Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer

In terms of the realm of popular culture...

rather than in the realm of journalism.

I think this is a bad time, not just for the press...

but it's a bad time for the truth.

Lantana, Florida, population 7,126,

according to the last census,

an undistinguished South Florida town on U.S. One

about ten miles south of Palm Beach, Florida,

an unlikely place, you'd think, to be the home

of one of America's most successful

publishing enterprises,

and yet Lantana, Florida,

is the home of the National Enquirer.

Generoso Pope Jr., a transplanted New Yorker,

Godfather of this magazine, journal, newspaper.

Gene Pope was a force of nature.

He knew what he wanted to do, and it was that paper,

and he wanted to sell the most papers

of anybody in the world.

Generoso Pope very cleverly identified

a way to communicate with mass-market America.

How he communicated it was studied by others,

adopted by others,

which set the stage for what was to come.

And you know as well as I do

that there are allegations

that Mafia money has been behind the Enquirer

- since the beginning. - Right. I've heard.

I've read that.

Generoso Pope Jr. Was the son of Generoso Pope.

Gene Pope was born into privilege.

His father owned Il Progresso,

an Italian-language paper in New York.

Because of that,

he was a huge political figure in America.

Gene was a child prodigy in many ways.

I mean, at 16, he was helping to run Il Progresso.

His father became

one of the most powerful guys in New York.

He pretty much controlled the Italian vote.

Along the way, he became a made guy in the Mafia.

When his father died, Gene was the heir apparent

to taking over the newspaper his father owned.

Il Progresso was not the kind of newspaper

he wanted to do.

He wanted to form a newspaper in his own image

just like his father had done it.

He wanted to buy the New York Enquirer,

which was a crappy little pape, mainly racing and sports,

but he needed 75,000 to buy it.

Believe it or not, Gene Pope's real Godfather

was the Godfather, Frank Costello,

who was a big guy in the mob obviously.

That's where he got the money,

and it was an interest-free loan. Why?

Because he was like family.

It's a very Italian thing.

And that was the start of the Enquirer.

He immediately put the word National on it.

He envisioned publishing

mounds and mounds and mounds of National Enquirers.

He was looking for something to sell more copies.

One day, he was driving on one of the New York highways,

and there was an accident ahea, and everybody slowed down.

They're all rubbernecking,

and they're looking at the side of the road.

And he looked at the crowd, and he saw

all these people staring at a really gory scene.

He went, "My God, nobody's doing pictures

of that."

He suddenly realized,

"This is what I have to do. I got to make a gore rag."

So what he did is that he went to the police department.

He basically got first dibs

on the photography of these horrible accidents,

and that's how it started.

I got to tell you, when I first saw it,

sometimes it was hard to pick up.

But circulation went up dramatically.

It took off, but it was a little uncomfortable.

He realized that gore was only gonna take him so far.

Circulation peaked at one million,

but he dreamed actually of 20 million,

which, of course, was insane.

By the mid-'60s,

many, many people were moving to the suburbs,

so they weren't stopping at newsstands,

and the idea was,

"We've got to get it in front of more people."

Well, where are the people?

There is madness in the marketplace.

Just listen to this.

We zeroed in on supermarkets

as the one area where I suppose

some member of every family unt in the United States

comes once a week at least.

He wanted to be racks at the front end

of every checkout counter in the United States.

People told him, "Great idea, but you can't do this.

A gore paper, how could that get into supermarkets?"

People would throw up

just at a time when they were about to buy milk, you know?

It was totally impossible.

So we drastically

in one fell swoop eliminated all the gore.

From the moment he started,

he never stopped playing with it,

trying to change the format to find the winning formula.

In came headlines like these.

Celebrity news.

Gossip items.

- Dogs. Pets. - Diets.

- Medical-oddity stories. - Psychic stories.

I happened to discover that Jimmy Carter

had once seen a UFO.

Gee-whiz stories.

We did one on making cars out of lobsters.

We had some guy called up

wanting to know where he could buy one.

Our headlines, our pictures, our front page,

and all of them had to be a triggering mechanim

to get people's attention first,

and if they liked what they saw, they bought it.

Generoso Pope really understood the psycholoy

of the average American person.

He used to call the reader of the National Enquirer.

Missy Smith in Kansas City.

She was the standard by which every story

in the National Enquirer was judged.

The basic American woman.

She was somebody who had family values,

who loves stories, loves celebrities

and wanted to know essentially that celebrities suffered, too.

Mrs. Smith goes to the beauty parlor,

talks to her girlfriends.

They're all chatting about celebrities.

Dolly Parton is depressed,

or Elizabeth Taylor got fat again

and can't find love.

She would go, 'Ugh," and have to read all about it.

We were Missy Smith in Kansas City.

I guess I'm a little nosy.

We were Missy Smith in Yonkers.

They can't print something in there that's not true.

We were Missy Smith everywhere.

I just enjoy the headlines.

She was our boss. She could make or break us.

Missy Smith has had a long week at work.

She gets her National Enquirer. She goes home.

She has a bath. She has a glass of wine,

and she sits down and enjoys herself.

I feel a great sadness...

that I will not be here in this office

working on your behalf to achieve those hopes

in the next two and a half years.

The Enquirer was a nice window

to look through, a pleasant place to go

after the harsher news in the real world.

Guns, ammunition, explosives

and at least one pipe bomb.

I don't think Pope wanted the outside world

to spill over into the Enquirer.

Our philosophy, I guess you'd call it,

is basically that, in all the other media,

the people are getting all the bad news today.

They're getting swamped with it, inundated with it,

and I think they've just about had it.

I think they're searching for something

that's gonna tell them there's a good side to life.

Everything isn't bad.

Pope was a conservative man.

Was he a Republican or Democrat?

I never knew. I could never tell.

Uh, he was a Democrat.

I never knew him to be anything but that.

But he wasn't somebody

who was interested in getting elected

or having a hand in Washington.

Uh, that wasn't his bag.

Because he came from a rich Italian family,

which was Mafia-related.

The only connection to politics they had

was they owned the politicians.

We were into country and flag.

Most of our readers were proud to be American.

We did not attack the U.S. government

because our readers believed in the U.S. government.

I mean, we weren't the conscience of the world.

We were interested in stories that would sell paper.

The National Enquirer was a place where,

you know, facts were not important.

Uh, what was important was eyeballs.

The universe that is described

in edition after edition

of the National Enquirer is a...

nonexistent universe in terms of reality.

It's always been fake-îsh.

In other words, there was a nub of truth

to most of the stories that printed.

We would sensationalize that germ of truth