The National Enquirer

views updated

The National Enquirer

As re-invented by Generoso Pope in 1952, and then again in 1968, the National Enquirer became the archetype and model of the "supermarket tabloids" of the 1980s and 1990s. The Enquirer, with regular sales in excess of four million copies, has the largest circulation of any weekly serial publication in the United States. In the late 1990s it was owned by MacFadden Holdings, Inc., which also publishes the tabloids the Weekly World News and the Star (while the other three principal tabloids—the Globe, the Sun, and the National Examiner —are all owned by Globe Communications). Although, in fact, the Star's coverage led the tabloid pack in some of the sex-and-politics scandals of the 1990s, it was the National Enquirer's photo spread of the Gary Hart/Donna Rice embroglio (June 2, 1987) which shaped all future coverage. To talk about the National Enquirer is to talk about American popular culture at the end of the twentieth century.

To call a newspaper a "tabloid" is, in the first place, only to say that it is, as Donald Paneth puts it, "half the size of a standard newspaper, therefore easier to carry and read on subway and bus in the big-city rush hour. It is plentifully illustrated. News is presented tersely, compactly." But, for most people in the 1990s, the word "tabloid" implies a qualitative, as well as quantitative, judgement, as Paneth goes on to explain: "The tabloid's style usually runs to sensationalism, a 'stoop to conquer' technique—crime and sex, exploitation of piety, sentiment and patriotism, money contests, comic strips, heart-stopping headlines." So far, Paneth is right on the money. But then, writing in 1982, he makes the foolish mistake of fixing too rigidly the parameters of a popular cultural phenomenon: he defines an "age of the tabloids"—basically, the 1920s—and then says that it is over (an erroneous prediction echoed in 1984 by Edwin and Michael Emery in their book, The Press and America). How they must have cringed at the title of a Newsweek feature by Jonathan Alter, published December 26, 1994: "America Goes Tabloid." Had he quit while he was ahead, had he not tried to trim his story, arbitrarily, into a discrete historical "period," Paneth might have answered Alter, with a sneer: "America went 'Tabloid' in 1919, with the founding of the New York Daily News !"

Launched smack in the middle of the first great "age of the tabloids," the original Enquirer bore no resemblance to the supermarket weekly of today (or to the mutilation-and-weird-romance rag of the 1950s and 1960s). It was not, at first, even a tabloid, but a full-sized paper, although it was published from the first as a weekly, on Sunday afternoon. William Griffin, a former advertising executive of the Hearst papers, started the Enquirer in 1926 on money he borrowed from William Randolph Hearst. The loan had certain conditions: Hearst was to try out new ideas in the Enquirer. This worked out fine for Hearst, since according to an unsigned piece in Newsweek (September 8, 1969), "the good ideas carried over into Hearst's own papers; the Enquirer was stuck with the bad ones." Still, Griffin continued to publish the Enquirer for 26 years of eroding circulation. He opposed America's entry into World War II, and used his paper to attack President Roosevelt's foreign policy. The attacks became so violent that Griffin was indicted for undermining troop morale. The charges were later dropped but his assaults on Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost him yet more readers. By the time the Hearst Corporation sold the Enquirer to Generoso Pope for $75,000 in 1952, its circulation had dwindled to 17,000. Except for consistently and flamboyantly backing the wrong horses, the paper had made no impression on American journalism.

All that was about to change. Generoso Pope was 27 when he bought the moribund Enquirer, but he had grown up in the newspaper business (his father had founded the New York-published Italian language daily, Il Progresso). He also knew a thing or two about mass psychology, having served for a year in the Central Intelligence Agency as an officer in their psychological warfare unit. Nevertheless, Pope did not immediately plunge his new paper into the murky depths of sensationalism. He tried out several formats. Then, "I noticed how auto accidents drew crowds," he told Time Magazine, in 1972, "and I decided that if it was blood that interested people, I'd give it to them." It was not long after this decision that headlines such as "MOM USES SON'S FACE FOR AN ASHTRAY," "MADMAN CUT UP HIS DATE AND PUT HER BODY IN HIS FREEZER," and "STABS GIRL 55 TIMES" began to grab the attention of people passing by newsstands, and the circulation began to edge upward for the first time in decades—helped a lot, Pope claimed, by a 1958 newspaper strike which removed many of his competitors from the stands for a crucial period of time. Murder was the mainstay of this version of the Enquirer, murder mixed with sex and mutilation, although the sex was never explicit. Some of the stories approach the surrealist nuttiness of the "black humor" novelists of the 1960s: "Eva Fedorchuk battered her husband's face to a bloody pulp with a pop bottle. Then she told the police he'd cut himself while shaving."

Another staple of this Enquirer was the "consumer" story, which was almost always slanted towards a latent sadism in the reader, an horrific tale, posing as a warning, of an over-the-counter product causing mayhem—as in "HAIR DYE HAS MADE ME BALD FOR LIFE." Celebrity gossip was featured as well, but seldom the sexual gossip of the late 1990s, and it was always a relatively small part of each issue. Typically, there would be a snickering report of the spectacular public drunkenness of a famous rich person, or a movie star who stripped themselves naked, or crashed their car into a swimming pool, or beat up their date. These reports, according to Enquirer insiders who have since come clean, were generally made up out of whole cloth. If a celebrity had ever misbehaved in public—all it took was one incident, no matter how remote from the present—that celebrity was considered fair game for the Enquirer gossips and they would report some similar, though entirely fictional, embarrassment, as if the one true incident had established a pattern of behavior and, for the rest of the hapless famous person's life, any remotely similar faux pas could be legitimately and plausibly attributed to them. But most people who bought the Enquirer in the years 1955 to 1965—and there is still considerable controversy as to who those people were—seemed to have been attracted by the lurid accounts of violent death and perverse mutilation. During this period, in any case, Pope's formatting innovations built up the Enquirer's circulation from 17,000 to over a million—a formidable achievement, especially since the tabloids, unlike other newspapers, make the bulk of their income from sales of copies, rather than advertising. To the many media pundits and professional scolds who found the Enquirer too disgusting to contemplate, Pope shrugged and replied, "Every publication starts out by being sensational."

After 1965, however, National Enquirer sales leveled off around 1.2 million and would not budge further. Pope was hardly the sort of publisher who would let a bad trend develop very far before attending to it. Making a study, he concluded that his death-and-dismemberment format had reached some kind of saturation point. "There are only so many libertines and neurotics," he said. More to the point, he noted a precipitous decline in the number of newsstands—the essential platform from which the Enquirer's grisly headlines trolled for "libertines and neurotics." At the same time, he followed with intense interest the success of Woman's Day magazine in moving into the then-uncharted territory of the United States' 50,000 supermarkets. Pope made up his mind to follow where Woman's Day had led. As Elizabeth Bird noted, he had his eye on a readership which was "more direct and consistent through national supermarket and drugstore chains than through conventional newsstands and other publishing outlets."

At the same time, it seemed obvious to Pope that headlines on the order of "PASSION PILLS FAN RAPE WAVE" and "DIGS UP WIFE'S ROTTING CORPSE AND RIPS IT APART" would not work quite the same magic on grocery shoppers as they had on newsstand passersby. So, he decided to make over the National Enquirer once again, as radically as he had in the early 1950s, only this time the tabloid would emerge as wholesome and golly-gee clean as the Reader's Digest of the 1930s (reportedly his model). Gore was gone, as were the kinky "personals," and in their place, Bird says, "features on household repair, pop psychology, unusual human-interest stories, and frequently flattering celebrity stories." The paper also began to cater to the burgeoning interest in the occult and mystical, with predictions by noted psychics and regular contributions from astrologers. Pope hired a public relations firm to repackage the public image of his tabloid, and to establish the transition in his writers' minds, he moved the Enquirer's offices from the urban pressure-cooker of New York City to the sleepy tropicality of southern Florida. At first, according to Pope, the circulation dropped by a quarter million, but it soon picked up, and by 1983 it was one of the ten most profitable supermarket items.

When the National Enquirer began to publish in color, in 1980, Pope founded the Weekly World News, so he would not have to sell his one-color press, and the News revived some of the outrageousness of the old Enquirer —although lunatic headlines such as "MAN CUTS OFF OWN HEAD WITH CHAINSAW—AND LIVES" no longer referred to actual bloody incidents, but now sprang from the vivid imagination of staff members. The News, too, has found a niche, and has become a cult in college dormitories, with circulation in excess of a million. The News has also enabled the Enquirer to devote more space to celebrity stories—very much a contested area in the 1970s duel between Pope and Rupert Murdoch, who founded the Star in 1974. The duel was resolved after Pope died, in 1988, when McFadden Holdings, Inc., bought both the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News ($412 million), and the Star ($400 million). This was also the year in which the tabloids began to have a material influence on the political process. The story of Gary Hart's dalliance with Donna Rice aboard the S.S. Monkey Business was broken by a mainstream daily, the Miami Herald, but it was the Enquirer's full-color cover photo of Rice—sporting a "Monkey Business" t-shirt—sitting on Hart's lap which inaugurated the new era of "gotcha!" political reportage.

It is, perhaps, more than sheer coincidence that tabloid revelations of political sexcapades have mainly benefitted conservative politicians. The Enquirer and its competitors are deeply conservative in their reinforcement of every kind of social and psychological norm. They are like Cecil B. DeMille movies, allowing readers/viewers to ogle every sort of lascivious behavior while maintaining an attitude of shocked disapproval. It is entirely appropriate that D. Keith Mano, writing in the February 18, 1977 National Review, should propose that, "Given its circulation, the National Enquirer is probably the second most important conservative publication in America" (the most important being the National Review itself).

—Gerald Carpenter