The War of the Tabloids

Dawn, from sky to sewer, was dirty. New York City was a busted comb standing on its back. Long gray hairs of smoke hung between the teeth. Trash cans wore lids like berets. Summer pressed hot hands on the tenements. Water trucks flushed the cobbled streets. The outgoing tide carried oil, timbers, contraceptives and dead fish on its bosom. The dapper mayor, Jimmy Walker, awakened wearing pearl-gray spats.

This was the hour when the day people and the night people slept. The poor curled on floors, fire escapes and roofs. Bowery bums felt the rap of night sticks on broken shoes. Under the streets, the subways roared and sighed. Elevated trains screeched. Fire engines shrilled through red lights. Times Square, the womb of New York, contemplated its barrenness.

In the Bronx, anemic farms raised corn. The cemeteries of Brooklyn raised headstones. Wall Street, from Pearl to Trinity Churchyard, was as empty as a broker's pledge. The fashionable slept late. Park Avenue did it between silk sheets. Fifth Avenue squirmed in satin. Houston Street was pushcarts, bargains and hock shops. Hell's Kitchen was brogues, booze and novenas. Harlem, a mourning band on the arm of Central Park, was laughter, chicken and gin.

Greenwich Village was art, cockroaches and ego.

All the newspapers were still at this hour. The morning sheets could use nothing after five. The evenings would not begin to run until ten A.M. Jeff Burke slept at his desk under an eyeshade. He had a tomato face and no neck. On the bare boards, his feet could hear the silence of the presses more clearly than their throb. In the basement of the Daily News, rolls of newsprint stood threaded, like toilet tissue for a monster.

The weak sun stood behind Coney Island. It tipped the spires and tall buildings with pink. The shafts touched the editorial contenders one by one. On the East Side, the hot red brick of the New York Journal and the New York American were first. Behind the fat finger of the Municipal Building, the gold dome of The World flashed like a Pope's orb. A thin slash of dawn pointed straight down Park Place to the dingy loft of the News, where photos were on display so that passers-by would not confuse it with the sweatshops on the street.

The sun never tapped the Daily Mirror, on Frankfurt Street, because it was shouldered by saloons. On the Far West Side, daylight felt the greasy windows of the New York Evening Graphic. The ferryboats hooted at the walls of The New York Telegram and listened to the late echo. On lower Broadway, The Sun seldom saw its namesake--in truth, never missed it.

The New York Times, newly moved to West 43rd Street, kept a skeleton staff at the city desk that remained awake, reading copy from the Associated Press and United Press machines. A few streets away, The New York Herald's presses cooled as a lobster-trick man wiped the oil cups on the rollers. Down on the West Side, near the ferries, the New York Post, an eight-column paper, accepted the warmth of the new sun and hoped that the day would come when it could address more than 102,000 readers.

Buried in the canyons were others. The New York Tribune, The Evening World, The Evening Mail, not counting such regional sheets as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Bronx Home News and the Staten Island Advance. The total, on

January 1, 1924, was 14 metropolitan newspapers and three robust sectional papers. The press lords of the time--William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Frank Munsey, Adolph Ochs, the Reid family--were convinced that New York City was a great newspaper town. It wasn't. The metropolis had always been a place of quick mergers and slow deaths. In rebuttal, the press lords said that the metropolitan area included anything within 60 miles of Times Square. This gave them the fat part of Long Island, all of Westchester and northern New Jersey.

Most of these newspapers were doomed. Some were limping before the 40-year war began. The Telegram was bleeding from an old editorial ulcer. The post, boasting that it had been founded by Alexander Hamilton, was gasping for readers. The Sun, threadbare snobbery with holes in the shoes, held its head so high that it wept up its forehead.

The economics were that 10,000,000 citizens refused to split their reading habits 14 ways. This also applied to the advertisers, all of whom had keen nostrils for editorial decay. Nor would they, in any case, split their dollar 14 equal ways. Their desire was to spend their money on those who needed it least--the healthy. An elite store like Bergdorf Goodman, for example, gravitated to the Times because the Times' readers had the purchasing power to generate additional sales at Bergdorf Goodman. Conversely, Klein's bargain dresses did well in the News, where thousands of secretaries and tightly budgeted wives might be looking for $2.95 dresses.

There might have been no war if the sex screams of the tabloids had been stifled or stillborn. The News came first, in 1919. Five years later, Hearst entered the field with the Mirror. In the same year, a vegetarian with electric hair, Bernarr Macfadden, designed a pink-orange afternoon tabloid called the New York Evening Graphic. The result was catastrophic. A war erupted between the tabloids on the one hand and the standard-size sheets on the other. The cost was about $70,000,000 and was played like Ten Little Indians, except that there were 14.

Newspapers died, or were merged, one by one. Men died, too, or were broken on the spinning presses. They crouched on whirling disks, fighting gravity, and some went quickly and others slowly. There were columnists who left momentary marks on hosts of readers: Don Marquis, Heywood Broun, Franklin P. Adams, Paul Gallico, Stanley Woodward, O. O. McIntyre, Floyd Gibbons, Arthur Brisbane, Damon Runyon, Mark Hellinger, John P. Medbury, Milt Gross, Bill Corum and Frank Graham. Over the years, their lights were turned off.

Editors went, too--fewer and faster. Herbert Bayard Swope, Victor Watson, Carr Van Anda, Stanley Walker, Emile Gauvreau, Frank Carson, Joseph Medill Patterson, William Randolph Hearst, Adolph Ochs, Walter Howey, Joseph Pulitzer, Frank Munsey, Roy Howard--a sentimental list of stainless-steel hearts. The reporters? The photographers? Nobody remembers the common soldiers. They didn't even have dog tags.

The fight was five years old when I became a copy boy at the New in 1929. Simply stated, the advertisers had already decided to stick to the conservative journals unless a tabloid could hold 1,000,000 readers. The agencies despised the News, the Mirror and the Graphic, but conceded that, with 1,000,000 circulation, it would pay to buy linage in a bastard journal.

This defined the battle area. The Times, The Sun, the Tribune and other eight-column conservative newspapers decided to husband their prissy propriety, losing circulation grudgingly, while maintaining advertising linage. The tabloids--News, Mirror and Graphic--decided to wallow in sensationalism and aim for 1,000,000 circulation. Then the advertising would fall into their laps. First, they would try to kill each other.

I Worked for two of these: the News and the Mirror. They were as lurid as a prostitute with a pad in a police station. If Christ had walked into a tabloid office, he'd have been referred to the religious editor, a fink whose function was to balance the stink of prurience with a whiff of celestial Cologne.In fact, Jesus did appear once. At night, in toga, beard and sandals, he asked the News receptionist for the city editor. "Who shall I say is calling?" the kid said. "Jesus Christ," the man said. The receptionist stood and shook hands. "Glad to meet-cha," he said. "I've heard a lot aboutcha."

It was on the lobster trick, and Jeff Burke, the neckless wonder, had no time for Jesus. If, for example, he had had a girl. . . or even a dog. . . . Word went out that the hour was late, the presses had stopped and to try again on the day shift, when Harvey Deuell, the city editor, might have time to listen.

The tabloids had a formula for worthy stories. Jesus wasn't part of it. A man who betrayed an innocent girl was a story. If he was rich, it was a better story. If he beat her with Arabian whips or wrote his name on her abdomen with a lighted cigarette, it was a nine-day wonder.

The editors tethered their consciences in the men's room. They had rewrite men who could shade any story tabloid style. They could write about anything. James Whittaker of the Mirror made page three with a story about nothing: "Doris Duke," he wrote, "is so attractive, so rich, so fabulously well-heeled, so glamorous, that news yesterday that she is not engaged to a New York State assemblyman stunned Broadway."

The juices of the era had a bearing on the cynicism of the newspapers. The tabloids could not have flourished at any time except the age of the flapper, the mockery of Prohibition, the one-way automobile ride, a Broadway featuring Florenz Ziegfeld, George White, Earl Carroll, Larry Fay, Texas Guinan, Arnold Rothstein, Legs Diamond, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Dutch Schultz, Owney Madden, Nils T. Granlund, Al Capone, Two-Gun Crowley, Daddy Browning and Vincent Coll. Eliminate these and others like them and the editor is left with Bishop William T. Manning, Cardinal Hayes, Alfred E. Smith, Calvin Coolidge, Billy Sunday, Bobby Jones, Gertrude Ederle, the five-cent subway fare and near beer.

The jazz journalists required a florid bouquet of events. Vice raids were derigueur. An errant husband was worthless, but a trusting, ever-loving wife who, let us say, parlayed a handshake with a cornetist into a boudoir duet was worth a photograph and a quote: "I only did it because I love my husband."

One editor had a tip that his spouse was in flagrante delicto and he was so eager to spring the trap that he summoned his chief photographer. They caught his wife in an amour which the editor claimed she had denied him, and the cameraman shot a few touching pictures. The lensman was so impressed that he passed out sets to the entire staff before printing one for the boss.

The words "Love Nest Raid" fitted nicely in five-column, 72-point type. The word "vice" was also a good seller, "Cop Killer" had its attraction then and now. Two-Gun Crowley sold a quarter of a million tabloids by shooting policemen. One afternoon, 400 cops trapped him in a flat in the West 90s and, when he was handcuffed, a police inspector was so elated that he patted Crowley on the shoulder and said: "Kid, I'm going to buy you a steak." Crowley spat with contempt. "What?" he snarled. "On Friday?"

To acquire the coveted 1,000,000 readers, the tabloids had to dramatize the news, or invent it. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnaped in Hopewell, New Jersey, Emile Gauvreau, the limping genius who was managing editor of the Mirror, walked through the page forms in the composing room asking a printer to drop a special line of type in every third story.

The line said: "Come on in, 1-X. Everything clear." I assumed that we had a contact with the kidnaper and asked Gauvreau what it meant. "Not a damn thing," he said softly. "I just want to excite the readers." When Ruth Snyder and a corset salesman were convicted of knocking off Mr. Snyder with a sash-weight, one of the tabloids paid Mrs. Snyder to keep a death-house diary on toilet paper and deposit it on top of the (continued on page 254)The War of the Tabloids(continued from page 164) ladies'-room plumbing. Another one--the News--had a photographer with a fixed-focus lens strapped to his ankle take a vague shot of the lady as the first 2000 volts raced through her body.

The Mirror deplored this ingenuity as vulgar, then stole the photo and published it on the back page. Normally, this space was reserved for outdoor sports. So, too, with the Hall-Mills murder, where the tabloids fought one another for ownership of the story. This time, the Mirror won and managed to have the members of the plush Hall-Stevens family tried for the slaying of the Reverend James Hall and his choir singer, Mrs. Mills, who were found in a lovers' lane near New Brunswick, New Jersey, in a state of disarray. The Mirror played the story like Brahms' Fourth in ragtime, but, when a jury acquitted all hands, the tabloid suppressed the story that it was being sued; in journalese, an embarrassment of bitches.

The Graphic made the Creighton-Applegate case its own and, for this murder, used the composograph, which consisted of having shapely staff members pose in step-ins, then superimposing the heads of the female principals in the murder. Gauvreau, who was then editor of the Graphic, watched his circulation soar past the 700,000 mark and had visions of dispensing with ads for trusses and constipation aids.

All of which is an incredible footnote to journalism history, because, standing alone, war is a contagious madness. However, when the struggle for survival is set within the swift rigadoon of the times, it appears that New York staged a lemming migration to the edge of a cliff and had a desire to fall to death young. There was a mass aspiration to "live it up," to cultivate all the sweet sacrileges quickly and rush the wrap-up.

It was this that the editors sold to the readers. A flapper was expected to be long on gin and short on virginity. The car was the Oakland, with balloon tires. Rudy Vallee crooned My Time Is Your Time into a cheerleader's megaphone. Girls smoked straw-tipped Melachrinos and Charlestoned in stockinged feet.

The attitude was jaded. A Michigan mother drew a life sentence for selling two pints of rye and, as a commentator wrote, she couldn't find sympathy under the Ss. John Gilbert, on a couch with Greta Garbo, swung his weight half on top of the lady for the big movie kiss and the female moviegoers sighed collectively. A bootblack polished shoes for ten cents and had $80,000 in Wall Street stocks. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novelist in his cups, waded in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel and couldn't make Walter Winchell's column. Clara Bow and Joan Crawford were the symbols of the self-designated Lost Generation, which danced its way through an apocalypse designed by Bacchus.

The mundane facts were that a hooker in a shot glass cost 25 cents; the same thing in lisle stockings came to two dollars. Men wore double-breasted pearl vests and fraternity keys. Sensation was everything. The citizens drank, not to be sociable but to get drunk. They spent their money and their youth with equal profligacy. Somehow, cruelty became a joy and men who would not pay $5.50 to see a chorus girl on stage would tip a morguekeeper $20 to see one on a slab.

The News published silhouettes of revolvers with the words "Stop Selling These," and this reminded peaceful men that a gun can make a hero of a coward. They drank wood alcohol, knowing that it induced blindness and sudden death, because there was no other anesthetic less expensive. Young ladies became engaged to stage-door Johnnies so that they could sue later for breach of promise. Winning or losing the suit was of small import; the romantic details in the tabloids were the winning gambit.

My first assignment on the News was a whim of Joseph Medill Patterson, the publisher. In the summer of 1929, he ordered me to escort two men, attired in pajamas, on the streets of New York. Mr. Patterson, after some cogitation, had decided that all men should wear pajamas in the summertime. The PJ boys were two ciphers and I took them to Central Park, to the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island boardwalk, Grant's Tomb, Columbia University and St. Patrick's Cathedral.

In spite of our propaganda extolling the neatness of creased pajamas, we won no converts. Mr. Patterson, of course, confined himself to his double-breasted suit. Still, this was no more reprehensible than the whim of Jack Lait, who, when his turn arrived to become editor of the Mirror, suddenly discovered a town in the state of Washington named Walla Walla and, in editorials and little inserts, asked the readership to start saying Walla Walla--for no discernible reason. Arthur Brisbane imported two females of fearsome size, who chopped down a tree in Central Park. He published their photos with the caption: "Any red-blooded American would be Proud to marry either of these Girls."

There was a morning when nothing happened. The metropolis teemed with crooks, gunfire, cement obsequies, incest and politicians who kept $200,000 in cash in tin boxes, but all of it had been printed before. Gauvreau, then editing the Graphic, sat at his desk writing 144-point headlines for the first afternoon edition, but none would sell a paper.

The optional course was to invent news. He called Arthur Mefford to his desk. "Meff," he said, "I want you to take this gun and go downstairs and around the back of the building. Climb the fire escape until you are outside my office window. Then fire a shot through the window into the ceiling. Understand me, Arthur. Into the ceiling."

Mefford, a topflight rewrite man who enjoyed attributing unsolved crimes to the Detroit Purple Gang, asked why. The managing editor told him to go fire the shot, then come back for instructions. Meff did it. The blast and tinkling glass brought the editorial department into the boss' office. Gauvreau asked Harry Grogin, the art director, to send a photographer to take a picture of the fire escape, paint a dotted line up the steps and show a skulking figure in white firing through the window.

This, too, was done blindly. Then Gauvreau wrote a headline for the first edition, over the full-page picture:

Underworld TriesTo IntimidateThe Graphic

Within the newspapers, we laughed so that we should not weep. Izzy Kaplan, a corpulent photographer on the Mirror, was charged with raping a girl who was in the darkroom to tell her life story. The editorial department got drunk at noon and attended Kaplan's trial at two P.M. The judge saw Izzy's protruding belly and dismissed the charge on the ground that the crime was physically impossible.

Tommy Flanagan was told by Lou Walker, picture editor of the Mirror, that the paper had lost all MGM advertising and to please hurry to the lobby of Loew's State and make a photograph that might win it back. The movie was The Canary Murder Case. Loew's had imported 600 canaries, which stood on perches with heads cocked, watching Flanagan pour a whole bottle of flash powder into a "gun." When it went off, so did the canaries. They died instantly. The photographer's defense: 600 simultaneous heart attacks.

Gladys Glad, "The World's Most Beautiful Woman," edited a beauty column for the Mirror. She had a wispy secretary named Sonny, a girl who arrived at nine A.M. to read the morning mail, written by females who were persistent in asking what to do about that pimple. At ten A.M., Sonny would be drunk. Miss Glad's husband, Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger, had a similar problem with his male secretary, and for a while, the Hellingers thought it might be a new love rite. However, diligent detective work revealed that Mark's secretary was getting intoxicated while trying to vulcanize a hangover. Sonny's case was more difficult. She arrived sober, ate bacon and eggs and fell over in a stupor. This mystified all hands, until it was learned that she had an agreement with the breakfast waiter to add a pint of gin to her four ounces of orange juice.

A Bronx reporter confided to me that he had two wives, two families. One was in New Jersey, the other in Connecticut. He kept them apart and spent midweek with one group, reserving weekends for the other. The only reason he gave me the scoop was that he wanted to borrow five dollars to romance a girlfriend.

Borrowing was an art, since salaries were $25 to $60 a week for good reporters and all the way up to $100 for a star. In time, each of the tabloids had its own loan shark, a slob who would lend five dollars for a week if the borrower agreed to return six. The users of this service were called the Six-for-Five Club.

The shark's most prosperous time came when a photographer on the Mirror bought a race horse. Everybody wanted to be told when it was ready for the killing. The photographer loafed his nag through a few trials, then phoned to give the gang the nod. That day everything, including the rent, went to the local bookie. The horse finished, which is about the kindest thing one could say. The owner begged forgiveness, claiming he had employed a cross-eyed jockey who couldn't count the furlong poles. The next time he said the horse was ready, there was a mass migration to the loan shark, who was so overwhelmed that he became choosy. The horse finished fourth. Real tears were shed by men who hadn't known they could cry. The third time it happened, the photographer walked the horse--silks and all--down East 45th Street and tied him to a hydrant. "He's all yours," he yelled up to the losers, and walked off.

After that, the editorial department joined the Monday-Before-Tuesday Club, an even more exclusive organization. To join, a busted reporter had to devise a phony assignment, write a cash voucher for five dollars or ten dollars and get an editor to sign it on Monday, the day before payday. The boss knew that there was no assignment, but he also knew that many of his boys were steeped in alcohol and alimony, and he felt stirrings akin to, but not quite, pity.

The Mirror's cashier was a sweet man named Hobby, who looked like a dissipated Santa. He never questioned the vouchers. For years, he helped keep the reporters financially afloat. Gauvreau, who had cashed a few fictional vouchers himself, asked the reporters and the photographers to chip in a dollar or two to get a gift for old man Hobby. They did. One afternoon, when the cashier came down from his cage, the gang watched him browse among the afternoon papers scattered over the city desk as Gauvreau sneaked up behind him. He tapped Hobby on the back and the old man jumped like a diver trying to do a half gainer into a wastebasket. "As members in good standing of the Monday-Before-Tuesday Club," the boss intoned, "it is my pleasure to present to you this fine gold watch as a token of our collective esteem." The watch glittered silently in a blue plush case and Hobby looked and burst into tears.

The editorial department thought that it was emotion, and it was. But not gratitude; fear. Hobby had been tapping the till for fives and tens himself. The difference was that he promised himself that he would repay the money, and reneged. He was over $3000 into the Hearst coffers and this could have moved him to another type of cage. Few tabloid stories ended as happily as this one. The writers and editors worked on the plot and came up with the reasonable assumption that if the management tossed Hobby into the clink, they'd never get the money back. If they kept him on as cashier and put bells on his fingers, they could deduct $20 a week for 150 weeks. It was so resolved, seconded and carried.

• • •

No one cared much about moral values. Honesty was the best policy for suckers. The successful gangster was the good guy; a casual conversation was a study in subtle semantics; the good girl was bad medicine; dying was the last thing a man wanted to do; a knowledge of libel laws and how to evade them was more important than an ability to spell; editors lost their minds trying to devise new sensations for their readers.

Phil Payne, an early editor of the Mirror, worked up a stunt guaranteed to draw 1,000,000 readers. He would take off from Old Orchard Beach, in Maine, aboard a clumsy aircraft called Old Glory, and fly to Rome. He would be the only person able to write an eyewitness account of this incredible adventure. The drumbeating before the event left New York nerve-racked and, when Old Glory finally rolled down the beach and lifted off the hard sand, the stunt reached the status of patriotism. Neither Payne nor the plane was ever seen again. The Mirror sagged to 550,000 readers.

On the afternoon Graphic, Bernarr Macfadden, the publisher, and Gauvreau, then the editor, worked to devise something that would not only get new readers but, more important, keep them. Gauvreau noted that the News was hanging onto readers by devising comic strips that had a continuity of thought. For example, one called Gasoline Alley introduced a woman who became pregnant, and 700,000 readers followed her hopes and miseries for nine months, until an infant named Skeezix was born.

Macfadden, who also published True Story Magazine, thought little of comic strips. Instead, he instituted a crusade to increase the five-cent fare to ten. This, he said, would reduce real-estate taxes in New York. Few of his readers, it seemed, had any interest in real estate, beyond walking across it. This project was abandoned and replaced by another sure winner: double-deck subway cars to reduce crowding. Macfadden had artists draw the proposed cars. It was applauded by all except sexual perverts, who respect crowded conditions. However, the city engineer pointed out that the subway tunnels were not big enough for double-deck cars, and those on the second floor would have to travel lying down.

At once, the Graphic dropped that gem and substituted a Walk-to-Work Club, the effect of which was to draw even more readers to the News. Desperately, Gauvreau located a professor of brain breathing, who did a series of articles on inhaling through one nostril and exhaling from the other. This was to quicken the wits. No stunt, however, permanently increases circulation unless it is followed by one more sensational.

Macfadden found a narcotics addict who said he had been cured by certain occult exercises. He said he would cure all addicts who would meet him at the Graphic office on Hudson Street. That night, the editorial department was filled with raving maniacs, screaming and shaking with palsied fright. The city editor, William Plummer, called the police. It made a good story.

The real news of the day--any day--rated little space in the tabloids. There were small columns headed "News in Brief" and "World News." This was the material that would be found, in considerable detail, on page one of The New York Times, The Sun or the Telegram. None of the eight-column sheets ever got beyond a readership of 350,000 in those days, although they showed an advertising profit. The Mirror had 550,000; the Graphic held onto 600,000; the News passed 850,000. Yet, they were lean and hungry and often a Saturday edition was but 20 pages.

Gauvreau hit pay dirt with his "Lonely Hearts." This was a promotion scheme designed to bring together friendless men and lonely women. The Graphic began to publish panting letters from the old and the naïve. These were paired off with similar letters from the opposite sex. In a week, New York was, in the vulgarest sense, swinging. The Graphic was sweating and happy. Letters were pouring in, bunched in big gray sacks. Gauvreau hired Madison Square Garden for a Lonely Hearts Ball, primarily to show reluctant advertisers his newspaper's strong following.

It was a smashing success. Crowds of timid spinsters shrieked with ecstasy as professional "warmers" pressed aft against them. Bachelors learned that everything is free and widows made bold bids and found that they had not lost the touch. Later, a girl walked into Gauvreau's office and deposited an infant on his desk. "This," she said, "is a memento of your Lonely Hearts Ball." A mature woman was found murdered in New Jersey by a sex fiend. She, too, had been a member. The Graphic decided to drop the club and return to sex stories in which its involvement was less direct.

The readers grew as jaded as the editors. They wouldn't buy mere sensation. The Graphic lost $519,018 in 1924; $1,579,470 in 1925; $1,459,645 in 1926; $1,074,888 in 1927 and $563,796 in 1928. "If only we can get the losses down to $10,000 a week," Macfadden told Gauvreau, "we'd be sitting pretty."

The struggle for 1,000,000 readers involved two newspapers that were not parties to the original war. These were William Randolph Hearst's morning New York American and his evening New York Journal. Both were standard-size newspapers with a flair for crusading and colorful writing. Imperceptibly, both inched toward the middle of the fight. They seemed beset by a notion that it was possible to maintain the best of the standard-size-newspaper policies while dabbling in the madness of tabloidiana. More and more, crusades and contests occupied the attention of the Hearst papers and special coverage for sensational stories became the watchword.

The dusty editorial offices on South William Street worked toward a peak of superlatives. The symphony of typewriters played night and day at allegro tempo. Damon Runyon, sitting with a porkpie hat back from his brow, the eyes squinting through an apostrophe of cigarette smoke, covered the big fights, the big trials and the executions at Sing Sing.

The Journal gave readers $30,000 a week for solving crossword puzzles. It took aim at the Graphic, the evening tabloid, and reached for the jugular. Soon, both newspapers were in a dead heat, with 700,000 readers apiece, each clawing for supremacy. Second place was suicide. Each one piled sensation on sensation and both began to bleed. In a short time, the Journal ran through three editors.

Hearst came up with an idea. If the Graphic was a problem to his newspaper, then the solution would be to hire the cause of the problem, the editor. The small, slight figure of Emile Gauvreau stood before the Lord of San Simeon at Sands Point, and William Randolph Hearst studied it and burst into laughter. "So you're the Graphic," he said. "You have created an awful nuisance. It may not be an indictable nuisance, but it is irritating to the Journal." He hired Gauvreau, hastening the death of the Graphic, and placed him on the Mirror as managing editor.

It was a healthful change for the little man with the sardonic smile, but it didn't alter the battle. He was in his new office in 1929. The fight was five years old. The morning World was collapsing. So was The Evening World, The Evening Mail and the Telegram. The latter merged with one of the Worlds and became the New York World-Telegram, a Scripps-Howard newspaper. The Herald and the Tribune could not stand the pace and merged under the Reid family banner. Six fine newspapers had become two.

Gauvreau trained the Mirror artillery on the News, but he was firing with a short fuse. The national advertisers, and some of the local merchants, staring through the debris and smoke, decided to capitulate to the News. Of the racy tabloids, it looked strongest. They had discarded the Graphic first, on the grounds that it wasn't quite a newspaper. It was a combination of Macfadden's True Story Magazine, noted for confession-type stories, and a pink-orange scandal sheet.

Of the remaining two, the Mirror seemed weaker. Mr. Hearst used cheap paper pulp and weak ink. As a picture newspaper, it required good halftone reproduction, and didn't have it. Only the News, backed by the Chicago Tribune, had good physical heft and good pictorial work. The millions of dollars poured into the News, backed by a group of smart editors, returned dividends.

The more the other two retrenched, the more the News spent on story coverage. It bought editorial cars for reporters, purchased a plot on East 42nd Street to build a skyscraper, sent several reporters and writers out on any good story and bought photos from amateurs. One of its first big picture beats was the purchase of film from a survivor of the sinking liner Vestris. The tilting deck, the frightened faces, were beyond price.

Reporters such as Red Dolan, Jack Miley, Martin Sommers and John O'Donnell mastered the terse, hard-hitting style of the tabloid. In addition, the News had comic strips such as Little Orphan Annie, Andy Gump, Moon Mullins and Smitty--all with enormous followings. News photographers blustered their way through police and fire lines to get pictures and were not above stealing photos from frames in homes.

The Hearst executives consoled themselves by proclaiming that there was room in New York for two morning tabloids. There wasn't, quite. The Mirror held onto 600,000 circulation as the News passed the 850,000 mark. Both might have lived had the sole component been circulation. But it wasn't. The advertisers could make or break a paper, and they saw too many New Yorkers in subways and buses with both a News and a Mirror under their arms. In an overlapping circulation, the advertiser puts his money on the larger.

One of the concomitant factors in the contest for survival was the matter of the special writer, or columnist. This was a stylized editorialist with a big by-line, his own sacrosanct space and, often, his picture in the paper. He had a secretary, his name on delivery trucks and a permanent divorce from the city desk. Now and then, the big man condescended to stop by the rewrite battery to swap pleasantries and perhaps pick up an idea for another column.

A one-paper columnist might draw as little as $100 a week in the era of the tabloid terror or, syndicated, he might earn $1000 for the same product. In the early days, sports columnists were not syndicated, and these included Paul Gallico of the News, Dan Parker of the Mirror and Ed Sullivan of the Graphic. Of the three, only Parker of the Mirror would remain at his post until the paper collapsed under him. Gallico went on to write novels and motion pictures; Sullivan became a Hollywood columnist, a Broadway columnist and, in time, a television personality.

If the war was unique, so was Walter Winchell. On the Graphic, the former dancer pecked at a typewriter, retailing Broadway gossip in terse sentences that closed with three dots. He was the first to devise this means of covering a variety of topics in one column. He also invented libelproof phrases like "Pfft!" to describe a couple contemplating divorce and "infanticipating" for a pregnancy.

He was short, sharp of feature and voice, fast of feet and mind. His following, almost from the start, was enormous. The average man read Winchell to divine the so-called "low-down" on Broadway characters; the Broadwayites read him to keep abreast of professional gossip; the gangsters read him to have something to discuss while sitting in a night club making a selection from the chorus line; newspapermen read him because he brought something new and powerful to their business.

Winchell's good friend was Mark Hellinger of the News. Hellinger had black, slick hair, pale-blue eyes, an ability to write fictional sob stories about poor butterflies who hovered too long over the flame of Broadway, and he drove a lavender Kissel. Hellinger started in 1923, when the News gave him an entire page in the Sunday editions. He was a devotee of O. Henry and De Maupassant and worked hard to devise a "snapper" ending to his stories. Later he was given a daily column called "About Broadway," but the News was not convinced that it needed a topflight Broadway that columnist. Hellinger had a desk among many desks, no private office. He drank a fifth of brandy a day and called everybody "Pappy" or, if this was not the proper gender, "Kiddy." At bars and in barbershops, he paid all the checks, picking up tabs as though they were cash.

The two men were opposites and, on different tabloids, rivals. Still their friendship flowered. Winchell was unhappy on the Graphic. His editor, Emile Gauvreau, despised him. His publisher, Bernarr Macfadden, couldn't understand the triple-dot gibberish. The city desk envied him and magnified his mistakes.

The two original Broadway columnists worked the late tour together, moving from Guinan's club to the Paradise to Barney Gallant's in the Village, always listening, always asking questions. Winchell was a nondrinker and nonsmoker. His mind remained keen at dawn; Hellinger squinted at the world through the bottom of a Hennessy bottle and made promises to pretty chorus girls to get their names "in the paper."

In time, both moved to the Mirror--Winchell first, in early 1929; Hellinger in November of the same year. The Graphic replaced Winchell with Louis Sobol; Hellinger's successor on the News was Sidney Skolsky, whose specialty was a character delineation called Tin Types. Winchell got to the Mirror in time to discover that he was working for the man he just left, Emile Gauvreau. Hellinger and Winchell had adjoining offices on the third floor--one flight above the editorial department--and averaged about $500 a week for openers. In time, this moved to $1000 a week because of king Features syndication. The Mirror, in grabbing both top columnists, thought that they would pull sufficient circulation from the Graphic and the News to tip the scales. They weren't quite that good.

Winchell was the stronger draw of the two and his spot on page ten was so well read that advertising on that page was sold at premium rates. For a long time, his nod of recognition or condemnation could make or break a man or a place. He had power and he was unafraid to use it. In time, he moved from Broadway events to national affairs and world politics. Hellinger wrote 5400 short stories, some of them two or three times, all with a surprise ending. Long before the tabloid war was over, he moved to the West Coast and became a writer-producer of motion pictures.

For a while, I worked with Hellinger as an assistant, taking story ideas and weaving them into his style of phrasing. Also, I wrote "Oddities in the News" for the Winchell Lucky Strike broadcasts, which always opened with the signature line: "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press ...!" In a modest way, I would say that I knew these men, as I knew Gauvreau and Harvey Deuell and the others. Winchell wanted people to read him. Hellinger wanted people to love him. Each succeeded in his personal goal and failed to reach the other man's. Winchell was the perennial cub reporter, eager, inquisitive, searching. Hellinger was a soft touch who affected blue suits, blue shirts and white ties. If a story didn't tap him on the shoulder in his rounds, he could invent one. Or failing all else, a check mark would appear in the old scrapbook to indicate that this story was now being revised to be published the second time.

The Mirror was now ready to fight the final long battle with the News, but Gauvreau found, to his dismay, that he had a new general: Arthur Brisbane. He also had a world-wide economic depression and neither of these events could be pleasing to a man with a Napoleonic complex and a loose forelock. Brisbane was a noted editor who was a paid $250,000 a year by Hearst. In fact, Brisbane had hardly settled himself in a big private office with secretaries and whirling dictation machines when "The Chief" twitted him with this message: "Dear Arthur, you are now getting out the worst newspaper in the United States."

Mr. Brisbane, a big bald dome shining behind the candid blue-eyed stare of an infant, had a minuscule sense of humor. He began to summon Gauvreau for daily orders, had his personal cartoonists in the Mirror art department and wrote incisive memos:

Will you inform the editor of the pink edition that we would make a better impression on business people if we had left out last night's picture of the lady who keeps a "gay house" in Chicago. At least off the front page. Also, she is hellishly ugly. Let us print photographs of as few prostitutes as possible unless they commit an interesting murder or otherwise force themselves into the news, as they are bound to do. I see also that the News used the word adulterer in a headline. Let them have it. That sort of thing will swing the church over to us. Stories of vice we want to tell coldly. By that I don't mean that we have to leave out the interesting facts, but we shouldn't tell the reader about it as though we were enjoying it. Also I notice we speak of Dutch Schultz as "the fat boy," but on page two we print a picture of him looking thin. Dig up a recent picture of this racketeer immediately.

An efficiency expert ordered the managing editor to suspend the junior men in every department and morale at the Mirror slid low. The "breakfast" editing of the paper by Brisbane forced Gauvreau and his city editor, George Clarke, to be cautious. They were trying to pre-edit Brisbane and the Mirror suffered.

Brisbane and his subordinates were not in perpetual disagreement. He backed his men when they made good moves. No one could accuse him of enjoying comic strips, but he felt that the acquisition of Ham Fisher and his Joe Palooka strip was a coup. Later, he felt equally smug about strips such as Li'l Abner and Terry and the Pirates. The Mirror had no radio columnist and Gauvreau hired Nick Kenny from the News for a reputed $60 a week. The readers' letters column averaged four missives per day and I was assigned to "goose it." The U.S. fleet was in New York, so I wrote a fake letter, signed Irate Mother, and said that I would rather see my daughter dead than out with a sailor. For a while, the readers averaged 1,300 steamy letters per day.

I also promoted contests, giving away $40,000 a month in sable coats and Packard limousines in return for readership interest in pasting faces together that had been cut in three segments. All of these contests began simply, so that any reader, however dull, could solve them. Once I felt that we had the reader hooked, the succeeding photos became less amenable to plastic surgery and, before we published the final set, we had to make certain that a tie for first prize was impossible.

Between these chores, I was sent to Sing sing to cover executions. The News sent George Kivel, a fat, jolly man who claimed that he was immune to the shock of watching sudden death but who always passed paper cups around among the reporters to be filled and refilled with bootleg whiskey an hour before the 11 P.M. meeting in the 12 church pews that, with the electric chair, constituted the death house.

The tabloids squeezed a lot of juice from these executions, referring to the pre-execution chamber as "the dance hall" and, although I never saw a man die any way except silently and well, their copy spoke of "the quavering, craven coward" being yanked toward the chair, "slavering at the mouth," as though there might be another aperture from which to slaver. Every detail was magnified--the "blue smoke curling from the back of his hand as his body cracked against the sturdy straps," "tears of remorse staggering down his cheeks" as the body was wheeled out for autopsy, etc., ad nauseam.

A sad-looking man named Albert Fish was so fascinating to readers that, before his execution, he was on the front page for a week. Mr. Fish lived near Gramercy Park and his weakness was eating little girls. He kidnaped them by promising them a ride home in a trolley car, killed them in his apartment and dismembered them in a bathtub. The parts were dropped into a barrel of brine. There they were marinated until sad Fish felt a sexual urge. Then he would eat a piece and attain an orgasm. His trial was, in a tragic sense, amusing, because the sad man was totally insane and New York State spent considerable time proving that he was aware of the nature and quality of his acts and that society would automatically be improved by his death. In Sing Sing, he was docile but, in the dead of night, felt the same urges. There were no little girls around, so he ate bedsprings and glass and was surprised to find, too late, that he achieved an identical result. The Sing Sing executioner, Mr. Robert Elliott, said that Fish could not be executed, because the bedsprings would short-circuit the chair. The State of New York had to retain the services of surgeons, who probed his belly to remove old tacks, nails, bedsprings, glass and other ecstatic oddments. He was repaired in time for death, but Elliott swung the switch and stepped back, as though he feared the whole panel would blow up. Sad Mr. Fish asked a guard: "Will I have time to get a thrill out of the first shock?"

• • •

The handsome, paralytic governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was running for the Democratic nomination for President, against Alfred E. Smith, when the Graphic expired. Macfadden, after the departure of Gauvreau, tried to bend the scandal sheet toward a conservative image. Newspapers in trouble can never be saved by changing faces. It alienates the remaining readers who buy it for what it is, not for what it can be. Macfadden filed a bankruptcy petition and the melting pots in the Graphic composing room began to chill. The thing had lived eight years--sex and fruit juice.

In this year, 1932, one of the survivors in this long game of Ten Little Indians--the Mirror--decided to fight harder for that elusive 1,000,000 circulation. In February, it inaugurated a Sunday edition and appointed Jack Lait, an old Chicago police reporter with loose lips, as editor. Lait had confidence and a keen eye for a racy story.

In a short time, he was running the show. Emile Gauvreau, capitalizing on a trip he had made to Russia, wrote a book called What So Proudly We Hailed. It said kind things about the Soviet Union and made the U.S. appear provincial by comparison. William Randolph Hearst fired Gauvreau at once and appointed Lait to replace him. It was a dramatic scene, the limping genius walking around his office, meditatively rubbing his forelock, with subordinate editors crying, "If you go, Chief, I'm going, too." He went and they stayed.

Back in 1919, Carr Van Anda, managing editor of The New York Times, had taken a look at the News, an infant devoid of character and journalistic grace, and said: "This paper should reach a circulation of two million." In 15 years, it did. The Sunday News passed the mark in 1934 and showed a profit of $3,300,000. Joseph Medill Patterson, the publisher, was certain that the key to success was simplicity and boldness. He tried it in the magazine business and lost $14,000,000 on a product called Liberty.

Over at the New York Herald Tribune, the lucid city editor, Stanley Walker, wrote: "In its handling of news, the Patterson tabloid is much less razzle-dazzle, much more conservative and factual, than it used to be. By 1934, it is neither conservative nor wild--just a jolly, rollicking brother of all humanity. It does not pretend to be a complete newspaper. It prints what interests the editors and throws the rest away."

The analysis is superficial but on target. In the same breath, Walker enumerated the Mirror's weaknesses. "It has little in it that isn't done better in the News. It is too bad that the Mirror feels that it must print strained and often inaccurate stories, although it is seriously handicapped by a lack of news services and the further circumstance that, although it has attained what ordinarily would be considered a splendid circulation, more than 500,000, the advertisers don't seem to like it."

Lait and the Hearst hierarchy refused to accept this thesis of doom. Circulation and advertising are Siamese siblings. They live together. They die together. The World, under Pulitzer, lived well on 395,689 circulation and increased its profit by $500,000. Walter Lippmann wrote scholarly editorials and Frank Sullivan could make page one with a story of a rooster who laid eggs. The World's words had plumage, but when the price went from two cents to three, circulation dropped. This frightened advertisers. The paper went back to two cents, but the blood pressure dropped to 285, 882 and death from shock ensued.

Both Worlds and the Telegram were sold to Roy Howard for $5,000,000. With the Associated Press franchise, he drew two aces--columnist Heywood Broun and book reviewer Harry Hansen. Broun, a stout, sweaty man, was organizing the American Newspaper Guild. Lee Wood, executive editor of the new World Telegram, was expected to fight Hearst's Journal, with its big circulation and meager advertising, but he didn't. He drew a bead on the old lady of Broadway, The Sun. Keats speed, the managing editor of The sun, was possessed of a notion that his sun, could hang onto a steady and literate 300,000 persons. The paper's motto was: "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." One day the paper published its own obituary.

The long war had been decided, but the warriors acted as though it hadn't. John C. Martin, publisher of the Post, cut the paper down to tabloid size and tried to make it dignified. It was an impeccable lady dressed like a whore. J. David Stern hurried to New York, bought the Post, ran it back up to eight-column size, fired almost everyone who walked across his line of vision and made the sheet a political liberal. The post would live through the tabloid era and become a tabloid again. Many times, in the heat of battle, what others accepted as a death rattle was only the clanking of old post presses, grinding out an assortment of columnists superimposed by exposes. It had a greater will to live, and less to live for, than stronger newspapers. A few brawny ones died that first year of struggle, 1924. Frank Munsey bought The Evening Mail and merged it with The New York Telegram. Sixty days later, he sold his Herald to the Reid family, which owned the Tribune.

The marvel of the 1930s was that Hearst had three newspapers in New York that, collectively, lost money. The Mirror was agonizingly slow as it fought toward a break-even point. The Journal, which had flashy make-up and name writers, had a circulation of 600,000 and earned a profit, but it had to fight hard for its daily bread. The American, which had fought Pulitzer's morning World before the turn of the century, had emerged victorious but exhausted. It had picked up The World's classified advertising, but the winner had the longest death scene of all.

• • •

The personnel in this war was expected to be eccentric. Drunks bounced from one protagonist to another. Reporters' wives left them regularly. An editor or photographer or columnist who slept with chorus girls was rated by the number of times the managed to sneak their photos into the paper. Tom Cassidy of the News pounded out a story with his eyes closed, his breath reeking of cheap booze. "I can't fire him," city editor Deuell said, "because the stories he writes make sense and are well phrased. We may be living in a time when talent despises itself."

Walter Howey, a Mirror editor with one suspicious eye and a friendly one made of glass, stalked the city desk, devising ways of "screwing" everybody. His solitary loyalty was to William Randolph Hearst and his nefarious schemes were sometimes aimed at friendly Hearst editors who stood between him and The Chief. He spent his off-duty hours trying to devise a way of sending a photograph over a telephone wire.

In the early post-War years, Gene Fowler was managing editor of the American. This gentle heart spent his time standing in the doorway of his office plunking sad songs on a mandolin. His behavior, at times, was no further outside the realm of the rational than the others'. He fired Walter Davenport for describing the grand marshal of a suffragette parade as "riding on a dappled gray horse." The horse was white. Davenport's alibi was that he covered the parade from a Fifth Avenue saloon and the bartender seldom washed the front window.

A man who murdered his wife insisted on surrendering to Jim Hurley, fish-and-game editor of the Mirror. The killer was a garage mechanic who came home to find his wife devoting considerable energy to a strange man. He shot her and tied her lover to a chair, bunched newspapers under it and lit the papers.

"I wasn't mad at him," the husband said, "just her. So I figured I never got anything out of life except reading your column, and I might as well drop over and give you the scoop."

Hurley watched the man lift a warm gun from a pocket. "This," Hurley said softly, "is the outdoor-sports department, mister." He pointed to the city desk. "Indoor sports are over there."

Red Dolan, star reporter of the News, was chronically late reporting to the office, and Harvey Deuell sentenced him to Ship News. This entailed getting aboard a Coast Guard cutter at five A.M. with $35-a-week misfits and sailing to The Narrows to climb aboard big liners for interviews with notable passengers. He begged for mercy, pointing out that the new assignment was "for kids." Besides, if he arrived one minute late, the cutter would be gone. He might even have to sit up all night to make it.

Deuell was adamant. "I'm going to teach you to be on time, Red," he said, "and you're going to stay on this lousy assignment until you learn." Dolan obeyed. On the first morning, he made the cutter on time. Aboard the Ile de France, he met Joseph P. Kennedy, a big stockholder in motion-picture productions, and Gloria Swanson, a big movie property. Kennedy poured the drinks, Miss Swanson answered the questions and Dolan sailed up the harbor in style. In parting, the Boston banker offered Dolan $300 a week to write motion pictures. Back at the News, Red consulted with Jack Miley in the men's room. Should he or shouldn't he?

He should. Pumping liquor from the bilges, he returned to the city room to tell Mr. Deuell where to put the Coast Guard cutter. He went West to drink and write movies. One day, laughing at a joke, he had a spasm and died of a heart attack. In New York, Dolan's sister held services for the last of the star reporters in an East Side apartment. His confreres were solemn, looking at Red's blue urn on a mantel. It contained his ashes, and a few rounds of drinks did not soften the doleful air. The lady tipped the urn to show that it was empty. "Isn't that just like Red?" she said. "Late again."

If it is true that the protagonists were eccentric, so, too, were the personalities who made the news. The Journal carried a story that the underworld, trying to spare itself the embarrassment of leaving clues in killing off rival gangsters, had bought itself a crematorium in the Catskill Mountains. The story was accurate, but the law saw nothing unusual about it and advised reporters to try "minding your own damn business."

A lusty old realtor named Edward Browning married a girl named Peaches Heenan, 16, and presented her with a duck on a leash. Daddy Browning was fond of adopting very young girls. A society man, Kip Rhinelander, eloped with a Negro girl and insisted that she was Indian but didn't know it. On his wedding night, he ordered her to execute an Indian war dance around his bed.

Mark Hellinger stood in freezing rain on East 43rd Street as a hearse brought a casket and pallbearers in swallowtail carried it up a brownstone stoop. He carried his fedora over his heart. This was the daily delivery of gin. Owney Madden, the gangster, thought that New York was going crazy. He fled to Hot Springs, never to be seen again.

Mayor Jimmy Walker, who awakened one morning still wearing pearl-gray spats--and a monumental hangover--had to greet an intrepid pilot at city hall at ten A.M. "What's the name of his plane?" his Honor asked. "The Winnie Mae," an aide whispered. "Stop shouting," the mayor replied. On the steps of city hall, Walker couldn't think of a thing to say except that he ached all over, but he finally intoned: "The Winnie Mae, the Winnie Must, the Winnie Did." The journalists said the line was immortal.

A pretty girl accused President Warren G. Harding of being the father of her baby. Harding died in San Francisco. A Boston newspaper with a clear beat on the story pushed the page-one form onto a dumb-waiter on the fourth floor. The dumb-waiter was at the fifth floor. The editors braced themselves when the building rocked, then went out quietly to get drunk.

The tabloids ruined the life of Rudolph Valentino by referring to him as the world's greatest lover. Until he read about it, the movie star hadn't thought of questioning the matter. Senator Tom Heflin of Alabama fired a shot into his coattails and told voters it was done by Catholics who wanted Alfred E. Smith to be President. In a serious vein, he warned the electorate that, if Smith became the Chief Executive of the United States, the Pope would build a tunnel between Rome and Washington and Smith would have to traverse it once a day to get his orders from his Holiness.

Some did not laugh. Victor Watson, an editor at the American, took an elevator in the Abbey Hotel and leaped from a high window. Men were selling apples on cold street corners. Barbers placed hot towels on the faces of those about to be shot. Unemployed women who couldn't stand the open solicitation of men bought a time-payment record player and advertised private dance lessons. Eddie Cantor, a hit in Whoopee, went hitless in Wall Street. On cold days, men and women begged the price of a ticket to a movie and remained inside all day.

Brisbane didn't laugh. He sat atop the Hearst editorial structure like an organist in a choir loft, and he couldn't make music. The dissonance began to affect him. "The trouble with these people," he wrote, referring to advertisers, "is that they don't know our problems. I should like to see them try to get a million readers with such news as they describe. They ought to know that when I get a million and a half more readers, I'll tone the whole thing down, make room for more advertising and be smug, like Captain Patterson. Pulitzer did it. He was yellower than Hearst once, but now they're canonizing him. This is pure hypocrisy."

This is the epitaph of the champion. He rationalizes. As Brisbane's newspapers lost more and more money, he found smaller and smaller villains. One afternoon he turned a vindictive eye on the comic strip Mickey Mouse and ordered it to be deleted at once. "Children," he wrote, "can be better occupied reading Sir James Jeans about the world we live in. Throw that rat out!"

At no time did any of the warriors glimpse the impossibility of their posture. No one could hang onto 1,000,000 readers without descending to the gutter. No advertiser would spend money on a gutter paper. While the News was publishing a novel called Ex-Wife, the Mirror was paying James Whittaker to sit home and write a competitive serial called Ex-Husband. Fading beauties were offered $10,000 to write their candid memoirs; an eyewitness account of a murder was worth $50. Reporters were told that getting the news was not enough. They were ordered to steal photographs, ransack rooms for diaries, hide witnesses and lie to their competitors. Rewrite men who were stuck with mundane material were told, "Think about an angle." Editors who whined about ethics were told, "Think about your kids." Photographers were ordered to get cheesecake photos: lots of legs and, if possible, partially covered bosoms.

None of it worked. It lifted the blood pressure but not the circulation. The situation deteriorated to the point where friendly newspapers fought one another. The Mirror and the American, blood brothers, began to race each other to the newsstands in the Bronx and Brooklyn. This final struggle for survival was ridiculous and tragic. The dollar each lost came from the same wallet, but the news handlers glared at each other and sometimes kicked bundles of opposition morning newspapers down sewers. An American reporter, Martin Mooney, was arrested and sentenced to 90 days for not telling a grand jury what he knew, if anything, about the connection between the numbers racket and a Tammany politician, James J. Hines.

This was in the nature of a final symptom in a long illness, because there was a time when no court would have the temerity to incur the wrath of Mr. Hearst and Mr. Brisbane. The lower courts had sniffed the decay, detected the toothlessness and cuffed the press lords with impunity. Suddenly, without warning, the Hearst empire looked at its ancient "flagship," the American, and wrote "-30-." Arthur Brisbane preached a doleful eulogy: "That's nothing," he said. "Do you fellows know what will happen if Mr. Hearst dies? Do you know? I'll tell you what will happen. The executors and the banks will look over this chain of publications and kill and sell every newspaper which doesn't show a profit. Think about that. A lot of fancy editors will be looking for work."

The thing he said was true. Every death left at least 500 starving pallbearers. There were fewer newspapers to absorb them. Some, like Joel Sayre, John McNulty, the younger Lardners, Gene Fowler, Gordon Kahn, Red Dolan and Martin Sommers, could move to another pew and start meditating over magazine articles, books or motion pictures. To the few, the expiration of a beloved sheet was a blessing, because it kicked their coattails toward higher incomes. But the average mourners--district men, city-disk men, copy cutters, compositors and pressmen--found standing room only at the back of the temple, and they wept for themselves and their children. There was no pension plan. No dole. No severance pay. No sympathy. Some swallowed their pride and pounded out copy for public-relations firms. Others got jobs writing speeches for politicians. A few applied for employment in big corporations as "statisticians." Overnight, each time it happened, the world became a cold and black cinder and the man awakened to find himself blind and emasculated.

Toward the close of the 1930s, the Mirror began to show a profit. It was as though part of a head and one nostril had appeared on a sea of red ink. It was a less violent paper than it had been. The wire desk began to "sell" stories of a hike in utility rates--formerly regarded as dull stuff--to the make-up editor for page-two display. Hitler's momentarily inoffensive war against the French and the British on the western front was worthy of a page-one headline. The sex and crime material was still present, but it didn't dominate the paper. A steady clientele of 690,000 readers kept the presses whirling and a stream of automotive advertising, in addition to some national and local advertising, tickled the Mirror's cash registers.

And yet this abused carbon copy of the News remained pale and barely decipherable. It had the same character as a rusty weather vane. The editorials were written by John R. McCrary, who had a degree in architecture from Yale. The daily viewpoint swung and was dependent upon the opinions of the Hearst hierarchy, sitting in plush offices on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street. The feel of the paper was as bad as ever. Rubbing it between the fingers caused the ink to bleed. The pages were opaque even without holding them up to a light. Stereotyped reporting and pedestrian photos became the Mirror's signature.

Success was a matter of how many Indians were left. In the morning field, there were now four--the Times, the Herald Tribune, the News and the Mirror. There were enough readers, enough advertising, to support these. Barely. If one newspaper became a little more prosperous, it could be disastrous for one of the remaining three. The balance was so delicate that the Herald Tribune, with a new and sophisticated face, was losing money to the Times.

In the evening field, the 1940s closed with three newspapers of the original big six still publishing and a new baby, PM, struggling in an incubator. The war of the tabloids was over--or almost so--but some of the dying fought death as though a miracle were impending.

The threat of a strike by the American Newspaper Guild, the mail deliverers, printers, pressmen and engravers, turned the publishers' spines to gelatin--because they knew that a shutdown of operations, even a short one, could reduce the Indians to three. They had learned, in an earlier strike against the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, that when a newspaper stops publishing, even for a short time, a percentage of the readers turns away permanently. The longer the paper is in limbo, the more readers it loses.

And yet the union contracts were staggered so that when negotiations with one were completed, another, with bigger demands, fell due. This kept the publishers negotiating for long periods just to keep publishing. If one of the unions struck, members of the others would not cross a picket line. This involved a complete shutdown. The publishers tried to band together, proclaiming that if one newspaper did not publish because of a strike, the others would not publish. In retrospect, it appears that both unions and management were long on threats and short on foresight. Neither side displayed a sense of public service or responsibility to the readers. It was a grudge fight. These tend to become feuds, which, in turn, beget murder.

Economically, the balance between health and disaster was too finely drawn. Whether or not a massive strike occurred, it is probable that one or two more of the survivors had to expire. The money of John Hay Whitney was funneled into the Herald Tribune when the Reid family gave up. Politically, the paper remained Republican, but it spoke smugly out of many sides of its mouth. The physical make-up was changed so many times that readers had to study the mastheads on newsstands to find out which was the Trib.

The Times maintained its sedate character and became a newspaper's newspaper, to be studied by city desks all over America for "folo-up" stories. The more it spent on domestic and foreign coverage, the more circulation and advertising it attracted. It was no Administration's "boy" and its readers sensed this. In the early 1950s, the surviving newspapers agreed that the Times was no longer a party to the war; it had such a large readership (700,000 daily) and so much money that its virtue was unassailable.

The News was selling 2,250,000 copies daily and 3,392,000 on Sunday. In a page-three box, it often told its readers, loudly, that it had spurned a number of pages of advertising because it had more than it could handle. It was not unusual for the News to whip out a main news section on Sundays of more than 100 pages.

The Mirror, chinning itself with 850,000 daily readers, passed the 1,100,000 mark with its Sunday newspaper. It didn't have the strength to climb higher and it didn't dare loosen its grip. The editorial department was gloomy with rumors that the Hearst Corporation was about to stop publication, about to sell to a private group, about to merge with the New York Journal American. Veterans took to boasting about how many weeks' severance pay they had coming "if the roof falls in." These rumors reached the advertisers, and publisher Charles McCabe issued periodic denials that the Mirror was going to do anything but keep getting out a paper as best it could.

The Post crusaded up and down the alleys of New York, indicting such circulation grabbers as Walter Winchell and Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City with "inside" stories. Its daily copy read like a necklace of editorials of many hues. It wore its liberalism like a personal copyright. If the founder, Alexander Hamilton, could have seen the Post, he may have permitted Aaron Burr to shoot him again. PM, on the other side of town, was a War baby. Marshall Field, a Chicago store owner, spawned PM on the premise that there was room for a well-written tabloid. He had Jimmy Cannon writing "The Sergeant Says" while Cannon was still in the U.S. Army, and he had Bob Brumby, a Georgian of considerable talent, writing a Broadway column. The rewrite battery was so clever that PM's most ardent fans were writers on other newspapers.

This was also true of the World. But while it is flattering to hear the applause of confreres, no one has been able to transmute it into cash. Field's resources kept PM alive for several years, but the ratio of advertising to circulation kept falling and the publisher watched himself pour treasure from other enterprises into a sparkling cipher. The journalistic gentry predicted that, in the battle, PM would survive and the Post would die. The millions who rode the subways decided to the contrary, and PM's sudden death in the afternoon induced an assortment of editors and reporters to repair to local taverns for the treatment of chronic depression. In the surviving newspapers, PM's demise caused an aura of fatalistic pessimism to engulf city rooms.

The World-Telegram was gathering a new set of heads for thinking. The old ones were tiring of the fight. It had turned out to be a 40-year war. Roy Howard and his bow tie were seen at the weekly lunch of the Dutch Treat Club, but not at the office. New men reached for the helm, but the ship was becalmed. The circulation would run in the lee of 425,000, then sink a little.

The New York World-Telegram and The Sun never shouted. Perhaps that was a weakness. It maintained a dignity, using big black type only when a reporter came in with an exclusive story of substance. In the summer, the paper sampled the waters of New York and found them still polluted. Ward Morehouse, a toothless tiger, talked of the theater as though it had died in his youth. Frank Farrell brightened a page with New York jottings. Editorials were carefully qualified and screened by the bosses. Joe Williams, a veteran sports columnist, was becoming dyspeptic. Only Willard Mullin and his cartoons caught the eye.

The Journal American had the best shoot-the-works city desk. It seldom held its fire. Paul Schoenstein, as managing editor, could make spot decisions. Edward Mahar, a snowy-haired city editor, had the affection of his staff and the reporters took turns "going to hell for him and back again." Basically, the Journal American was practicing tabloid journalism without a license. The district men and the stringers still prowled, looking for the news beat, as though it might hold for a day instead of the usual 20 minutes. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., accompanied by Bob Considine and Frank Conniff, formed a task force that flew to the corners of the globe for the exclusive story. For a long time, they rode high. The staff often fought the world of narcotics or a psychopathic bomber and assumed other police chores. The stories were so spectacular that the district attorney's office didn't know whether to pin a medal on the editors or indict them for obstructing justice.

The make-up of the paper was exciting. The Journal American never conceded that there could be a day on which nothing happened. And yet circulation was down to 506,000 and only 640,000 on Sunday. Inside, there was the drawing power of Dorothy Kilgallen, Bob Considine, the masterly illustrations of Burris Jenkins, Jr., a sharp critique of television and radio by Jack O'Brien, social news by Cholly Knickerbocker and the last of the truly Broadway columns, by Louis Sobol. The paper had the unctuous character of a Catholic faro dealer. But it was broke. The J. A. was taking more and more money from other Hearst properties. The flagship in the Hearst chain was now the kept woman. She wasn't even young.

• • •

Newspaper doctors always issue optimistic reports. No matter how ill the patient or how well founded the doleful rumors, they proclaim that the sheet will live, will flourish. It was so with the Mirror. Circulation was up, within 150,000 of the coveted 1,000,000, but the death rattle could be heard in the presses. The Mirror had been better off with 600,000 circulation when the News had 1,200,000. Then, it was at least running two to one behind its free-spending rival. With 850,000 against 2,250,000 for the News, it was losing ground and advertising.

On the afternoon of October 16, 1963, the Mirror gave up. Those who had been with the paper since its birth in 1924--Mort Ehrman, Aaron Altman, Dan Parker, Selig Adler--gathered around the bulletin board and adjusted their spectacles as a management notice was tacked. After this day's run, the obituary said, the Mirror would cease publication. Nobody wept. Some seemed dazed. Some phoned home. Some went next door to Sam's for a double.

The shock jarred newspaperdom in waves. The intensity was in proportion to the distance from East 45th Street, New York. Some of the daily features had been sold to the News. All this meant was that the Mirror could not be sold. The city, already full of good reporters and photographers and editors with long-standing records of unemployment, now had several hundred more. The mechanical unions were hit, too. Many of their members took their journeyman's card and left for friendlier climates. None of the union leaders believed that they were forcing weak papers to the wall; all of management had a contrary view. Salaries had gone up, in some instances, 300 percent over 1924. Working hours had dwindled. Fringe benefits were up. The retail price of papers had arced from two cents to ten cents, but the price of pulp had risen, too. There was one unheftable factor: education. During the 40-year war, the people had become better informed. In 1924, most workers had elementary-school educations. In 1964, the generation had 12 years of formal education and more. These people, as readers, were more analytical. They could spot trash and sensation as such. They had stopped voting for the editor's political candidate in 1936, when 94 percent of the press favored Alf Landon against Franklin D. Roosevelt. They heard newscasts in their automobiles, saw television broadcasts at home. More of them read news magazines. They were sophisticated. The tabloids (and I include the Journal American in the group) could not rise to this level. They pandered to an older generation and, like the newspapers themselves, such readers diminished. The young "gum chewers" still favored the tabloids, but advertisers questioned their power to purchase products and services.

The final shot was fired on April 25, 1966. Two afternoon papers and a morning paper merged, giving each a one-third interest in a solid property. The World-Telegram and The Sun (ScrippsHoward) gave up its independence to blend its copy with the Journal American (Hearst) and the Herald Tribune (Whitney). Thus, three Indians became one. Problems with the Newspaper Guild and other unions did not permit the three to capitalize on a combined circulation of 1,180,000.

After four and a half months of debate and settlements, the new paper was published and, after some curiosity sale, it settled to a circulation of 700,000. It might properly have been called The World-Telegram, Sun, Journal American and Herald Tribune. The triad publishing group settled on World Journal Tribune, but the inescapable fact is that seven big newspapers had, in four decades, become one. The post, now the arch rival of the combine, had picked up only 22,000 readers in the final stages of the war--from 320,000 in 1963 to 342,000 in March 1966.

When the smoke cleared and peace had been restored, there were only two P.M. papers--W. J. T. with 700,000 readers, and the Post with 350,000. In the morning field, the News had 2,250,000 and The New York Times, 767,000. An assortment of 13 newspapers in the great metropolis of New York had been reduced to four, with a total readership of 4,000,000.

In the suburbs, small papers began to flex their muscles. Hackensack, New Jersey's The Record had 146,000; The Jersey Journal (New Jersey) had 95,000; the Long Island press held 338,000; Long Island Star-Journal, 97,000; Newark (New Jersey) Star-Ledger, 246,000; Newark News 283,000; Newsday (Long Island) 414,000; and, in addition, and old sloth, The Wall Street Journal, had stirred itself when the War was almost over and now had 989,000 readers.

These were all within the so-called New York metropolitan area, which is within a radius of 60 miles from Times Square. They totaled more than 2,500,000--all of it siphoned from what the New York press lords regard as their eminent domain. And there were additional small and healthy newspapers in Westchester and Essex, Nassau and Monmouth. Readers were becoming "local," Many seemed more interested in a Main Street bargain in beef and a benefit dance in a village firehouse than in editorial thunder.

The proliferation of the pygmies ensured the death of the giants. One more newspaper had to go. The World Journal Tribune had a dual problem: unions and personality. It shared the former with the News, the Post and The New York Times, all of whom found themselves in the untenable position of bargaining with rapacious union leaders every few months. One would hardly conclude an agreement with the engravers when he would be facing the mail deliverers or the Newspaper Guild across the table. These would barely be settled when the printers or the pressmen would follow. Each watched the "package" given to the others and the succeeding bargainers asked for more.

The News and the Times could endure the squeeze for a while. The Post hung on because the will of its publisher, Mrs. Dorothy Schiff, was that the paper would continue. It was ironic that this sheet, the perennial sick sister, was destined to survive no matter how outrageous the demands of the unions, no matter how minuscule and exclusive the advertisers became.

But W. J. T. had to try to live with unions and with itself. Some observers felt that the character of the paper was taking on the shades of the old Journal; others felt that the Scripps-Howard group was dominating the editorial department. Frank Conniff, columnist and assistant to William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was its first and final editor. He is a damn-it-to-hell-full-speed-ahead man, but he found it impossible to please all three partners and a dozen unions. Conniff was in a hospital with an ulcer when the publishers saw a statement by Bertram powers, head of the Printers Union, that he was not prepared to heed any sob stories of financial loss on W. J. T, that when he negotiated, he expected the same fat contract he had just signed with the News. Abruptly, publication stopped. The union leader never reached the W. J. T office. The newspaper expired at the age of eight months. Seven big newspapers had become three, then one, and now the one had burst like a bubble.

Meditating, it seems a long way back to that summer dawn of 1929 when I walked the streets of New York as a copy boy. Those big presses and I had hummed with hope. Jeff Burke had dozed at the city desk of the News. Now he slept permanently, along with Gauvreau and Deuell and Macfadden and Brisbane and Fowler and Hellinger and----

But that's another list of statistics.