In late January 2019, Jennifer Ash Rudick, a documentary film producer, was granted an in-person meeting at the Manhattan offices of American Media Inc. with Dylan Howard, then editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer. Rudick had been following up on a monthslong email trail of requests seeking the participation of Howard’s boss, AMI CEO David Pecker, for a feature-length documentary on the origin, evolution and impact of his most infamous publication. The meeting was brief, and as Rudick would recall to our team afterward, centered on a single question: “How much of the film will be focused on Donald Trump?” (In true Enquirer fashion, readers will be “shocked” to learn that AMI declined all requests to have any of its staff participate in the film, in order to “protect” the “confidential investigative reporting process of our journalists and editors.”)
Why would Trump care about the editorial stratagems of a trashy supermarket tabloid in the first place?
At the time of that reply, our team had already spent months researching the outlet, interviewing two former Enquirer editors-in chief, a former Los Angeles bureau chief, a former senior photo editor, and over a dozen former editors and reporters, all of whom willingly and in great detail shared many specific practices and tactics of their former employer’s “reporting process.”
Those processes were put under a microscope this past week as part of the alluring reality show unfolding in a lower Manhattan courtroom, the People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump. For multiple days, David Pecker testified about his tabloid’s habit of buying stories and sometimes burying them. But putting aside why Stormy Daniels might need to be paid hush money, why would Trump care about the editorial stratagems of a trashy supermarket tabloid in the first place? This was a magazine whose arguably biggest claim had been scoring the only photo of a dead Elvis lying in his coffin, which sold millions of papers in 1977.
Trump and the AMI CEO were indeed symbiotic bedfellows. But before there was David Pecker, there was Generoso Pope Jr.
Pope fashioned the National Enquirer back in the late 1950s as a gore rag featuring block headlines that barked “news” items like “MAN DRILLS HOLE IN HIS HEAD FOR KICKS,” with full-page, blood-soaked photos designed to grab attention and drive newsstand sales. But by the late 1960s, those newsstands were gone, and Pope did a full editorial makeover on his paper so he could sell it in the one place where he knew millions of Americans go: the supermarket. By the early 1970s, Pope had brokered deals to place racks he had designed at the front end of checkout lines in thousands of grocery stores across America, effectively guaranteeing that the covers of his tabloid would be seen by millions of “enquiring minds” every week.
Pope’s former employees told us that his real genius was a keen understanding of the mind of the typical Enquirer reader, a fictional archetype he called “Missy Smith from Kansas City.” Pope and his editorial team closely monitored which stories drove the most sales, and ascertained that Missy Smith preferred a perfect blend of celebrity gossip, health tips, UFO encounters, predictions, human interest stories, and photos of adorable puppies. Iain Calder, who worked for the Enquirer from 1964 to 2000, largely as editor-in-chief, put it this way in our film: “We were Missy Smith in Kansas City, we were Missy Smith in Yonkers. We were Missy Smith in California. We were Missy Smith everywhere.”
This is relevant to why David Pecker and Donald Trump are sitting in the same lower Manhattan courtroom last week. When Pecker took charge of the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, in 1999, he inherited that precious, eye-level, front-of-the-checkout-line real estate that Pope had secured years earlier. Pecker also inherited a tradition of having a vast spy network of unconventional, paid sources across Hollywood, Manhattan, Vegas, D.C., London, Monte Carlo and points beyond, whom his reporters would rely on for salacious information about celebrities and politicians.
According to several former Enquirer employees we talked to for our film, one of the best sources for gossip that the paper had in the 1990s, long before he was a political candidate, was Donald Trump. And a reporter named Larry Haley was assigned to be the full-time “Trump editor.” As Haley pointed out in our documentary, “Trump was a New York guy that the Enquirer wanted salacious stories from, because they sold a lot of papers.” And, Haley says, “Trump saw the National Enquirer as a megaphone to an audience that he did not have.” Pecker also had a pattern of aligning himself with powerful politicians on the rise, regardless of party affiliation. This is the man who, in 1995, as president of a division of Hachette Filipacchi, cozied up to John F. Kennedy Jr. to announce the launch of George, a celebrity-driven glossy magazine with a “fresh, non-partisan” perspective. This is also the man who in 2002, as CEO of AMI, would acquire Weider Publications, publisher of the nation’s most widely read muscle and fitness magazines. Pecker would forge a valuable alliance with Weider’s most prominent board member, Arnold Schwarzenegger and enthusiastically back him in a successful 2003 bid to become the Republican governor of California. Unless you stared at the ceiling or down at your feet it was impossible to miss the perfectly placed Enquirer cover in its new role as political advertisement. Standing in grocery checkout lines in the months leading up to the 2016 election, I often felt like I was in a scene from “The Manchurian Candidate.” Unless you stared at the ceiling or down at your feet it was impossible to miss the perfectly placed Enquirer cover in its new role as political advertisement. One week Hillary Clinton was “IN JAIL!” A trip for milk would reveal she had “SIX MONTHS TO LIVE!” with a photo of her on death’s door. Other weeks the covers were bright, with headlines as big and bold as the ones about the guy who drilled a hole in his head. One standout issue promised to tell me and everyone else in line that day all about “THE DONALD TRUMP NOBODY KNOWS!” We did not know at that time any of the details of the deal-making that had transpired between Trump and Pecker. We did not know then that information potentially damaging to the Trump campaign would be acquired by Enquirer staffers, doing what Enquirer staffers have done for years as de rigueur for the job, and buried so as never to reach the public. What we did discover was that Pecker had successfully test-driven his skill for catching and killing negative stories on powerful allies with political aspirations years before he and Trump would go into business together. For more on that you might watch a documentary about the National Enquirer.
Mark Landsman
Mark Landsman is the director of the CNN Films/Magnolia Pictures feature documentary, "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer," nominated for a 2021 News & Documentary Emmy Award.
