Dastard Cleverness

What was her name? That was what the policeman wanted to know.

He had found her wandering through the streets of Weehawken, N. J., weeping with the fierce, cloudly bitterness of one deranged by shock. He spoke gently to her. She did not know where she was going. She did not know where she had come from. That was why she was crying. Ho, but the officer knew what this meant! It was some disease they had when they talked like that; he had read about it in the papers many’s the time; magnesia was the name of it, or rhodesia, or one of them. He took her to the North Hudson hospital. The doctor asked her a simple question.

She was sorry, she said, she could not tell him; she did not know her name.

“Amnesia,” said the doctor kindly; “amnesia,” said the internesexcitedly; “amnesia” pityingly said the nurse who undressed her, bathed her and put her tenderly to bed.

Now this woman was not entirely derelict. In her vanity case she had: 1) a mutilated passport picture of herself, with some notes scribbled on its back, 2) some British pounds and shillings, 3) a small silver mirror marked with the initials “V. L.” Reporters were somewhat skeptical of the woman. One of the notes on the passport picture was the name of Elinor Glyn. A telegram to the famed novelist in California elicited the reply that she knew no woman of this description. One of the pressmen, the representative of The New York Herald-Tribune, thereupon refused to have anything more to do with the “victim”.

But not so the others. They published her story.

Next day she had the pleasure of seeing her picture in The New York Times—romanesque nose, sagging eyes, together with the skinny neck and long horselike upper lip which are so often the characteristics of the more unfortunate female members of the British nobility. She saw herself described as “a pretty young woman.” The Daily News (for gum-chewers) went even farther afield:

“Officials of the British embassy,” it stated, “believe that the young woman is the former Vanessa Levy, daughter of Sir Benjamin Levy, who vanished from London shortly after her marriage to Lord St. Anstell recently. Their convictions have been reinforced by the finding in her possession of a vanity case which bears the initials ‘V.L.'”

Said the New York Telegram:

PRETTY GIRL FORGETS NAME.

What was this name which she could not remember? The public soon found it out. Her name was Fraud, Charlatanism, Trickery, Guile, Deceit. She, one Alma Sioux Scarberry, employee of the New York Daily Mirror (Hearst), had been “planted” to play her role as a publicity stunt. The Daily Mirror was about to publish a serial novel by Elinor Glyn relatingthe adventures of the vanished British woman, Miss Levy. Hence the carefully arranged passport pictures, the initials, the English money, in the fraud’s vanity-case. Hence the dastardly clever reference to Elinor Glyn. Next day the Mirror publicly gloated over the success of its mountebankery.

“Miss Scarberry will tell readers of the Mirror today what heradventures were while she emulated the role of Miss Glyn’s heroine and baffled doctors, policemen, and other newspaper reporters.”

In the same edition appeared a photograph of the poser, reproductions of the statements of the Telegram, the News, and the first swing of Miss Glyn’s clap-trapeze.

Commented The New York Herald-Tribune:

“As if it were not enough to have press agents trying to victimize newspaper editors, one of the craft has tried it. … to make a Hearst holiday for the Mirror . . . If the Mirror had simply wanted to prove that this malady could be simulated by fakers, and did it without taking the other papers into its confidence, it would have been bad enough, but. . . .”

“Happily the Herald-Tribune labeled the fake from the first and did not for a moment take it seriously. . .”

Lawson

Death, among his grim deletions and obscure blue-pencilings, included a fortnight-ago, the name of Victor Fremont Lawson, famed editor of the Chicago Daily News. He died in his 76th year, after a sudden illness, in his home on Lake Shore Drive. Last week he was buried.

The newspaper adjective “famed,” when applied to a newspaper man, is always a qualified term. A great journalist wears, for insignia and token of office, the robe of anonymity; it is the unwritten law of his calling that his name, however potent for good, must remain also unwritten except when its appearance in public print is absolutely unavoidable. A newspaper editor resents gratuitous publicity as a betrayal. He is concerned with the reality rather than with theappearance of power. Thus it comes about that a great newspaper name which has been for years a talisman to politicians, capitalists, princes, and men of letters, remains, to the vulgar, no more than the puzzlingly familiar overtone of something they ought to know, until the man dies and his deeds roar like trumpets from every headline. It is characteristic that this should have been true of Victor Lawson, characteristic also that his monument in Graceland Cemetery should preserve his profession’s tradition by anonymity in an expanse of sheer stone, grooved only with the austere colophon:

BORN 1850

DIED 1925

President Coolidge, Vice President Charles G. Dawes, Secretary of State Kellogg, Secretary of Commerce Hoover, Postmaster Harry S. New, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon and innumerable other celebrated gentlemen telegraphed footnotes to this bleak epitaph. They were familiar with much that might well have been set upon the width of marble that no chisel had scarred.

When Victor Lawson took control of the Chicago Daily News it was a struggling paper with 4,000 buyers. Chicago disliked pennies. Lawson had to bring them into circulation by millions to enable his sheet to live. In 25 years the Daily News had the largest paid circulation in the U. S. When Hayes was nominated in (1876), the News beat the Western Union bulletins. Its foreign despatches during the late War were considered by many authorities the best in the United States.

Mr. Lawson began his career by teaching Chicago’s citizens not to base their local government on the fact that Lincoln had freed the slaves. He was the first editor with courage enough to proclaim that because a man had been a gallant officer in the Union Army it did not necessarily follow that he would be a wise city counsellor.

When Lawson became a partner of Melville E. Stone, he made a covenant with him that neither would buy the securities of any public service corporation for fear they might lay their paper open to the suspicion of serving that green-backed, slobber-jawed ogre, THE INTERESTS.

In countless numbers of the neat obituaries in the morgue of the Daily News, as in those of every other existing paper, occurs the phrase “His work was his recreation.” It was true of Lawson. When he was in Europe a few years ago, a man ‘of over 70, with his lifework behind him, he cabled daily 3,000 words of detailed comment and instruction to the News— received from that journals executives 5,000 words of questions and reports. His wife asked him to learn golf. He tried it, gave it up, said to her, “I can’t get mad at it.”

He had a hobby: words. In his spare moments he would seize the Webster dictionary which crowned his desk and therein peruse definitions which he compared with those of the lexicographer, Worcester. This habit bred the rhythm in his conversation “Now Webster says . . . but Worcester maintains. . .”

All the recorded life of the world for 50 years—wars, dreams, bankruptcies, inventions, good crops and bad crops, dead presidents, murdered archdukes, life in all its scuffle and fire, its dinginess, its mournful, miraculous beauty— passed under his direct scrutiny.

Crime alone—the industry which, with meatpacking, is responsible for the wide reputation of his native city—he could not understand. When the report came to his paper of the bandits who raided the Drake hotel, (TIME, Aug. 10, NATIONAL AFFAIRS), he said: “Poor fellows.”

He abhorred negligible vices. He did not smoke, enforced a non-smoking rule among his employes. They could chew if they wanted to. He cultivated, however, a taste for wine and a proficiency of tact worthy of one of the scrupulous courtiers of Louis IV. Once an employe who had been accused of excessive drinking came to him while he lunched and began passionately to repel the slander. Lawson listened with courtesy but without concentration to the man’s stammered protestations. At their conclusion he directed the waiter to bring to the table a bottle of Imperial Toquay, and having filled two glasses, said; “Your health, my friend.” Eugene Field, that celebrated wag with the face of a tortured martyr, would shamble into Lawson’s office, bent on a loan of lunch money. Then would follow mumbled circumlocutions, explanations, an appeal, a roar of laughter from Lawson. Twisting his Savonarola visage, Field would scuttle from the office. . . “Sure, I diddled him.”

Was it not, some wondered, largely the fear of indolence, the terror of the waste and shrill emptiness of life that drove a gentleman of such parts, schooled in such a civilized charm, to lead a life beleaguered with lonely effort, desolated with efficiency? Was it this terror, also, that bred in him such a pity for men that his instant reaction to an outrageous crime was sorrow for the criminals? Various comments to some such effect were; made by his friends, but strangest of all was one supplied by an item printed in his paper just before his body exchanged its pleasant room on Lake Shore Drive for the suburban field where it will rest forever—an item that revealed something of the terrifying diversity, the proximities, the contrasts, of the human spectacle which had been so long and so intimately under the observation of Victor Lawson. The item, a very inconspicuous one, spoke of another burial. It related how Eric Nelson and Ted (“Texas”) Court, the marauders who died in the raid on the Drake hotel, had been shoveled into the ground at Potter’s Field.

*Due to an accident, TIME’s account of Mr. Lawson’s death was omitted from last week’s issue.

†William R. Hearst is the exception.