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getting the details of the stories for the first time—the conservative
Los Angeles Times
played down the story, but Hearst’s bawdy
Examiner
put the story on the front pages and the paper sold out almost every day. Some editors, however, refused to publish details about the trial. Particularly in the South and in the Midwest, stories about the
Confidential
trial were heavily censored or banned altogether; the tales of nude parties and interracial romps were just too salacious for family newspapers. Even the tabloids that covered the trial in detail often expressed shock and outrage over the “sleaze mongers” and “dirt diggers.” Some of the umbrage, however, was posturing. One reporter who was covering the trial for the New York
Daily News
was taken off the story after it was revealed that she contributed to
Confidential
under a pseudonym. Lee Mortimer, a gossip columnist for the New York
Daily Mirror
who wrote articles attacking
Confidential
and its publisher, was privately friendly with Harrison, according to the publisher. “Mortimer wanted to keep the controversy going,” Harrison said. “We would meet at a phone booth in a little hotel on East Fifty-second Street and exchange information so that he could keep writing about
Confidential.
It was a big help to me.”
    The trial was turning out to be devastating to the Hollywood image that it was intended to protect. By the time Gloria Wellman, the adopted daughter of famed director William Wellman
(A Star is Born
and
Beau Geste
) and a self-described “naked model” and prostitute, testified that she was the source for a story on a “Naked Canapé” party attended by some of the movie industry’s biggest names, stars were openly complaining that thestrategy had backfired; stories that had been dismissed as tabloid trash were being confirmed on the witness stand by the sources. “Now that the whole world is reading what first appeared only in
Confidential,
it looks to me as if it were a mistake to bring this action into court,” lamented singer John Carroll. “There is one thing for sure. Folks aren’t going to be thinking from now on that we show people are like the boys and girls next door.”
    So, on August 19, when a sultry young singer and actress named Mylee Andreason took the stand and began to testify about a “star-studded naked rug party,” she got only as far as identifying herself as a participant in the raunchy festivities before the prosecution interrupted her. The District Attorney’s office appealed to Judge Walker, who was, himself, a former child actor and was sympathetic to the film community. Walker made a ruling that completely undermined the defense’s strategy: he said that any new testimony had to relate to the few articles that the prosecution had already read into the record. Judge Walker’s decision thwarted Harrison’s plan for a parade of celebrity witnesses, or at the very least, an open discussion about their accuracy.
    Then came another devastating blow to the magazine’s credibility. Paul Gregory, producer of
The Naked and the Dead,
testified that Harrison’s niece, Marjorie Meade, had tried to blackmail him. Gregory, the subject of a stinging
Confidential
exposé, produced a tape recording of a woman claiming to be Meade’s secretary. In the recording, the woman demanded that Gregory meet Meade at a restaurant called Sherry to give her $10,000—or Gregory would be the subject of a scathing article in
Confidential.
The defense, however, proved that the restaurant Sherry wasn’t even around at the time of the alleged blackmail attempt. What’s more, they produced a witness who said Meade was out of town visiting a friend that day—and they had the tickets and receipts to prove it.
    On September 16, after 6 weeks, 2,000 pages of testimony, and 164 exhibits—the case went to the jury. Attorney General Brown, however, wasn’t finished with
Confidential.
While the jury was locked away in its deliberations, Brown