THE BOSS DON'T LIKE ROBBERY MAKE IT SWINDLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000200760003-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 16, 2010
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: July 1, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

I
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July-August 1982
he genial Scot at the Na-
tional Press Club bar in
November painted a pleas-
ing picture of National
Enquirer opulence in the
Florida sunshine. Winter
enhanced his plausibility. My visions of
having to invade Hollywood funeral
parlors, sift through mountains of celeb-
rity garbage or track Senator Kennedy
to see whether he broke the speed limit
on the George Washington Parkway
were dispelled: "Mythology," he said.
And if there was a touch of the hustler
in his broad Glasgow accent, it was be-
lied by the half-moon reading glasses.
Simon Barber, former Washington cor-
respondent for the British newsweekly,
professorial tweeds and Mont Blanc
fountain pen.
The Enquirer's recruiter found me
at a vulnerable moment. My previous
employer, a British newsweekly, had
folded some months previously; the job
hunt was going badly; I was broke. I
could scarcely afford to go to the super-
market, much less scorn the drivel on its
checkout counters. Sympathy for Carol
Burnett, whose suit against the Enquirer
I once cheered, had become a luxury.
He suggested I try my hand as arti-
cles editor. It started at a $1,000 a week,
carried the responsibility of creating and
running a network of reporters, and
might, in the e%ent of some really spec-
tacular death or disaster, involve a little
travel. Hopelessness, and the rakish idea
of building a Smileyesque Circus dedi-
uirer for ti..o ,x -i- cated to ferreting out the Untold, Amaz-
ing and Bizarre, were ample stimuli. I
bit, and three days later I was on a pre-
paid flight to Florida.
The Enquirer resides in Lantana,
one of those countless ribs of real estate
whose primary function is to separate
Palm Beach from Fort Lauderdale anal
1-95 from the Intracoastal \tiaterw,ty. .A
bland tract of telegraph poles, tired palm
trees and prefabrication, it is remarkable
on two counts: it has a large population
of Finns and coruscating soullessness.
In the midst of this refugee camp
for the cold and old, wedged between a
railway line and a crumbling sports fa-
cility, the National Enquirer makes its
one stab at irony and keeps a low
hle. Once the visitor has given up trying
to figure out the Minoan-style hulls
horns that mark the entrance, he is
pleasantly surprised h'. the landscaping.
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The grounds are thick with hibiscus ano
other fragrant shrubs, each thoughtfully
labelled with its botanical name. The
building itself lives up to a more squalid
expectation No bastion of multimillion-
the Enquirer's higher echelons, "There
doesn't seem to be anything behind his
eyes." The effect is a mask of staring
malevolence, which does little to endear.
dollar publishing this. instead a sleepy He is educated. A top of his class
single-story sprawl that might service- 1 graduate in engineering from MIT. ac-
Like everything in Lantana, it exudes served in the CIA's psychological war-
the grim quality of being instant. fare unit. Further glimpses of his life
It was perhaps my misfortune to be beyond the Enquirer, which he pur-
ushered into the presence of executive chased in 1952, are virtually nonexis-
editor :Mike Hoy at lunchtime. The edi- tent. His father was the publisher of the
torial offices were all but empty, and New York Italian-language paper 11 Pro-
c()!t%rved, in an efficiently pastel way, a gre.sso. Some see murkiness in the fact
ike an that since he moved the operation from
sense of innocent cheerfulness, like'
outsized kindergarten. Indeed, one of the New Jersey in 1971, Pope has never left
newsroom cubicles was stacked with ex- south Florida. He says he hates to fly.
otic toys. I began to suspect that the peo- There is an eeriness about him en-
ple who worked here might be having hanced by gun-toting plainclothes secu-
fun. rity men who haunt the premises, spot
Hoy. thirtyish, Australian and checks on reporters' telephone conversa-
modelled on the lines of a hygienic rock tions, and the uniformed Lantana pa-
star, encouraged this view by offering trolman who escorts Pope to and from
me a job, on a trial basis, within 15 his car.
minutes of our meeting, and by explain- My first day should have taught me
ing why the company would not, as had more, perhaps, than it did. My initial
once been its practice, rent a car for me. mistake was to turn up in coat and tie.
One of my more exuberant predecessors Higher authority wore shirtsleeves and
had driven an Enquirer Hertz into the an increasingly familiar pair of pants, a
Waterway. style, admonished Hoy, that I would do
Then he said something rather well to emulate. I blundered again by
strange. "I want you to know that we trying to strike up a conversation. Ap-
really are looking for editors." Having parently one did not talk to colleagues,
been tracked down by a recruiter and be they only six feet away, except by
flown in from Washington to be inter- internal telephone and with one's back
viewed for such a slot, and having just turned. I needed coffee. "Put a top on
been offered a month's trial at it, I it," someone hissed as I carried a cup to
thought this scarcely needed saying. my desk. "The Boss don't like stains on
That impermanence was an institution his carpet." To atone, I worked through
at the Enquirer did not occur to me, nor, lunch, another miscalculation. "The
as yet, did the connection between its Boss believes in lunch." Next day I ate,
desperation for new blood and whatever grateful for a temporary escape, only to
had possessed the predecessor to sink his be informed that I'd been seen leaving
car. the office with the wrong people. My
Every aspect of the Enquirer, from
its management to what it prints, is gov-
erned by a surgically precise apprecia-
tion of human frailty. This is the great
achievement of its owner and publisher,
the splendidly named Generoso Pope,
Jr., and evidently appreciated by six
million supermarket purchasers a week.
Pope's relationship with his employees
approximates that between the God of
the Old Testament and the Children of
Israel minus forgiveness. His control is
total and awe-inspiring, his ways myste-
rious, his retribution swift. When he
deals with a man, he likes, to use his
own very secular phrase, to "have him
by the balls," and usually succeeds. Un-
der Hoy's guidance, it was hoped I
would quickly learn to divine his will.
Known simply as The Boss or GP,
Pope dominates the waking thoughts,
and more than a few sleeping ones as
well, of all at the Enquirer. An autho-
rized account, published in 1978 by the
Miami Herald, describes Pope as "a tall
man, built like a Bronx precinct cap-
tain." Fifty-four years have softened that
image somewhat, except for the face.
companions were said to be under some
form of cloud and best avoided. Besides,
what was I doing having lunch? I won-
dered whether Pope ever specified his
desires before punishing those who
transgressed them.
The arena in which this curious
drama was to be played out might have
been a newsroom in any large daily be-
fore the electronic age. Its open plan lay-
out was symmetrical about a narrow
avenue across which two rows of editors,
about nine in all, numbers varied, were
occasionally polite to one another. Be-
hind them sat their secretaries, each bus-
ily pretending to callers that her boss
worked in a private office. Next, pinched
into lines of narrow, benchlike desks
were the 40 or so reporters, each owing
allegiance and his job to a particular
editor. Finally the writers, who are re-
sponsible for the Enquirer's deathless
prose and probably the happiest employ-
ees. Deemed creative by The Boss, they
were left in peace. At the end of the
central aisle, rather too close to where I
had been stationed, was a series of glass
cubicles. Pope had a grander sanctum
come when he wished to make his pres-
ence felt. Assistants ensured that a pack
of Kents and a lighter always awaited
his arrival.
As a deracinated Englishman, I
should have had some cause to feel at
home. A surprising proportion of my
new colleagues hailed from Britain and
parts of its old empire. A buzz of famil-
iar accents could be heard insinuating
charm down various telephones. Having
had some success in this department my-
self, I could imagine the interrogatees
being thoroughly disarmed. To their
cost.
Pope's predilection for what one
American writer has called British Em-
pire journalists has little to do with the
narcotic power of the speech patterns,
however, but derives more from their
tradition. American reporters tend to
take a rather romantic view of their
trade, see themselves as somehow in the
public service. Their minds are bur-
dened with scruple. Not so the British
Empire Journalist. He can report, as in
1978 one imaginative correspondent for
the London Daily Mail actually did, that
President Carter was growing a beard to
look more Lincolnesque, and receive a
kudogram from his superiors. Rupert
Murdoch ranks high in the Pope pan-
theon, and as publisher of the Star, con-
stitutes Pope's most serious opposition.
My first impression was that my
fellow editors all looked very ill: ex-
change their typewriters for oars and
they would have made perfect (though,
on $60,000 a year and up, very expen-
sive) extras for the sea battle in Ben Hur.
Enquirer reporters had the furtive
look of kicked and beaten Labrador Re-
trievers. Foot soldiers, they were at least
insulated from The Boss by their editors,
whose paranoia-induced savagery was
the price of relative security. The reason
I had been brought in from outside to be
articles editor was that no reporter
wanted to risk his neck or his $45,000 a
year more than was strictly necessary.
Now and then one or two were forcibly
promoted-given the option of leaving or
climbing-which regularly amounted to
the same thing: climbers who failed at
editor could expect to be fired, and the
chances of making it were no better than
those of a World War I subaltern on the
Western Front.
One of the luckier ones was the
young Englishman sitting to my left.
Promoted some months previously, he
had begun his career on a small provin-
cial paper outside London, and had been
lured to Florida by wealth and warmth.
In an earlier age, he might have set out
to make his fortune in some tropical out-
post of Empire. He seemed to be doing
all that was required of him: his file
drawer was full of good stories in prog-
ress, yet there was an air of doom about
him. Colleagues shied away, spoke of'
him with, of all things in this emotional
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house. compassion. It
he was being executed, Enquirer-style.
First they cut his salary, then re-
moved his reporters, forcing him to rely
on stringers, finally demanded a massive
increase in output. This is the
Pope always does it," he said one
way
eve-
ning towards the end. "They dig you a
grave and say climb out if you can. You
never can. The grave just gets deeper."
Several days later his desk was empty.
In this case the editor was allowed to
reincarnate himself as a reporter. A rare
privilege.
A reason would have been helpful,
enquiries were about as fruitful
as asking a priest to account plausibly
for human suffering. The editor's de-
frocking could be ascribed to no particu-
lar commission or omission, it was just
the way things worked around here. A
sympathetic reporter noticed my puzzle-
ment. "The Boss is a toy train freak,"
she explained. "I think he likes to see us
as a vast toy train set. He throws
switches, sets up obstructions, and races
us off bridges just for the hell of seeing
what happens."
In terms of how they are put to-
gether, there is essentially little differ-
ence between the National Enquirer and,
say, Time. To the structuralist, anyway.
Leads are developed and assigned, re-
porters and stringers turn in voluminous
files, which are rigorously checked for
accuracy, boiled down by writers into
the house style, and finally, with luck,
printed. There, however, the resem-
blance ends.
Appearances to the contrary, gung-
ho fabulism is not the Enquirer's line of
business. Nor indeed is journalism, in
any of the accepted senses of the word.
Bear in mind that the Enquirer is
not designed primarily to inform, amuse,
or even, really, to be read. It performs
these functions, of course, but they are
secondary. It exists to be consumed,
much in the same way as premixed pea-
nut butter and jelly. The idea is pretty
simple. People enter the supermarket in
a buying frame of mind, so let's give
them one more brightly packaged object
to shove into their shopping bags.
The editorial content addresses it-
self scientifically to the consuming mood,
a condition frequently brought on by
boredom, restlessness and unfocused dis-
satisfaction. The u'nivcrsc depicted is a
bright, uncomplicated, unambiguous
place where things either are (in this
category we may include metempsycho-
sis, UFOs and psychic fork-bending) or
are not (unhappy endings, celibate celeb-
told that he is basically good, that the
rich and famous are basically miserable,
and that the quality of life is improving
immeasurably: cancer, obesity and ar-
thritis can be cured.
In short the Enquirer is a kind of
printed Valium, its editors little more
than pharmacists, cutting each other's
throats to combine and recombine a
limited number of ingredients which
Pope, the master chemist, has deter-
mined will have the desired effect. It is a
mechanical and, the financial aspect
apart, unrewarding task.
The process begins
Each editor is expected to submit 30 or
so to The Boss every Friday, of which
perhaps half a dozen may be approved.
On the rest he scribbles the ubiquitous
initials NG (No Good). The ideas come
from reporters and stringers (all of
whom receive up to $300 if their offer-
ing gets into print), other publications
(there is always a race for the new
Omni, Cosmopolitan and Self) and the
imagination. Memorable specimens from
the latter category include "The Junk
Food Diet," "How Brooke Shields, Loni
Anderson and Farrah Fawcett are
Wrecking Your Marriage" and "Let's
Get Accredited as a Salvation Army
Fundraiser and Go Knocking on Celeb-
rity Doors to See How Generous the
Stars Are." A number of celebrity leads
are preemptive. I myself proposed
"Wedding Bells for Patti Reagan and
Peter [Masada] Strauss." The Elizabeth
Taylor-John Warner separation was in
the works probably before they had even
said their vows, and certainly for months
before it occurred. At this very moment
at least one editor is contemplating mar-
riage between Robert Wagner, widower
of Natalie Wood, and his television co-
star Stephanie Powers.
Often, of course, celebrities do dra-
matic things that even the Enquirer can-
not foresee, the deaths of Natalie Wood
and William Holden for example. In
these instances, leads are rushed through
under the rubric of "Untold Story," the
logic being that there will always be one.
In the Wood case, which occurred a few
weeks after I arrived, the editor involved
went to extraordinary lengths to find
something that the voluble Los Angeles
coroner Thomas Noguchi had iot said.
What he came up with was the sugges-
tion, ascribed to 'f6p Doctors, that the
actress, rather than drowning. had been
asphyxiated by a potent mixture of
drugs and alcohol. This on the basis of a
well-stocked medicine cabinet and the
alleged absence of froth on the victim';
lips. What I heard of the interview .
went as follows: "Doctor, if after mn-
suming such and such a quantity of al-
cohol, a person were to take drugs x intl
y, what would be the result:'"
Even the most grizzled veter,,n o ,m-
not second guess Pope's taste with any
certainty. His notions of what constitutes
a contemporary star are quixotic, but
seem to derive from movies of the '50s
and '60s (hence Sophia Loren, Princess
Grace and, by association, her daughter
Caroline) and the top ten Nielson-rated
shows he happens to watch (not 60 Min-
utes). Dudley Moore, of 10 and Arthur
fame, fails to register on the grounds
that he is, and I quote, "Not big
enough." The currently lionized Tom
Selleck (Magnum, P1), did not have the
right stuff either, until Pope was per-
suaded to poll his favorite gauges of gut
reaction, the secretaries.
There are, however, some totally
predictable NG's, chief among them
blacks, except when they practice voo-
doo, or are child comic Gary Coleman. I
presented Hoy with a heart-warming
story of a young New Orleans man who
had survived a grain elevator explosion
and 80 percent burns to become a multi-
millionaire (a surefire hit under the
Rags to Riches category). He immedi-
ately asked me what color he was.
Black. Kill it. Gays, on the other hand,
may be beaten up at will. An outraged
account of San Francisco's demographics
was headlined "Sick! Sick! Sick!" The
Enquirer, a self-styled Equal Opportu-
nity Employer, has no minority employ-
ees.
Once an approved lead has pleased
Story Control, a computer programmed
to weed out duplicates, it is ready to he
reported, and the ethical mayhem be-
gins.
If celebrities are the potatoes of tab-
loid journalism, miraculous medicine is
the meat. Unfortunately, the medical
fraternity likes to be circumspect about
describing its advances, and talks of per-
centages, hopes, possibilities, rarely of
anything so definite as a cure. This is
too gray for the Enquirer which does not
recognize the subjunctive mood: a thin,
either is or it isn't. The trick, therefore.
is to get the medical man, who in his
right mind would never even talk to the
Enquirer, to say things that would cost
him his shingle if he tried to say them in
the New England Journal of kleclicine,
and on tape. This is known in the trade
as Burning Docs.
Technically, the reporter's path is
strewn with regulations. Not only trust
his interviews be taped, but he has
signed a waiver binding him to identify
himself as working for the Enquirer and
as using a recorder, thus excusing his
employers when, as he must, he sidles
past the law. if his editor wants him to
get a doctor to say something. he is un-
der considerably more pressure to pro-
WASHINGTON JOURNALISM REVIEW
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d;ice than to be .,,, ~r erea sounaci ev+ac..< U'... a ,.. _? ctor
fu sat to carry out an order is treated Amendment.
with military firmness. Much of the information on who is because the latter has the unfortunate
w
There are many ways to ease on- bedding whom, whose career is on the habit, of being accurate.
the-record indiscretion from an inter skids and who is currently being detoxi- he reigning exponent of what may
yiewee, the most popular being the old fied from what, emanates from the thriv- be called the "Hey-Martha-Will-You-
20 Questions ploy. The subject is ing gossip industry as a wholel I do not Get-A-Look-At-This" school is Enquirer
stroked into a state of trust and then hit pretend to know how this works. Obvi- superstringer Henry Gris, a former UPI
with a series of convoluted queries, to ously, however, the Enquirer hats to delve correspondent. His latest find is one
which he will answer, if the reporter is deeper to satisfy what the commercials "Dr. Victor Azhazha," eminent Soviet
adroit enough. merely yes or no. These call its readers' "Enquiring Minds." scientist. Dr. Azhazha claimed, and
little words can be made to speak vol- What makes the reporter's mission there is an artist's conception complete
umes. Critical readers may have won- particularly tough is that he is often coy- with silhouetted Kremlin to back it up,
dered how it is that supposedly sophisti- ering not a set of circumstances his edi- that a mysterious shining cloud had
cated professionals, when quoted in the tor knows or believes to exist, but one drifted over Moscow one night causing
Enquirer, :tl%. ays manage to clutter their i that the editor wishes to have happen. A great consternation. A friend of mine,
stationed in Moscow for a well-known
British daily, cormnented, "I didn't see'
this cloud, which was perhaps careless.
It might have started World War III."
A cardinal rule of the information
trade is that the more bald and uncon-
vincing a story, the greater the machin-
ery needed to lend it verisimilitude. The
Enquirer is inordinately proud of its Re-
remarks with an effusion of amazings,
incredibles and fantastics.
This method is openly encouraged
by Pope. In a memo distributed to all
newcomers he commands bluntly: "Ask
leading questions." Lest it be carried too
far, reporters are then reminded,
"Quotes should not only be appropriate
but believable. A Japanese carpenter
should not sound like Ernest Heming-
way, or vice versa."
Add to this Pope's rather confining
taste in vocabulary, and the results can
be bizarre. Reporter Byron Lutz had
worked hard to produce "The Biggest
Swindle in U.S. History," a tale of a
computer rip-off within the federal gov-
ernment. He had even persuaded a jus-
tice Department official to agree that it
was indeed "the biggest swindle," a
questionable assertion by itself. Enter
the Evaluator, a character whose task it
is to condense finished files into single
paragraphs for the benefit of Pope and
the writers.
Evaluator: "This won't get
through, Lutz. We don't use swindle."
Lutz: "But that's what the guy at
the justice Department called it, it's on
the tape."
Eval.: "It's got to be robbery."
Lutz: "But there's a diffe'rence.'
Editor (intervening): "He's right.
Let's look it up in the dictionary."
Eval.: "Hey, I don't care. The Boss
don't like swindle make it robbery."
Editor (snapping to what looked
suspiciously like attention): "Get on it,
Lutz, get your guy to say robbery.
Now...
At least doctors and officials can be
made to speak. Celebrities are less oblig-
ww ith their reputations. To reveal the
drama of their lives the
re- must resort to an alto~~ether
}11her order of (.toile. In compensation,
new TV series has emerged, perhaps, search Department. A copy of a glowing
h
at ap-
and The Boss wants an exciting story account in Editor & Publisher t
about its participants. Or an editor may peared in 1978 is compulsory reading
conclude that there has been too striking for all arrivals.
an absence of Farrah Fawcett. A recon- E&P tells us that Research is staffed
ciliation with Lee Majors is needed to by probing professionals, headed by
fill the gap. Thanks to a large array of Ruth Annan, a 16-year veteran of Time.
"insiders," "friends" and "intimate Her team includes "two medical special-
sources," many of whom are in the ists, two lawyers, a linguist who speaks
Enquirer's pay, such things can be ar- four languages, a geographer, three with
ranged. master's degrees in library science, one
In some cases, a great deal of old- with a master's degree in educational
fashioned shoe-leather reporting does go psychology, and an author."
on, though it has been known to get out And yet it regularly lets through
of hand. The coffin photographs of Elvis palpable inanities. The concept of a
Presley are not an isolated phenomenon. "4,000-year-old Stone Age statuette"
One reporter told me that while-tracking does not bother it, for example, but this
the hometown life of a currently popular is a quibble. Most of what escapes the
television actress, he stumbled onto the tireless fact-checkers is on a grander
fact that that she had had an abortion. scale, even in cases where the facts can
Such was the pressure he was under, he actually be checked.
lined up a neighborhood hoodlum to Researchers are cunningly paid less
steal the records. Getting mixed signals than reporters whose work they scruti-
from his editor, he thought better of it. nize, and thus approach their task with
Celebrity romance stories are fre- the enthusiasm of inquisitors. That the
quently the work of reporters whose Enquirer is published at all is not their
main activity is to hang around fashion- fault.
able watering holes. Maitre d's and I have no doubt that Research pur-
waiters are also retained. Thus, the sues Truth with genuine vigor, but it is
Enquirer often has a pair of eyes in place hampered by one major defect: literal-
when an interesting couple appear in mindedness. If the tapes and copy jibe,
public for the first time, or have a vio- and sources when contacted agree to
lent quarrel. what has been reported, the story must,
Hollywood sex, in the Enquirer, is a however reluctantly, be granted the im-
formulaic affair. The starting assump- primatur of accuracy.
tion is that any physical contact repre- One disadvantage of Annan and her
sents romance. At the lower end of the staff is that they clog up an already
scale, hand holding is described by "in- hopelessly slow system-lead time is
siders," who do not have to be told the usually three or four weeks-with hag-
Enquirer style, as "they looked like a gling that, given the nature of the beast,
pair of teenagers in love." Any kiss less is utterly unnecessary. On the upside,
demure than a peck is evidence that the however, their mere existence enables
relationship has turned "hot and heavy." reporters to tell a suspicious world that,
Equally earnest is the Enquirer's at- yes. really. the Enquirer does strive after
titude towards the paranormal. Cranks fact. As editor Paul Levy told E&P,
are not tolerated, and anyone claiming to "Today iny reporter can say with justi-
have been reborn, sighted UFOs or corn- fable pride that he works for the most
umcated with the beyond is subjected accurate paper in the country.- ?
m
hr i Iequired to otjer less in the way of
pro~+t fit: r are public property. and
p
It 1,v \t (It sI 11W-1
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