• U.S.

The Press: The Woman in Scarlet

3 minute read
TIME

To his Chicago Tribune sanctum, Managing Editor J. James Loy Maloney summoned his star newshen, trim (5 ft. 5 in., 107 Ibs.) Norma Lee Browning. Maloney, who thought that Christian charity was all too rare a virtue, told her to find out how rare it actually was in a huge city like Chicago. “Good luck,” he told her, “but don’t be disappointed. You’ll find it’s a cold, cruel world.”

Sob Sister Browning, a veteran of five years on the Trib and currently winning more Page One bylines than any other city staffer, borrowed some red & green ankle-strapped shoes from a Trib secretary and took off her wedding ring. She bought a scarlet coat, laid on a heavy job of make-up and went forth in her new identity: a country girl who had gone wrong but was seeking help to go straight.

Sweet Charity. Last week Reporter Browning’s findings—a set of surprises for herself, Editor Maloney and presumably for the Trib’s readers—were blazoned across the Trib’s front page and on its circulation trucks. The nice-Nellie promotion men had a tough problem of finding a euphemism for the harlot Norma Browning had pretended to be, had toyed with “wayward woman,” finally settled on “woman outcast.”

In her two weeks as a woman outcast, Reporter Browning had skillfully told her phony, woeful tale to priest, to minister, in Salvation Army hostels and gospel missions, and had found charity everywhere. She had narrowly escaped being firmly placed in a home for unmarried mothers, was compelled to accept money from strangers (she sent it all back), had 19 offers of free lodging with meals, and scores of offers of help in finding work.

When it was all over, Reporter Browning found it was “the hardest thing I ever tried to write. It’s easy to expose people, but hard to be nice . . . They were really good to me.”

Bitter Medicine. Pert, Missouri-born Norma Browning had been putting things to the test—and turning the results into first-rate copy—ever since she got her master’s degree in English from Radcliffe College in 1938. Shortly after, she married Photographer Russell Ogg and they settled down to live in a Manhattan slum on his $15-a-week salary. Norma quickly turned the hardship into $1,100 from the Reader’s Digest for a sprightly piece on We Live in the Slums. She joined the Trib as a feature writer in 1944. But not till two years ago did she get her first chance on a breaking news story when the Trib sent her to Havana to cover the Satira yacht-murder of Playboy John Lester Mee (TIME, May 5,1947). She scooped a horde of male reporters by getting aboard the police-impounded yacht and scampering off with Mee’s diary. Last March she got Septuagenarian Vic Shaw to tell the intimate story of her life as one of Chicago’s best-known madams. (She sneeringly told Norma she was such a “little cracker you wouldn’t be no good in a house.”) Last summer Norma went after Chicago’s quack doctors and had everything from electric vibrators to “atom water” prescribed for her imaginary ailments ; one of her “doctors” is now awaiting trial. That was the only time she was frightened. Said she: “Those places were horrible . . . even the injection needles were dirty.”

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