The Press: City Editor

Of 1,768 city editors in the U.S., few are as well conditioned to subdue tigers barehanded as the 15 who work for Hearst. Of that little band, none has reigned longer or more despotically than the Los Angeles Examiner’s asp-tongued James H. (for Hugh) Richardson. In a 20-year running feud with slow-moving staffers and half the officialdom of Los Angeles, one-eyed Jimmy Richardson (he lost his right eye in a slingshot accident at the age of seven) has driven a long parade of newsmen to pressagentry. the bottle—or to fame. He also bullied and blarneyed his way to more newsbeats than any other Hearst city editor, made the Examiner (circ. 350,739) Los Angeles’ most readable daily and a clamor that echoes from the smallest cell in the Lincoln Heights jail to the flossiest mansion in Westwood.

Last week, when City Editor Richardson, 62, announced that he was retiring from the Examiner after 45 years in the business (40 with Hearst), some of the blood drained permanently from one of the last great arteries of blood-and-guts journalism.

The Bloody Angle. Jimmy Richardson was always bored by news of government and politics and was convinced that readers were, too. “Unless there’s a bloody angle to it,” says one longtime staffer, “Jim just don’t care.” His particular talent, in the ’40s and early ’50s, was to make it seem as if bodies in trunks were arriving hourly at Union Station—and when one did, Richardson expected every staffer to hop on the story as if the next body might be his own. When Richardson himself scored the biggest local beat of the decade—a 32-column exclusive on the prison love notes exchanged by Beulah Overell and her boy friend while awaiting trial for the yacht murder of her parents in 1947—he bragged that the $1 Examiner was selling on the streets of Los Angeles for $1 a copy.

If Buddha-faced, butcher-fisted Jim Richardson seemed by talent and temperament to have been a natural-born Hearst-man, he also had the luck to land in Los Angeles in the headiest heyday of the city and of Hearst newspapering. Hired at 19 by Hearst’s old Los Angeles Herald (for $7.50 a week). Canadian-born Richardson shrewdly plied the creed he learned as a cub on the old Winnipeg Telegram: “Walk like a newspaperman!”

Swaggering Newspaperman Richardson assiduously cultivated his sources, righteously used them to sniff out corruption, solve crimes, dredge up scandal. In 1924, after finding a missing friend for Hearst’s famed Editorialist Arthur Brisbane, Star Reporter Richardson found himself, at 30, the Hearst chain’s youngest city editor. Then he drank himself out of his first Hearst career in less than four years, spent the next four lurching from despised publicity jobs to outright handouts. Asked what he had done between 1932 and 1936, Richardson once rasped: “I was drunk.”

Type Casting. Off the bottle at last and on the Examiner rewrite desk, the old pro was a candidate for city editor of Hearst’s No. 3 paper (after the New York Mirror, New York Journal-American) within a year. Department heads protested in unison against promoting “that old s.o.b.,” but the Examiner’s Publisher George Young pronounced: “It’s Richardson. That’s what that job down there needs.”

To this day. oldtime graduates of Richardson’s don’t-come-back-without-it school tremble at his name. Says Richardson Alumnus Robert W. Kenny, former California Attorney General: “The palms of my hands still sweat when I talk to that man on the phone.” Though his rages often tied the city room in knots. Richardson’s intuitive ability to smell out sensational news and get it covered has given “the Examiner’s news columns a high luster. In the still unsolved Black Dahlia killing and the Overell murder, Richardson was usually a leap ahead of the cops, often brought in authors such as Adela Rogers St. Johns to make his stories match his dripping red headlines.

Lifelong Democrat Richardson gave only halfhearted support to such Hearst causes as I Am An American Day and the career of Marion Davies. But when Marion’s brother-in-law was slugged one night, Cop Hater Richardson gleefully pounced on Hearst’s notion that law-abiding Los Angeles was in the grip of a crime wave. As a result of City Editor Richardson’s fearsome crime statistics (including the number of sidewalk spitters), the Los Angeles police department was doubled at a cost of millions a year. When Hearst talked of promoting him to managing editor, Richardson said: “I would rather be city editor.” Grinned The Chief: “So would I, Mr. Richardson, so would I.”

True to the Front Page stereotype, Jimmy Richardson’s salty hide has never wholly concealed the sugar-cured ham inside. Says one old Examiner hand: “He’s half oaf, half elf.” One of the greatest thrills in his life was when Author (and longtime friend) Harlan Ware wrote a movie about four-times-married Richardson (Come, Fill the Cup), dedicated it to the “Last of the Terrible Men.” And after swearing off liquor himself (he has not had a drink in 20 years), City Editor Richardson helped many another capable newsman fight his way out of the bottle.

No More Hop. In conversation and in his autobiography, For the Life of Me, Richardson bitterly decries the mellowing of newspapers and newsmen over the years. “In my day.” he muses, “all reporters were single. They lived in a rooming house near the paper, and they drank themselves to sleep every night and went to bed with their socks on.” But now he, too, has reluctantly begun to mellow. “I’ve lost the hop on my fast one,” he said last week, “and I’ve lost the will to fool ’em with junk any more. I guess, really, I’ve outgrown this job.”

Bowing to the new school, the Hearst organization named as the successor to the beastly elf a quiet, competent assistant city editor named Leonard Riblett, 42, who has spent a lot of time in the last few years soothing staffers who wanted to assassinate that s.o.b. on the city desk.