Dish by Jeannette Walls Read Free Book Online Page B

network issued a full retraction and apology. Mike Wallace and Drew Pearson insisted that the story was true and refused to back off. Nevertheless, ABC issued a full retraction and apology. Wallace was furious. It was one thing to apologize for the rantings of aformer mobster like Mickey Cohen, but Pearson was a serious investigative journalist whose allegations about Kennedy’s authorship of
Profiles in Courage
would later prove to be true. Nevertheless, Oliver Treyz, then head of the network, appeared on Wallace’s show and offered a full retraction and apology. It was a terrible blow to Wallace and the credibility of his show. He became such a pariah around the network that John Daly, the vice president at ABC as well as the host of
What’s My Line,
refused to moderate the show when Wallace was booked as the mystery guest. Wallace’s appearance was canceled and Sammy Davis Jr. appeared instead.
    “Along Madison Avenue it is no secret that veteran news commentator John Daly did not like the switch of headline-grabbing Mike Wallace to ABC. Daly is said to have stated that he did not believe there was any place for a show on TV that dealt with such controversial issues,” noted one magazine.
    Goldenson had assured Wallace that he wanted him to “shake the building,” but the moment he did, the network executives were not willing to stand behind him.
The Mike Wallace Interview
went off the air in the summer of 1958. The networks were not yet ready for scandal.

4

the birth of a tabloid
    At twilight on a warm day in early May 1957, just as the
Confidential
trial was getting underway in Los Angeles, a young publisher lumbered into the East Fifty-fifth Street restaurant L’Aiglon in New York City, took a seat at his usual table, and settled back to enjoy a taste of a world that was about to disappear. Generoso Pope Jr. had been having a rough time lately. Five years earlier, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, Pope had bought a floundering weekly tabloid called the
New York Enquirer.
In the first issue, Pope published his credo on the front page:
    In an age darkened by the menace of totalitarian tyranny and war, the
New York Enquirer
will fight for the rights of man—the rights of the individual, and will champion human decency, dignity, freedom and peace.
    Decency, dignity, freedom, and peace didn’t sell so well, so within a few months, Pope had turned the
New York Enquirer
into a scandal magazine. Recently, city and state officials had begun to take issue with the unseemly content of Pope’s paper. Gene Popedidn’t mind a battle; he was aggressive and cocky and came from a wealthy, influential family. He assumed he would always win. Besides, he had a powerful ally: the man he was meeting for dinner that night, his benefactor and godfather, gangster Frank Costello, who at that moment was perhaps the most powerful mobster in America.
    Costello entered L’Aiglon shortly after Pope arrived. The two men embraced and ordered Scotches. The solicitous waiters arranged the carnations on their table and fussed over the men as they brought the food: risotto Milanese and piccata a la romana, served on plates so hot that you couldn’t touch them—just the way Costello liked. Frank Costello was treated like a celebrity in New York. His incredible influence over city politics had been exposed several years earlier during the televised Kefauver hearings; Costello controlled Tammany Hall, appointed judges, and, the inquest concluded, controlled a “government within a government.” Costello served some time for income tax evasion, but even from jail, his power was immense. The
New York Times
called him the Prime Minister of the Underworld, but to Gene Pope, he was still “Uncle Frank”—an old family friend who helped him out when he got into financial binds and political scrapes.
    Several friends and business associates joined them that evening, but as usual during Pope’s frequent dinners with Costello, Uncle Frank