The Press: Mr. Two Million Circulation

Broadway is busy, its nightclubs jammed (TIME, March 22), but Broad way columnists are writing less about Broadway than ever before. Time was when most Broadway columnists concentrated on bedroom trivia about marriages, divorces, impending births and who-was-that-lady items. Since the war began they have written more & more about national and international affairs. They still peep through keyholes and write in keyhole language, but now most of the keyholes are in Washington and Chungking doors.

The shift in emphasis came about be cause most Broadway columnists secretly yearn for the dignity that goes with straight news columning, and have used the war as a springboard for a leap into general punditry. And, trendwise as they are, all realize that mischievous chitchat is no commodity to market in wartime.

Most typical, perhaps, of the strictly Broadway columnists who have been lured to broader if not greener pastures is the New York Daily News’s Danton Walker (real name: Dan). Five days a week Walker writes a column naturally enough entitled “Broadway,” for an estimated 5,000,000 readers of the News, (circulation: 2,000,000) and seven other metropolitan newspapers. Only a handful of Danton Walker’s columns this year have featured the old-style, peeping-Tom type of item; most of his columns, filled now chiefly with predictions, are about such non-Broadway matters as gas rationing, the Ruml tax plan, the war, Interior Secretary Ickes. Broadway Columnist Walker now works the universe.

Background for Broadway. Dapper Dan Walker became a Broadway columnist by accident. Georgia-born and 44 years old, he is a 145-lb. man with thin brown hair and a well-scrubbed look, who manages to look neat even after a seven-hour nightclub tour. He makes a fetish of cleanliness, gloomily anticipates a soap shortage, which he feels will be deliberate ly manufactured by the Government be cause “they’ll want us to get used to living without soap so we’ll be able to get along with all the foreigners who’ll be coming in, after the war, under the Four Freedoms.” Walker was literally shot out of school when he was twelve. A chum argued with him about a murder movie they had seen.

The chum picked up a pistol, said, “This is the way it was,” and fired a bullet into Walker’s chest. W7hen he recovered, as a juvenile pioneer he went west, worked as a Western Union messenger and clerk in San Francisco. Rejected by both the Army & Navy in World War I (under weight), he got overseas by joining a civilian corps under Army supervision.

After the war he stayed in Europe until 1921 working with the American Relief Administration, picked up French and a working knowledge of German and Czech.

Returning to the U.S. in a depression, he was a steamship deckhand, a deaf & dumb apache in a show called The Hummingbird, a minor principal in an Elsie Janis show. Once, in the Theater Guild’s production of Juarez and Maximilian, for $18 a week he played two Mexican generals. In 1928 he became Alexander Wooll-cott’s secretary; then worked awhile as secretary to New Yorker Editor Harold Ross. Fired, he was reduced finally to handling Republican Party foreign-language publicity in the 1932 campaign. In this job he uncovered one of the first U.S. fifth columnists. He had to hire linguists to write G.O.P. pamphlets in languages he did not know. The pamphlets were supposed to carry “Vote for Hoover!” messages. One of the pamphlets said something like “To Hell with Hoover!” but Walker did not find out until some 60,000 copies had been distributed.

Walker joined the Daily News just ten years ago in the spring of 1933 as assistant financial editor. His career’s turning point came one night when News Publisher Joseph M. Patterson asked him if he could tell the difference between a sharp and a flat. Reassured, Patterson sent him to cover a Lily Pons opera.

Walker’s review, printed Feb. 19, 1935, said: “. . . It must be reported that our favorite songbird did considerable flatting . . . but what’s a matter of pitch when one can gaze upon the loveliest tummy that ever graced the operatic stage? …” Patterson loved it, gave Walker his first byline. He has been writing a Broadway column since September 1937.

Weasel Words. No litterateur, and no coiner of Winchellisms, Dan Walker is scarcely a writer at all. Yet he manages to turn out a Broadway column regularly by making up in quantity of items what he lacks in prosody. No stanch admirer of other Broadway columns, he admires his own, says proudly that about 85% of his predictions come true.

He can claim this high average because in five and a half years of columning he has evolved a system that is virtually foolproof. He words his predictions in such a way that if events turn out otherwise he can wiggle out. Thus he can rightfully claim scoops on predictions that come reasonably true, and firmly deny error when predictions flop.

Only once has Walker been sued for libel (the case was dropped on the plain tiff’s motion). Only once has he incurred anyone’s wrath to the point of physical violence. When he wrote that Author Quentin Reynolds planned to marry, and named the girl, the burly Reynolds came across middle-sized Walker in a tavern a few nights later, smacked him in the eye (and never married the girl).

Secret Sources. Like all Broadway columnists, Walker is secretive about his sources. His paper’s employes help; many tips come on his tours to nightclubs, where people rush to his table and whisper in his ear. A small amount of material is cribbed from other publications, which Walker does not consider cribbing, since he believes that nothing is really news until the News prints it. “There are plenty of News readers,” says he, “who don’t read the Times. My houseman doesn’t call me ‘Mr. Two Million Circulation’ for nothing.”

But Walker’s main sources of information are the New York pressagents who daily send him sheets of stuff liberally sprinkled with the names and doings of their own clients. Most of the “news” items they submit are based on mere hearsay. But like the military experts who predicted war, knowing that in the end they would be right, Walker prints much of what the pressagents send in, knowing well he will find hits among the misses. One safeguard against error: a refusal to accept contributions from people he does not know and trust.

Rigid Routine. Walker rents a four room apartment in midtown Manhattan lives alone, surrounded by French and Civil War prints and hundreds of books.

His day is a seldom-varying routine. He wakes at 10. His houseman, a young Italian named Johnny Garry, fetches him coffee, mail and papers. Walker then shaves, showers, dons slacks and lounges until noon. Then he dresses and spends a couple of hours sorting column material and answering the phone (he has three, one with a shut-off device, scattered around the apartment). About 2 he walks to the News office, where his . column usually takes some two hours to type.

Says he: “I always have to start off three times before I get going, and I often find that what I wrote the third time is exactly what I wrote the first.” His column done, Walker goes home, undresses, rests. In midevening he goes out to dine. He eats at various cafes and nightclubs, in many of them cuffo. The ethics of this does not bother him, since he feels he is much like the sportswriter who gets passes to ball games. Besides Walker gets only $50 a week expense money.

Now & then, for a rest, Walker goes to his farm in Rockland County, north of New York City (he also owns a cabin in Connecticut, a house in Tampa, Fla.). “Every once in a while I like complete rest and silence and the opportunity to get away from people and noise. When you get away, you are really renewing yourself—that and a hot shower—those are the two greatest things in the world.”

Pap & Prediction. What Walker really considers his greatest triumphs are his column’s predictions. Examples:

> Sept. 8, 1941: “Wendell Willkie will succeed Will Hays at the end of the year as czar of the movie industry. . . .”

> Dec. 29, 1941: “. . . Russia will carry on alone against the Germans in Europe, with U.S. forces joining the British in Africa. . . .”

> Dec. 29, 1941: “Congressional elections for 1942 will be a mere formality, if the war is still on; practically all incumbents . . . will be re-elected.”

> Jan. 26, 1942: “If Singapore falls, so will the present British cabinet.” — June 23, 1942: “. . . FBI men are swarming through Florida swamps because . . . Nazi submarine crews, in civilian clothes, are at large [there].” (Confirmed five days later.)

>July 13, 1942: “. . . Jim Farley has been proffered one of the nation’s most important war posts and will be back in the capital, hard at work, by Thanksgiving.”