The anonymous blogger behind CDAN claims to be an in-the-know entertainment lawyer living in Beverly Hills—he signs his emails “Enty.” He posts first- and second-hand gossip about celebs while withholding their names and any obvious detail that might identify them. Because they are anonymous, the stories are often more salacious and drug-fueled than what you’d find in US Magazine, and as a result are extremely popular. Although Enty would later tell me, in an emailed interview, that he doesn’t keep track of the number of hits he gets, his blog is a clear beneficiary of the booming celebrity news industry. Enty claims not to make much money off his blog's Google ads. But if public attention is a currency, Enty is getting very rich indeed. Among celebrity newshounds, he’s become a celebrity himself.

Fueled by sites like TMZ and Radar, the celebrity news industry, The New York Times reports, generates more than $3 billion a year, and a sizeable portion of that is derived from online traffic—TMZ alone attracts 8.7 million visits a month, according to Compete.com. Within this market, the most valuable commodity is exclusivity—publications will pay big bucks for first-hand information. As noted in that same Times piece, Dawn Holland, the woman who worked at the seemingly unbreachable Betty Ford Center, was paid ten thousand dollars for Lindsay Lohan’s files by both Radar and TMZ through a secret account set up by her lawyer. In 2007, TMZ purchased stolen photos from the main production office of the Steven Spielberg movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Ultimately, they decided against publishing them, reportedly after receiving a call from a Paramount attorney. But the transaction signaled to many in the media community the kind of game TMZ was going to play.

Often, celebrities set up the tents at their own circus. Many work hand in hand with the media outlets covering them to raise their public profile. As epitomized by Kim Kardashian’s highly profitable wedding, celebrity publicists may brainstorm with editors to fabricate the controversies or relationship developments that will bring the most attention to their clients.

Blind items are the black market of this gossip economy: they operate on the fringe of mainstream celebrity news. They are unverified, unpaid and are often the jotted-down whisperings of people who work closely with the celebs. The seeming authenticity of the gossip comes from its sources' proximity to the film industry. As CDAN's Enty told me, he never has to pay for information, and he gets much of it from other insiders in Hollywood.

Blind gossip is becoming so popular that many older gossip mags, like the National Enquirer are adding them to their sites. And “[s]ites that do depend on traffic for business have added blind items to their sites,” said. Enty.

After five years of writing his blog, Enty has developed a large network of people who work in different areas of the film industry. “I would say 80% of the items come from someone else as there are only so many places I can be every day,” says Enty. “Of that 80%, I would say 75% is solid stuff and the other 25% is so-so on trustworthiness.”

Although it took years as an entertainment lawyer to develop the network of eyes and ears that makes CDAN possible, Enty shrugs off any suggestion that the blog requires much effort. “It is not that hard. You just have to have a network of people. The juicier bits of course require knowing someone who is really tight with a subject, but, again, it is not that hard.”

But what gives blind items their shine of authenticity is also what renders them totally unreliable. Because they are single-sourced and anonymous, there is no way of knowing if they’re simply made-up. In other words, it’s the purest, most uncut form of gossip. There are accusations against Enty that he fabricates most of his blinds, a rumor in part fueled by the disclaimer on his site that it is a work of fiction. Not so, he says. “I never fabricate blind items. The disclaimer is because in some of my posts I include a lot of satire.” But one wonders if would really matter if he did.

***

Credit for the invention of the blind item is given to a man named Colonial William d’Alton Mann. After becoming a Civil War hero in the battle of Gettysburg, he made a fortune licensing an invention for an equipment-hauling rig to the US and Austrian armies. In 1891, his brother, who published the New York City society paper Town Topics, vanished after he discovered he was wanted on an obscenity charge. Mann, whose long white beard and shock of white hair made him a dead ringer for Santa, took over Town Topics and transformed it into one of the most notorious gossip rags ever published.

Colonel Mann’s written contribution to the paper was a column called “Saunterings,” a sharp, sardonic weekly piece about the goings on in high society, much of which he witnessed himself. He often kept his musings nameless, as with this example from February 3, 1893:

High society has been treated to a sorry spectacle of inebriety during the last two weeks at balls and dinners, and I am glad to say that this shocking example, though unfortunately a woman, is not an American, but a specimen of British aristocracy. … If Great Britain is to send us such specimens of her boasted aristocracy, I would advise society to entertain in camera and with a bread and water diet.

Although no one was named in these items, Colonel Mann devised an easily breakable code to help tip off readers. Flip over the piece of newsprint and directly on the other side of “Saunterings” one would find a tepid write-up about an act of charity by a member of the Sykes family, or a barely news-worthy piece about William Vanderbilt. Blind item solved.

Town Topics didn’t just make its money by printing juicy gossip—its editors also had one of the most elaborate blackmail schemes in publishing history. For example, Edwin A. Wall Main Post was approached with evidence of his “white apartment,” the place where he wined and dined his mistress. He was told to pay a large sum to the paper in exchange for a glowing piece about him in one of the paper’s supplements (which never saw the light of day). If he didn’t, another piece, on the front page and far from glowing, would be printed. The paper had been using this strategy for years. But Town Topics had chosen the wrong mark in Wall. Wall approached his wife Emily Post (yes, the same Emily Post who, ten years later, would write the consummate etiquette guide) and, together, they decided to go to the police, despite the fact that it meant public disclosure of the affair.

***

Enty has developed his own system of hint-giving, as have other sites like Ted Casablanca’s The Awful Truth and Blindgossip.com. For example, he recently asked which actress who was “foreign born B-list actress who has been nominated for one of the big awards” was caught doing drugs in a bathroom stall by a "teenage movie actress." Many readers, posting their thoughts in the comments section, guessed the drug user to be Carey Mulligan. Those details—foreign-born, B-list, award-nominated—are the closest he can come to publishing the information without being sued for defamation. “I have received e-mails from lawyers for celebrities,” said Enty. But despite the threats, Enty is protected. “Comments are protected by free speech and guesses are opinions which are not defamation,” he wrote. “Just because people guess the right answer does not mean someone is liable. I would have to confirm their guess as accurate and be wrong myself before I would be liable.”

Hints are also telegraphed by wording choices in many blind items. Read something that includes “midnight,” “pale” and “teeth,” you have a pretty good sense of the franchise to which the item is referring.

Online speculation about Enty’s true identity ranges in guesses from "female blogger in Calgary" to "fiction writer in LA." But, according to Enty, there are only a few people who accurately know who he is. “I would say there are about 20-25 people who know I write the site.” And of those, he says, one only one has threatened him face-to-face, a surprisingly low number given how much hate flows his way.

Enty receives a steady stream of angry email from publicists representing both the celebs the blind items were actually about as well as those who show up in the comments section as guesses. They have reason to be concerned. Once a celeb’s name is guessed often enough, it becomes a search engine result. Take actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Five years ago, Ted Casablanca started writing about a closeted Hollywood actor he refers to as “Toothy Tile .” In these items, Toothy comes across as a sad, repressed character, skulking around shopping mall parking lots looking for male prostitutes while allowing his handlers to determine his (hetero) relationships. If you Google “Gyllenhaal,” it takes a little while to get to a link to Toothy. But Google “Toothy Tile” and the first search result is “Jake Gyllenhaal is Toothy Tile.”

But not all publicists stress about blind items. Marlan Willardson, owner of MWPR, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm specializing in the entertainment industry, thinks that blind items are preferable to the outright fabrication in which many gossip mags engage. “I think people have a love-hate relationship with Ted [Casablanca],” says Willardson, “but that's Hollywood. He's certainly more responsible than someone who writes an outright lie connected directly to the celebrity.”

So why does Enty do it? Why does someone spend the time to develop networks that enable him to collect intimate information about people he doesn’t know? It may be that, despite his claims to not care about traffic, Enty has his sights on becoming the next TMZ—he recently created his own CDAN YouTube Channel . So far the channel seems to consist mainly of red-carpet interviews conducted by someone named Tom, who looks to be about 13. But Enty says it’s all just for fun. “I just post as a hobby. It is just something I enjoy doing.” Why does he enjoy it? “I just do.”

Carrie-May Siggins has spent the last couple of years writing for true crime TV and is currently working on a young adult novel.

Photo by s_bukley, via Shutterstock.

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Here’s an anecdote from James Wolcott’s crackerjack new memoir of ink-stained ’70s New York, Lucking Out: Wolcott, then in his twenties and cutting his teeth at the Village Voice, tagged along with Pauline Kael for a drink at the townhouse of a top Newsweek editor. Kael was three decades older than Wolcott and miles above him then in the editorial food chain, but he wasn’t about to ask the most famous movie critic in America why she kept inviting him to screenings. (Whatta town.)

The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Kael asked the host what he thought of it. "The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: 'It’s full of resonance.'" Wolcott adds: "I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance."

Kael, who died in 2001, had a simmering rivalry with Didion that occasionally came to a boil, as Nathan Heller notes in The New Yorker. Like all rivalries, it no doubt owed something to what the two had in common. David Kipen once said, “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” Kael and Didion both went to Berkeley (Kael didn’t graduate) and shook off sexism and East Coast bias to gain mountaintop perches in the literary-journalistic landscape. It’s not hard to imagine why they would have spent some time playing compare-and-contrast.

They had occasion to cross paths, but mostly the contretemps played out in print. When the movie version of Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays appeared in 1972, with a script co-written by Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Kael took the opportunity to give the book a beating. Delivering a shock to Didion’s cultish following, she called the book “ridiculously swank” and added that she’d read it “between bouts of disbelieving giggles.” Centered on the disintegrating life of a young but fading model-actress, the novel sounds a note of alienation and despond on the baked sands of moneyed Hollywood. Kael wrote that she “whooped” at the first line and “whooped” at the ending, quoting both.

A longtime Didion enthusiast (and we are legion), I was a bit alarmed to encounter these quotes recently and decided to correct my failure to read this novel and see if Kael was being unfair; there’s something suspect about all that whooping. The title always seemed alluring besides, Play It as It Lays—conjugation problem notwithstanding, how can you go wrong with the combination of Didion and silky cardsharp argot? It is no pleasure to say that you can indeed go wrong. Despite a couple of exceptional scenes, the novel is unaffecting, faux-profound, and more out of focus than it wants to be. Score one for Kael on this point, I’d say.

The following year, Didion’s husband struck back, reviewing the Kael collection Deeper into Movies in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Dunne points out in the first paragraph that he had accepted the assignment prior to the pan of Play It as It Lays, while also mentioning that Kael’s previous book, the “arrogantly silly” Raising Kane, made him “giggle and hoot.” (Is there an echo?)

Dunne dismantles Kael in a more levelheaded fashion, on the whole, than Kael had torched his wife. In fact, there’s something touching about the evenhandedness and candor in Dunne’s public description of the relationship between Kael and Didion. He loves his wife so much, he doesn’t need to tip the scales in her favor:

They circled each other warily, Ms. Kael from the Napa Valley, my wife from the Sacramento Valley, and they hit upon their rhythm—Valley talk. They talked about ranches and pickups and whiskey on the floorboards and the Silverado Trail, two tough little numbers, each with the instincts of a mongoose and an amiable contempt for the other’s work, putting on a good old girl number. It was a funny act to watch and I liked her.

Dunne gives Kael credit for a passion for movies that matches “anyone who has ever written about them,” and for being “funny, quirky, bright, encyclopedic, healthily mean-spirited, combative, malevolent, contentious and often right.” But the switchblade does come out. His main complaint is simply that Kael doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that her work amounts to a lovely edifice built on sand. Dunne knew his way around a set, and his specific examples of her “implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmmaking,” though certainly selective, ought to concern a Kael fanatic.

How much to discount Dunne’s piece in view of his obvious bias? It was as hard to say then as it is now. Kael and Didion have both been lacquered over with layers of legend. It’s almost jarring that Didion is still at work, publishing a new memoir in days. If you have a ticket to see her at the New York Public Library in a few weeks (it’s sold out), you will see the very same woman who wrote “Goodbye To All That" in her early thirties, 44 years ago. That essay is so popular that it now feels embarrassingly cliché to say how much I adored it the first 25 times I read it. I would be quietly devastated if a new friend or girlfriend didn’t get it when I shared my faded photocopy. This probably isn’t going to work out.

In Kael’s case, Brian Kellow does a lot to sand away the paint obscuring her in his new biography, but what comes through most memorably is still Kael the Phenomenon. She wielded tremendous clout with those in her circles of influence, and not only because of her position at The New Yorker. (Even at her peak she shared the job with Penelope Gilliatt. We’re still waiting for a big biography of her—but then, as Tom Carson says, isn’t every other film critic in the language in the same boat there?) Crowds rearranged themselves when Kael entered the room, literally and figuratively. She had an almost talismanic belief in the validity of her first response to a movie (she never saw it twice), and she wrote with a verve and abandon that caused subscribers to spit up the morning coffee in delight or horror. Readers, terrified filmmakers, protégés (the “Paulettes”)—they hung on her words of judgment and her wide-angle riffs, and wondered how far she could push the bounds of New Yorker decorum and house style.

It’s hard to give writers a fair reading once they’ve become this famous. It’s even harder if you already hate the writer, and it seems to me that Kael and Didion lost the will to be fair to each other. The way Didion pulls showbiz rank on Kael in the essay “In Hollywood” lacks the class and persuasiveness of Dunne’s approach. Collected in The White Album (1979), the piece first appeared in the New York Review of Books five months after Kael’s Play It as It Lays review was published, and it posed her work as emblematic of film writing that “approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally.” The essay sniffs at the entire field of movie criticism, actually, though my guess is the mention here of lecture fees is directed specifically at Kael, who worked the circuit liberally: “Making judgments of films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.”

For Kael, Didion’s work suggested a familiarity with the high life that pushed all the wrong buttons. Kael was raised partly on a chicken farm and worked a string of bad jobs as a single mother before getting her feet set. She harbored a lot of bitterness toward people she thought had it easy, as Kellow shows. To be "swank" was to risk her enduring disdain. The existential zero at the bone that Didion absolutely conquered often had nothing to do with material need. It was going to bother Kael no matter what. “I did my own share of soul-wrestling,” Kael once said, “and it’s not too tough to do.”

Even in the basically accurate Play It as It Lays review, the attack gets personal enough that an underground motive shows through. Kael speaks of the story as “the ultimate princess fantasy” (it’s more of a nightmare, really) and writes, “Joan Didion wanted Frank Perry to direct—possibly because he had already glorified the suffering little-girl-woman in ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife.’” Another penalty flag marring a good football game. In response, Dunne wrote to Kael to remind her that he had already told her at a party that Perry was not the first-choice director.

The rivalry missed its chance to rise to the level of the great ones, despite the titans involved. Kael and Didion didn’t tussle often enough, for one, but they also didn’t fight over the right things. When a leading critical mind takes Didion’s work as a cue to pull out the cudgel that a rich person doesn’t get to be depressed, we all lose. And does Didion still feel that Kael needed “vocational guidance”? If only they had fought about the movies and what they meant to the culture during Kael’s heyday, one of cinema’s golden ages. And I’d love to see Didion assess Kael’s legacy now in more than a one-line zinger. She would do it as no one else could.

Related: Pictures Of Joan Didion


Evan Hughes's book, Literary Brooklyn, a work of literary biography and urban history, has just been published. He's on twitter.

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"SNOOTY" EMERIL A ROBE-ROBBER?

Has celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse added some unpleasant ingredients to the down-to-earth recipe that made him a star? Our spy thinks so: In a recent dream Emeril turned out to be "a lot snootier than you'd think." Bam!

So what happened? Well, in said dream, our correspondent lived in the same luxury condo as the überchef from Cajun-land. She couldn't find her favorite bathrobe, and was perplexed to learn from the doorman that it was in Emeril's apartment. ("I've never been to Emeril's apartment!" our source protests.)

But that's where she went, for the robe-and some answers. "I had to wait a really long time," she says, adding: "The apartment was kind of nothing special."

Finally Emeril emerged, surrounded by admirers-seemingly dozens of them. Many were young hipsters, "sort of pierced, if you know what I mean." The ex-sitcom actor didn't even acknowledge our spy, who never got an answer about her missing robe. "He seemed sort of full of himself," she says. "He was nothing like he comes across on TV.

"Then I woke up," she adds.

DASH: WHITE AND/OR PART BALDWIN?

A journo pal who insisted on anonymity had a startling encounter with hip-hop mogul Damon Dash in a recent dream.

Startling, because in the dream Dash not only delivered a withering verbal assault on the journo-but he also turned out to be a white guy! "It was really inexplicable," our trusted source reports. "I was just looking at an old issue of The Source, and there was an article about Dash's interest in boxing memorabilia or something, and a big picture of him, and he's black. Just like I always thought he was. Yet in the dream, he was white, with longish dark hair.

"He looked sort of like a cross between Adrien Brody and a Baldwin brother."

The dream scene unfolded at the sparsely attended screening of a movie directed by Dash. Dash confronted and yelled at the discombobulated scribbler about a story that has not even been published.

"I think he was saying that I should have been writing an article about him," says he. "But I don't really remember, exactly."

NEWSMAN WALLACE, STILL SMOKIN'

We've all seen the old black and white footage of hard-nosed TV journalist Mike Wallace puffing his way through an interview. But that filthy smoking habit is a thing of the past for the "60 Minutes" star.

Or is it?

Wallace was smoking "like a chimney" in a dream last week, says a knowledgeable source who insisted on anonymity. "It was weird, you definitely don't see prominent anchorman-type guys smoking anymore," this insider says. "That's why I remembered it.

"Actually it's kind of all I remember-I don't know what the context was, I just remember there was Mike Wallace, smoking."

Wallace, journalistic legend via his work on CBS's award-winning news magazine, has battled depression, and written courageously of his struggles.

"He kept sort of turning into Jim Lehrer," the source adds. "Sometimes he was Mike Wallace, and sometimes he was Jim Lehrer. When he was Mike Wallace, he was smoking. That was kind of it."

Sounds like it's worth a "60 Minutes"-style investigation: Where there's smoke-there's fire!



Have you slumbered around with a star? What popular singer surprised you in your dream by becoming your high school algebra teacher? Brady Hammock wants to share your story with the world. Tattle your tale-or as much of it as you can remember-here. Pleasant dreams!

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"There's still a couple weeks to give Owen a proper send-off, but I just wanted to let you all know that he is indeed leaving us. But Valleywag will live on, and he's agreed to help out the new person — someone who you may already know! — who will be taking over. As they say, more to come..."

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