Inside Confidential

Bob Harrison, publisher of Wink and Flirt, switched on his TV set one day and found himself watching the hearings of the Kefauver anti-Crime Committee. "It was a great show--I sat through it to the end," he recalls. "And as I was watching, it dawned on me that this sort of 'inside stuff' was a lot better than cheesecake." Unwittingly, he had stumbled upon the basic formula for a new type of magazine.

A few months later Harrison deserted the cheesecake field to concentrate his efforts on a new publication which he entitled Confidential. Using the expose as the basic technique, he quickly proved that his idea was a sure winner. With such stories as "Georgie Jessel's Juvenile Janes" and "Pamela--the Churchill They Only Whisper About!", Confidential managed to increase its circulation from a modest 150,000 for the first issue to the present figure of almost 4,000,000.

Because Harrison takes great care not to leave himself open to any possible libel action, it was not until March 9 of this year that one of his targets--Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum--filed the first suit against Confidential. Since then five more have followed, the damages requested totaling $7,500,000. But there is little chance that any of the claimants will collect. At present, the suits are all still pending. None of them have caused Harrison as much concern, however, as his recent dispute with the Post Office. None of them could end more favorably, either, for the Post Office Department failed entirely in its attack on Confidential.

On August 27, Postmaster General Arthur J. Summerfield's department issued a withhold-from-dispatch order to prevent Harrison from distributing his magazine to news dealers through the mails. He and his two lawyers, Edward Bennett Williams and Daniel Ross, immediately started a civil action against Summerfield, claiming the order was a "clear violation of the Constitution." They were right. On October 7, District Judge Luther W. Youngdahl ordered the Post Office to rescind its order.

Lawyer Ross described two pictures in the November issue of the magazine, published at the beginning of September, which the Post Office called indecent. "We had a picture of some show-girls dancing around in panties," he said. "The officials didn't even say this was obscene--just racy. Then there was another picture of Terry Moore which they also described as racy."

Williams and Ross based their case on two points: a withholding order had been issued with-out hearing and on the complaints of unnamed informants. The order, they claimed, violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. By the time the case came to court, the November issue had already been sent out.

Judge Youngdahl's ruling was a clear-cut victory for Confidential, even though Harrison must submit two copies of each issue to the Post Office before using the mails. As Ross gleefully pointed out, "If the officials think any particular issue is obscene, they must ask for a hearing and can't interfere with the distribution of that number. And even if the examiner finds the issue was obscene, a recent ruling has established the precedent that just because one issue of a publication is obscene does not mean that all issues are obscene." In other words, the same process would have to be repeated with each issue to which the Post Office objected.

Ross admitted that if several numbers in a row were found to be obscene, a withhold-from-dispatch order might be issued--but even this order would probably be held up until a review of the case. In short, he said, the Post Office has "no right to control the contents of magazines."

And so Confidential continues to use the mails and increase its circulation, already the largest in news-stand sales of any magazine in the country. Despite the derogatory comments which the press makes, it appears that Harrison's 1951 brainstorm will net him even more money in the future. The only people who can hurt Confidential are the purchasers of the magazine. That they will cease to buy each copy seems extremely unlikely.