I cut out her Heart & Stomped on it!

freakies and weirdos, violence and kinky erotica are the lurid staples of the national tabloids

The 14th Street IRT station in New York differs very little from subway stations elsewhere in the city. Its atmosphere is rancid from the grease-coated grime and sour excrement that cling to the walls behind the stairs and there is, in this obscene and mephitic vault, a sense of death and imminent violence; which is, perhaps, why I have always thought it vaguely appropriate that it was in this station, on the downtown platform, that I was offered a job as articles editor on the staff of the National Enquirer.

I didn't know too much about the Enquirer at the time, but I knew it was a gory, ultrasensational horror tabloid. The vacuum that it evidently filled in the world of letters was one I did not care to contemplate and grieved to acknowledge. But it was the spring of 1963; the New York newspaper strike was in its third month and there were no jobs left on the TV newsroom staffs or at the big uptown magazines. Most of the unemployed newspapermen I knew were out getting experience for the Big Novel--working as short-order cooks, merchant seamen, hired guns, pimps or encyclopedia salesmen; the cowards among us found jobs writing for the Woven Fiber good Monthly and similarly racy publications, which is what I was doing when the Enquirer offer came along.

"You'll like it," my benefactor assured me, adding, in an appeal to my tepid chauvinism: "The staff is nearly all English." I recognized immediately that this was a decision that called for deep meditation and so I accepted on the spot, although not without misgivings--the most important being: How would the words "National Enquirer" look on my résumé? Clearly, prospective employers elsewhere in the fourth estate would regard ex-Enquirer staffers with disgust and contempt, much in the same way a colony of lepers might view the intrusion of a stranger who had syphilis. It was a fear I overcame soon after joining the staff. Anesthetized by money, the Enquirer's most abundant by-product, I stayed for nearly a year--ten months, to be exact. For what they are worth, those months are my credentials for writing a piece about the Enquirer and related members of America's mauvaise lettres, the tabloid press.

There are many tabloid-size newspapers in the mainstream of journalism; but the word "tabloid," as used here, refers specifically to a lurid subspecies that specializes in disasters corporeal and sexual--and often more imaginary than authentic--and unabashed gossip about the rich and the famous. There are upwards of 40 tabloids published every week in the United States and Canada, with a combined circulation of around 7,000,000 and a total readership (allowing three readers to a paper) of some 21,000,000. In view of this popularity, it is surprising that tabloids have been so widely ignored by serious commentators on the press; they represent a significant condition in our culture, yet few people talk about them. It is perhaps even more noteworthy that few tabloids are considered officially objectionable, even by such tirelessly censorious bodies as the National Office for Decent Literature, which, for example, tacitly condones the editorial policies of a tabloid that specializes in hatchet murderers and other unfriendly neighborhood psychopaths, and condemns another because it turns up an occasional feature on marital infidelity.

Though most of the tabloids are indistinguishable in content, there are several basic editorial themes, the principal ones being violence, congenital or acquired deformities, heterosexual and aberrant sex. Some papers concern themselves with only one theme, others try to cover the field. Ostensibly, the Enquirer shuns all contact with sex stories; Justice Weekly, on the other hand, boasts an editorial obsession with just about every form of deviation known, short of bestiality and necrophilia; while Confidential Flash, the National Informer and Midnight range over as many bases as possible but incline toward "straight" sex and horror-violence. These five publications are reasonably typical of the medium; it is safe to assert that when you've looked at them, you've seen them all

The Enquirer is the biggest and richest of the lot. It has more than 20 editorial staffers and its own printing plant in Florida. In my day, the Enquirer's New York headquarters was on Madison Avenue, and not in the cheap blocks but up there at 60th Street, where the Lincolns with the TV antennas double-park and the dogs are better dressed than some of the people. It has since moved to bigger premises in Englewood, New Jersey.

It has full-time correspondents and stringers throughout the United States and the rest of the world. The paper is well organized and it takes itself seriously. In the spring of 1966, a large group of Enquirer correspondents and bureau members was flown to New York to attend one of the American literary season's least-publicized happenings--a seminar for National Enquirer writers. One delegate came all the way from Turkey, others from several European capitals and half a dozen U. S. cities. For two days, they sat in the windowless conference room in the Enquirer's offices and talked about the need to produce bigger and bloodier stories on quadruple amputees, white cannibals, grave robbers, animal torturers and killers of every conceivable quirk and quantity, such topics being the Enquirers staple editorial diet at that time. (Tabloid styles change from season to season, according to what the market will bear, rather than the dictates of the publisher's conscience. The Enquirer is currently in one of its "clean" phases and has of late de-escalated the emphasis on freaks and violence.) All expenses for this bizarre salon, including round-trip air fare and four days' accommodation at the St. Mortiz, were paid by the paper. The seminar was termed a great success by those who attended and, when it was all over and the delegates had been feted at a rooftop party at the St. Moritz, they received tickets to the hit Broadway show On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Sex was not discussed at the seminar, because, as already indicated, the Enquirer doesn't like it. Apart from routine pictures of bikini-clad starlets and the occasional "confession" feature by one of Hollywood's leading ladies, the paper hews to none of the vivid sexual themes that typify the tabloid format: no adultery, no incest, no homosexual scandals, no rape, no virgin sacrifices. It's true that coy hints are sometimes insinuated furtively into the gossip copy, but in the lead feature stories, sex is verboten. Which may explain why the Enquirer is not included in the list of objectionable and condemned publications periodically issued by the NODL.

"Sex stories appeal to people's prurient taste," Nat Chrzan, the editor of the Enquirer, told me after I left the paper. "We don't want to do that; we feel we're shooting for a larger market." A sampling of headlines from past editions echoes this distaste for sexual prurience: "Kills son and feeds corpse to pigs"; "400-LB. Baby sitter punches in fant to death"; "Serenades ex-wife and she knifes him"; "Commits suicide with a machine gun"; "Digs up wife's rotting corpse and rips it apart"; "Penniless cripple hangs himself"; "Man, 23, beats woman, 102, to death in self-defense"; and the classic, "I cut out her heart and stomped on it."

Now and then, the Enquirer Ventures into other areas of the public interest, usually in the guise of Social Conscience. It once ran a front-page picture of a man's face that had been split open vertically in an automobile accident. "The Enquirer joins with the National Safety Council in the plea: Don't let this happen to you!" read the text inside. Accompanying the related four-page spread were pictures of the dead man's severed arm, the charred bodies of his infant sons, his wife ("With her right eye open, she gives the strange appearance of being alive") and a final photo of the driver, "on the morgue table after his torn face was put together by an attendant." In the same issue, the predilection for Before and After was carried a stage further in a story accompanied by two juxtaposed photographs, one of which showed an assortment of human remnants; the other, the face that police had reconstructed from them.

The Enquirer's third principal theme (the first two being Violence and Social Conscience) is Consumer Protection, which was in one instance demonstrated by the front-page headline "Hair Dye has Made Me Bald for Life," with pictures of the hairless victim and the dye manufacturer's name sharing equal prominence. Other popular themes have included amputation (thoughtfully combined with conjugal bliss in the story "Armless Woman Finds Armless Man Through an Enquirer Story--and They Marry"); law enforcement ("Policeman Goes Berserk and Bites Three People"); Politics ("L. B. J.'s Brother arrested as drunk"); animal welfare ("Hundreds of pet dogs killed by invasion of giant toads"); (continued overleaf) finance ("Accountant works with feet because he was born without arms"); happy endings ("She'll marry the man who cut her throat"); show business ("After 25 years of trick shooting--I missed and killed my daughter"); national defense ("Insane missile scientist kills wife and two children"); miracles of medicine ("Dad and two kids die in car crash--and his widow gives their eyes to six blind people"); and anticlimax ("Widow prays for five years at wrong Grave").

The Enquirer used to have five gossip columns. The gossipees are those wicked Hollywood people. Not surprisingly, the paper turns a blind eye to their boudoir debaucheries. According to the tabloid's columnists, it's not broads that make star life what it is, it's bashing and booze. In fact, they say, all movie and television celebrities spend their waking hours either stupefyingly drunk or pummeling one another--and innocent passers-by--into insensibility. The prose is vividly descriptive: So-and-so "smashed A. into a bloody pulp"; B. "slammed her fist into the dancer's mouth and knocked her down"; "pint-sized actor C. charged muscle man D. and walloped him with punch after punch"; and "E. kicked his screen wife in the throat."

It was no surprise to discover shortly after I joined the Enquirer's staff that much of the gossip material was virtually pure myth. I was waiting in the office of one of the desk men one morning while he checked a column over the office telephone with its author. The conversation went something like this: "Listen, how come you've got John Wayne punching some loudmouth drunk in Tokyo two paragraphs after you've got him punching another loudmouth drunk in Copenhagen?" There was a pause while the voice at the other end made its explanations. The desk man nodded and then put his pencil to the copy. "I got it," he said finally. "Make the second one Brod Crawford."

I didn't know it, but what I was seeing applied at that moment was the Enquirer principle of Historic Precedent, an instrument of astounding simplicity that was applied in the following manner: Any celebrity who was at one time or another unlucky enough to land in the national press on charges of assault or drunkenness could have his name resurrected and attached to a similar charge for the rest of his life, even if he became senile or joined the temperance society. Carl Grothmann, the Enquirer's former editor, once defined the Historic Precedent principle when, as a new arrival, I asked him why nobody ever sued. He gave me this explanation:

"They wouldn't dare. They know that if they took us to court, even though we might not be able to prove the item in question, we could produce enough evidence, press cuttings and the like, tosubstantiate a similar incident they'd been in before."

"But wouldn't that be inadmissible or irrelevant?"

"Yes, but that wouldn't matter. By this time, the guy would be receiving so much publicity that he'd be wishing he hadn't sued us in the first place. Remember, all the public cares about is the charge made against the guy, not whether he's guilty or innocent. That's what sticks in their memory."

Asked whether he subscribed to his predecessor's theory, Chrzan mentioned the Senator Dodd case. "Even if he got off," he said, "the chances are that a lot of people would still think he was guilty. It's not so much the verdict as what they accused him of."

Among other house rules and theories, a canon that was long imbued with the sanctity of Holy Writ at the Enquirer was the Law of Accumulative fact. Under Grothmann, every feature story that appeared in the paper had to be provably factual, in order to establish the reader's belief and faith in the gossip columns, which were provably fictitious. Consequently, every effort was made to ensure the authenticity of the main features, and a full-time library staff was employed to check the details. It sometimes happened, however, that a fake story of such tempting potential appeared that all this apparatus of noble diligence was sacrificed in the rush to get the story into print, which is what happened in the case of one of the Enquirer's Before and After perennials, a story about a ten-year-old French girl with a congenital facial defect. The paper flew the girl and her mother to New York, where the child was to undergo plastic surgery. The subsequent story was a classic tabloid fraud: The little girl's face was as pathetically and irremediably grotesque in the After story as it was in the Before, despite the unblushing headline, "Enquirer fixes her face," and an improbable quote from her father: "It's miracle. There's been a wonderful change. I can hardly believe it."

Behind this conglomeration of soiled legends and abiding principles stands the figure of Generoso Pope, Jr., enigma, graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and multimillionaire publisher-president of the National Enquirer. During the ten months I was there, I saw Mr. Pope only once. Although he spent most of the day at the paper, he rarely left his office and was accessible only to key executives, to his barber, who called once a week, and to an intermittent procession of pinkie-ringed male visitors who arrived in twos and threes wearing white-on-white and expensive shot-silk suits and who would sit in the reception area, backs straight and with manicured fists resting on their knees, while waiting to be ushered into Pope's office. "Who are those guys?" a writer once asked another staffer. "I think they're connected with charity," he was told. I once passed one of them, who had evidently lost his money in the cigarette dispenser that stood outside the washroom. He was kicking the machine, intently, methodically and with great force, all the while holding it with both hands and rolling a toohpick slowly from one side of his mouth to the other.

Pope maintains vigilant editorial supervision of the paper, but did not until quite recently allow his name to appear on the masthead. Modesty, prudence or an aversion to personal publicity? With Pope, nobody ever really knows. His name seldom makes the papers these days, but this was not always the case. In 1950, when Pope was 23 years old, he was director of radio station WHOM, editor of Ll Progresso Italo-Americano (an Italian-language daily owned by his father), honorary deputy police commissioner of the city of New York, member of the New York City Board of Higher Education and, according to Acting Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri, an active supporter of a mayoralty candidate who was allegedly backed by racketeer Frank Costello. Impellitteri said Pope had told him he would be voting with "Frank C."

The youthful millionaire was stripped of his honorary policy position in October 1950 but retained his seat on the education board until 1954, when Mayor Robert F. Wagner expressed uneasiness about the cultural inconsistencies between board membership and the editorial tone of the National Enquirer, which Pope had purchased two years earlier. In any case, 1954 marked a city drive against newsstand displays of salacious publications and horror stories. Pope resigned from the board.

The Enquirer publisher made the front pages again in 1957, when a friend was shot and slightly wounded as he returned home after dining with Pope and an Enquirer columnist. The friend was Frank Costello, who, according to a former executive employee, was Pope's godfather and a frequent visitor to the Enquirer offices. But I never saw him there; and when I asked Chrzan if Costello was related to the publisher, he shrugged. "I don't know and I care less," was his reply.

Among his staff, respect for Mr. Pope transcends awe. "He's a fine journalist," one of his editors told me. "He's one of the best I've ever known, a truly vital man. Working for him is really a stimulating experience; but don't put that in, because it sounds like a load of old bullshit." Much of this modest loyalty springs, no doubt, from the publisher's fabled generosity to staff and free-lancers alike; Starting rate for articles editors today is $400 a week, which is $150 more than the current minimum for desk men on New York dailies. A former executive (continued on page 204)I cut out her heart(continued from page 120) employee reports that when he was at the paper, the editorial budget was around $500,000 a year, but Pope never imposed a mandatory ceiling. Once story in the 1960s cost more than $60,000 in transatlantic fares and telephone bills, medical fees and staff expenses.

The Enquirer's most prolific contributor at that time maintained an office at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street on the strength of his earnings ofabout $100,000 annually. Another former editor, who left to free-lance, bought a 40-foot motor cruiser and a house in the San Fernando Valley and had enough money left over to go into the publishing business himself. Among the free-lancers were a staff member of The New York Times and a former assistant producer for David Susskind. Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, worked in the Enquirer's fabulously unsuccessful mail-order department. "I couldn't believe the way Pope spent money," Selby told me. "He hired a buyer at five hundred dollars a week and spent something like a quarter of a million a year on running the operation." Selby stayed less than six months.

When Pope bought the Enquirer in 1952, it had a circulation of around 25,000 a week, Today, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, it sells more than 1,000,000 a week and there are signs that it is still growing. Last fall, the paper opened its new automated printing plant in Florida. When I was at the paper, there were no bureaus south of the border and, apart from an elderly American in Mexico City, no correspondents, either. Our one link with the Spanish-language press was provided by a former Mexican attorney who lived on Long Island. It was his job to write synopses of stories that had appeared in Spanish publications and that looked promising for development into fulllength features for the Enquirer. José, which was not his name, was known at the office as the "Omposible Man" after he left the following note on my desk:

To Mr Paterton atencion

I am sending you de four traslation you order me to do.

It was omposible to see you Monday, but I will be at your office soon.

Shortly after, José delivered the following synopsis of a story he had seen in Excelsior, a Mexico City daily:

An Airplane piot killed a Tacos vender. The vendor refused to sell him more beers and the pilot became angry and in a funny question asked the vendor: "who bought you that funny little hat." The vendor answered: "I am your father." The pilot drew his gun out and killed the man and injured Guadalupe Mendiola a waitresess. He is in jail. Photos available.

When not "traslating" for the Enquirer, the Omposible Man taught English to new arrivals from Puerto Rico and Mexico. In addition to the touch of Dadaism that José gave the proceedings, the Enquirer was (and still is) notable for its prose style, which often approached black humor at its blackest. The lead for a story about a missile expert who wiped out his family offers a typical example:

Joseph Barnocky had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a healthy bank balance and a job that paid him a high five-figure salary.

On top of all that, Barnocky, 45, was one of the United States' most highly respected missile scientists.

He had only one problem. He was stark-raving mad.

Similarly:

Salvador Jiminez took his girlfriend at her word when she told him to drop dead. He walked out of her house and blew his brains out.

Eva Fedorchuk battered her husband's face into a bloody pulp with a pop bottle. Then she told police he'd cut himself while shaving.

Mrs. Maria Contorno couldn't bear to watch her seven hungry children cry for food while most of her husband's salary went to pay for her medical bills. So Mrs. Contorno, 47, and suffering from many ailments, solved the problem by hanging herself.

The two policemen rushed to the bank in answer to an alarm. When they saw Santa Claus coming out the door with his bag they started to chuckle.

The laugh died in their throats--because Santa had a special present for them. He lifted a tommy gun and shot them full of holes.

It is perhaps significant that many of the readers who wrote to the paper expressed their thoughts in a similar style. I kept a few of the letters that landed in my cubicle after they were rejected for publication. Among them were the following.

From Brooklyn, New York:

About two weeks ago, there was a story in the Enquirer about a man dying in New Jersey and after dying his pet dogs ate him. I would like to know if the house that he was found in is for rent and if you could find out if it is for rent to let me know.

From Phillipsburg, New Jersey:

Would like to know who to contact in reference to selling a story of a 84 yrs old man recently deseased. He was a retired Paymaster of the Lehigh Valley RR. Worked there 42 yrs. I am his widow and have 48 letters, 10 & 12 pages (Lge Pages) long written 55 yrs ago. In these letters. he discusses Rents, 8 rooms, all Imp--$18 a mo. His mind broke two das before xmas, 1962. He tried to kill me with a hatchet. As I am partly crippled, I don't know how I got away from him. He completely smashed the glass knob on our l bath-room door. From then on it was hectic. I had to put him in a nursing home. Please have someone write to me and they will get a 100% unheard of story. He died 3000 miaway at Eugene, Oregon.

From Cleveland, Ohio:

I like to know if you have any reporter around Cleveland, Ohio, because I have very interested story about me how they robed me in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 20 minutes after I left aeroplan, it was in Croatian paper and I have a copy of it of course in Croatian langvige. I have Enquirer every week for last three years and liked everything you write so I like to get that story in because lot Croatian people reed it. I have those custom oficial arested and they are in jail now. There are two more things what happen same time, about Mexican vice counsel in Beograd and about smal girl who was dying and did die because they did not let medecine to be send in hospital for her. So if you have sombody around here send him to my house I will give him that margarine from Zareb, Yugoslavia.

Why do people read the Enquirer? Krafft-Ebing, Stekel and Freud would have told us in a trice. In the first place, they might have said, this ostensibly asexual publication, with its explicit prohibition against sex stories, is based almost entirely on sex. Amputation, one of the Enquirer's most popular themes in its gorier days, is a subject riddled with sexual connotations: Krafft-Ebing treated men who confessed that their sexual passions could be aroused only by the sight of women who had arms or legs missing. Stekel, who described such patients as amputation fetishists, recorded a similar case of a man who declared: "Any woman who has had a leg amputated exerts a most marked sexual influence upon me." In Stekel's view, such patients suffered a castration complex. As for the Enquirers exposition of violence, the experts would say that it satisfies vicariously a form of latent sadism. According to Freud, such a compulsion originates in feelings of sexual inadequacy. Thus, it would not be too extravagant to suggest that a large proportion of the Enquirers readership consists of sexually maladjusted, latent sadists.

If this is the case, it offers food for contemplation, because the Enquirer's formula sells ten times as many copies each week as does Justice Weekly, a quarto-sized publication that's been in circulation for 24 years and is probably the oldest regularly published tabloid in the world that caters almost exclusively to what might be described as the hardcore deviate market. To quote from one of its house ads, Justice Weekly is for "disciplinarians, boot and foot slaves, faddists and transvestites, ladies & gentlemen." Each edition sells around 100,000 copies.

The news stories that appear in this Canadian weekly revolve around the topics of indecent exposure, rape, corporal punishment, child molesting, incest, homosexuality and transvestism--or TV, to use Justice's beguiling abbreviation. Sometimes it manages to combine a soupçon of everything, as in a recent story headlined, "Incestuous father of eleven transvestite."

It is a sober-looking publication with no pictures or cartoons; and scattered among the court reports that constitute the news stories are terms of editorial reproof such as "loathsome activities," "offenses too indecent to describe" and "the rest of the evidence, of a revolting nature, cannot be published." Fortunately for its readers, however, JW's code of morality is governed by expediency rather than substance; for, in addition to the court reports, there are several pages of personal ads and interminable letters to the editor, many of which recount the writers' fondness for being beaten into a stupor while wearing combat boots and corsets.

The editor-publisher, and the man responsible for the tone of civic outrage that runs through the news columns, is Phil Daniels, a 76-year-old journalist who has been reporting court cases since 1911. When I telephoned his Toronto office to question him about the authenticity of the ads and letters that appear in his paper, he said, without any prompting: "I am one hundred percent normal." I was a little taken aback by this unexpected confession but concluded that the automatic response was one born of long custom. "There's a need for a paper like mine," Mr. Daniels went on. "It allows these people who can't be cured--and they can't, you know, they can't--to get in touch with each other through our ads. By doing so, they leave decent, innocent people alone. Everything in this paper, including the letters, is guaranteed bona fide. There's nothing phony about this operation."

I was impressed by the tone of triumphant pride in Mr. Daniels' erudite analysis of sexual incongruities, but I reasoned, perhaps uncharitably, that without such conviction, he might feel he was wasting his time. When I asked him about circulation figures, however, he was less outspoken.

"Justice Weekly is sold all over the world in huge numbers," was all he would say. Pressed further, he added: "Mine is the only publication I know that doesn't lie about its circulation, and the reason we never lie is because we never divulge it." I was later able to obtain the figure of 100,000 from the paper's former advertising agency in New York.

In addition to the contents already described, Justice carries editorials (often on the need for more stringent law enforcement in these evil days) and paid ads that promote everything form a club for "swinging disciplinarians" to a set of nine-by-six glossies featuring bondage equipment, hoods, rubberwear, gags and masks, "as modeled by Wendy, one of Europe's top-line bondage models." Each of the ads is prefixed with a code number. It costs two dollars to adverise, and respondents must pay a dollar for their reply, which is forwarded by Justice.

Nobody who has read the case histories in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis or in Stekel's Sexual Aberrations will be too puzzled by the classifed ads in Justice Weekly. Clearly, as editor-publisher Daniels confirmed, the publication represents a kind of community bulletin board for foot and boot fetishists, sadomasochists, parapathic voyeurs and transvestites. The cryptic wording of some of the personals would be immediately explicit to those partial to mixoscopia--a term psychiatrists use for sexual excitement derived from witnessing others perform sexual acts; while other ads might appeal to those with a preference for everything from Pygmalionism to coprophilia.

One wonders what Stekel or anybo dy else would have made of the man who wrote the following letter about life in a concentration camp. It appeared in an issue of Justice Monthly, which was a short-lived attempt to exploit unused material from the files of JW, and Phil Daniels swears it is authentic.

What was hellish degradations, humiliations and tortures for some prisoners was simply heavenly delight, felicity and ecstatic fascination for others. Having been a boot fetishist and masochist of booted men since my early childhood, being made a boot slave by the SS was for me the most rewarding and fascinating experience that could happen to me. During those years of boot servitude, I lived in sheer ecstatic fascination and heavenly delight.

Every day, for 12 to 14 hours, I was kept in groveling servitude under those irresistible high black-leather militaristic boots, caring for them, pulling them off my captors' feet and pulling them on for them, keeping them spotlessly clean and highly polished at all times.

I was always so fascinated by those domineering and masterful high-booted SS men, who also wore fullflared black riding breeches, that I constantly assumed a cringing, crawling and groveling attitude before them, keeping my head low, never abouve the level of the height of the boots of my masters, as instructed, keeping my eyes constantly fixed on the boots, admiring them, hypnotized by them, and my ears always opened to the heavenly sound of creaking and squeaking boot leather as well as to the thumping and scraping sounds of heavy boot soles and heels on the floor around me.

An intelligent, genial and genuine boot sadist will get actively stimulated to more imaginative actions in the presence of a slave who is completely submissive and subservicent under his boots.

The writer went on for several hundred words, recalling past delights he had experienced at the feet of his "genial and genuine boot sadists" and noting, with genuine nostalgia, that life had not been quite so rewarding since. "I only wish it had lasted until the end of my days," he concluded. "I was perhaps the most happy and contented captive that ever lived throught the War. ...It just shows that what can make one man miserable can also make another man happy." The letter was signed, "Happy Boot Captive, Lachine, Quebec."

Happy Boot Captive would find little to excite him in midnight. which, after the Enguirer, is the best-written tabloid and the most professionally produced. When it started in Montreal 15 Years ago, the paper was little more than a parochial scandal sheet, given to such delicate observations as, "Miss Thingummy, a well-stacked secretary who works for the XYZ Company on Craig Street, turned her eyes the other way last week when she exited from her apartment building and saw two dogs doing what comes naturally on the sidewalk. She should be so prudish! Anyone would think she spent those long lunch hours with her boss taking down dictation!"

Since those pioneering days, Midnight has eliminated its provincialism and increased its circulation to 550,000 a week by adopting a more salable formula. A later issue, for example, carried this headline over a story on June Wilkinson: "I hate my bust--it gets in my way tol success." She was moted as saying: "When I come out for my act, there is always a chorus of low, long whistles. These I like very much. It is so flattering--it always makes me think the men want to do awful things to me."

Elsewhere in the same issue was, "Boy, 14, kidnaps tot to rape its mother"; and on page 15 appeared a story about a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary, captivatingly titled "Orgy televised--live." Page 19 was headed "Forces his wife's lover to walk down street in the nude"; while page 10 quoted Warren Beatty, allegedly in conversation with a midnight reporter: "My childhood ambition was to be a bareback rider. As any girl with whom I've been out can tell you--I've finally got halfway there. You just figure that one out any way you want." This candid reportage, whether truthful or not, has one disadvantage: midnight appears regularly on the NODL list.

For the rest, the paper offers nothing too exotic or erotic. There are the familiar gossip columns, with their forays into the sex-and-violence front in the world's movie capitals and the popular tabloid formula of pseudo science, which prompted this remarkable headline in a recent issue: "Latest Psychiatric research shows badly fitted shoes can cause constipation, headache, backache, frigidity, insanity, cancer--and make your feet hurt, too!" In a bid for respectability, however, midnight does not accept salacious or suggestive advertising in its personal columns, and the paid ads that appear elsewhere in its pages are far less lubricous than those found in some of the lower-grade tabloids. About the most bizarre ad midnight has carried lately is an offer to transform the reader into a "master of Chinese Kung-Fu, the Oriental Art of Instantaneous Death that is applied with NO Bodily Conatct."

The paper shares with the enquirer a fondness for incongruous prose, as this excerpt indicates: "If Clarence Harrell, 31, had known that within an hour a man he'd never seen before would bite off his left ear and swallow it, he wouldn't have suggested going for a ride with his wife. 'That,' he says bitterly, 'would be the last thing I'd have done.' " Unlike the Enquirer, however, Midnight seems unabashed by its professional vocation. Its corporate name is Midnight Paublishing, whereas the Enquirer's is Best Medium Publishing Co., a McLuhanish title that sounds more respectable when Enquirer writers introduce themselves to some hapless celebrity they intend to crucify in a future issue.

The National Informer, the fourth paper of the quintet, has all the earmarks of a tabloid in search of an audience. It is a quest for identity that somethimes produces this kind of front-page banner: "I was raped eight days by three men and a lesbian." Vince Sorren, the Informer's 26-year-old publisher, says the paper has a circulation of around 500,000, with, if true, is surprising, because the tabloid audience tends to take its sex and horror seriously, and the Informer, though laced with the gaudiest imaginable innuendoes ("Ann-Margret xxxxed by nine guys in wild scene"--inside, readers learned that the xs stood for "Kiss"), does not. If anything, it could be considered a parody of the tabloid form, for its stories are of such blatant flamboyance that none but the most gullible could be expected to believe them. One issue carried a story headlined "Nun confesses having love affair in convent with men--bride of Christ flips her lid." This spectacular revelation was totally unsupported by the text of the story, which often happens when a tabloid editor's imagination runs ahead of the available facts.

Publisher Sorren holds a B.A. degree (in business administration) from Marquette. His editor, Joe Reece, an affable and mildly loquacious 38-year-old, claims to have a Ph.D. from Stanford. Their South Side Chicago office was a dusty hangar of a room filled with newspapers and ancient office equipment; one wall was covered with the Informer's filing systerm: row upon row of large enevelopes, each of which bore a subject title printed in black: Nucrophila, incest, monsters, perversion, scandal, vice, violence, sex light and sex serious, etc. "We go after all the sex we can get," Sorren explained, "although sometimes we have to draw the line." He said that he had been compelled to exercise this kind of editorial discretion only the week before in rejecting a story about a horse and a nymphomaniac. "There's only so many of your perverted people who would be interested in that kind of thing," he said.

Reece began to describe the front page for the next issue. "Somebody made this schlock movie with Batwoman in it. We wanted to get a bust shot of her, but all we could get hold of was this tiny picture, so we blew it up and cut out her profile in such a way so that her bust looked bigger. The headline will read in two parts, 'I want to be handled' in our biggest type and 'By real Men' in smaller type down the side. But, actually, we've been moving away from sex lately in favor of more gore features. We used to get some really wild stuff from a local cop--morgue shots and that kind of thing--but he's been made chief of police or something and he's stopped supplying us." Reece picked up a clipping from the pile on his desk. "Here's one about a guy who was fished out of the river. Nobody knows how he got in there, but we've written a story that says it was a vengeance murder. Great pictures of his body. We'll call it "Revenge for rape,' I think."

The paid ads that run in the Informer include marital aids such as Prolong ("Get more lasting pleasure from marriage") and Jems ("Sex Energizer Nature Pep Tablets"), a somewhat wishful course in mesmerism ("Hypnotize Women Instantly--Unnoticed") and a service called Fantasy Correspondence. "I cater to your fantasies through 'make-believe' letters'" the copy reads. 'Who would you like to hear from? Use your imagination." Another ad exhorts: "Answer God's Call. Start Preaching Today. Become an Ordained Minister of the Gospel for christ. Conduct Funerals--perform Marriages. Send 10¢ for Details."

"A lot of these are fake," Reece admitted. "The ads for Instant Pussy and Instant Peter, which we run regularly, for instance. You send the company a dollar and they send you either a tiny cat or a rabbit made of sponge. All you do is drop them in water and they get bigger." The copy in both of these ads runs: "In keeping with the modern trend toward automation, we have developed a product which we call Instant Peter/Pussy. This, of course, is synthetic and is not designed to replace the original. However, in a pinch, we hope it will prove to be a satisfactory substitute."

"Vince and I are both the squarest people, you know," Reece went on. "He's married, with kind; we don't swap wives or anything like that and I lead a very sedate life. In fact, I don't do anything but sleep, listen to classical music and read."

The same tone of jovial depravity that characterizes the Informer's feature stories runs through the column edited by Miss Informed, one of the paper's two lonelyhearts counselors. "I bet I could love you to death," writes Romeo Hevvyhung; "I got 20 sez you can't," replies Miss Informed. Another writer complains, "My wife brings home strange men every night. What should I do?" Miss Informed: "Tell her to bring home men you know." Also: "I think I know how we can crush the Communist nations," writes a reader in the letters-to-the-editor column. "All we got to do is scratch themselves to death."

"These readers of ours never cease to amaze me," Reece said. "The letters they send in are more fantastic then the stories we run." He showed me one from a Philadelphia man who said his present wife was dying of "incurable diabetic skickness" and was, in addition, blind. Perhaps, he suggested, if the Informer published his letter, some healthy female reader would offer herself as a replacement. "I don't think people care that most of our stories are phony," Reece said. "In fact, a lot of them write and say that while they didn't believe a specific story, they enjoyed reading it. Others send in ideas of their own, many of which are a bit strong even for us."

"Trruthful News of All Facts of Life," runs the blurb under the Informer logo. "When you think about it," a friend pointed our later, "is it any more farfetched a claim then the Chicago Tribune's blurb, 'The World's Greatest Newspaper'?"

The weekly tabloids devote little space to significant world news, such as Vietnam, an omission in coverage that could be due to the fact that even these papers are unable to grasp horror on a large scale. One occasional exception to this general rule is confidential flash ("No Fear--No Favor--The People's Paper"), a Toronto tabloid that jumped right into the void with a story by one Archer Heaton, staff military strategist, who had obviously given the Vietnam issue his unstinted and scholarly consideration. "Let's Smell Burnt Flesh!" ran the subhead over the main headline, "Only bombs can purge that pyre."

"Pinkos and pacifists and their misinformed followers have been having a ball bellowing over the bombing of Viet Cong oil dumps by American fliers," Heaton declaims, and then goes on to deplore the fact that these unworthy citizens--"expertly brainwashed and blinded by subtle Red propaganda"--disapprove of official U. S. policy in Vietnam. Fortunately, as war correspondent Heaton is quick to point out, "The boys in the Pentagon have stuck to their guns." This reference to the United States military leadership reflects a relationship between Mr. Heaton and the generals that may or may not be mutual; but, in any event, it leads him directly to the core of his argument. After noting that bombing raids will inevitably kill Vietnamese civilians, the only question he asks is, "Isn't quick death by high explosive preferable to dying by inches in unspeakable torture or fire?" Unfortunately, what might have been a valuable contribution to national policy deteriorates from this point into a vividly imaginative account by an unnamed "eyewitness" of a Viet Cong raid on a jungle village. Colorful dialog abounds ("Shoot 'em in the guts if there's any trouble"), and sex and violence replace the statesmanlike admonitions: "Rape the women and burn the men--that's the way to bring these scum into line." There's no question about it, concludes Mr. Heaton: Bombing is essential. "The Red Beast [must be] brought to bay and the insidious hammer and sickle broken beyond repair."

For Confidential Flash, this is pretty serious stuff, far weightier, intellectually speaking, than "Naked sex fiend attacks girl, Six--left ugly handprlnts on little legs," which headlined one of its stories. Most of the news features in this singularly humorless tabloid are clumsy inventions illustrated with stock shots of badly posed models. There's a gossip coulmn written by somebody identified as the founder and president of the Exotique Deancers League of America, a page of personals (lonely widows and some couples on the make), plus two pages of classified and paid ads with an emphasis on homosexual publications, bondage equipment, transvestism, physique photos ("Teenage German Sailor--striking, muscular!") and sexual aids. A film depicting the birth of a child is available for "those who desire knowledge on a subject of scoial and medical significances," and, for readers whose sex knowledge stops short of the basics, a book that illustrates the sexual organs "and their functions." These are "unretouched, actual photos, not just drawings, [of] types of pubic-hair arrangements...nipples...and variations in sizes of penes--with average size as well as the largest ever recorded."

During the time I worked for the Enquier, I often wondered whether there was such a being as the typical tabloid reader; not the man or the woman who picks up a copy every month or so just for laughs but the regulars, the subscribers, the believers. I pictured such a person as a roller-derby fan who owned several Lugers, voted straight lunatic fringe and cruised around the neighborhood in a 1955 Mercury sedan, hoping to come across fatal accidents.

It was suggested at the office one quiet afternoon that we throw a big party for 50 of our most faithful readers and an equal number of the walking wounded, maimed and deformed who had appeared in previous issues. We dropped this plan when we discovered a man who had invented a machine that cured hiccups. Somebody devised a scheme that was known briefly as Operation Belch, the idea being that we would bring a large number of chronic hiccup victims to New York and stage a demonstration of the machine at the Waldorf-Astoria, with invitations to the press. "Think of the publicity if it makes the network new," one of the writers said. "Yeah, but we might kill some poor bastard with the goddamn machine," growled another. "Great," said the first. "If that happened, we'd get an even better story out of it. "Enquirer exposes quack inventor.' Anyway, we'd have doctors there and everything." In the end, neither plan was carried any further, and so we never did get to meet our readers.

In six years, I have seen only two people reading the Enquirer in public. The first was a man in his late 40s on a Long Island train bound for Montauk Point. He wore a tweed highland jacket with leather buttons and tartan trousers, and he wan't actually reading the paper when I first noticed him; he was playing Summertime on the bagpipes. He looked very pleased with himself. It wasn't until after the train passed Patchogue that he took the Enquirer from his pocket and opened it. The second reader I saw was on the subway, going into the same station in which I had accepted the Enquirer job. She was an elderly, tormented-looking woman and she was visibly amused by a story about a Kansas woman who had driven 600 miles with her dead husband in the back seat of the car. I had been on the staff for only a short time and was tempted to identify myself but, after a second look, decided against it. She was still silently laughing behind the paper when I got off the train.

A couple of years ago, I asked Nat Chrzan if, as the Enquirer's new editor, he planned to conduct a survey of the readership. He recoiled and shook his head emphatically. His reluctance may be justified, but there is, somewhere out there, an appreciative and responsive audience, as I think this last letter to the editor, form one of its members, proves:

I think your paper is wonderful. My husband and I both read it. You don't know that there is so much dirt and filth going on in this world untill you read about it in your paper. I look forward to seeing your paper every sunday keep them coming.

P.S.Print initials only. Thank you.