Read Online Dish by Jeannette Walls - Free Book Online Page A

they also strained their necks for a better view. People were drawn to gore, Pope realized, so he gave it to them, hiring an editor named Carl Grothman, who boasted, “If a story is good, no matter how vile, we’ll run
    Pope and Grothman packed the
New York Enquirer
with grisly stories and bloody photographs about horrific crimes, deformed children, and tragic accidents. Mothers who went berserk and killed their babies, spurned lovers who tortured the women who rejected them, hapless horses that were decapitated when they stuck their heads out of moving trailers, and random violence and senseless tragedy were the
New York Enquirer’s
fare. “Mom Uses Son’s Face as Ashtray!” blared one headline. “I’m Sorry I KilledMy Mother, but I’m Glad I Killed My Father!” declared another. “Teenager Twists Off Corpse’s Head to Get Gold Teeth.” Sometimes, exploitative articles were disguised as altruism, such as the time the tabloid tracked down the “World’s Ugliest Little Girl—she’s so ugly that she’s not allowed to go to school!” The
Enquirer
paid for her plastic surgery and plastered her haunting face across its pages for weeks. * More often, however, the tabloid’s subjects had died horribly. If they had already been hauled off to the morgue, a
New York Enquirer
photographer would have to “raid a morgue,” according to a former reporter. “When you ‘raid a morgue’ you pull the corpse out of a special drawer, photograph the deceased, then return the body to where you found it,” explained
ex-Enquirer
staffer George Bernard. “Imagine the anguish, the despair and the hatred generated towards the
Enquirer
by the family and friends of the deceased when they saw their loved ones plastered through the pages of what was then the most terrifying tabloid in the country. Not a very pleasant business.”
    Nonetheless, the formula was a success. The circulation skyrocketed to about 1 million. Pope decided to take his grisly publication national and in 1957, he changed the name of the
New York Enquirer
to the
National Enquirer.
Pope became the pioneer of gore exploitation magazines, much as Robert Harrison discovered the scandal market several years earlier. Soon, imitators sprang up. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than forty titles catered to a macabre taste for gore; tabloids with names like
National Exposure, National Mirror,
and
National Limelight
saturated the newsstands. Their combined circulation was estimated at 7 million. “In view of this popularity, it is surprising that tabloids have been so widely ignored by serious commentators on the press,” noted Reginald Potterton, a mainstream reporter who went to work for the
Enquirer
in 1963 during the newspaper strike. “They represent a significant condition in our culture, yet few people talk about them.”
    Indeed, gore magazines were the demented cousins of thepublishing industry. Pope’s outrageous formula for the
National Enquirer
worked wonders for circulation, though it didn’t help him much in the prestige department. The
National Enquirer,
Gene Pope quickly learned, wasn’t going to open doors for him the way
Il Progresso
did for his father. Quite the opposite. Pope’s children were once asked to leave the Catholic school they attended when the mother superior discovered what their father did for a living. * New York City administrators were worried that the
National Enquirer
and magazines like it were taking over the newsstands and tainting the minds of the young. The tabloid was banned in some areas and Pope was forced to resign his position on the Board of Higher Education because of the
Enquirer.
Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy refused to give Pope’s staff the police press cards they needed. Pope sued Kennedy in New York Supreme Court, charging him with “restricting freedom of the press.” He didn’t win the case.
    To stay ahead of the competition, Pope, who actually grew faint at the sight of blood, kept upping