Confidential (magazine)
Confidential (April 1958)
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| Chief editor | Howard Rushmore, Jay Nelson Tuck (after 1958) |
|---|---|
| Managing editor | A. P. Govani |
| Associate editor | Jay Breen, Edward Gibbons |
| Staff writers | Mike Connolly, Aline Mosby, Florabel Muir, Agnes Underwood |
| Categories | Celebrity, investigative, consumer advocacy |
| Frequency | Quarterly, then bimonthly |
| Publisher | Robert Harrison, Hy Steirman (after 1958) |
| Total circulation (1955) |
5 million |
| Founder | Robert Harrison |
| Year founded | 1952 |
| First issue | December 1952 |
| Final issue | 1978 |
| Company | Confidential Inc., By-Line Publications, Inc. (after 1958) |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City, New York |
| Language | English |
Confidential was a magazine published quarterly from December 1952 to August 1953 and then bi-monthly until it ceased publication in 1978. It was founded by Robert Harrison and is considered a pioneer in scandal, gossip and exposé journalism.
After the World War II years of the 1940s, 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, crime and violence, it provided many of the themes that Harrison would use as publisher of Confidential. When Harrison started as a copyboy at the paper, he met the theater critic, Walter Winchell, who would later promote the future magazine.
After the New York Graphic shut down, Harrison moved to the editorial staff of the Motion Picture Herald, a film trade publication whose conservative Catholic owner, Martin Quigley, Sr., helped create the Motion Picture Production Code. Though Harrison was more interested in Broadway and New York social life, his tenure at the Herald would bias the direction of the future Confidential toward Hollywood.
Having learned from Quigley what he could get away with legally, Harrison struck out on his own with a series of non-pornographic "cheesecake" magazines. His first was Beauty Parade (1941–1956), started in October 1941. Using the facilities of Quigley Publishing surreptitiously at night, Harrison used publicity photos collected from a visit to the company's Hollywood offices to paste together his galleries. When he was caught and fired on Christmas Eve, 1941, his sisters Edith Tobias and Helen Studin rallied around him and raised several thousand dollars in capital, $400 of it from his favorite niece, Marjorie Tobias, who would later become a central figure in his most famous enterprise. Harrison had great success with Beauty Parade and five sister magazines, but their circulation declined in the post-war years. Harrison had a distaste for full nudity and refused to follow the trend of magazines like Playboy. By early 1952 his accountant told him that he was broke.
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