“You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard. Some that you recognize, some that you’ve hardly even heard of. Oh, people who worked and suffered and struggled for fame. Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.” From Celluloid Heroes, written by Ray Davis.
Readers of Pop Culture Squad (of which, obviously, you are one) and listeners/viewers of the Pop Culture SquadCasts know all too well the guy responsible for providing me and my buddies such a warm, safe platform is named Bob Harrison, my co-conspirator, my playmate (in the traditional sense of the word), and my friend.
But he wasn’t the first Bob Harrison. Nor was the guy I’m about to discuss, but this one changed the nature of publishing in America, and not in a good way. My pal Bob Harrison has dedicated much of his life to the improvement and promotion of the comic book arts. The guy I’m pushing pixels on was nowhere near as noble. He worked on my all-time favorite newspaper, Bernarr McFadden’s New York Evening Graphic, along with his mentor Walter Winchell, Winchell’s arch-enemy Ed Sullivan and writer/filmmaker Samuel Fuller. Bernarr did not invent sex and scandal, but he did monetize it. As you can see from the illustration, Bernarr might have invented Photoshop.
Harrison moved on to the Motion Picture Herald, a right-wing “trade” organization that helped establish — and helped write — the notorious Hays Code that censored movies of all left-of-center politics as well as sex, drugs, and the shameful practice of having a discussion with both feet in bed. He published all kinds of tacky (even by the standards of the time) cheesecake magazines whose stock in trade was vaguely covered female tits and ass. The best known and longest lasting was called Whisper; from what I’ve seen, it had nice art direction.
But in 1952, he put the world of publishing on its ear by releasing Confidential, the first “modern” gossip and scandal magazine. He had a particular passion for exposing homosexuals, bigamists, and communists — remember, this was at the height of McCarthyism and hating socialism was quite the fad. Harrison also possessed a hatred of race-mixing, a term which, today, sounds like something Nick Charles would drink in a Thin Man movie. He prominently ran a story about Eleanor Roosevelt having an affair with her African-American chauffeur. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: The REAL Bob Harrison”
