Free Dish by Jeannette Walls Page A

handed out tickets and boarded a train for Florida. Pope had a printing press in Pompano Beach, and he was moving his entire operation to nearby Lantana. Shortly after he arrived, he got his friend Roy Cohn to set up a meeting with Richard Nixon. On the promise of favorable press from the
Enquirer,
Nixon invited the heads of fourteen supermarket chains to the White House and talked them into selling the now cleaned up
National Enquirer
at their checkout stands. Pope would no longer be dependent on newsstand sales, which meant he would not be beholden to the Teamsters.
    “It’s politics,” Pope later said of his deal with Nixon. “One hand washes the other.” Pope would rule over the area around Lantana, Florida, population 8,000, and it would become known as Tabloid Valley, a place where a certain type of journalism was allowed to take root, to grow and flourish.
    * Lewis later had an ideological break from his friend Cohn over Robert Kennedy.
    * Father of WNBC reporter John Miller Jr. Miller was also with Costello the night he got shot, as was Miller’s wife, who was nine months pregnant with the future T V reporter.
    * The child, unfortunately, looked the same in the “before” and “after” photographs.
    * Pope had a total of six children by three wives. His first wife, socialite Patricia McManus, was institutionalized. His second marriage was brief and ended badly. In 1963, Pope wed a beautiful former actress and show girl named Lois Berrodin, the young widow of MC A agent George Wood, who was allegedly connected to the mob. Lois and Gene stayed married until his death.

5

“they’ve got everything on you …”
    “How can I take this kid seriously?” Walter Winchell said when John F. Kennedy was running for President. “He spends half his time screwing every girl that comes around. I’ve seen lots of nothings like him around the Stork Club and other places where the sons of rich men go and waste their time and money.” By then, Winchell’s power was declining, but he was still the most powerful gossip columnist in the country, and he thought that if John F. Kennedy really wanted power, he would eventually have to bow to him. Winchell had reason to believe that he had some power over Kennedy. Although Winchell was past his peak, he had the dirt on the young politician. Joseph Kennedy had once hired Winchell to get the goods on a woman John Kennedy was dating. One of Winchell’s all-time best sources, J. Edgar Hoover, regularly gave Winchell files on Kennedy. So did Bobby Kennedy’s nemesis, Roy Cohn, who was another big source for Winchell.
    But during the election, Winchell was quite evenhanded and invited Kennedy to appear on his foundering television talk show. When Kennedy, who could nurse a grudge and who was also aware of Winchell’s ratings, turned him down and instead wenton Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show,
Winchell was furious. He saw it as a snub, which it was—a very portentous snub. It foretold the decline of gossip columnists and the rise of celebrity-friendly TV talk shows. After Kennedy was elected,
Confidential,
which since the 1957 libel trial had ironically taken to attacking gossip writers, chortled about the slight. “President Kennedy has no time to waste on gossip columnists,” the former scandal magazine declared. “As soon as he took office, the White House welcome mat was withdrawn as far as WW was concerned. And Walter, longing to share the confidences of the great and powerful, was out in the cold.”
    Winchell began to attack the President in his column. Some attacks were legitimate, such as the stories he reported linking Kennedy to organized crime, but most were hysterical, personalized attacks, accusing Kennedy of being soft on Communism and calling the White House the “Pink House” or the “oddministration.” Irritated, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Hearst executive Richard Berlin and put pressure on him to delete anti-Kennedy comments from Winchell’s