Word: lantana
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Unlike its ritzy neighbors, Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Lantana is a sleepy, unassuming little town on Florida's east coast. On closer inspection, however, the place has subtle marks of distinction. Like Dawn's News & Smoke Shop, where the daily selection of newspapers from around the world rivals that of any five-star hotel in London, New York City or Tokyo. The papers are bought and avidly read by a rambunctious colony of 200-plus British and Commonwealth expatriates who make their homes in Lantana and the surrounding area...
These are no ordinary immigrants to sunbaked Florida. They are top tabloid journalists from Fleet Street -- most of them Englishmen, Scots, Australians and Canadians -- lured to the U.S. by the inflated salaries at the Lantana- . based National Enquirer. (Starting pay for a reporter: $50,000 a year, with no experience required, except an apparent aptitude for spying on the celebrity species.) The Fleet Streeters began arriving in droves during the 1970s, enough of them to field cricket games, fill dart rooms and prompt some local eateries to include bangers and mash on their menus. Their presence in turn encouraged other...
...Brits were kids in a candy store," says Malcolm Balfour, a South African by birth and former Enquirer editor who now works out of Lantana for the New York Post and Bild Zeitung, a West German daily. "The Enquirer meant plastic cards that would take you to the best hotels in the world." Enquirer Owner Generoso Pope Jr. was never satisfied with his staff and fired reporters often. Nonetheless, seduced by the sunshine, many of the dismissed staffers stayed on in the Lantana area, working as free-lancers for other tabloids or mass-circulation dailies abroad. Some found lucrative opportunities...
Mike McDonough, a Lantana free-lancer, counters by recalling the night he watched an intrepid Brit scale the facade of a hotel in Freeport, the Bahamas, to bang on Howard Hughes' window. "That is the closest anyone ever came ((to Hughes))," he claims proudly. Ace Tab Photog Jimmy Leggett, a wiry Scot, remembers a "scheme to drill a hole down into Hughes' coffin to get a picture of his face." Another plot, in the '60s, involved renting a submarine to surprise Jackie Kennedy and little Caroline yachting in the Mediterranean. Leggett admits with a wink, "Neither plan made it past...
...close imitation was taken, possibly sincerely, as flattery in the Lantana, Fla., headquarters of the Enquirer. Said Enquirer Editor Iain Calder, 43: "Obviously, I noticed the similarity. It's another confirmation that we are No. 1." Hendra's partner and publisher, Larry Durocher, 42, joked in an interview that the major difference between the publications is that the spoof is stapled together, while the Enquirer is merely folded. Then he noted another distinction that probably ought to matter to the 11 million credulous readers of the major U.S. scandal tabloids. Said Durocher: "We make no claim that...