The Press: Tabloid Napoleon

Coolidge was in the White House, gin was in the bathtub, and U.S. tabloid journalism was in its bawling, irresponsible infancy. Worst of all, more brazen even than the brassy era it covered, was Publisher Bernarr Macfadden’s sexsational New York Evening Graphic. Quickly dubbed the ‘PornoGraphic, the paper assaulted the town with scandal, reported what nobody else would dream of printing, invented what it could not report. Leading the assault from a desk littered with busts of Napoleon was a short (5 ft. 2 in.), lame martinet named Emile Henry Gauvreau, a Connecticut-born newsman of French Canadian-Irish descent. His brilliance as a reporter and editor made him managing editor of the conservative old Hartford Courant at the age of 26. But the Courant was too slow for Gauvreau’s new ideas. After it fired him, Macfadden lured him to launch the Graphic.

Lonely Hearts. The tabloid Napoleon, who sometimes propped his hand in his vest, waged the war for circulation (goal: 1,000,000) with stunts and sensations. The Graphic gave toys to the poor in Central Park, filled Madison Square Garden with a “Lonely Hearts Ball.” The lonely hearts project was dropped within a year, when a woman deposited a baby on Gauvreau’s desk and asked what he proposed to do about it. It had happened after the ball, she said.

Gauvreau’s staff ghosted byline stories by golddiggers. gigolos and bootleggers to keep his growing readership titillated with “heart balm” suits, gang wars and midnight revelries. Typical headline: HE BEAT MEI LOVE HIM. When a young mother walked into his office, introducing herself as Nan Britton and her child as the late President Harding’s illegitimate daughter, Gauvreau splashed her story. He got the jump on Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris before the plane had even been sighted in Ireland by taking a chance on printing and distributing 50,000 papers plastered with the photo of a grinning Lindy and the caption, WELL, I MADE IT. He “exposed” the Atlantic City beauty contest as a “frame-up.” thereby pushing the total libel suits filed against the Graphic to $12 million. When the treasurer complained wistfully, Gauvreau cracked: “Take it out of my salary.”

Strange Race. Gauvreau also hit on a way to invent pictures that he called “composographs.” He boosted circulation by 100,000 with a composograph showing Rudolph Valentino’s arrival in heaven. The faked picture came most sensationally into its own when it illustrated the bedroom horseplay of eccentric Millionaire Edward (“Daddy”) Browning and his young bride “Peaches,” whose litigious romance was a Graphic bonanza. The couple was shown in composographs that sometimes contained balloon dialogue even for Daddy’s pet goose (see cut).

As circulation mounted to 700,000, Gauvreau posted a bulletin-board communique: “The circulation … is tearing the guts out of the presses. This has resulted from my policy of sensationalism. Any man who cannot be yellow has no place on the staff.”

William Randolph Hearst tried to buy the Graphic. When he failed, he hired Gauvreau to become managing editor of his Daily Mirror. Eight years after the little Napoleon launched it in 1924 and three years after he left it, the Graphic crumbled. Gauvreau left the Mirror in 1935, wrote books and edited magazines, but after the Graphic it all seemed like Elba. Perhaps his most durable contribution to U.S. journalism was a vaudeville hoofer named Walter Winchell, whom he launched as a daily columnist. It was a contribution that he bitterly regretted: he soon loathed Winchell, once flung a bust of Napoleon at him.

Last week Gauvreau died in Suffolk, Va. at 65. One of the reflections in his memoirs served as an epitaph for both him and his gaudy era: “I was 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.”