Progenitor of today’s gossip magazines and modern celebrity journalism.

Robert Harrison was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up in the Bronx in New York. He started out as a copyboy on a New York tabloid and worked his way up to advertising space salesman. Later he started up smaller publications specializing in material seen at the time as sexually titillating and perverted. He was not beyond posing himself with the models (among them the famous Bettie Page), “playing everything from pith-helmeted white slaver to wife spanker.”

At one time he was arrested for having staged pornographic pictures at a golf course in New Jersey.



I’ve written on Confidential before, but on a much more cursory level. Below you’ll find the culmination of the chapter on which I’ve been working (and of which the ‘Problem Star’ series has been a part), detailing the rise and fall of the magazine that fundamentally altered the way the gossip industry did business. Stay tuned: as the end paragraph promises, there’s much Liz Taylor (and continued scandal) to come.