want and I think we make them a hell of a lot more interesting than they really are. What's a guy gonna do, sue us and admit he was in the hay with the dame, but claim he didn't do all the other things we dress the story with?" Before Rushmore's tenure at Confidential, Harrison published stories like "Is It True What They Say About Johnnie Ray?" and "Why Joe DiMaggio Is Striking Out with Marilyn Monroe!" With "Winchell Was Right About Josephine Baker!", Harrison came out in support of his childhood mentor at the Graphic during the Stork Club controversy. Though Harrison would publish non-show business stories involving "racketeering, consumer scams and politicians' peccadilloes," "exposés of star secrets" became Confidential'''s prime focus. From his headquarters in New York City, Harrison developed a Hollywood network of informants—prostitutes, hotel employees, down-on-their-luck actors and vengeful celebrities—working with local detective agencies like the Fred Otash Detective Bureau and H. L. Von Wittenburg's Hollywood Detective Agency. Among the informants were minor actresses like Francesca De Scaffa (ex-wife of Bruce Cabot) and Ronnie Quillan (ex-wife of screenwriter Joseph Quillan). According to Harrison, Barbara Payton would stop by Confidentials Hollywood office and sell a story whenever she was short of cash. However, the informants could rise to the level of prominent Hollywood columnists like Florabel Muir and in some cases, all the way up to a producer like Mike Todd or even a studio head like Harry Cohn. Money, publicity, revenge or blackmail was the lure. Editorship Rushmore, having earned the enmity of McCarthyite papers like those of the Hearst chain, found himself cut off from his usual employment. He hoped to use Confidential as a new venue to expose communists, though he often had to settle for suspected Hollywood "fellow travellers", who, he implied in his stories, were sexual "deviates."Kenneth G. McLain (July 1955), "The Untold Story of Marlene Dietrich," Confidential (New York City, New York), pp. 22–25, 56, 58 While his anti-communist hit pieces appeared under his own name, Rushmore used a host of pseudonyms for Hollywood exposés such as "Juan Morales" for "The Lavender Skeletons in TV's Closet" and "Hollywood—Where Men Are Men, and Women, Too!", or "Brooks Martin" for the Zsa Zsa Gabor story "Don't Be Fooled by the Glamour Pusses." Beside Rushmore-authored pieces unmasking communists and homosexuals in Washington and Hollywood, he also wrote how-to articles on divorce and conducting extramarital