl. 1804–1837) was a combative British journalist and theatre critic. According to attack pieces in The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, he was "countenanced" by Matthew "Monk" Lewis and Thomas Moore, and frequented the green room of Drury Lane Theatre until Charles Mathews and other actors complained he was spying for scandalmonger Anthony Pasquin. Gilliland's 1806 pamphlet Diamond cut Diamond defended the future George IV, then Prince of Wales, against Nathaniel Jefferys's attack, for which the Prince gave him 500 guineas.
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Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 197 Despite the lack of evidence, Confidential sent a copy of the story to Scott herself.Henry E. Scott (Pantheon, 1st reprint edition, January 19, 2010), Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, "America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine, p. 98 What Scott read was that a police raid occurred on a Hollywood Hills bungalow Trulia (accessed May 23, 2014), "8142 Laurel View Dr Los Angeles, CA 90069 (Hollywood Hills).
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During the 1920s Harrison began his journalistic career as a copy boyTom Wolfe (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st edition, September 1982), "Purveyor of the Public Life," The Purple Decades: A Reader, p. 79 for Bernarr McFadden's New York Evening Graphic,Darden Asbury Pyron (University Of Chicago Press, June 1, 2001), Liberace: An American Boy, p. 216 an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s. Called the "Pornographic" by detractors for its emphasis on sex,Neal Gabler (April 2003), "The Scandalmonger: Confidential's Reign of Terror," Vanity Fair (New York City, New York), p. 194 crime and violence, it would provide many of the themes that Harrison would use as a publisher.
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Emile Gauvreau, My Last Million Readers, Dutton 1941 Gauvreau's 1935 book about a trip to Russia, What So Proudly We Hailed, got him fired by Hearst, but he continued to write, and later edited a pictorial magazine, Click, for Moses Annenberg of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His books, starting with two quasi-autobiographical novels about "tabloidia", include Hot News (1931), The Scandalmonger (1932), What So Proudly We Hailed (1935), Dumbells and Carrot Strips (with Mary Macfadden, 1935), My Last Million Readers (1941), Billy Mitchell: founder of our Air Force and Prophet Without Honor (1942), and The Wild Blue Yonder: Sons of the Prophet Carry On ( with Lester Cohen, 1945). Gauvreau was profiled by Michael Shapiro for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011, under the title The Paper Chase.
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The only explanation that Browder offered was "'You know that we are supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt' ... He just looked very solemn, implacable, and pious, pious, pious." By 1936, his health had declined seriously and his clear antagonism to the German government increased his personal sense of defeat.Offner, 204 During the 1936 U.S. election campaign, Dodd wrote a public letter acknowledging the views of some in America's elites towards Nazi Germany, and warning that the defeat of Roosevelt's programs would produce a fascist dictatorship financed by an American billionaire: Several Senators called for him to be recalled from Germany and Senator William Borah called him "an irresponsible scandalmonger." He supported Roosevelt's attempt to enlarge the membership of the Supreme Court, arguing that courts need to be responsive to popular wishes if the United States were to avoid totalitarian impulses.
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