Harrison is said to have been inspired by the live televised covering of the Kefauver hearings. To gather material for his new magazine, Harrison established an organization called Hollywood Research Inc., operated by his niece and her husband, which, fifty years later was described by a British celebrity interviewer as:

a spy network of hack journalists, private investigators, waiters, call girls, and 75-dollars-a-week starlets who were on the rosters of the major studios and were going nowhere except to bed with anyone who might boost their careers.

By July 1955, TIME was decrying its success:

In a little more than two years, a 25¢ magazine called Confidential, based on the proposition that millions like to wallow in scurrility, has become the biggest newsstand seller in the U.S. Newsmen have called Confidential ("Tells the Facts and Names the Names") everything from "scrawling on privy walls" to a "sewer sheet of supercharged sex." But with each bimonthly issue, printed on cheap paper and crammed with splashy pictures, Confidential's sale has grown even faster than its journalistic reputation has fallen.TIME, July 11, 1955.

Legal problems led to format and subject matter changes that in turn reduced circulation to less than a third of what it was at its heydayTIME, May 26, 1958. By May 1958, Harrison sold the magazine to a group led by Hy Steirman. The magazine went through a number of further changes in format and ownership and eventually ceased publication entirely in 1978.

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Legal problems

In July 1955, Doris Duke sued the magazine for $3 million, claiming libel when Confidential wrote about her and a "Negro handyman and chauffeur" whom the magazine said she once employed.TIME, August 1, 1955.

In August 1955, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield barred the mailing of Confidential, citing objectionable content such as a racy description of a stripteaser's gyrations and a "questionable" cheesecake photograph of Terry MooreTIME, September 19, 1955.

See also

• Supermarket tabloid, gossip magazine

References