Confidential Confidential cover art

Confidential Confidential

The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine

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About this listen

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including their sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire.

Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Stars filed multimillion dollar libel suits against the magazine, and the state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted its publisher for obscenity, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial in 1957. The lawsuits forced Confidential to end its scandal-mongering, and stopped printing its sleazy gossip in 1958. However, the magazine's legacy lives on in our culture's obsession with gossip and celebrity scandal.

This is Confidential's story, how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond.

©2018 Samantha Barbas (P)2018 Tantor Americas Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV History & Criticism Media Studies Social Sciences True Crime United States Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing Celebrity Funny
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Highly recommend this book. it is about so much more than just Confidential! If you are interested in modern history this is a must!

Fascinating story

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I really enjoyed this fascinating and well researched scholarly study of scandal magazines and the narrator did a great job too

rich and engaging

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All the gossip that people tried to hide, all these years later so much of it was true. How people careers were ruined by scandals without a thought for them or their families. I was gripped throughout.

Amazing!

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Brilliant book. Read alll about it right enough. Anything you want to know about all the celebrities this book is worth checking

Confidential

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This is a rather leaden account of the rise and fall of a particular kind of gossip magazine in mid century Hollywood.
I thought it would be more interesting but I found it quite dull. It feels quite repetitive and the writing is often lazy and cliched.
It is endless and would have benefited from some editing. I can see why it's included for free.
As a contrast I've just started Erotic Vagrancy and the quality of the prose is a hundred times better.

Too long, cliched writing, strangely dull

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