Confidential Confidential
The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine

This highly readable history of Confidential, the very first scurrilous supermarket tabloid, is an informative, yet entertaining read for anyone who has ever wondered how and why magazines such as Star, People, and the National Enquirer sell millions of copies at supermarket checkouts, and why thes......more

Throughout Confidential Confidential I was struck by how little understanding the author, Samantha Barbas, had of the decade of the 1950s, the decade with which the book concerns itself. Granted, the author was born in 1972, which means her adulthood was 30 years after the close of that decade, but......more

Really well-researched, really readable tale of Confidential, a short-lived but extremely influential 1950s publication known for its stories about the private lives of Hollywood stars—chiefly stories that contradicted the public image that those stars and the studios’ publicity machines created wit......more

I've been listening to some podcasts about "old" Hollywood and several have been about Confidential magazine of which I knew only a little (I was 8-9 at its end) so I wanted to learn more about this controversial, influential, rather horrible magazine. Samantha Barbas does an excellent job of telling......more

The third, and most comprehensive, book on CONFIDENTIAL magazine, the original scandal sheet of the 1950s. Barbas's book is a complete history of the founding of the magazine, its sordid (if highly successful) history, and its legal wrangling. The focus is on the legal battles for the magazine's sur......more