TABLOID TALES
In pursuit for sensation
INTERVIEW
DICK BELSKY
The story of legendary headline
Dick Belsky is a crime fiction writer and journalist from New York City who contributed to the creation of the most famous headline in the history of tabloids: 'Headless Body in a Topless Bar'. Michal Lachowicz speaks with him about his journalistic career and the world of tabloids in the the US.
Michal Lachowicz: Dick, in your journalistic career you were a metropolitan editor of The New York Post, managing editor of New York Daily News or news editor in Star magazine. The last one is in particular associated with celebrities. You spent many years as a tabloid journalist. How this particular area of journalism distinguishes itself from others? What kind of advantages and disadvantages a person who enters a tabloid environment can experience?
Dick Belsky: Well, I think the biggest advantage of working for a tabloid is that it’s a lot more fun and interesting than most other journalism. A tabloid story has to be quick, lively and tell the story in a straight-forward manner – the way we all would tell a good story in real life. There’s a true art in doing that. One of the best tabloid rules I ever learned as a young journalist was: “Tell the story the way you would in a bar.” In other words, you’d burst into the bar if there was a car crash outside and yell: “There’s a big car crash outside.” Then, “it looks like someone is dead.” And then, “more people are hurt.” And then “it just happened down the block.” And “one car ran a red light and the other driver must not have seen him.” All the who, what, why , where, etc. of a story in the first few paragraphs. That’s tabloid journalism in a nutshell. The celebrity tabloid story is especially interesting because people care so much about celebrities (whether they admit it or not).
Everyone I covered from Liz Taylor to Jackie O to Oprah to Julia Roberts to Lindsay Lohan to Kim Kardashian and her family these days – people either love ‘em or hate ‘em. But they want to read about them. The disadvantage of being a tabloid journalist is that a lot of people in the so-called mainstream media don’t understand tabloid journalism and don’t take it seriously. Or, sadly, they look down on us tabloid journalists. I remember situation from many years ago when I was a young city editor at the NY Post and went for a job interview with a prestigious news magazine. The editor there looked at my resume, saw I worked for a tabloid and told me: “I don’t have any jobs open, and if I did I wouldn’t hire someone like you.” Hey, I got over it.
ML: Which story, particularly from the period of your work for the Star is the most memorable for you? Do you remember any challenging, controversial or the ones which received unexpectedly large coverage? What tasks did you have there?
DB: The biggest, most memorable and challenging story to cover at the Star, I guess, was O.J. Simpson. It ran nearly two years from the start of the Nicole/Goldman murders, through the White Bronco chase and arrest, then the trial of the century, etc. And we had it on page one of the Star virtually every week of that time. I assigned one of my top tabloid people, Tony Frost, fulltime to run the coverage from LA, then we sent many other people there to help out. The idea was to sort through the breaking news from the trial each week and find interesting stories about the people and events involved that no one else knew about. We broke a lot of stories!
Another memorable moment at Star was breaking the first Bill Clinton sex scandal story in 1992 just before the New Hampshire primary. No one knew much about him then, and we uncovered his affair with Gennifer Flowers and told her story on the front page of the Star. It wound up making national headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post and on “60 Minutes.” The mainstream press didn’t like that the news came from a tabloid. They had no choice but to run with it and give us credit. That was very satisfying.
ML: Did you experience situations when despite of having ready material, you felt that for some reasons it shouldn’t be published? What in your opinion are the boundaries, which tabloid journalist should never cross? How they have changed in comparison with the past?
DB: Of course. There are always stories that you are pretty convinced are true, but you don’t have the evidence to run them. I certainly heard a lot of stuff about celebrities that never was able to make it into print. The boundaries for a tabloid journalist are the same as for any journalist: the story has to be true and backed up by facts. The old adage is: the three most important things in a story are: “accuracy, accuracy and accuracy.” You have to be right about any story – or you can’t print or air that story.
Have those standards changed in comparison with the past? Not for any good tabloid, any good newspaper, any good journalist. Unfortunately, those journalistic standards aren’t always the same at some of the countless websites and social media outlets that have sprung up. There’s a feeling in some cases that news – true or not – can just be put up in a tweet or whatever and then taken down/changed if not true. Don’t get me wrong: I love digital journalism. I think it’s great and I’ve worked at some terrific websites. But a story on a website – or any kind of social media – still needs to follow the basic rules of journalism.
"Just like that, journalistic history was made. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR wound up being memorialized on T-shirts, buttons and even became the title of a movie."
Photo Credit: John Makely
ML: Could you tell me about the attitude of celebrities and public figures in relation to you when you worked for the tabloids? Was it distanced or maybe stars realise that one day they might need this contact to promote their work? How would you describe this relationship?
DB: It depends on the outlet. At the Star, hardly any celebrity would talk to us. So we had to get our stories from the people behind the scenes, the people who worked for the celebrities or were friends of theirs or just knew what they were doing. It was a lot more work. But, in the end, we got better stories that way!
At a place like the Post or the Daily News, celebrities would be more cooperative in many cases – but not all. The first celebrity I ever met as a young reporter at the NY Post was Dustin Hoffman. I approached him on a movie set on location in New York and asked for a few minutes of his time. He was a huge star at the time – but I was impressed and forever grateful that he took time to be kind and patient and helpful to a young kid just starting out. I guess I assumed back then that all the celebrities I liked on the screen would be as nice as him. They weren’t.
ML: Tabloid journalism sells well, but there are a lot of negative things written about it. I would like to ask you what kind of benefits this work brought for you? What was the most exciting part of it?
DB: Just going to work every day – covering a lot of interesting stories with a lot of interesting people. Some of the most colorful characters – and the best journalists I've ever met worked in tabloid newsrooms. The competition was fierce – especially in New York City at the height of the tabloid wars in the 1980s – but we all worked hard, played hard and did some great work at the tabloids.
ML: Do you have any thoughts about the British tabloid press market? Are there any significant differences or similarities in a way of reporting in comparison with the US counterparts?
DB: I’ve never worked there so don’t know much first-hand about it. But I spent 13 years with Rupert Murdoch at the Post so I saw a lot of the British concepts put into action here. Many of Murdoch’s ideas revolutionized the American media market.
I also worked with many, many British tabloid journalists at the Post and later at the Star and even the Daily News. They bring a lot of great ideas from the British tabloid market to the U.S. (as well a lot of energy that many U.S. newspapers don’t have) – but there was always an adjustment for them too in going from the British tabloid market to the one here in the U.S.
ML: Nothing attracts reader’s attention better than a good headline, especially in tabloid journalism. I know that in 1983 you contributed to creation of the most famous headline in the history of New York City tabloids. Could you tell me a bit more about this story?
DB: I’ve spent my entire lifetime in tabloid journalism, and that headline is the one thing I’m probably most associated with. And I didn’t even write it. But I was there to help make that famous headline happen.
Legendary New York Post headline writer Vincent Musetto came up with the idea after he heard that a holdup man had shot to death–and then bizarrely cut off the head–of the owner of a seedy sex bar. I had to confirm it was indeed a topless bar to make the headline work.
I called the cops, but they didn’t know if the place was topless. I had someone try the bar, but there was no answer. We reached out for people who lived in the neighborhood, checked phone listed phone listings. Nothing. I assigned a woman reporter to go to the bar, but the place was locked up tight. There were no signs, no advertisements about it being a topless place. Finally she climbed up on a trash can, looked through the window and saw a sign inside that said: “Topless Dancing Tonight.” Just like that, journalistic history was made. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR wound up being memorialized on T-shirts, buttons and even became the title of a movie. It is a cult classic–the “Night of the Living Dead” of headlines.
ML: Your wide knowledge about media and show- business resulted as well in book publications, such as for example the recent series of thrillers, in which reporter Gill Malloy investigates different criminal cases, often related to media scene. In one of books he deals with murders, happening in New York and associated with the death of President Kennedy. In the other he tries to discover the truth about another murder, in this case of movie star Laura Marlowe. Could you tell me how do you look for topics of your books, what inspires you the most and what makes these mysterious deaths of famous people so fascinating for us?
DB: When people ask me where I get my ideas for thriller and murder mystery topics to write about, I always say: “I just go to work.” There’s so many stories that happen in a newsroom every day that capture your imagination and let you turn those ideas into a novel by saying: “What if it happened this way?” And then, unlike a journalist, you get to make the rest of the story up. My most recent Gil Malloy thriller SHOOTING FOR THE STARS, for instance, draws on a number of real life celebrity deaths – including John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe.
One of the things that make deaths of famous people so fascinating is that there are always so many questions about them, From Marilyn to Jim Morrison to Elvis to Natalie Wood to Princess Diana – there are many people who believe the real facts have never come out and secrets have been covered up. The most famous person who ever died with these kind of questions, of course, was John F. Kennedy – so I used that as the inspiration for my first Gil Malloy thriller, THE KENNEDY CONNECTION. Unless you believe the Warren Commission (and almost no one does) the Kennedy assassination remains the most famous unsolved murder cold case in our history.
ML: What are you working on at the moment?
DB: A new Gil Malloy novel called BLONDE ICE will be out in October. It’s about a female serial killer – a blonde, beautiful woman – who targets men looking for sex as her murder victims. The inspiration for this was Son of Sam, which I covered in the late 70s at the Post when he was killing women at singles bars and lovers lanes throughout New York City. That has spawned countless other serial killer books about men who prey on women. So, I decided to write one about a female serial killer instead.
ML: What kind of advice could you give for young journalists who like me are about to graduate and will have to experience these first steps of journalism industry, outside university environment?
DB: Just go out and write and do the job. Sounds simple, but that’s really the only way to do it. There’s a lot of doomsday talk now about newspapers dying, etc. Well sure, the business of journalism is changing at lot right. But it’s always been changing.
When I was growing up, there used to be twelve newspapers in New York City – now there are only three. But there are ten times that many local news outlets available online. People once got their breaking news first from radio, then from television and now from Twitter. CNN changed the face of journalism with a 24-hour news channel a generation ago in the same way blogs and websites and social media are doing it now. TMZ is breaking big scandal stories online every day the way the National Enquirer used to do once a week at the supermarket checkout counter.
But the news is still the same. The only thing different is the way it’s delivered. Or, to paraphrase the Who, “meet the new media, same as the old media.” There are so many different way for people to get news now – and that provides a lot of opportunities for a young journalist.
ML: Thank you very much for interview