Clinton Story Puts Star in Spotlight
The latest issue of the tabloid Star contains the usual sensationalized celebrity burlesque: Julie Andrews complaining that “The Sound of Music” drove her to a shrink and Cher delivering a marry-me-or-else ultimatum to her longtime beau.
For readers more interested in everyday folks, there is the story of an Upstate New York mother who was jailed for asking questions about breast feeding. “I’ll never call a help line again,” she confides ruefully.
But the Feb. 4 edition also has something else, a hot story that has the scribes from the more-respectable press sniffing at the tidbits from a supermarket weekly: “My 12-Year Affair With Bill Clinton.”
Gennifer Flowers tells the purported “all” to the Star. On Page 25, she also lies across a bed, showing off her smile and her cleavage.
“Thank you all for coming,” the Star’s editor, Richard Kaplan, began a Monday press conference here at the Waldorf-Astoria. Before him were hundreds of reporters. His own staff--and his newspaper’s checkbook--had ferreted out a story that others were forced to follow.
It was possibly the tabloid’s biggest scoop since those honeymoon photos of Michael J. Fox at Martha’s Vineyard.
Flowers conceded the power of the Star. She followed Kaplan to the podium, saying “things had gotten out of control.” The Star’s reporters had convinced her that they had the goods, she said. They were going to run their lurid story with or without her cooperation. At least this way, she’d get to tell things from her side, to say nothing of cashing a check.
“It’s certainly the biggest story we’ve had in recent memory,” said David Galpern, executive vice president and chief financial officer for the Enquirer-Star Group Inc., the owner of the Star.
His memory searched for a scoop to rival it. Oh, yes, of course. “We published the Gary Hart pictures,” he said. In 1987, the presidential candidate was shown with Donna Rice atop his lap in the Star’s sister publication, the National Enquirer.
The Enquirer-Star Group, headquartered in Lantana, Fla., also publishes Weekly World News and Soap Opera Magazine. The Star, founded in 1974, was acquired in June, 1990, from media baron Rupert Murdoch for $400 million.
Star claims a circulation of 3.2 million, about 600,000 less than the flagship Enquirer. Seventy percent of its readers are women, Galpern said; 50% are in the 18-to-34 age group.
The tabloid’s editorial offices are located in Tarrytown, N.Y. It has 80 full-time employees, according to a recent prospectus. It also has a “free-lance and editorial contributor network” of 150.
“I’m in the entertainment business,” Kaplan candidly told a reporter in 1989. “I’m in the field of hype. Oprah, Vanna, Cher--I live in their world.”