The Press: Sponged & Expunged

In their gutter-eye view of America, U.S.A. Confidential, the New York Daily Mirror’s Editor Jack Lait and Nightclub Columnist Lee Mortimer threw enough mud to bring six libel suits against them (TIME, May 19). Biggest of the six was by Dallas’ elegant Neiman-Marcus store. It sued for $7,400,000 on the basis of Lait & Mortimer’s statement in the book that “some Neiman models are call girls—the top babes in town . . . Price, a hundred bucks a night. The salesgirls are good, too . . . twenty bucks on the average.” Named with Lait & Mortimer were Crown Publishers, Inc. and the American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., the book’s printers.

Last week all but Lait & Mortimer agreed to a crow-eating settlement with Neiman-Marcus. It called for 1) letters of apology to every one of the store’s 1,500 employees, 2) a guarantee that the offending paragraphs will not be printed in future copies of the book, 3) a cash settlement with the store, 4) a half-page apology “to the highly regarded Neiman-Marcus store and its employees” paid for by the defendants and printed this week as an ad in seven big-city dailies.

Neiman-Marcus will continue to press its suit against Authors Lait & Mortimer. Say the two authors doggedly: “[The others] threw in the sponge and surrendered, [but] we propose to establish the truth of all our assertions . . . We reject and repudiate such an apology . . . We believe [the] suits against U.S.A. Confidential are politically inspired …”