The Press: International Gadfly

For eight years, as foreign news editor of the Paris daily L’Oeuvre, Geneviève Tabouis (Aunt Geneviève to Frenchmen) turned out contradictory prophecies of things to come and intimate chitchat about Europe’s statesmen. When Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Europe’s showmen, turned the Continent into a death-defying variety act, Tabouis became their Winchell. In one of his radio harangues in Berlin last year, the Führer referred sarcastically to Tabouis as “the wisest of women,” complained publicly of her gossip. Said he: “That woman seems to know what I’m going to do before I do it. She is ridiculous.”

An order for Aunt Geneviève’s arrest waited last week in Vichy, France, seat of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain’s Government.* But haggard, frail Aunt Geneviève had long since escaped from France, was in Manhattan, where she will write three columns a week for Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, a weekly letter for the London Sunday Dispatch.

The Mirror paid Tabouis $50 a week before Paris fell, has not yet settled on terms for her new series. Two other U. S. papers (Chicago Times, Nashville Tennessean) used Aunt Geneviève’s column until she fled from France. Exiles in the U. S. like herself are two longtime Tabouis sources (she calls them “agents”) who still try to keep her informed. She has tipsters in several Washington embassies—diplomats who keep their jobs even when ambassadors are relieved. Still in Paris is Aunt Geneviève’s husband, an obscure radio executive; her son (who served in the Maginot Line) and daughter are somewhere in France.

Last week Tabouis, separated from Adolf Hitler by 3,000 miles of ocean, still thought she had an inside wire to Hitler’s brain. In the Mirror she reported: “The Führer’s desperate decision to attempt to land in England between August 15 and 20 was reached on Saturday, August 3, after a lengthy phone talk with Mussolini. . . .” Three days later Aunt Geneviève wrote triumphantly: “Hitler is dissatisfied with his Blitzkrieg so far. . . . Göring is said to have pleaded that time is lacking to train new German pilots.”

*Also “under arrest,” though not in France, were three other notable French journalists: Emile Bure, publisher of L’Ordre, now in London; Aviator Henri de Kérillis, editor of L’Epoque, now representative of refugee General Charles de Gaulle in Canada; Commentator André Géraud (“Pertinax”), now in the U. S.

writing for the New York Times.