The boss don't like swindle, make it robbery

The National Enquirer is a shadow of its former self. I worked there for a month in 1981 when it was owned and edited by Generoso Pope. I was no fan of his then but in retrospect I can’t imagine him catching and killing for Donald Trump. His guys would have caught and published, the way they did with Presidential aspirants Gary Hart and John Edwards. They would have ripped the lid off Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels in real time, not years after the fact. The Apprentice would have been riddled with moles on the Enquirer payroll. We would have known all there was to know about what was being snorted and with whom the star was getting hot and heavy. The schmuck being told “You’re fired!” would have been Trump himself. Or so I’d like to think. Generoso Pope was weird but knew what he was doing. He hired Brits and Australians with Fleet Street instincts and scruples and used his checkbook to get scoops, not hide them. By the standards of the time, he also paid extremely well. I was a Brit, so they thought I might be a good fit. I wasn’t. This is something I wrote when I go back from my brief encounter. It was published in the now defunct Washington Journalism Review.

To understand the National Enquirer, it helps to hear a parable. Actually, the story is more or less true. It is meant as a gentle warning to newcomers, and it was as such that I was told it.

A Wall Street Journal reporter, it seems, one day discovered that prestige could no longer meet the demands of mortgage, college fees, alimony and the IRS unless supplemented by a massive, indeed impossible, raise. This common quandary has driven some to drink, others into lobbying. Our man chose the Enquirer.  Confident that his substantial, though sober journalistic talent could be moulded to the tabloid’s taste, he signed on and moved his family to its headquarters in Florida. His salary doubled, the sun shone brightly on his new condominium, he acquired the beginnings of a tan.

The Enquirer gives its recruits a month to prove themselves. No problem, he thought. Three weeks in, it was becoming plain he would not make the grade. Either he must produce a blockbuster, or ... well, it didn’t bear much inspection. He began to thrash around.

The result was nothing if not inspired. Dallas star Larry Hagman, he wrote, was even more fiendish than the JR he portrayed. Why, even as a child he had delighted in tearing the wings off sparrows and biting the heads off mice. The Amazing Untold Story. The only question was how to stand it up.  In this respect, the author was considerably more diligent than Janet Cooke whose fabrications had so embarrassed the Washington Post; under the circumstances he had to be. More exalted practitioners of the craft may consider the Enquirer’s interpretation of ethics and accuracy a trifle idiosyncratic, but the bladder has standards, and sticks to them.  It uses greed and paranoia to spur reporters to new heights of inventiveness and zeal, but realizes the First Amendment’s mercy can be strained. So there is a balancing mechanism, the Research Department.  Its members are cunningly paid less than the reporters whose work they scrutinize and approach their task with the baneful enthusiasm of Inquisitors.  That the Enquirer is published at all is not their fault.

However, Research was no match for the creator of Hagman: Hollywood Caligula.  Their basic strategy is to demand dozens of taped interviews and the names and numbers of all sources in order to re-report each story. His response was to enlist a corps of friends around the country and assign them roles as indiscreet Hagman intimates.  The deception was well‑rehearsed, there was pressure from above, where the story positively screamed record sales, and the splendid act of desperation sailed though the guard rails. Even the libel experts retained from Edward Bennet William’s law firm were impressed. Six million shoppers got their money’s worth.

So, alas, did Hagman’s lawyers. After a brief flash of glory, the reporter was given ten minutes to clear his desk under the businesslike gaze of the Enquirer’s armed security men. A tragic end, but better perhaps then simply being branded No Good, or as the Enquirer laconically terms its rejects, NG.

The genial Scot at the National Press Club bar painted a pleasing picture of opulence in the Florida sunshine. If there was a touch of the hustler in his broad Glasgow accent, it was belied by the half‑moon spectacles, professorial tweeds and Mont Blanc fountain pen. He had found me at a vulnerable moment. My previous employer, a British newsweekly, had folded, the job hunt was going badly and I was broke.  I could scarcely afford to go to a supermarket, much less scorn the drivel on its checkout counters. Sympathy for Carol Burnett, whose suit against the Enquirer I once cheered, had became a luxury.

The recruiter suggested I try my hand at Articles editor. It started at a thousand a week, carried the responsibility of creating and running a network of reporters, and might, in the event of some really spectacular death or disaster, involve a little travel.  Poverty, and the slightly rakish prospect of building a Smileyesque Circus dedicated to ferreting out the Untold, Amazing and Bizarre, were ample stimuli.  Three days later I was on a prepaid flight south.

The Enquirer resides in Lantana, one of those countless ribs of real estate whose primary function is to separate Palm Beach from Fort Lauderdale and 1‑95 from the Intracoastal Waterway. A bland tract of telegraph poles, tired palm trees and prefabrication, it is remarkable on two counts, a large population of Finns and numbing soullessness.

It was perhaps my misfortune to be ushered into the presence of Mike Hoy, the Executive Editor, at lunchtime. The place was all but empty, and thus conveyed, in its efficiently pastel way, a sense of innocent cheerfulness, like an outsized kindergarten. One of the newsroom cubicles was stacked with exotic toys. I began to suspect that the people who worked here might be having fun.  Hoy, thirtyish, Australian and modeled on the lines of Cliff Richard, offered me a tryout almost immediately, then explained why the company would not, as had once been its practice, rent a car for me. One of my more exuberant predecessors had driven an Enquirer Hertz into the waterway.

Then he said something rather strange. “I want you to know that we really are looking for editors.” I thought this scarcely needed saying. That impermanence was an institution at the Enquirer did not occur to me, nor, as yet, did the connection between its desperation for new blood and whatever had possessed the predecessor to sink his car.

Every aspect of the Enquirer, from its management techniques to what it prints, is governed by a surgically precise appreciation of human frailty, for this is the great achievement of its own and publisher, the splendidly named Generoso Pope Jr. His 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 mysterious, 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. Under Hoy’s guidance it was hoped I would quickly learn to divine his will.

Known simply as The Boss or GP, he dominates the waking thoughts, and more than a few sleeping ones as well, off all at the Enquirer, yet no one, except* perhaps his most trusted henchman Iain Calder (another Scotsman), can be said to know him.  Even Hoy at number three in the hierarchy, lives in terror.

An authorized account, published in 1976 by the Miami Herald, describes him as “a tall man, built like a Bronx precinct captain”. 54 years have softened that somewhat, except for the face. Said an editor, one of the few women in the higher echelons, “There doesn’t seem to be anything behind his eyes.” The effect is a mask of staring malevolence, which may be unfortunate, but certainly does little to endear.  There are times when he seems to crave a locker‑room camaraderie with his editors.  This normally occurs in the evening when everyone else has left. He perches himself on a desk and starts to josh. The atmosphere is like an overstretched elastic band.  His humor is coarse, painful and revolves around the attributes of absent secretaries.  I recall one episode vividly. An editor had just been assigned a particularly beautiful girl,  sweet‑natured with long pre‑Raphaelite hair, and, as Pope put it, built. He suggested a swap, then, making an open‑palmed gesture just above his waist, remarked, “I like milk in my coffee.”

He is, however, educated. A top of his class graduate in engineering from MIT, he reportedly served in the CIA’s psycholgical warfare unit. That said, glimpses of his life beyond the Enquirer, which he purchased in 1952, are virtually non‑existent His father was the publisher of the New York Italian paper Il Progresso, which has spawned the inevitable legends, none of them proved. I particularly like the one which has a Genovese family boss, back in the early days, distributing the weekly payroll from a cash‑filled black bag. Some see murkiness in the fact that since he moved the operation from New Jersey in 1971 he has never left south Florida. He says he hates to fly.  Such stories add to his eery mystique. Other contributors include the gun‑toting plainclothes security men who haunt the premises, the spot checks on reporters’ telephone conversations, and the uniformed Lantana patrolman who escorts him to and from his car.

I cannot say I knew any of this when I started, though day one should have taught me more perhaps than it did. My first mistake was to turn up in coat and tie.  The Higher Authority wore shirtsleeves and an increasingly familiar pair of pants, a style, admonished Hoy,  that I would do well to emulate. I blundered again by trying to strike up a conversation. Apparently one did not talk to colleagues, be they only six feet away, except by internal telephone and with one’s back turned. I needed a coffee. “Put a top on it,” someone hissed as I carried a cup to my desk, “The Boss doesn’t like stains on his carpet.” To atone, I worked through lunch, another miscalculation. “The Boss believes in lunch.” Next day I ate, grateful for a temporary escape, only to be informed that I’d been seen leaving the office with the wrong people. My companions were said to be under some form of cloud and best avoided. Besides, what was I doing having lunch? I wondered 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 before the age of computers. The open plan layout was symmetrical about a narrow avenue across which two rows of editors, about nine in all, numbers varied, were occasionally polite to one another. Behind them sat their secretaries, each busily pretending to callers that her boss worked in a private office. Next, pinched into lines of narrow, benchlike desks came the 40 or so reporters, each owing allegiance and his job to a particular editor. Finally the writers, responsible for the Enquirer’a deathless prose and probably the happiest group. 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 boxes. Pope had a grander sanctum elsewhere, but it was here he would come when he wished to make his presence felt.  Assistants ensured that a pack of Kents and a lighter always awaited his arrival.  My first impression was that my fellow editors all looked very ill: exchange their typewriters for oars and they would have made perfect, though at $60 000 a year and up, very expensive, extras for the sea battle in Ben Hur. 

Among the healthier looking was my neighbour to the right, yet another expatriate Scotsman.  The gossip editor,  he had lost his laryngx to cancer and went about his duties in a hoarse, high‑pressure whisper punctuated by clicks. Across the way sat a man with a weight problem, feverishly working his way through a bag of tangerines. Two triple bypass operations had slimmed him down somewhat, a fact Pope considered humorous: “It’s good to see old Levy fits in his chair these days.” And then was a character they called the Poison Dwarf, a wizened homunculus with a peach blossom accent. Had he really been 55, his appearance might not have been so distressing. He was 38.

The reporters seemed to be faring better. Many might have been worthy candidates for the SPCA. They had  the furtive look of kicked and beaten labradors.  Foot‑soldiers, they were at least insulated from the Maximum Leader by their editors, whose paranoia‑induced savagery was the mild price of relative security.  The reason I had been brought in from outside was that none of them wanted to risk their necks or their $45 000 a year any 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 One subaltern on the line.

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 provincial 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 colony. He seemed to be doing all that was required of him, his file drawer was full of good stories in progress, yet there was a smell of doom about him. Colleagues shied away, spoke of him with, of all things in this emotional charnel house, compassion. He was being executed, Enquirer‑style.

First they cut his salary, then removed his reporters, forcing him to rely on stringers, finally demanded a massive increase in output. “This is the way Pope always does it,” he said one evening 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 deck was empty. It reminded me of a scene from a Bond film. Mr Big holds a council of operatives, one of whom has failed to satisfy. A flick of a switch, and the offender is electrocuted, his remains brusquely flushed through a convenient hole in the floor. In this case the victim was allowed to reincarnate himself as a reporter. A rare privilege.

The editor’s defrocking could be ascribed to no particular commission or omission, it was just the way things worked around here. A sympathetic reporter noticed my puzzlement. “The Boss is a toy train freak,” she explained, “I think he likes to see us as a vast train set.  He throws points, sets up obstructions, and races us off bridges just for the hell of seeing what happens.”

In terms of how they are put together, there is probably little difference between the National Enquirer and, say, Time. To the structuralist, anyway. Leads are developed and assigned, reporters and stringers turn in voluminous files which are rigorously checked for accuracy, boiled by writers into the house style, and finally, with luck, published. There, however, the resemblance ends.

The process begins with the lead. Each editor is expected to submit thirty 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. The ideas come from reporters and stringers (who both receive up to $300 if their offering gets into print), other publications (there is always a race for the new Omni, Cosmopolitan and Self) and the imagination. Memorable specimens from the last, and frankly largest, 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 Celebrity Doors to See How Generous the Stars are” (in the hope, apparently, that the reporter will get savaged by a guard dog).

A number of celebrity leads are preemptive, developed in advance like obituaries. The Elizabeth Taylor‑John Warner separation was probably ready to run before they had even said their vows and certainly for months before it occurred. At this very moment at least one editor is contemplating marriage between Robert Wagner, widower of Natalie Wood, and his television co‑star Stephanie Powers.

Even the most grizzled veteran cannot 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 fifties and sixties (hence Sophia Loren, Princess Grace and, by association, her unfortunate daughter Caroline) and the top ten Neilson‑rated shows that he happens to watch (not 60 Minutes). Dudley Moore, of 10 and Arthur fame, fails to register on the grounds that he is, and I quote, “not big enough.” Tom (Magnum PI) Selleck didn’tt have them right stuff either, until Pope was persuaded to poll his secretaries.

There are, however, some totally reliable No Good’s, chief among them blacks, except when they practice voodoo, witness aliens, 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 per cent burns to become a multimillionaire (a surefire hit under the Rags to Riches category).  Hoy immediately asked me what colour he was. Black. Kill it. Gays, meanwhile, may be beaten up at will.  An outraged account of San Francisco’s demographics was headlined “Sick! Sick! Sick!” That the Enquirer, a self‑styled Equal Opportunity Employer, has no minority employees is not coincidental.

Once an approved lead has pleased Story Control, a computer programmed to weed out duplicates, it is ready to be reported, and the ethical mayhem really begins.  If celebrities are the potatoes of tabloid journalism, miraculous medicine is the meat. Unfortunately, the medical fraternity likes to be circumspect about describing its advances, and talks of percentages, hopes, possibilities, rarely of anything so definite as  a cure. This is too grey for the Enquirer which does not recognise the subjunctive mood.  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 Medicine, and say them on tape.  This is known as Burning Docs.

Technically, the reporter’s path is strewn with regulations. Not only must 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 under considerably more pressure to produce than to be an upright citizen. Refusal to carry out an order is treated with military firmness.

There are many ways to ease on the record indiscretion from an interviewee, the most popular being the old Twenty Questions ploy. The subject is stroked into a state of trust and then hit with a series of convoluted queries, phrased in Enquirerese, to which he will answer, if the reporter is adroit enough, merely yes or no. These little words can be made to speak volumes. Critical readers may have wondered how it is that supposedly sophisticated professionals, when quoted in the Enquirer, always manage to clutter their 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 Hemingway, 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 US History”, the tale of a computer rip‑off inside the federal government. He had even persuaded a Justice 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. The following scene ensued:

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.

Evaluator: It’s got to be robbery.

Lutz: But there’s a difference.

Editor (intervening): He’s right. Let’s look it up in the dictionary.

Evaluator: Hey, I don’t care. The Boss don’t like swindle, make it robbery. 

Editor: Get on it, Lutz, get your guy to say robbery. Now.

What makes the reporter’ s mission particularly tough is that he is often covering not a set of circumstances his editor knows or believes to exist, but one that the editor wishes to have happen. A new TV series has emerged, perhaps, and The Boss wants an exciting story about its participants. Or an editor may conclude that there has been too striking an absence of Farrah Fawcett. A reconciliation with Lee Majors is needed to fill the gap. Thanks to a large array of “insiders”, “friends” and “intimate sources” many of Celebrity romance stories are frequently the work of stringers whose main activity is to hang around fashionable watering holes. Maitre d’s and waiters are also retained. Thus the Enquirer usually has a pair of eyes in place when an interesting couple appear in public for the first time, or have a violent quarrel. The venues for the events which led up to the death of Natalie Wood were Iittered with informants.

Hollywood sex, in the Enquirer, is a formulaic affair. The starting assumption is that any physical contact represents romance. At the lower end of the scale, hand holding is described by “insiders”, who do not have be told the Enquirer style,  as “they looked like a pair of teenagers in love”. Any kiss less demure than a peck is evidence that the relationship has turned “hot and heavy”.  Full‑scale osculation inspires sources to declare “they are closer than this”, referring to an imaginary pair of intertwined fingers.

The distinctions are taken very seriously. “You say they kissed?... What kind of kiss? ... On the lips? ... How long did it last?... Did he put his tongue in her mouth?” Equally earnest is the Enquirer’s attitude towards the paranormal. Cranks are not tolerated, and anyone claiming to have been reborn, sighted UFO’s or communicated with the beyond is subjected to hypnotic regression. This is considered sounder evidence than a lie detector because the latter has the unfortunate habit of sometimes being accurate.

The reigning exponent of what may be called the “Hey‑Martha‑Will‑You‑Get‑A‑Look-At‑This” school is Henry Gris. His latest find is Dr Azhazha, eminent Soviet scientist. I was unable to discover much about Azhazha during my time in Lantana except that between himself, Gris and Gris’ editor a fertile mind was at work somewhere. He claimed, and there was an artist’s conception complete with silhouetted Kremlin to back it up, that a mysterious cloud had drifted over Moscow one night causing great consternation. A friend of mine, stationed in Moscow for a well‑known British daily, commented, “I didn’t see this cloud, which was perhaps careless. It might have started World War III.”

The Enquirer is inordinately proud of its Research Department. A copy of a glowing account in Editor and Publisher is compulsory reading for all arrivals.

E&P tells us that Research is staffed by probing professionals, headed by Ruth Annan, a 16 year veteran of Time. Her team includes “two medical specialists, two lawyers, a linguist who speaks four languages, a geographer,  three with master’s degrees in library science, one with a master’s degree in educational psychology, and an author.” A considerable  brain’s trust, and certainly better qualified than many reporters, some of whom have been heard to discuss George Orwell’s 1984 as “the one about a pig named Churchill who gets to rule the world.”

And yet it regularly lets through palpable inanities. The concept of a “4 000‑year‑old Stone Age statuette” does not bother it, for example, but this is a quibble. Most of the rubbish that escapes the tireless fact‑checkers is on a grander scale, even in cases where the facts can actually be checked. My own favorite is the charming story of a young and extremely tall Glasgow girl who showed her true saintliness by marrying a sixty‑year‑old dwarf on crutches. Having never been an optimist when it comes to human nature, I called Scotland. The reality was rather grim. “She’s a well‑known bitch,” said my contact, “He was the doting village idiot. She married him on a bet. Now she’s suing for divorce.” My information was not gratefully received.

I have no doubt that Research pursues Truth with genuine vigor but as the adventures of the Wall Street Journal reporter demonstrate, it is hampered by one major defect: literal‑mindedness. If the tapes and copy jibe, and sources when contacted agree to what has been reported, the story must, however reluctantly, be granted the imprimatur of accuracy.

One disadvantage of Annan and her gang is that they clog up an already hopelessly slow system—lead time is usually three or four weeks—with haggling that, given the nature of the beast, is utterly unnecessary. On the upside, however, their mere existence enables reporters to tell a suspicious world that, yes, really, the Enquirer does strive after fact. As editor Paul Levy told E&P, “Today any reporter can say with justifiable pride that he works for the most accurate paper in the country.”

Christmas is a season tailor‑made for the Enquirer. There is uplift in the air, the urge to consume takes on cosmic proportions. The Boss, like so many dictators, is also a fanatical sentimentalist. The place erupts with nostalgia for the imaginary Yuletides of Dickens and Disney. There will be joviality in Lantana, even if the staff must be bludgeoned into it.

I have always thought tropical Christmases disconcerting. The sight of a Santa Claus sweating under mounds of cotton wool and red felt is peculiarly uncomfortable, not least when he is ho‑ho‑hoing through one’s office. I suddenly found myself being saluted by a life‑sized mechanical toy soldier every time I came to work. The grounds,  once elegant and restful, blossomed with creches, Wise Men, reindeer and angels trumpeting seasonal musak from hidden loudspeakers.  Every bush twinkled with myriad fairy lights. Model trains chugged and whistled their way around a gigantic candy mountain in the forecourt. The building all but disappeared under bunting. Employees, glum as ever, now inhabited a world of maniacal festivity.

This is the one time that the Enquirer opts to reveal itself to the surrounding drabness. The means is a truly heroic tree, Pope’s pride, and at 150 feet billed as the largest in the country. The splendid growth is felled in Oregon, its branches painstakingly removed and numbered, and the whole thing transported in kit form to the Enquirer’s gates on a flatcar. A team comprised of the Lantana public works department and a benign motorcycle gang then reassembles and proceeds to hide it under several thousand lights.

Hundreds descend to watch The Boss turn it on, rendering it visible from Boca Raton to Palm Beach. For an instant the brooding glare gives way to beatification. The ceremony over, he wanders quietly through the crowd, listening for criticism of his display. If anything disappoints, it will immediately be rectified.  The woman was right, I concluded. We really are just a part of his extraordinary toy railway. Found NG, I was glad to be going home.