The surprising thing to learn, as a person old enough to remember Confidential, the 1950s scandal magazine, is that nearly every one of its stories was factually accurate. I had always assumed they were all a pack of lies, in the manner of today's supermarket tabloids.

Not at all, claims says Henry E. Scott in his informative and enjoyable history of the tabloid. Robert Harrison, the unconventional publisher started Confidential on a shoestring in 1952 and, in less than four years pushed its circulation to 4 million per issue. He insisted on fact-checking and otherwise vetting the stories. In the six years he ran it he slipped up on only a small handful of them.

It might be more accurate to say Harrison built Confidential on sex and the female anatomy, for he had been publishing a string of "girlie mags." Noticing that many were following the Senate hearings on organized crime on the new medium of television, Harrison concluded that people liked the sense of having "inside" information, of exposing the gamy reality about figures whose names they heard day in and day out.

And that is just what he gave them starting in August 1952 when the first issue of the bimonthly with the lurid red-and-yellow cover hit the newsstands. It was immediately so successful that it spawned a dozen imitators. Today's "entertainment" magazines, whether in print or on television, descend directly from it.

Confidential used a network of tipsters to get the dirt on Hollywood:

Adultery, homosexuality and lesbianism (then, of course, illegal and considered immoral in most of the country), stars caught in brothels, mixed-race sexual dalliances.

Its story catching Desi Arnaz consorting with a prostitute came out almost simultaneously with a Look magazine puff piece showing Arnaz and Lucille Ball and children as the ideal American family.

The other vein that Harrison worked frequently, in that McCarthyism era, was the Red Menace or alleged "pinkos" (and worse) in high levels of government and society. He did it, the author says, "both as a circulation builder and to craft an aura of social purpose in what was, after all, a gossip magazine."

Hollywood could not stand idly by and let itself be hammered, no matter how factual the hammering might be. Studio moguls, with the assistance of California's government, mounted a coordinated campaign to suppress Confidential. It was hit with multiple million-dollar lawsuits and its sale was banned in California.

The campaign worked, although the biggest trial in California resulted in no verdict. Confidential radically changed its contents. Circulation plummeted. Harrison sold the magazine in 1958 and within a few years it fizzled out.

It was kicked into the gutter of journalism for publishing factual articles while Life and Look and others were acclaimed for swallowing Hollywood's lies whole and publishing them.

Truth is not always a defense, and only some messengers get shot.

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