(Chicago Review Press, 2018)
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.
Reviews
“In ‘Confidential Confidential,’ law professor Samantha Barbas recounts the inside story of the ‘little magazine that could’ with drama, humor, and verve…Ms. Barbas paces her terrific story well, and the book ends with her cogent analysis of Confidential’s larger significance.” – Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
“A thoroughly researched history of a lurid publisher and Americans’ lust for scandal” — Kirkus Reviews
“A fascinating, highly detailed study of a precursor to today’s celebrity-obsessed media” –David Pitt, Booklist
“Popular culture enthusiasts and media studies students will appreciate how this well-documented tale resonates in today’s climate of celebrity scandal and Orwellian politics” — Library Journal
“Samantha Barbas’s book offers a concise, highly readable history of the publication’s rise and precipitous fall, finally weighed down by a welter of legal entanglements that Barbas, as a law professor, is quite qualified to straighten out for the lay reader” — Film Comment