The Press: Death of Brisbane

Three weeks ago 72-year-old Editor Arthur Brisbane of the Hearstpapers began to suffer heart attacks. Last week Editor Brisbane took to bed in his Manhattan apartment. On Christmas Eve, Mr. Brisbane murmured into one of his numerous Dictaphones, brought to his bedside, a timely installment of his far-famed “Today” column: “Another Christmas has come. . . . Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-six years ago . . . ‘Peace on earth, ‘good will toward men’. . . .” Before he could finish, Mr. Brisbane was tired out. His son Seward furnished the final paragraph, the first writing not actually by Arthur Brisbane ever to appear in the daily editorial column he had turned out for 39 years. On Christmas morning, the sick old editor’s physicians prepared an oxygen tent, but could not use it, for Death had come to Arthur Brisbane.

The career which thus quietly closed, while not the most distinguished, was in many ways the most remarkable ever achieved by a writer for the U. S. Press. In annual salary ($260,000), and in readers reached (an estimated 30,000,000 a day), Arthur Brisbane far outstripped any other columnist. No less than 1,200 weekly papers carried his “This Week” contribution. Some 200 dailies beside the Hearstpapers ran “Today.” As editor of the Hearst tabloid New York Daily Mirror, Mr. Brisbane turned out eight columns of special editorials a week. And every week in the Sunday Hearstpapers, Pundit Brisbane furnished the text for an illustrated page which dramatized some tremendous, if obvious, thought, or outlined the contents of a classic biography or history.

Not so much worried about the loss of such a prodigious volume of expert copy as he was deeply and genuinely moved by the death of an old friend, Arthur Brisbane’s boss personally filled the “Today” space day after Christmas:

“I know that Arthur Brisbane was the greatest journalist of his day. … I know that this nation and the world have lost incalculably in the death of Arthur Brisbane … but all that I can think of for the moment is that I have lost my friend. … I grieve for that and realize the loss. … I grieve inconsolably . . . that the world in which I must spend my few remaining years will hold for me a blank space. . . .”

Hearstwriter Damon Runyon added in all seriousness: “Journalism has lost its all-time No. 1 genius. … It doesn’t seem possible. It doesn’t seem possible that with so many Lilliputians of humanity on the face of the globe, this giant has been removed.”

The journalistic giant who inspired such awe began his newspaper life early. Son of a well-to-do parlor radical, Albert Brisbane of Buffalo, who paid for space to run a doctrinaire column in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Arthur Brisbane was educated abroad, mostly by tutors, turned up on the old New York SMI in 1883, aged 19. At that time the SMI thought extraordinarilv well of itself, encouraged its young men to write long “literary” pieces. Thriving young Arthur Brisbane was made the Sun’s London correspondent, wrote a famous account of the fight between John L. Sullivan and Champion Charly Mitchell of England, became himself an expert boxer.

Next big job for able Arthur Brisbane was with fiery Joseph Pulitzer, whose World was astounding New Yorkers as the pioneer “yellow” newspaper. When William Randolph Hearst came out of the West to challenge Pulitzer with his rampant new Evening Journal, one of the first Pulitzer men he hired away was Brisbane, who had added 600,000 readers to the Sunday World by his inspired journalistic showmanship and ballyhoo. Appointed editor of the Journal in 1897, Brisbane swore he would drink no more claret till the Journal’s, circulation could be compared with the World’s high mark. This objective was reached at a cost to Brisbane of 37 Ib. In perfect journalistic accord, Editor Brisbane and Publisher Hearst knew from that time on that each would serve his own interests best by sticking closely to the other.

When Editor Brisbane began to make big money with the Hearstpapers, he started the large-scale real estate deals which made him unique among working newspapermen. In these operations Mr. Hearst was also soon involved. In 1926, Mr. Brisbane built the Ritz Tower apartment hotel, then the tallest (540 ft.) residential building in Manhattan, later selling it to his chief. Together they built the elaborate Ziegfeld Theatre, the Warwick Hotel across the street, took over other hotels, apartment buildings, beach properties. Mused William Randolph Hearst: “Arthur comes to me all the time with some wonderful plan to make money, but when I examine it, I find the profits are to be divided 90% for Arthur and 10% for me.” Mr. Brisbane was his boss’s publishing pioneer in Washington, where he acquired the Times, then sold it to Hearst, in Milwaukee, where a similar maneuver was executed with the Evening Wisconsin (now the Wisconsin News), and in Chicago, where Arthur Brisbane helped found the American.

Superbly gifted with the common touch, as an editorial writer Mr. Brisbane created in his millions of published words a monument more remarkable for its smooth flow and clarity than for depth or originality of thought. An example of Brisbane’s writing at its best: “To many fear of death is worse than death. . . . Death is soon over, fear is dreadful and prolonged agony. . . . Crillon, greatest fighter of them all, laid out in death, was found to have wounds on every inch of his body in front, not a scar on his back. Of him it could be said ‘he never feared the face of any man.'” Some Brisbanalities: “The best cart horse in the world can’t beat the worst race horse.” “There is more in any woman than any man can learn in 50 lifetimes.” “A sneeze not nearly violent enough to dislocate an arm will always kill many millions of germs.”

An omnivorous reader with a sharp memory, Pundit Brisbane possessed a great stock of odds & ends of information, like the hodge-podge of an almanac, which was mightily impressive to his readers. He had a Wellsian feeling for science and material progress, often pondered on the vastness of the material universe, as contrasted with the minuteness of man. For a King Features symposium just before his death, Mr. Brisbane typically wrote: “The successful completion of the 200-inch telescopic reflector is the most important event of 1936. It will carry the sight and mind of science man at least one million light years into space, and that is a long distance.* … I think mankind will plod along about as it has been doing, slowly, following some plan mapped out far away, and beyond our understanding. Man should find comfort in the fact that he has done pretty well. . . .”

Among Mr. Brisbane’s likes were Mussolini, Calvin Coolidge, big families, aviation, and the Emperor Nero, who he vowed was history’s most admirable, character. Mr. Brisbane was fond of describing executions, took a detailed and almost professional interest in Nazi decapitations, seemed to derive great satisfaction from the thoroughness with which the Italians mopped up Ethiopia. Some people & things of which Mr. Brisbane did not approve: atheists, “half-baked” college boys, gamblers, “brain-trusters.” In his editorials Mr. Brisbane long affected to despise professional pugilism, liked to point out that “a gorilla could lick them all.” Actually he frequently attended big fights, once had Sport Editor Danny Parker bring colored Fisticuffer Joe Louis around for a chat.

In his working methods Brisbane displayed an efficiency which was as great and remarkable as was his industry. Most of “Today’s” fluent stream was spoken into Dictaphones, which Mr. Brisbane had installed even in his limousine and on planes and trains. Often the “Today” column would be dictated as Mr. Brisbane’s car stood on the deck of the ferry taking him from Manhattan to his New Jersey estate. The speed with which he learned to dispose of journalistic chores left him plenty of time to devote to his financial and real estate interests.

Eccentric to a mild degree when he got older, Brisbane displayed no fear of Death, took sensible health precautions. On his New Jersey estate he built a brick tower which he called “a machine for living.” Each of its five floors had one large room. On the roof was a sleeping arrangement, for Brisbane argued that if outdoor sleeping was helpful to consumptives, it must also be good for people in normal health. When the morning sun waked him, he merely adjusted a lightproof mask of black silk, slept peacefully on.

*But not nearly so long as the correct figure. Mt. Wilson’s 100-inch telescope already penetrates .500 million light-years into space, and Caltech’s 200-incher is expected to pierce 1,500 million.