New feature: Death of The Day

We give up. 2009 has turned into the Celebrity Death Year. We submit to the Celebrity Reaper, no longer content to take them in Threes, but now scytheing them up at several a day. Ted Kennedy... Ellie Greenwich... Dominick Dunne... We realize more are going because more are out there, living longer and waiting to get the crook of the skeletal finger (as one Tabloid Baby pal explained: "We are entering the beginning of the sunset years for boomers, the largest population group in history, born during a profound media expansion. So a population expansion begets a celebrity expansion. They are dying at a faster rate simply because there are more of them. Think of what will happen when the reality TV stars start to drop en masse..."), but we're filling up too many posts with too many mentions of dead people.

So we introduce the Tabloid Baby Death of The Day. It can be found among the features in the column at the right --> We will update accordingly. Heck, at this rate, we might have to institute the Tabloid Baby Death of The Hour... Sad about Dominick, even though he did give us the "author" Mark Fuhrman...

Last tabloid legend standing? (Or rolling around in a wheelchair, at least?)

Ted Kennedy was a great Senator

Ted Kennedy's tabloid television close-up

…The story would be a watershed in American political and sexual mythology. Generations of condoned womanizing by America’s royal family had led to this: a young woman, claiming she was raped at the famed Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in the early hours of Easter morning after a late-night drinking binge with Teddy, his son, and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith.

Willie, as he was know, son of Steve Smith, the late “fixer of Kennedy scandals, was accused in the biggest family disgrace since Chappaquiddick. This would be the first defining new story of our tenure at Hard Copy, and we were sure to come up against massive competition from A Current Affair. After all, Brennan and Dunleavy had written Those Wild, Wild Kennedy Boys back in the seventies—and it wouldn’t get much wilder than this.

We stationed a live truck outside the Kennedy mansion and led the next’s day show live from Palm Beach, Dimond had Michelle Cassone, a young woman who claimed to have gone to the mansion with the victim the morning in question. Cassone accused Senator Ted of chasing her around in a nightshirt while his nephew was having his way with the victim out on the beach.

Back in LA, we had Mike O’Gara don a nightshirt and stand in is stocking feet while a cameraman did a pan from his toes up to his belly As Michelle Cassone described her alleged encounter, we threw in the shot in a frightening, almost subliminal recreation of Ted’s lower regions.

The cops weren’t talking and that made the story even better, Dimind dug up everything possible and we ran stories every day that week. It wasn’t difficult for her to get exclusives, though. For some reason, there was no competition…

After years of looking the other way while Teddy stumbled and groped his way around Washington, going as far as to allegedly have relations with a woman under table during lunch in a private restaurant-- though he apparently won points with the press corps by making use of a private dining room -- all these network newsmen in the Brooks Brothers shirts and loosened ties who spent time taking “L’s” and “R’s” out of Tom Brokaw’s scripts actually ran through a list of the world events and decided that a story in which Senator Ted Kennedy was embroiled in a rape case wasn’t even worth fifteen seconds. The arrogance of the networks was mind-boggling—at least until you considered the Kennedy influence and infiltration…

Read the rest of this story... and much more about Ted Kennedy, his family and their tabloid history... in Tabloid Baby.

Steve Dunleavy Tabloid Master Class Part 6: What can be learned from his infamous TV brawl with Michelle Cassone

Journalism legend and cultural icon Steve Dunleavy wrestled a bear on A Current Affair.

He also wrestled Michelle Cassone, who implicated Sen. Edward Kennedy in his nephew Willie's 1991 rape case in Palm Beach, Florida.

Steve talks about the story behind fracas above.

(From the Tabloid Baby-Frozen Pictures production: Steve Dunleavy: The Man and His Music.)