The Press: The Keyhole Kid

“I was completely amazed.” White House Press Secretary Jim Hagerty wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “to read in the Chronicle . . . one of the most scurrilous pieces of gossip that I have ever seen printed. I am sure I do not have to tell you that this is completely false and was either maliciously invented or deliberately planted. Officially and personally, I want to protest the terrible injustice done to both the President and the Vice President.”

The cause of Hagerty’s rebuke, carried without comment in the pro-Eisenhower Chronicle (circ. 190,045) last week, was a gobbet of gossip in a syndicated column that appears in the Chronicle each Sunday under the head “Confidential Memo,” by John J. Miller. The item: “Vice President Nixon is talking behind President Eisenhower’s back and saying things that would be considered in the worst taste if ever printed. Perhaps the mildest statement he made at one gathering recently was, ‘Sometimes I think he’s just a jerk’—meaning Ike, of course.”

Manhattan-based Gossipist Miller’s ineffable tastelessness sparked the sharpest rebuke ever dealt a reporter by the Eisenhower Administration. But the slur that caught Hagerty’s eye was not inspired by mere partisan malice. In recent months, Miller’s column has unstoppered fetid allegations about Adlai Stevenson that make the Nixon item seem fragrant.

Sinerama. Though barely old enough to vote, brash, nightclub-pallid John J. Miller is precocious enough to be Broadway’s most scurrilous keyhole peeper. For Manhattan’s National Enquirer (circ. 119,055), a Sunday tabloid (“The World’s Liveliest Paper”) that caters to subway society with a churnful of cheesecake, a flutter of racing tips and leering feature stories (LANA TURNER: A GIRL NEEDS MORE THAN A BOSOM), Miller writes what is probably the yeastiest scandal column printed anywhere. Besides his own bylined sinerama each week, thick-set (“six feet when I stand up straight”) John Miller also grinds out five other Enquirer features: a tearjerker called “Millerdramas,” a trade-talky TV column bylined John Jay, “Inside Politics” by James Miljae, “Hollywood Keyhole” by Gene Carter, and a second titter-tattle column over the byline of John Rellim (a rear-view Miller).

In the three years since he joined the paper, Miller has sold his Enquirer sweepings to the Chronicle and three other dailies, two of which—the Erie (Pa.) Times and the Cincinnati Times-Star—have dropped him. The third, the New Orleans Item, deleted the Nixon item from Miller’s copy. Memo-Merchant Miller uses the same raw material to tape-record 30-second hotspots that are used around the clock by 15 radio stations (top price: $50 weekly). Now Miller has filmed his first TV keyhole show (which he hopes to sell to WXEX in Richmond, Va.), and will sign a syndication contract with Intermountain Network, Inc., which will add its 57 Western stations to his string in October and, he hopes, boost his total income from $50,000 to $75,000 a year.

Quos for Pros. John Joseph James Miller uncovers the celebrities like a one-man Confidential (whose contents he dismisses as “despicable”). His stuff ranges from the smutty to the delirious. Samples: “A bungled assassination attempt on the Queen of England was hushed up real fast.” “Sophia Loren likes to stand in front of a mirror for hours admiring herself while wearing nooding.” “Marlon Brando slugged the hairdresser at the beauty parlor he visits daily.”

In all his columns each week, Gossipist Miller ticks off more than 300 names of celebrities against a catalogue of follies and foibles that range from adultery to vandalism. Yet Miller has never been horsewhipped or even sued for libel—probably because nobody takes him that seriously. He has no paid professional legmen, but he finds policemen “fantastic sources—after all, they’ve got eight hours to watch four blocks,” and admits that press-agents give.him tips and check items for him on a quid pro quo basis. The quo: “Tickets for a play, or maybe a member of their family needs a job.”

“My Job Is Me.” Miller’s only jobs before going to the Enquirer as a full-fledged columnist at 19 were as a part-time office boy at 20th Century-Fox’s Manhattan offices and as a hired hand for a Broadway pressagent. He explains that his journalistic training consisted mainly of burrowing through public-library files for old columns by Ed Sullivan, Louis Sobol and mostly, Walter Winchell, the grand old man of keyhole journalism.

To get out six columns a week plus his syndicated name-droppings, Miller teetotals through the nightspots until 4 a.m. On dull nights he prowls for crime stories, Winchell-fashion, in a black 1957 Chrysler equipped with three short-wave radios. By 5 a.m. he goes home for supper with his wife, a onetime singer named Cindy Stoker, sleeps for an average of four hours, then bangs out one of his columns.

This schedule leaves Columnist Miller almost no time for relaxation, or for more than a peep at his three-month-old daughter, but he does not chafe at being chained to a golden keyhole. “I consider my work just fabulous,” young Miller confides. “My job is me.”