Dish (14 page)

Late at night on July 29, 1975, Secret Service agents spotted a slim young man with a mustache and aviator glasses behind the Georgetown home of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The man was in the process of heaving five green plastic garbage bags into the trunk of his 1968 Buick. The agents confronted the man and ordered him to return the trash. He refused. They argued with the man and tried to reason with him, but he held fast. He was, he said, keeping the garbage. The Secret Service agents were puzzled—they had been trained to deal with terrorists, but not with garbage thieves—and they called their supervisor, who ordered them to bring the man in for questioning.

At Secret Service headquarters, the agents interrogated the man, a twenty-seven-year-old named Jay Gourley. The theft of the trash seemed so bizarre that the agents were at pains to establish the man’s mental stability. But Gourley was quite sane, even lucid and articulate. He argued that garbage, by definition, had been abandoned by its owner, and therefore he couldn’t be accused of stealing anything. After two-and-a-half hours, the Secret Service concluded that, indeed, Gourley had not broken the law.
Since they couldn’t charge him with any crime, they took his photograph and reluctantly released him. Gourley had neglected to tell the Secret Service that he was a reporter on assignment for the
National Enquirer,
but as soon as he was free he telephoned his editors in Lantana, Florida. “Operation Trash,” he reported, was accomplished.

Most of Kissinger’s garbage, as the tabloid reported the following week, was simply garbage: an empty vichyssoise can, used packages of antacids, empty yogurt containers, two unread copies of the
New York Times,
a lot of empty cigarette packs (his wife, Nancy, was a smoker), and a prescription for a bottle of Seconal. The
Enquirer
also found what it boasted were “hundreds of Secret Service documents.” Among the booty were copies of Kissinger’s daily agenda, including appointments with corporate leaders that weren’t on the official agendas distributed to the media. One classified document explained a coded light signal system that was being tested by the Secret Service for use in all of its limousines. Another detailed the amount and kind of ammunition carried by each Secret Service limousine.

When the
National Enquirer
published its findings, the story made headlines around the world. Kissinger was outraged, “Really revolted,” he said. His wife Nancy was in “anguish.” The article so alarmed the Hollywood community, that in Beverly Hills an ordinance was passed forbidding garbage theft. And when furious officials at the Secret Service complained that sensitive information like that should never have been made public, the
Enquirer
turned the admonishment into vindication. Generoso Pope, the
Enquirer’s
editor-owner, insisted that the tabloid wasn’t violating the Secretary of State’s privacy; it was performing a service to the American public—indeed to Henry Kissinger himself—by showing how easy it would be for an assassin or a Communist spy to get his hands on the classified documents that were in Kissinger’s trash. Then, using the classic tabloid tactic of moralizing about prurient detail in order to justify serving it up, the
Enquirer
followed up its initial story with the headline: “Secret Service Admits: Confidential Documents That
Enquirer
Found in Kissinger’s Trash Was a ‘Breach of Security.’ ”

For most of its twenty-year history under Gene Pope Jr., the
Enquirer
had been beneath notice, as far as the establishment press in America was concerned. But after the headlines generated by “Operation Trash,” its audacity—or shamelessness, depending on one’s point of view—as well as its success began to receive attention.

Since Pope had moved the tabloid to Florida in 1971, housing it in a nondescript low-level office building in an area near the coastal town of Lantana that became known as Tabloid Valley, circulation had climbed from 2 million to over 3 million in 1975, giving it the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. Its gross earnings for 1974 were reportedly $41 million, versus $17 million a year earlier. It received nearly 2 million pieces of mail a year and had its own zip code. And according to one study, the 20 million people who read the
Enquirer
every week were not, as was commonly believed, “trailer park trash” at the very bottom of the demographic chart, but women aged twenty-five to forty-nine with high school or college educations.

The man who had created this wildly successful handbook of the middle class, middle American housewife was unrecognizable as the New York power broker who had fled the Northeast in terror in 1971. The man who had dined with mobsters, hobnobbed with political fixers, whose arrogance infuriated the city reformers had come to distrust and loathe the powerful crowd he once personified. The MIT grad had become an anti-intellectual. He was worth an estimated $150 million, but he drove a beat-up white Chevy and ate brown bag lunches of lettuce, tomato, and American cheese on rye. His clothes—short-sleeved shirts and baggy work pants in either blue or gray—came from Sears. New hires at the
Enquirer
often mistook him for the janitor because he spent so much time checking the thermostat in the company’s offices (it had to be at
exactly
seventy-five degrees) and tending to the grounds (the grass, which he would measure with a ruler, had to be
exactly
three inches high). Generoso Pope Jr. was a man intent on controlling his environment.

The only indication of his tremendous fortune was the fourteen-room mansion he had built on a bluff overlooking the ocean in Manalapan, a five-minute drive away from the
National Enquirer’s
offices. It was largely a concession to his wife, Lois, a former Broadway showgirl and cabaret singer who had not taken to life in the swamplands of Florida quite as easily as her husband. Within a few years, however, Lois came around and eventually she and several of Gene Pope’s six children were working for the
National Enquirer.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his publication’s relentless investigations into the private lives of the famous, Pope himself liked to remain anonymous. In fact, his name didn’t appear on the tabloid’s masthead. But there was no question that Gene Pope
was
the
National Enquirer.
He worked incessantly. He chainsmoked Kents and came into the office six days a week, usually bringing piles of work home with him each evening. Pope approved or killed every story idea—about six to nine hundred were submitted every week—and read each page proof, signing off with a rubber stamp: “Passed. G.P.” He never took vacations, and since moving to Lantana, which was just outside of Palm Beach, the farthest he had traveled was to one of his printing facilities in the next county to the south.

As a manager his behavior alternated between astonishing generosity and tyranny. He quietly paid for an expensive operation for the local barber; when one editor needed an expensive bone marrow transplant, Pope assigned a researcher to find the best specialist in the country and footed the bill. Then he turned around and fired half a dozen staffers a few days before Christmas.

Pope’s peculiar mixture of kindness and self-aggrandizement was epitomized by his annual “Christmas present” to Lantana: the world’s tallest Christmas tree. It started out as a 21-foot spruce outside the
National Enquirer’s
offices in 1971. Some motorists stopped by to admire it. The next year he erected a 40-foot tree, and crowds gathered. Within a few years, it became a massive operation: teams were dispatched to the Pacific Northwest, sometimes bribing officials or local Indian tribes to circumvent regulations and let them cut down the largest tree they could find in existence. Over the years, the tree’s usual height was over 125 feet. It had to be chopped into pieces, put on a train, and reassembled with cranes and teams of workers in Lantana. It was decorated lavishly, with hundreds of feet of lights, garland, moving
teddy bears, and Santa’s helpers. Busloads of families made pilgrimages each year to gawk at the tree. It was rumored to cost close to $1 million; Pope would never comment on the price, saying merely, “It’s a Christmas present.” Much to Pope’s anger and dismay, he could never get it listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the world’s tallest Christmas tree. It was just another example, Pope would grumble, of the establishment’s refusal to recognize his achievements.

The newsroom of the
Enquirer
had an incredibly competitive atmosphere. Many of its reporters came from England, Scotland, or Australia and imported the aggressive Fleet Street brand of reporting. “They’re the masters of the
Enquirer’s
kind of ‘hit-and-run,’ make-a-story-out-of-one-fact journalism,” former articles editor P. J. Corkery once observed. “The English support a half dozen national newspapers like the
Enquirer.
In fact, that’s how I got interested in this stuff. For a long while when I was in England, I was fascinated by the fact that every Sunday morning, sober, respectable people would leave their churches and homes to pick up papers much more lurid than even the
Enquirer.
The reason for this is that while the stories are often outlandish, the reporting is exceptionally well organized and researched. They come up with all sorts of small details that are very revealing. In fact, the better papers of this kind in England are fun to read.”

To motivate staffers, Pope paid them $100 for any idea that resulted in a published story and “The Far Out Story Idea of the Week” was worth $1,000. Pope also liked to pit editorial teams—two editors and six reporters—against each other to see which could come up with the most provocative, shocking stories. Editors who got the most stories in the tabloid received the highest pay; the number of stories each reporter produced was posted in the newsroom. Those in the bottom third were put on thirty days’ notice; if their ranking didn’t improve in a month, they were fired. One Friday, thirteen reporters were fired for not producing more.

Turnover was so high at the
Enquirer
that its rival, the
Globe,
moved to nearby Boca Raton in the early 1980s so it could more easily hire fired
Enquirer
employees. But Pope never had trouble finding replacements; starting salaries at the
Enquirer
were among the highest in the industry, and the perks were unparalleled.
“Money was no object to him,” noted former freelancer Colin Dangaard. “Planes, yachts, traveling to wherever. Whatever it took, he [Pope] didn’t care. I used to freelance stories to him during my lunch hour when I was a reporter at the
Miami Herald.
For what took me thirty minutes of work on the telephone for the
Enquirer
once a week, I was paid almost as much as I made for the entire week from the
Herald.
And these were little human interest things, not even celebrity stories.”

The reporters and editors themselves, in addition to being compensated handsomely, funneled money to their sources. The publication had an editorial budget of $15 million. It made some 5,000 payments a year to sources for tips and spent $850,000 on stories that went unpublished. Reporters were given thick wads of $20, $50, and $100 bills to use as bribes in getting stories. “You go into a bar and you leave twenty dollars. You have one drink, you leave twenty dollars. You have no drinks, you leave twenty dollars. You use the phone, you leave twenty dollars,” said Mike Walker. “This was back in the 1970s, when twenty dollars really meant something. We can easily spend $20,000 for something that’s going to end up in the trashcan.” “I would walk into that newsroom and I could do anything I wanted,” said Tom Kuncl. “To be able to do that, to have those sorts of resources, was truly exciting.”

Contrary to charges made by its critics, the
National Enquirer
didn’t have an official policy of making up stories. It merely sensationalized them. Its reporters knew just how to manipulate people into giving them the quotes the magazine needed. Pope himself spelled out the techniques in a confidential memorandum in 1975. “Prod, push and probe the main characters in the story,” Pope wrote. “Help them frame their answers,” he advised. The memo gave this imaginary interview between an
Enquirer
reporter and an inarticulate source: