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owe it all to Jackie O.
Book tells of the real birth of celebrity journalism
By Jeff Bercovici
Tabloids have been around for a long time--the better part of two centuries, depending on how you reckon it.
But it wasn't until the late 1960s that they hit on the format that would allow them to penetrate every supermarket in America and sell 12 million copies a month.
The pivotal change came when the king of the rags, the National Enquirer, decided to trade in gruesome crime stories for another kind of sensationalism, says Bill Sloan, a former top writer and editor for the Enquirer and the Globe and the author of a new book, "I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact."
"If you could see those Enquirers from 1963 to ’66, they were just the raunchiest things you ever saw in print," says Sloan, "axe murders, decapitations, photos that would turn any normal person’s stomach."
Then inspiration came to Generoso Pope, the Enquirer's larger-than-life publisher, in the form of an article on Jackie Onassis that ran in 1969.
This was six years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but the nation was still fascinated by, if not still in love with, his widow, then remarried to Greek shipping magnate Ari Onassis.
"We ran a very negative story on Jackie in which her kids’ former nanny just blasted the hell out of her," says Sloan.
"It caused a real jump in our sales. Pope thought he’d found the magic formula. After that, he tried to put Jackie on the cover every chance he got," he says, adding that Pope often called on freelancers to fabricate stories around suggestive, or even commonplace, paparazzi shots of her.
As the other tabloids followed suit, a war ensued in which publishers were paying huge sums of money to guarantee prime placement in supermarket checkout aisles. By 1982, the tabloids were selling a collective 12 million copies a week, with the Enquirer alone accounting for 5.4 million.
Sloan was working as a reporter at the Dallas Times Herald in 1968, just as Pope was embarking on a campaign to make the magazine respectable by hiring writers and editors from the journalistic mainstream.
"At that time the Enquirer was using a cover organization called Worldwide Features as a contact for people in the 'legitimate press,'" says Sloan, who now lives in Texas.
"I had handled half a dozen freelance features for Worldwide Features without realizing where the stuff was bound for," he adds. He discovered the true nature of the assignments after receiving an advance check for expenses in an Enquirer pay envelope.
After working for several months under this arrangement, he was invited to the Enquirer’s headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., to interview for a position on staff.
Like many other reporters, he accepted the invitation thinking he would surely decline the job offer. But once there he was bowled over by the promise of a salary more than double what he was earning at the newspaper.
Sloan was also surprised to learn that the Enquirer’s staff consisted not of alcoholics and deadbeats, as had long been the case with the tabloids, but mostly of other ex-newspaper types.
"They were not all a bunch of loonies and weirdos working in someone’s garage like I expected," says Sloan.
Thanks to Pope’s initiative, the Enquirer was then in the process of making over its image in the hopes of winning distribution in grocery stores and other mainstream sales outlets. Before the change, displaying the magazine in supermarkets would have been out of the question.
Sloan believes it was in large measure an overreliance on the selling power of celebrities that led to the gradual but dramatic decline of tabloid circulation that began in the mid-'80s and has lasted up through the present.
Though the issue of the Enquirer with Elvis Presley dead in his coffin became the best seller ever, moving seven million copies, once the King, Jackie O. and Princess Diana were gone, there were no "megastars" who could replace them, says Sloan.
Even so, the tabloids continued to increase the amount of celebrity coverage in the mix, doing fewer of what Sloan calls "gee whiz stories" and "freak stories."
"Frankly, I think the tabloids have gone too heavily toward celebrities, and I don’t think that’s all tabloid readers want to read," says Sloan.
Meanwhile, a curious citizen no longer has to pick up the Enquirer or the Star to learn about the latest Hollywood love triangle; this coverage is omnipresent, in magazines like People and Us Weekly and on shows like "Extra" and "Inside Edition."
"The mainstream has suddenly cultivated a very keen interest in celebrity scandal which it did not have up until the late '80s or early '90s," says Sloan.
"The Clinton thing has fueled this, but I think it was in the making even before Clinton came along. The tabloids have in essence lost this private universe that they used to have all to themselves, where the stories they were doing were stories that basically no one else would touch."
August 10, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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