[4] Rushmore described his own inauspicious beginnings: "When I was eight, my father lost his job in the railroad yards of Sheridan, Wyoming and took advantage of the government homestead offers to 'prove up' a 320-acre claim.
His father, now "a fifteen-hour-a-day farmer pitted two hundred pounds of muscle and bone against the black gumbo (local soil) and finally lost.
A defeated man, Rushmore's father was apolitical, but his wife was an optimistic Democrat and strong supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt, which influenced her son's early political outlook.
[3] Political columnist and friend George Sokolsky would later describe Rushmore as "at heart a hillbilly, proud of his colonial ancestry ... he himself was an enormous disappointment to himself ... a sad mountain boy, morose, looking for something he could never find.
[10] On January 12, 1931, he witnessed the lynching of Raymond Gunn,[11] in which the African-American suspect was seized from the local sheriff, doused with gasoline atop a roof and set aflame while several thousands watched.
[13] Later that year, Rushmore joined the Young Communist League USA (YCLUSA) in St. Louis despite having neither a technical knowledge of Marxist philosophy nor its history.
During 1944–45, he met a new staff writer on the Journal-American, Marjorie Frances McCoy (née Everitt), a widow with two young daughters, Jean and Lynn.
The investigations were motivated by the domestic activities of the brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, both communist refugees living in America during World War II.
The opening of the Soviet archives decades later showed that Eisler, a Comintern agent, used his political authority to make Earl Browder the American "leader" of the CPUSA during a mid-1930s leadership dispute.
The United Federation of Teachers complained that Jansen was influenced by allegations from the Journal-American,[43] which said that Gutride was a secret communist organizer for the longshoremen unions.
There he switched the subject to Washington, D.C., waving a piece of paper that he claimed was an FBI report that named 150 federal employees as members of a Soviet spy ring.
The FBI's reply warned against relying on Rushmore's veracity: "[His] writings have proved unreliable, due to his tendency to sensationalize and blow up fragments of information."
[3] During the late 1940s–early 1950s, a group of State Department employees complained about "left-wingers" and "pro-Reds" working at the Voice of America (VOA) facilities at 57th Street, New York City.
Its publisher, Robert Harrison, began as an office boy and later writer for Bernarr McFadden's New York Graphic during the 1920s,[49] an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s.
As an adult Harrison was on the editorial staff of the Motion Picture Herald, a trade publication whose conservative Catholic owner, Martin Quigley, Sr., had close ties to the Hays Office.
[50] Supposedly inspired by the Kefauver Committee hearings,[51] Harrison later launched a tabloid-style gossip magazine focused on the substance abuse habits, criminal records and hidden political and sexual preferences of celebrities.
Film historian Mary Desjardins described Confidential's editorial style as using "research methods and writing techniques that recycled old stories or created 'composite' facts as the basis of new ones.
[7] Though Harrison would publish non-show business stories involving "racketeering, consumer scams and politicians' peccadilloes," "exposés of star secrets" became Confidential's prime focus.
[53] However, the informants could rise to the level of prominent Hollywood columnists like Florabel Muir[56] and in some cases, all the way up to a producer like Mike Todd[57] or even a studio head like Harry Cohn.
He hoped to use Confidential as a new venue to expose communists, though he often had to settle for suspected Hollywood "fellow travellers",[7] who, he implied in his stories, were sexual "deviates.
"[3] Beside Rushmore-authored pieces unmasking communists and homosexuals in Washington and Hollywood, he also wrote how-to articles on divorce and conducting extramarital affairs, echoing his past relationships with his two wives.
[64] Contrary to the popular legend that Confidential double-checked its facts before publishing its articles, as well as being vetted by the magazine's lawyers as "suit-proof", proposed stories were either immediately printed without vetting or, more typically, Marjorie Meade – Harrison's 26-year-old niece and the head of Confidential's intelligence-gathering front, Hollywood Research Inc. – would either personally visit a subject or dispatch an agent to present a copy of a future issue as a "buy-back" proposal, agreeing to hold the story back for in exchange for information on other celebrities.
As the nation speculated that Rushmore was either kidnapped or murdered by communists,[67] he was discovered hiding under the name "H. Roberts" at the Hotel Finlen in Butte, Montana.
Lazar said, "It's a simple fact that I live quite normally in Manhattan and that any green cub reporter would not have the slightest difficulty in locating me if he honestly wanted to.
Having quit the Journal-American after eleven years,[3] Frances became an account executive for Klingman & Spencer, a prominent Manhattan public relations firm.
Rushmore, now the state's star witness, testified that Confidential knowingly published unverified allegations despite the magazine's reputation for double-checking facts:[76] "Some of the stories are true and some have nothing to back them up at all.
On January 3, 1958, at 6:15 pm, a few days before Frances was scheduled to lead a group of editors on a trip to Brazil, the Rushmores met inside the lobby of their apartment building in a final attempt at reconciliation.
At the police station, an unregistered .32 caliber Colt revolver[85] was found in Rushmore's hand and a seven-inch commando knife inside the waistband of his trousers.
[86] Contrary to general expectations, Dobbins said her parents quarreled "over personal things, not Rushmore's controversial public life ... 'He was very possessive, very jealous, and wanted to go everywhere with her.
"[85] Frances' father, Louis Everitt, the owner of a women's shoe store in Charlotte, brought his daughter's body back to North Carolina.