The Press: Colored Bodies

Fiction magazines like Liberty, Cosmopolitan (but not Satevepost) have ventured illustrations of bare-breasted Javanese, Balinese, African native women. Scientific journals and smutsheets excepted, no U. S. magazine editor would yet dare have its illustrators draw a distinct picture of a white woman with breasts completely bare. For his reason, the editor might say that women in the tropics customarily expose their upper halves; U. S. women customarily do not.

In the August issue of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan appeared an instalment of Sons, novel about Chinese by Author Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (The Good Earth). A large illustration showed a beauteous Chinese girl lying asleep, about to be skewered by a vicious-looking sword. Save for a narrow drape about her middle, the girl was naked. Chinese women do not go about naked. Probably they are less likely to sleep nude than U. S. women. Observers wondered if U. S. editors, having managed a picture of a nude Chinese, would next try a Turk, a Russian, a Mexican, finally a Nordic.

Last week the Sons illustration was reprinted in Hearst’s New York Evening Journal with an editorial by Arthur Brisbane blatantly advertising Hearst’s Cosmopolitan. In that reproduction the Chinese girl’s breasts had been carefully hidden beneath a brassiere by a retouch artist.

More Merry-Go-Round

A year ago when Washington Merry-Go-Round first appeared, the Christian Science Monitor discharged Robert S. Allen, its capital correspondent, for having been one of the anonymous authors. Lately appeared More Merry-Go-Round, another volume of critical chit-chat about official Washington. Everyone knew that Drew Pearson, Baltimore Sun’s able newshawk at the State and War Departments, was one of the authors. His contribution included a chapter entitled “The Cotillion Leader,” which scorched Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley. Few days after that appeared, Reporter Pearson lost his job.

In Washington, and among newsmen throughout the land, there was astonishment at the discharge of Pearson, far greater than at the fate of Allen. The Sun is liberal, the Monitor punctilious. But last week such generalities were forgotten in debate over specific, pungent questions: How much did Secretary Hurley have to do with the firing of Pearson? What, if anything, did he say about one John McGinnis? Whose word should be accepted as truth, “Pat”‘ Hurley’s or Drew Pearson’s? The Chicago Tribune thought the questions important enough for front-page discussion by its Washington correspondent, Arthur Sears Henning.

Reporter Pearson’s story: Just after More Merry-Go-Round was published he was summoned by his Managing Editor William Emmet Moore who inquired pleasantly if Pearson were going to write any more books, said the Sun would be pleased if every staff member produced a best seller. A day or two later Pearson was summoned to the War Department. He found Secretary Hurley, white-faced, “in a towering rage,” pacing up and down his office. Said the Secretary: “This is a terrible thing you have done, Drew. You are trying to ruin my career. . . . Damnable lies. . . . You wrote that I posture before a mirror. Look around my office. There isn’t a mirror in it.* You wrote that I used airplanes at Government expense to make political speeches and that I had smashed up a $70,000 plane. I’m going to put you in your place. I’m going to get your job. You’re going to learn that you can’t say things like this about me. I won’t have it. I shot John McGinnis for stuff like this. . . . I’m going to call up Paul Patterson [president of the Sun] and tell him about this campaign against me.”

Secretary Hurley’s story: The Secretary did not ask for Pearson’s dismissal. He never “shot” anyone, except perhaps in the War, and he never knew any John McGinnis.

The Sun: Secretary Hurley did com plain about news stories filed by Pearson to the Sun in recent months, but made no protest about the “Cotillion Leader” chapter in More Merry-Go-Round. Of their own volition, Sun executives decided that Pearson’s part in the book was a “last straw,” that his usefulness to the news paper was ended.

John McGinnis remained unaccounted for. Secretary Hurley’s lifelong acquaintances in Oklahoma scratched their heads. McGinnis? . . . Shooting? . . , They re membered that one of the Hurley brothers was killed in a Mexican revolution. Another was killed by a train. A Hurley sister was accidentally shot. And when Pat was a boy working in a coal mine he once thrashed a bully named Whiteside who later was killed by.someone else. But Pat never shot anybody. And he never had dealings with any John McGinnis. An Oklahoma City newspaperman thought the story had something to do with an editor named John McGuire, now deceased. He seemed to recall that Editor McGuire had published something dis pleasing to Mr. Hurley, and Mr. Hurley had told him: “I once shot a man, McGuire. for saying less than that.”

Spite Book

When a Negro conjureman wants to de stroy an enemy, but is stayed by practical considerations from using direct methods, he may fashion a hideous image of the hated individual, break its limbs, stab it with pins, imagine that he is making his enemy suffer. In The Scandal Monger* published last week. Editor Emile Gauvreau of the tabloid New York Mirror gouges the figure of a Broadway colyumist.

He has made the figure unspeakably ugly, has named it “Roddy Ratcliffe.” But despite two or three punctilious libel-barriers such as: “. . . Ratcliffe was not and never would be a Winchell.” most readers will be convinced that it is supposed to be Colyumist Walter Winchell of the Mirror. He and Editor Gauvreau bitterly hate each other.

As in his first novel, Hot News (TIME, July 13, 1931), which flayed the Macfadden brand of tabloidia, Author Gauvreau plays upon a theme which many an observer would applaud: that the gossip-colyumist has become an extremely ob noxious U. S. institution. But the theme is nearly lost in the author’s exhibition of spite against Winchell.

Roddy Ratcliffe (nee Willie Goldfarb), an impecunious, loudmouthed, fourth-rate vaudeville “hoofer,” is a gossip writer on the American Actors Association Weekly when Editor William Gaston of the tabloid Comet hires him as Broadway colyumist. (Walter Winchell, once a third-rate “hoofer,”e was hired from the New York Vaudeville News by Editor Gauvreau, then of the Graphic.) Editor Gaston’s motive for creating the colyum is explained thus: “He, Gaston, would be the Hindu to charm the serpent [Broadway] to his will. He would be the whipmaster to this belly-crawling thing, whose venom was even now seeping through the arteries of every tributary that led into and away from it. He would control its course and shape henceforth its destiny, for weal or for woe. He would be its sole and ultimate law.” When he had hired Goldfarb: “. . . ‘So now I’ve got him. He’ll smell out the rats in their vile holes, so I can dangle them in the faces of my greedy public. A swell business, my fine bastard, and you, Gaston. are its most artful practitioner.”

Uncouth, vain, ignorant, despised by all the Comet staff except the copy boys. Ratcliffe sets about his work as the town keyhole-peeper. He succeeds, brings thou sands of new readers to the Comet, becomes utterly unbearable by knowledge of that fact. His early snivelling, grovelling gratitude to Gaston is forgotten soon after his first rise in salary. But when his swaggering independence gets him into trouble he crawls to Gaston, drops to his knees, weeps over the editor’s hand, pledges undying loyalty.

As Winchell offended the Shuberts, theatrical producers, Ratcliffe antagonizes the Producers Schlommer, loses $150,000 worth of advertising for his paper. By that time Gaston has begun to fear the “Frankenstein” which he has created. He is glad to let Ratcliffe go to a higher paid job on the Lantern (Mirror). Soon afterward Gaston is discharged for negligence in failing to copyright the nom-de-plume Roddy Ratcliffe, with which the Lantern proceeds to plaster the city. Then the Lantern hires him as editor, but at not so high a salary as Colyumist Ratcliffe’s. Ratcliffe now is a national byword. His colyum is syndicated; he broadcasts on nationwide networks; magazines inter view him. No longer content with Broad way chitchat, he pries into the sex-lives of important persons, dabbles in market rumors, business and political scandal, takes liberties with smut. Gaston fights him every inch of the way, is hampered by the knowledge that he is less valuable to the Lantern than is Ratcliffe. A woman precipitates the debacle.

Hard-boiled in his profession, extremely sensitive of his physical ungainliness (Gauvreau himself is lame), Gaston is a lover of literature and good music. He falls in love with a beauteous singer in a nightclub. Ratcliffe brazenly tries to seduce her. Failing, Ratcliffe reveals in his colyum that the girl was a onetime con sort of a Negro. The singer is unaware that Gaston is away from the office on the Lindbergh kidnap story when the colyum appears. She thinks it is his way of letting her know he has found her out. When Gaston returns he finds she has shot her self.

Instead of killing Ratcliffe, Gaston elects to to destroy him slowly by letting him fear what form his punishment may take. Meanwhile he emasculates the colyum, deletes the brightest lines, deliberately leaves the falsehoods unedited, hears with satisfaction the report start that “Ratcliffe is slipping.” Frantic with fright Ratcliffe goes so far as to engage gunmen to take Gaston for a ride. After Gaston thwarts the plot, Ratcliffe is in deeper water than ever. His nerves are taut as banjo strings, his mind a scramble. Finally Ratcliffe’s underworld associations lead him to predict the murder of a famed Broadway killer-as Winchell predicted the machine-gunning of Vincent Coll. Sensing the consequences, Gaston lets the item be printed. The murder occurs on schedule. Ratcliffe is caught between the fires of Grand Jury and gangland. As Gaston intended he should be, Ratcliffe goes completely, raving mad.

Last week Winchell was again at his desk, recuperated from a nervous breakdown which followed the Vincent Coll murder. His only public comment on Editor Gauvreau’s book was to reprint one of his favorite lines: ” The height of something or other would be for Walter Winchell to get sore because somebody said somthing about him.”

*The book said what had often been said before: ”It became noised around that prior to their big dinners, the Hurleys practiced their exits and entrances before full-length mirrors” (TIME, Sept. 14, 1931). The story is one of many concerning the energetic and successful social climb in Washington of handsome Secretary Hurley and his beauteous wife Ruth, daughter of Admiral Henry Braid Wilson. Decorative, likable, they found the climb an easy one.