Dish (47 page)

Over at the
Enquirer,
the editors and reporters reacted in horror. The
Globe
was giving supermarket tabloids a bad name. “I don’t think they’ve done any real reporting,” sniffed the
Enquirer’s
David Perel. “I’ve yet to read anything with credibility in that publication.” When the
Boston Herald
wanted to do an article on the
Globe
and the
National Enquirer’s
coverage of the case, Iain Calder refused to be interviewed unless he could be assured that photographs of his publication wouldn’t appear alongside those of the
Globe.
“I don’t want us to appear next to a magazine that runs headlines about alien babies from outer space,” he said. After all, he had the tabloid’s reputation to think about.

By the peak of the O.J. story, Iain Calder was growing weary.
The
National Enquirer
had been sold in 1988, after its owner, Gene Pope, died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-one. (“National Enquirer Owner Goes to Meet with Elvis,” ran the headline in the
New York Post.)
The new owner, Peter Callahan, proudly described himself as cheap and pronounced that there were plenty of excesses that could be eliminated from the
National Enquirer’s
budget. The first thing to go was Pope’s beloved “World’s Tallest Christmas Tree.”
*

Iain Calder had stayed on under the new ownership with a stunning salary of $600,000, but by 1995, the work was no longer fun. He was fifty-six years old, and was still working sixteen-and eighteen-hour days. He had started having dizzy spells. To relax, he and his wife of forty-one years, Jane, took a visit to his hometown in Scotland. There, thousands of miles away from OJ. and Jackson and Tom Cruise and Donald Trump, the dizzy spells stopped. When Calder got back to the United States in November 1995—in the midst of the biggest tabloid story of the century—he declared that he would retire. “It’s an epic moment in tabloid history,” said Dan Schwartz, an
Enquirer
alum who was working at the competing
Globe
at the time.

To replace Calder, Callahan chose Steve Coz, the thirty-eight-year-old who had been heading up the O.J. coverage. Coz was, in many ways, the polar opposite of Calder. He was the product of an exclusive New England prep school—and he looked it. He had a square, aristocratic chin and wore tortoiseshell glasses and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. He had been hired by the
Enquirer
in 1982, shortly after graduating from Harvard cum laude with an English major. His mother was always embarrassed that he worked for the tabloid—”He’s smarter than that,” she would insist—but Coz was impressed by the aggressiveness and intelligence of the reporters, and, he argued, the mainstream media was every bit as tabloidy as the
Enquirer.
“The other night, I’m watching
television and there’s Mike Wallace, hosting a show called ‘20th Century’ and it’s all about the cover-up of UFOs,” Coz said. “So here I have a 60
Minutes
correspondent telling me about visitors from outer space! The next morning, I’m listening to an ad on the radio and it’s saying ‘Tonight! On the Discovery Channel! The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies!’ And then I open our local newspaper and there’s a story on page two, underneath all the celebrity news, that says, “Lobster Boy Dies…. It’s so close to our stuff,” Coz said, “I can’t believe it.”

Because the rest of the media had embraced tabloid topics, those subjects were now considered mainstream. And what that meant, in Coz’s view, was that the
Enquirer
had become in effect a mainstream publication. But for every seven people who looked at it in the supermarket, only one bought it. “People are still embarrassed,” Coz said. “So we’re trying to change the common perception of the
Enquirer.”
In the wake of the Simpson trial, he hoped to reposition the magazine, to establish it as a legitimate, even celebrity-friendly publication. He had celebrities sing the praises of “the new
Enquirer”
in the pages of the tabloid. “I love the new
Enquirer,”
celebrities such as Montel Williams would declare. “It is the tabloid of integrity!”

The strategy appealed to the corporate owners of the
Enquirer,
who figured they could make up in advertising revenue what they had lost in newsstand sales. Being a “good” tabloid had another advantage as well. Focus groups repeatedly showed that one reason that people weren’t buying tabloids was because readers found them hostile toward the celebrities they revered. If Coz could establish the
Enquirer
as celebrity-friendly, he figured, he could reverse the circulation losses. He set out to accomplish this on January 16, 1997, a year after the Simpson trial ended, when Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis, was shot and killed on a Los Angeles freeway.

Bill Cosby, who in several surveys was ranked the most-loved man in America, had long had a complicated relationship with the tabloids. The
Enquirer’s
detractors claimed that the tabloid had “blackmailed” Cosby. In 1989, a woman had called the
Enquirer’s
Los Angeles offices, claiming Cosby had an illegitimate daughter and she had the photos to prove it. The tabloid had
approached Cosby and promised not to go with the story, according to several people familiar with the arrangement, if Cosby could cooperate with it on other stories. Cosby, according to the sources, agreed, but resented the tabloid’s intimidation and intrusiveness. When his son was murdered, he blasted the tabloid practice of paying sources, and challenged the tabloids to use the money instead to offer a reward for information about his son’s killer. At that time, the
Globe
revealed that they, too, had been pursuing the story of Cosby’s alleged illegitimate daughter. After Ennis’s murder, according to
Globe
editor Tony Frost, people at the
Globe
became suspicious and revealed that they had been negotiating with Autumn Jackson to pay her $25,000 for the story that she was Cosby’s illegitimate daughter.

Coz, seizing the opportunity to polish the
Enquirer’s
reputation, quickly responded by putting up a $100,000 offer for information leading to the arrest of Ennis Cosby’s murderer. Much to Coz’s horror, the
Globe
followed suit, offering a $200,000 reward. The Cosbys were mortified at having the
Globe
and
Enquirer
as their allies. They hired security expert and tabloid foe Gavin de Becker to help them with their dilemma and they demanded that the tabloids rescind their offers. Despite the increased respect for the
Enquirer
among certain figures in the mainstream news, celebrities continued to loathe it. “My husband and I do not want their money to be associated with our son,” Camille Cosby said. “These publications have lied about me and my family and have enriched their coffers at our expense.”

Both refused to withdraw their offers. “The reward stands until we talk to Bill Cosby and find out what’s at issue here,” Steve Coz said at the time. “We feel we have handled the Cosby family with respect throughout our coverage,” responded
Globe
editor Tony Frost. “We were offered the photographs of Ennis Cosby in a pool of blood at the murder scene. A terrible, terrible tragedy. We turned them down. It was totally inappropriate to publish those photographs.”

A week after the
Enquirer
offered its reward, a thirty-four-year-old named Chris So called in to say he knew who killed Ennis Cosby. A friend of his, Mikail Markhasev, So later testified, said, “I shot a nigger. It’s all over the news.” So’s testimony led
to the conviction of Markhasev. When in July 1998, Mikail Markhasev was convicted of murdering Ennis Cosby in a botched robbery attempt, police said the
Enquirer’s
tip was crucial. “We will take help wherever we can get it,” said Los Angeles Police Department Commander David Kalish. “We appreciated the
National Enquirer’s
help. Their reward money was very, very important to us in solving this case.”

“It was our finest hour,” beamed Coz. “We hope this has ended any anger Camille may have towards us.”

The “new
Enquirer”
also found itself in the somewhat ironic role of ombudsman of the tabloid press, castigating its rivals for their journalistic lapses. It particularly found itself at loggerheads with the
Globe,
which it repeatedly accused of using sleazy tabloid tactics. When Steve Coz saw the May 20, 1997, issue of the
Globe,
“FRANK CAUGHT CHEATING ON KATHIE LEE WITH BLOND!” his first reaction was professional envy. “Wow,” Coz said to himself, “that’s a great tabloid story!” Then, when the Giffords denied the allegation—”We live in what I call a ‘cash for trash’ society,” Kathie Lee declared in a speech at Marymount College, “where anyone can say anything about you, anything unkind about you, then they’re rewarded for it financially”—the
Globe
released the videotape of Gifford cavorting with Suzen Johnson. Coz seized the opportunity to moralize. “It’s a major crossing of the line,” said Coz. “We chase celebrities, we chase cheating celebrities. We try to find out what’s going on in Hollywood. We uncover and report the news. We don’t create the news. What happened here is that the
Globe
commissioned an act of prostitution to entrap Frank Gifford to sell a story which bordered on pornography…. When you do what the
Globe
has done, you violate the whole journalistic process…. It’s not a question of the tabloid press, it’s a question of the press.”
*

While the
Globe’s
editors ridiculed such language as shameless
posturing—”Sour grapes,” said
Globe
editor Tony Frost—it seemed to be working. That year, circulation climbed 4 percent—from 2.6 million to 2.7 million. The increase was small, but it was significant—the first time readership had gone up since the early days of the O.J. scandal.

Coz celebrated the entré of the
Enquirer
into the mainstream media by hanging four framed magazine covers on the wall of his office. There was a
Time
cover of a bug-eyed alien, a
Newsweek
cover with lesbian couple Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher declaring “We’re having a baby,”
People
magazine’s exposé of “Men Behaving Badly” (Eddie Murphy, Joe and Michael Kennedy, Donald Trump, and Frank Gifford), and the
Enquirer’s
scoop detailing the confession given by Ennis Cosby’s murderer. Over the four covers Coz hung a sign with the words: “Which one is the tabloid?”

The
Enquirer,
Coz was convinced, was on the road to respectability. And so was he. He was writing op-ed pieces for the
New York Times
and appearing on Sunday morning talk shows along with other media pundits.
Time
called Coz one of the twenty-five most influential people in the country, and the
Enquirer
took out full-page ads in the
New York Times
touting the honor. Reporters were calling the
Enquirer
for story leads, and citing the tabloid in their articles. Upscale advertisers were even beginning to approach it. Then something happened that would darken the reputation of the
National Enquirer
and the tabloid press for years to come.