Tabloid Titan

By Andrea Sachs

O.J. Simpson! Jonbenet Ramsey! Michael Jackson! "Enquiring minds want to know," and the National Enquirer is eager to oblige. No one knows more about the colorful supermarket tabloid than Iain Calder, author of The Untold Story: My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer. What's it like to be at the helm of the paper that put celebrity journalism on the map? TIME met with Calder:

Who was the Enquirer reader? During my editorship, our average was about 4 million per week. So there was no one kind of person. But I always said to my people, Think of Mrs. Smith in Kansas City. I said, She's in her 40s, maybe 50s, and she has children. Our buyers were probably over 80% women because we were selling in supermarkets.

Does the fact that the Enquirer paid for stories diminish its credibility? We didn't pay for most stories. When we were paying big sums, we were paying for exclusivity. People say, Well, if you pay somebody, they're going to lie just to get the money. Journalists in general don't know when people are lying. You check it out. You double-check, triple-check, and you do everything you can to make sure the story is right before you run it. That's what we did.

Celebrities had a love/hate relationship with the Enquirer, didn't they? Many times, and I mean many, many times, the celebrity would come to us and say, "I'll give you the story, but you mustn't say it came from me." So they would get a front-page story in the Enquirer. Now, remember that we maybe had 150 million people walking past it. Then they could go back to their friends and say, "How could that rat rag get that story? It's not true."

Did you feel you weren't getting enough respect? My feeling was, if we start getting too much respect from the mainstream press, we're going to be doing something wrong.

Who was a star that was difficult to deal with? Liz Taylor. So we'd go in through the back door. We knew more things about celebrities sometimes than they knew themselves. We would have their beautician, we might have their sister, we might have a person in the contracts division of their lawyer, we might have their agent's secretary, we might have their boyfriend or girlfriend.

How did you get your famous picture of Elvis in his coffin? It was an incredible coup. It was our biggest-selling issue ever. We sold 6.7 million copies. One of my photographers followed a relative of Elvis' to a bar. When he went into the men's room, standing at the stall, our guy said, "Listen, I'm from the Enquirer. Would you like to make some money?" The relative said, "The photo could be done after everything is closed down for the night. They just put the lights out, leave Elvis, and we go and drink until the early hours of the morning." Under our instructions, the relative managed to get in for 10 minutes. They didn't close the casket. His picture was the most perfect picture of Elvis you could ever imagine.

After the O.J. Simpson trial, how did you feel when the mainstream media started going after the same stories? That was a bad thing for us, because no longer were we the only game in town. So I would have preferred less respect and bigger sales.