ROBERT HARRISON The High Priest of Sleaze by Nick Tosches
Robert Harrison, of whom little is known and less remembered, began publishing Beauty Parade, the first of the girlie magazines, in 1941. Amid advertisements that were often stranger than fiction ("Girls Can't Resist the KISS ME NECKTIE as it GLOWS in the DARK!"), Beauty Parade offered everything from hair fetishism ("Titian Tresses") to catfighting ("Battling Babes"). "Dramatizing Lingerie" (February 1942) and "Ankles Aweigh" (May 1952) were representative of a decade of purposeful editorial thinking. Early issues included color centerfolds by Bruno of Hollywood.
Beauty Parade was five years old and going strong when Harrison began putting out Whisper in early 1947. This new bimonthly featured even hotter fetish photos. Every cover featured a dame in hosiery. It was almost as if a dame without hose was no dame at all. But Whisper featured something else as well: scandal exposes and true-crime stories. Whisper took its readers to a "Benzedrine Thrill Party," where "kids become hopped up." (Of course, all the gals at the thrill party were pictured wearing high heels and stockings.) In July 1948, Whisper gave the lowdown on "Dope: Our Secret Sin": "Soft lights... the plink of the guitar...the moan of the saxophone...And in the faces of a few in every youthful gaping group in Hipsters Heaven -- 52nd Street, New York-- one can see the glazed eyes that signify this or that poor youth has joined the big tea and witch hazel mob (marijuana and heroin if you're not hep to jive)." There was also practical advice. "Don't go around figuring you're the smartest bucko since Einstein," Whisper warned in "How the Shakedown Sweeties of the Big Town Ply Their Nefarious Trades" (March 1948), "because there's a racket for you, and a smart gal who'll make you throw caution to the winds."
Whisper's blend of flying saucers, garterbelts, bondage, and hardboiled hepcat journalism was as successful as it was sublime. There was no stopping Harrison now. Late in 1952 came Confidential, the ultimate distillation of Harrison's vision of a sleazo-centric universe.
Though Whisper was by far the most intriguing and outrageous of Harrison's publications, Confidential was the crown of his ascendance. As a prosecutor later put it, Confidential "maliciously dredged up from the gutters a slip from the straight and narrow path by a prominent individual and depicted it as the individual's way of life," inferring "by innuendo the lewdest sort of situations." Confidential was The Scarlet Letter for real, Time magazine for the salt and scum of the earth, the confirmer of every vicious suspicion; the logos of America's cheap, meaningless mythology. By 1957 Confidential's newsstand circulation, estimated at four million, was the largest of any magazine in the country.
The beginning of the end came in June of that year, when Harrison and his associates were arraigned in Los Angeles on charges of conspiring to commit criminal libel. Under a court agreement that autumn, Harrison relented: Confidential and Whisper would revise their editorial policies in exchange for the dismissal of criminal charges. The magazines lingered, wraiths of their former glory, through 1973.
Harrison's end passed unnoted. But his legacy, while still unhonored, imbues every breath America takes. Many have spoken of America in search of herself. Robert Harrison found her, posed the way men like 'em.