Confidential Confidential ― The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine

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 their sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, 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.
Confidential’s spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Stars filed multimillion dollar libel suits against the magazine, and the state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted its publisher for obscenity, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial in 1957. The lawsuits forced Confidential to end its scandalmongering, and stopped printing its sleazy gossip in 1958. However, the magazine’s legacy lives on in our culture’s obsession with gossip and celebrity scandal.
This is Confidential’s story, 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 had been sold to the public by Hollywood and the press. It transformed America from a nation of innocents to a 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. It was the forerunner of People, the National Enquirer, and TMZ.com, and was more outrageous and raunchy than all of them.

Samantha Barbas is a professional historian, law professor, and author of Movie Crazy, The First Lady of Hollywood, Laws of Image, and Newsworthy. She frequently offers commentary on issues related to celebrity gossip and freedom of the press to the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Associated Press.