The Press: Eager Igor

Anything can still happen in America. Less than ten years ago, slight, pompadoured little Igor Loiewski-Cassini landed in the U.S. with only $10, a hint of a titled past, and a lean & hungry look. By last week, at 30, as the new “Cholly Knickerbocker” of Hearst’s New York Journal-American, he had reached the peak in his peculiar field.

The field was society gossip. Igor’s most famous predecessor, the late Maury Henry Biddle Paul, made $100,000 a year out of writing, in his own brand of pink perfume, about the half-world of Manhattan’s cafe society for 60 U.S. papers. Igor Cassini hopes to do even better: he will concentrate on what he thinks is the International Smart Set; his ambition is worldwide syndication.

Spicy Little Column. Igor’s distant alliance with nobility, which he makes much of, comes from being grandson of Count Arthur Cassini, once the Tsar’s Ambassador to the U.S. Igor was born in Sevastopol, grew up (after the revolution) in Denmark, Switzerland, Italy. At 21 he came to the U.S. to coach tennis at the University of Georgia, went back to get his brother, Oleg, a nubile young man. Oleg’s marriages, to date: with Million-heiress Merry Fahrney, Cinemactress Gene Tierney. Igor covered sports and read proof for an Italian paper in New York, wrote obituaries and police news for a Washington paper, finally talked himself into a $25-a-week job writing “a spicy little column like I had once done back in Italy.” One spicy little column in 1939 aroused three young members of the Warrenton, Va., horsy set, who abducted “Ghighi” Cassini from a country-club dance, tarred & feathered him on a lonely road. He took refuge in the Warrenton home of one Major Austin McDonnell. Next year, when he became a U.S. citizen, Cassini married the Major’s daughter, “Bootsie.”

Cassini was drafted in October 1943 just after he had signed a contract to-become Cholly Knickerbocker. Bootsie kept Igor’s old Washington column going while her husband, a sergeant on Stars & Stripes, became a pal of socialite colonels and generals in England and France.

Society Is Here. His first Journal-American, column stated the new Cholly’s credo: “I have the warmest sentiments for the Spotlighted Creatures to whose exploits, witticisms and ‘modus vivendi’ this space will be devoted. … I frankly and firmly believe in Society. .. . Not prompted by any desire to slander the grand Old Guard … I want to bring it back where it belongs—to full honors and to the headlines. . . . Society is here to stay!”

Igor has adopted Maury Paul’s tried & true formulas: no drinking on the job; plenty of references to favorite people (like Pat Di Cicco and the Plaza Hotel’s Colonel Serge Obolensky); a few good feuds, a generous salting of his copy with such phrases—some of them borrowed from other chefs—as snobility, cafelegant, upperclawss, Longuyland, the Rarefied Set. He also leased an apartment on Manhattan’s upper East Side (Maury Paul said a good address made all the difference). And one thing more: “I think it is very important,” he said, “not to develop a pot belly.”

What a Change. Igor makes a great play of not being a snob. Sample: “I have just emerged from an air-conditioned suite of the Park Towers, where I was locked for 45 sacred minutes with their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”

Still ecstatic about his medical discharge from the Army, Igor Cassini gushed in a recent column: “Peace, it’s wonderful! What a change from the muddy boots, the shivering cold, the caked blood.” Better times were coming: “We’re in for an era of mad spending and fun-making. . . . Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Sr. entertained at a gala dinner.”