Orgy

"The Big Show has come to White Plains.

"One look at that performance would make the shade of the late P. T. Barnum turn green with envy.

"Barnum at his best only thought he was good.

"This Browning affair is good....

"Barnum's circus was staged in a smelly sawdust arena.

"The Browning circus is set with a background of sweet-scented boudoirs with fancy fripperies and doo-fangles.

"Barnum's prides leaped for their lives.

"Browning's bride leaps for alimony.

"Barnum had a galaxy of daring stunts.

"But the Browning production is even more daring.

"So goes the greatest show on earth. . . .

"Admission is free but accommodations are limited.

"What a pity."

Thus, with the frank grin of a degenerate, did the most abnormal sheet in U. S. journalism, Publisher Bernarr ("BodyLove") Macfadden's New York Evening Graphic, last week embrace the divorce hearings of a pawky lecher and his fleshy girl-wife. There are thousands of Edward West Brownings in the U. S., but never before had one sprawled forth whose pathological condition included lust for publicity. The pornoGraphic, closely followed by its loose-lipped fellow-tabloids, the Hearst Mirror and the Patterson-McCormick Daily News, and abetted by an accommodating judge, proceeded with an exploitation to which previous obscenities--the Arbuckle, Rhinelander, Hall-Mills and Chaplin cases--seemed a prelude almost refined. Pressing its usual policy, the Graphic had a paunchy man in pajamas and a plump girl in a film of silk underwear re-enact for Graphic cameras the more revolting moments described by Mrs. Browning. Faces of the real characters, their grievances exaggerated by retouchings, were then pasted in these photographs and the Graphic's front pages were spread with the admittedly faked results, To ridicule Mr. Browning and stimulate convulsions corresponding to laughter in the biped organisms to which the Graphic panders, astounding imbecilities were shown issuing from the character's mouths. From Mr. Browning's: "Woof! Woof! Don't be a goof!" From Mrs. Browning's pet African honking goose: "Honk! Honk! It's the bonk!" The Graphic started a "Woof! Woof!" contest--$1 each for "just little nifties" about the Brownings. Specimen: "Woof! Woof! Daddy Browning, real estate operator whose heart is rent." Graphic headlines: "PEACHES'S SHAME STORY IN FULL," "RAH, DADDY! HAIL, PEACHES!" There were semi-nude pictures of one Marion Dockrell, "female Oom," cult leader admired by Mr. Browning. Inane attention was paid to Mr. Browning's rubber eggs, baby dolls, clay puppies, infantile endearments, trick spoons. New screamer: "DADDY TO BECOME A MONK"--and a picture of the lecher in his office, the walls of which were entirely covered with pictures of females, ranging from small children to fully developed women. Even Mr. Browning, who took evident pleasure in the court rehearsal of his unnatural acts, finally pretended to be vexed with the Graphic. He gestured loosely at subpoenaing its managing editor, one Emile H. Cauvreau.

Mirror. The Hearst Mirror covered its front page with close-up portraits of the Brownings and, in prodigious type: "SUNNY CRAZY." (Mr. Browning's portrait stood for the "B" in "Bunny"). Shaking letters were used to print: "FLAMING YOUTH." Subtitle: "His Mania Causes Peculiar Love for Young Girls--Alienist." Text: "A famous [anonymous] alienist . . . diagnoses his case as 'pathological pedophilia,' a symptom of a disease of the brain classified as a sexual aberration. . . ." The Mirror, too, strove for features to please child minds--an "interview" (in mixed dialects) with Mr, Browning's pet African goose; a history of the case in prize fight vernacular. Stenographers and clerks were asked to vote on which was worse, Mr. or Mrs. Browning. Each day a different verdict was manufactured.

News. The Patterson-McCormick Daily News delivered such headlines as "PEACHES'S BRIDAL SECRETS," "HUNT PEACHES'S 50 SHEIKS," "OUTLAW GOLDDIGGERS! PLEADS BROWNING," "BLED OF CASH--DADDY." (The News, to be "different," sided with Mr. Browning.) All the tabloids, of course, published judiciously selected slices of the testimony.

Other N. Y. Newspapers. The "regular" newspapers were like urchins sliding down an icy sidewalk who suddenly behold a garbage pail at the bottom of the hill. Having filled their columns with the same sort of thing before, they now found it too late to stop. The tabloids, moreover, had made of the Brownings "news" which newspapers could not, they felt, afford to omit. The Hearst Journal was willing enough, nay, eager, to rush its leading staff members to the trial, including saccharine Nell Brinkley who discovered a "lesson to mothers" for the front page. But the editor of the New York Herald Tribune may well have pondered before deciding the sensation was so unavoidable that he must assign to it Star Reporters Forrest Davis and Whitney Bolton. Both the Herald Tribune and the New York Times made pitiable (and dishonest) efforts at decency by referring to "Mr." and "Mrs." Browning. The Times kept the story off the front page-further dishonesty--but well knew that its readers would skim impatiently until they reached the most widely and avidly read divorce story in years.

The Country Over. Newspapers the country over--San Francisco's Chronicle, Washington's Post, St. Paul's Pioneer Press, Baltimore's Sun, Toledo's Blade --submitted to the logic of their past scandal policies and told their readers, in front-page despatches from news services and special correspondents, about the abnormalities of a fat old flesh-potter in a distant city. The sensational Cleveland News, stewing in its own juice finally became disgusted with itself and apologized to the public, in real misery.*

The New York World, ever tinged with yellow outside and intellectual blue-blood within, experienced the acute pain of a wolf trapped by the foot. It sought relief from its dilemma in an agonized editorial admitting that it was staggered by "a deep-rooted disorder in modern civilization." The public interest in the Brownings, it thought, was "no superficial blemish" but a phenomenon of vicarious sensual indulgence to which the nearest analogies were the Roman circus and the Spanish bullring. Yet "frank animalism" was lacking. "The combination between the courts and the tabloids," raged the World, "has produced a situation for which there really is no precedent. . . . There is no pretense possible that these spectacles are for the purpose of ventilating the processes of justice or that, like a realistic play or novel, they add to human experience. . . . The whole atmosphere of them is fraudulent. They are produced by swindlers for suckers. . . .

"There are naive libertarians who comfort and delude themselves with the theory that if only everything were printable, and if, everything could be photographed, we should arrive at a condition where nothing would shock the moralist and nothing would excite anybody. . . . The purging power of frankness does not fit these spectacles. It may be that when the tabloids have squeezed the last bit of sensation out of the Rhinelander case, for example, their public would then be bored with another spectacle dealing with miscegenation; that after the Browning case their public will for a time be immunized against further interest in the psychopathology of an old lecher. But what is the consequence of that boredom and immunity? It means simply Chat in order to maintain their circulation the publishers of the tabloids have to look around for a new case which has seme hitherto unexplored variation of the sexual theme. . . .* This new journalism is like the procurer to an old roue who has daily to tempt him with new excitements."

There were plenty of people to cry, out of long habit, "There ought be to a law. . . ." Others, angry, were for punishing judges who allow themselves to be seduced by the thought (if not by anything more tangible) that "it will leak out anyway." A few realized that the only medicine for a sick society is an overdose of the original poison. It remained to be seen if the Browning filth would give rise to an antibody in the public current of thought, or if a still fouler injection was inevitably in store.

*Cleveland merchants claimed to have forced this apology, but Publisher Daniel R. Hanna Jr. (grandson of the late Mark) stoutly denied that his paper had suffered the added degradation of kowtowing to advertisers. . . .

*To vary its own fare, the World hired one Maurine Watkins, author of a play about murder-lust in Chicago's stockyard district, to write a delectable tidbit pretending to scorn Mrs. Browning because she had gone to court instead of killing Mr. Browning. The World's introduction : "... To become famous in Chicago the woman kills and kills and kills. Miss Watkins, investigating scientifically the road to fame in our own fair city, gives her conclusions below." Some conclusions : "In Chicago, you must shoot, not sue, your way to glory. Her front pages drip with blood, whereas New York's are smeared with dirt. Still, what's the odds--dirt or blood? Both are good for the circulation ! . . . Oh, for the peanut venders . . . that used to enliven our funeral mobs. Anything to jazz up those curiously apathetic groups that huddled on the Westchester Court House steps. . . . Like subway crowds they waited, patient and dull. . . ." World subtitles: "One-Ounce Fag Lifts Counsel's Eyebrow," "Testimony is as Full of Beds as a Barracks."