Reporters: The Sentimental Cynic

Damon Runyon died of cancer in 1946, after having contributed some 90 million words to the newspaper record of his time. Much of this prodigious output appeared in Hearst’s old New York American, where Runyon in scribed such transitory events as prize fights, ball games, murder trials and wars. He may well have been the most-read U.S. journalist of his day, says Biographer Edwin P. Hoyt in A Gentle man of Broadway (Little, Brown & Co.; $6.95); but Hoyt argues convincingly that Reporter Runyon was also the most misread.

Broadway was Runyon’s country. In his other career as a short-story writer, he peopled the Great White Way with a tender host of Guys and Dolls -Harry the Horse, Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Mad ame LaGimp, a long parade of gold-hearted touts, pimps and whores.

Thanks to the characters he created, Runyon is best remembered as the sen timental troubadour of that most cynical of all streets. The truth is, though, that Runyon was all cynic himself. By romanticizing Broadway, he was thumbing his nose at the world of respectability that he mistrusted and despised Cold Blue Eyes. “When a prominent citizen gets jammed up with the rules,” he once wrote, “there are always a lot of folks ready to turn on the brine for him. But when some bezark that no one ever heard of gets found out, they rush him off to the sneezer or jail, with never a sob gulped out in his behalf.” Yet when two bezarks awaited execution in Massachusetts in 1927, Runyon turned in a story so unsentimental that his editors refused to run it: “They’re frying Sacco and Vanzetti in the morning,” ran the lead.

Runyon lived by a cynic’s creed: “If every person in the world was taught from birth to trust no one, it would eventually be a universal state of mind.” He followed a cynic’s success formula: “Get the money.” His cold blue eyes discouraged friendship. From his altitude in journalism he could reach a hand down to promising young comers -Bob Considine, Paul Gallico -only to turn on them if they seemed to threaten his position. One he always cut was Ring Lardner, whom Runyon suspected -rightly -was a writer of far greater in sight, substance and style.

Early & Alone. A gambling friend once told Runyon that the odds were 9 to 5 against everything in life. Alfred Damon Runyan,-as he was born in Manhattan, Kans., faced worse odds than that. His father was a sometime newspaper publisher reduced to typesetting and the bottle. His mother died when he was seven. Before he was out of his teens he was both a newspaperman and a drunk.

Success did not mellow Runyon. He never stopped trying to impress newsroom recruits with his $40 shoes (size 51B) and his sharpie suits. He avoided the sportswriting clan’s easy fraternity, arriving early and alone at the ballpark, leaving alone and late. He was a married bachelor whose first wife died of the habit that he had kicked.

His second marriage, to a Broadway showgirl in 1932, ended in divorce six months before he died.

Small-Timer. Only on Broadway did he find characters with a cynicism to match his own. They told him where the bodies were buried, and he repaid their trust by miscasting them in solid-citizen roles. Assigned by Hearst to an anti-rackets crusade in 1933, Runyon led off with the charge that the Administration of President Harding was “the most brazen display of racketeering in our times.” His story went on to tick off other notable racketeers-“after the bankers come the Wall Streeters”-before arriving at Al Capone, who was charitably described as “a small-timer.” Biographer Hoyt finds it strange that Runyon’s dark side went so unrecognized, since Runyon himself gave it such a lifelong promenade. “By saying something with a half-boob air,” Runyon once wrote of himself, “he gets ideas out of his system on the wrongs of this world which indicate that he must have been a great rebel at heart.”

* An errant printer in Pueblo, Colo., changed his last name to Runyon. An editor on Hearst’s American eliminated the Alfred.