The Press: Master Stylist

Ever since William R. Hearst Jr. took command of the family’s papers, the chain’s columnists have been getting some hard editing and trimming by the boss. Last week Westbrook Pegler, who has seen the blue penciling on the wall, drafted a new set of ground rules for himself and proved he was still master of the humorous, wry style that made him famous before he became a bore. Wrote Pegler:

“The great trouble with you, Pegler, is that you write too damn long. You run on and on like a hack driver’s dream, bloviating about unions and the Constitution and the income tax, and you forget the white paper has been going up and up and that a newspaper has got to set a table of smorgasbord, with some of this and some of that … to hold the readers who draw the advertisers who pay your princely stipend. Why don’t you write more funny stuff? … I guess you don’t want people to know you still tie a bag on now and again these days when you have gone cosmic and claim to know all the answers . . . Keep them guessing, Pegler. Don’t groove your stuff so that they can figure you for unions Monday. La Boca* Tuesday, civil rights Wednesday, and your message to mankind Thursday.

“People have got to concentrate when you start giving them the old habeas corpus mandamus potatus. Don’t try to be required reading. Be a diversion . . . You remind me of an old ham in vaudeville stretching his laughs and sweating his bows and keeping the other acts hanging around cracking peanuts or laundering their tights in the basin when it would have been more effective to quit on a loud laugh five minutes sooner . . . The trouble with you, Pegler, is when you have got nothing more to say you say it, and say it, and say it. when the thing to do is to stop right here.”

* Peglerese for Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.