Tales of Hollywood Are Told in Smoke

On cue, a crew member manning the smoke machine on the sidewalk next to a vacant Hollywood storefront blasts a cloud of white smoke toward the star of E! Entertainment Television's "Mysteries & Scandals." With the faux fog swirling around him, A.J. Benza begins strolling toward the video camera set up on this evening near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

"Steve Cochran stormed through life like a raging tempest. But even the strongest storms don't last long," Benza said, reading from a TelePrompTer, his street-savvy voice and demeanor giving the purple prose a compelling edge.

Cochran, a boozing and brawling minor movie star who died mysteriously aboard his sailboat off the coast of Guatemala while scouting film locations with three young Mexican girls in 1965, is a "Mysteries & Scandals" kind of guy.

Since debuting in March 1998 with an episode on '40s "Sweater Girl" Lana Turner, the half-hour "Mysteries & Scandals" has served up the sometimes seamy celebrity dish on everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift to Frances Farmer and Sal Mineo.

In the process, the 38-year-old Benza has become one of E!'s most recognizable on-air personalities, a Tinseltown Rod Serling stepping out of the foggy night to guide viewers "down the flip-side of the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

Ratings for "Mysteries & Scandals" have increased considerably since the cable network began showing back-to-back episodes weeknights beginning at 8 in November, say E! executives. On average, 332,000 cable households are tuning in over the course of the hour.

They credit Benza, a former New York Daily News gossip columnist, for making the show's vintage celebrities relevant, fun and hip to younger audience members. Celebrities like Doodles Weaver. ("That's right. I said Doodles Weaver," Benza says on camera for the benefit of those who have never heard of the zany comic who worked with the Spike Jones band.)

"We wanted somebody who was irreverent, didn't take anything too seriously and was a little sardonic and sarcastic," said supervising producer Michael Danahy, who had worked with Benza when he was one of the contributing newspaper columnists on E!'s "The Gossip Show" in the late-'90s.

Danahy, who came up with the idea for "Mysteries & Scandals," said the show "was always supposed to have just the slightest campy quality and A.J. sort of fit that without any effort. And after 150 shows, A.J.'s really what people see: They think of 'Mysteries & Scandals' and they see this guy, A.J., standing in smoke."