The Press: Girl from Boise

The Queen Mother wore a diamond tiara shaped exactly like her hats— honestly! . . .

Since this was a wedding reception, Sistie and Buzzie got a taste of champagne. They didn’t seem much impressed with the sour stuff. . . .

Sir Samuel Hoare sat in the peanut gallery draped in blue satin, as though forgetfully he had worn his spouse’s negligee to the Abbey. . . .

Francis Ormond French, who has been in and out of hot water oftener than a four-minute egg, has again put his haughty family squarely behind the eight ball. . . .

Zippy comments like these on “People Who Matter” have long been the highly marketable stock-in-trade of smart, nosey Inez Callaway Robb, who for the last ten years has been sticking pins into stuffed shirts as “Nancy Randolph” of the world’s biggest tabloid, Manhattan’s daily News. This week blue-eyed Inez Robb, chic and peppy at 36 despite her greying hair, started on a brand new job as “roving reporter,” covering U. S. and international high life for the rival New York Mirror and more than 100 other papers lined up by King Features Syndicate. First assignment : to survey the prospects for socialite Manhattan’s winter “season.” With the new job went a new by-line (her real name) and a whopping jump in pay (from about $175 a week to $420).

Inez Callaway Robb’s career has been the kind every pencil-nibbling journalism-school co-ed dreams about. California-born and Idaho-raised, she earned her first silk stockings scribbling high-school notes for the city editor of the Boise Capital News, a next-door neighbor. After a course at University of Missouri’s famed School of Journalism, she landed a reporting job on the Tulsa World, pasted everything she wrote into a scrapbook. One day, between trains in Chicago, she dropped into the Tribune office, left the scrapbook. Within a fortnight she had a wire from the News (whose Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson is a cousin of the Tribune’s Robert Rutherford McCormick) offering her $75 a week to write Sunday features.

In Manhattan she felt at home as soon as she walked into her first Christmas Eve party and saw her future husband, Adman J. Addison Robb Jr. “He had a little black mustache and shook up the cocktails. He was just my idea of a city slicker.” When, after 18 months, Publisher Patterson suddenly promoted her to society editor, she simply carried her notebook and pencil to debutante parties and night clubs, asked friendly photographers to point out important faces.

What she brought to society reporting was not only a gift of phrase, but a lively news sense, and the ability to see the group she records as a current in the general news stream. When Broker Richard Whitney crashed, Reporter Robb’s column was devoted to reporting what lunchers at “21” and the Colony had to say about it. Few society reporters take so newsworthy an approach. She spurns the usual drivel of rumor and chitchat.

As “Nancy Randolph” of the News, Reporter Robb had a hand in hatching Manhattan’s iridescent cafe society from its hard-shelled, speakeasy stage, but she has never succumbed entirely to its lures. She loves dancing—”It is my vice”—but she generally gets home by 12 or 1 to her fifth-floor apartment off lower Fifth Avenue, where her husband rarely waits up for her. (Because he has his own job —with Prudential Insurance Co.—he escorts her to El Morocco and the Stork Club only on Fridays and Saturdays.) At home she has a collection of demi-tasse cups from special assignments — one from Tours, near the chateau where the Windsors were married, one from the maker of King George’s coronation china — her favored Chinese rugs, simple prints, easy chairs, and stacks of white gloves (“A society writer can always get by on clean gloves”) and “silly” hats (“With my face it doesn’t matter”).

Quiet, even-tempered Husband “Ad” Robb is a writer on his own account, once ghosted a book called I Was Condemned to the Chair, by Edward F. McGrath. Last week he insisted that his wife undergo a hospital check-up before starting her new job; was pleased when doctors pronounced her fit. Once his solicitude proved embarrassing. When his wife was running for chairman of the News unit of the Newspaper Guild, he killed her chances by printing paper match covers boosting her candidacy, distributing them to the staff. Fellow Newshawks remember Inez Robb better, though, for the frenzied inaccuracy with which she swung at the well-smacked chin of famed Sports Editor Jimmy Powers* the morning after he allotted her a remote gallery seat for the crowded finals of the News-sponsored Golden Gloves tournament. For that feat, admiring staff members presented her with what is now her favorite piece of jewelry, a small gold charm bearing the letters UROK.

* Four months earlier Editor Powers was lambasted by two male colleagues.