The Press: Will the Ice Age Return?

Readers of Hearst’s American Weekly (circ. 8,135,982) whose Sunday breakfast is a pumped-up omelet of cornfield murders, betrayed maidens, prehistoric monsters and the evils of vivisection, are going to get more herbs with their eggs. A new publisher is in the kitchen. He is 63-year-old Walter Howey, onetime holy terror of Chicago journalism, and the real-life model of Front Page’s brash, blustery managing editor.

Howey, who rang the bell with his Iroquois Theater fire scoop (1903) and turned Chicago newspaperdom on its ear by his banner-lined blasting of thieving politicos, has quieted down since the old raw-meat days. In recent years he has been running Hearst’s dreary Boston tabloids, the Record and American, in quiet, nice-old-boy fashion. So while some of his greying onetime minions like Burton Rascoe and Charlie MacArthur may have felt a twinge of nostalgia, they could not have been surprised to hear that mellowing Walter Howey’s first move on the Sunday-supplement American Weekly was a peace move: he called off the old war between his weekly and Hearst’s local feature editors.

A Few Names. Previously the American Weekly got its regional U.S. coverage through the back door, from Hearst rewrite men around the country. They did Weekly stories for sideline cash without telling their local publishers — who might have chosen to run the story in their own news columns. Under the new system, Weekly stories will be ordered direct through the local Hearst publisher. If the plan works (i.e., if other Hearst brass hats will play along), Howey will have the whole Hearst empire at his beck & call.

Aiding & abetting them will be a crew of good rewrite men, several recently hired from the New York Daily News.

Instead of smalltime bylines, American Weekly will henceforth parade such high-priced talent as Fannie Hurst, John Erskine, Paul Gallico, Damon Runyon, et al, from Hearst’s Cosmopolitan circuit.

“Of course, they will have to be housebroken to American Weekly ways,” says slim, smart Martin J. (“Mike”) Porter, who is only the third editor in the Weekly’s 49 lurid years — and who is also, in print and flamboyant illustration, quite a few light years ahead of the scientists.

The Tried & True. Starting in the fall, American Weekly covers will feature not just pretty-girl heads & shoulders, but Nell Brinkley-type dimpled beauties with legs out of Esquire. Inside, the magazine will continue to ask the tried & true question like: “If the Earth Becomes Uninhabitable—Where Shall We Go?” Only now the answers will look more authoritative.

The treacle for snaring readers discovered by Morrill Goddard, when Hearst lured him away from Pulitzer to found the Weekly, still works. A typical Goddard issue mixed a princess in distress, an actress “telling all,” science’s latest mechanical brain, and a snorting brontosaurus. Oldtime Goddard-admirers at the American Weekly say that his secret was his ability to believe anything that made a good story. It was a big help that most of the things he wanted to believe happened in remote villages in Siberia, China and the Balkans.

For years Goddard held up to his staff the one perfect American Weekly headline: NAILED HER FATHER’S HEAD TO FRONT DOOR. Porter, who wrote that headline, says: “Nowadays we don’t nail people’s heads to doors — unless, of course, it happened.” Instead, Porter has found that the prosaic household hints in the back pages draw better. Best draw of all is plastic surgery. Says Porter drily: “From where I sit, it seems that no one in America likes his own face.” Hearst’s Concern. The American Weekly’s world of tomorrow probably will never stray too far from the world of Goddard, since old William Randolph Hearst keeps a dimming eye on the Weekly’s ways. He bombards Porter daily with telegrams and letters, story ideas for the future and critiques on past issues. Latest Hearst concern (which was also one of his earliest): Will the Ice Age Return?