The Press: Tabloid Editor’s Confessions

At their fantastic, nightmarish extreme U.S. tabloids never surpassed the strange journalism of Macfadden’s late Graphic and Hearst’s early Mirror under the editorship of Emile Gauvreau, a brilliant, unhappy, sensitive, tough, crippled. French-Canadian-Irish, Connecticut-born newspaperman who now raises goats and chickens on a small farm near Philadelphia.

Last week Editor Gauvreau published his confessions*— a sulfurous document which ordinary newsmen found alternately exciting, terrifying, hilarious, gagging, slightly sanctimonious, good for their souls. Confesses Gauvreau: “I was a part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike.” Better reading than Gauvreau’s penitent philosophies are anecdotes of his colleagues. Samples:

> Graphic “composograph” (faked photograph) upped circulation 100,000 when it was employed to show Rudolph Valentino entering the spirit world.

> Editor Gauvreau hired a vaudeville hoofer named Walter Winchell, “a prodigy who, by some form of self-hypnosis, came to feel himself the center of his time.” Gauvreau hoots at Winchell’s illiteracy (he called Zola a famed woman writer, described Paris as a seaport city), damns Winchell for perfecting the kind of tabloid journalism he himself did most to encourage. Editing Winchell for libel “developed in me a philosophical imperturbability which, otherwise, my nervous make-up might never have acquired.” Said Arthur Brisbane of Winchell’s jargon: “Shake speare described it. ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'”

> From the Graphic, Gauvreau was hired by Hearst’s fabulous Albert J. Kobler, publisher of the Mirror then founded to beat Captain Patterson’s Daily News. Kob ler was “a well-read, intelligent man” who talked like Sam Goldwyn. (“This tabloid business is not all rag, tag and cocktail.”) After making millions for Hearst, he died with less than $5,000.

> Hearst picked Brisbane to push Mirror circulation to a million. Unable to do so, he ruthlessly cut expenses, rhapsodized over successmen, dictated editorials at the rate of 39 in three hours.

>Conceiving a phobia against Mickey Mouse, Brisbane wanted it thrown out, said it was humorless, a waste of space. When Gauvreau balked, Brisbane roared: “Children can be better occupied reading Sir James Jeans about the world we live in. Throw that rat out!” Too old for Mirror journalism, Brisbane one day received a wire from San Simeon: “Dear Arthur, you are now getting out the worst news paper in the United States!”

> As commentary on his career Gauvreau bemoans his lack of opportunity to “indulge my tastes for good literature,” the necessity to get circulation “by pushing into the back of my mind all that I had learned about the value of constructive news.” But before Hearst fired him for writing a book in praise of Russia, he had salted away a tabloidian nest egg.

* My Last Million Readers — Dutton; $3.