Carnival

It was carnival week again in Manhattan. This time a muscular corset-salesman had murdered a middle-aged art editor, assisted by the editor's adulterous wife.

The details, unusually gruesome, included poisoned whiskey, picture wire, binding, gagging, taking turns at skull-smashing with a window-weight, and $104,000 in life insurance.

The murderers had confessed separately and were reviling each other from their prison cells. Judd Gray, the corset-salesman, was pleading insanity and saying he had been led astray, debauched. Ruth Snyder, the wife, was professing horror and penitence, calling her paramour a low "jackal." Also there was even a child, Lorraine Snyder, aged 9, to heighten the emotionalism of the trial. Lorraine still believed her father and mother were temporarily away "on a trip."

Bernarr Macfadden's porno-Graphic, as usual, made the most striking announcement of all. Its editors had evidently, at some time or other, observed the consummate effect a notorious woman can achieve by appearing at the loosest party of the season dressed, not as everyone expects in more daring decollete than ever, but in a quiet gown with long sleeves, high bodice, sweeping train. The Graphic anticipated the Snyder murder trial with a public proposal that all Manhattan's newspapers be called to conference by the state crim? commission; that they all agree to limit their daily courtroom reports to 500 words. There was no catch in the offer--the Graphic would be the first to curtail its sensations, despite its disagreement with the crime commission's theory about crime news. The Graphic meant the space limit to include all media, fake photographs and drawings as well as writing. The Graphic would even consent to a proportionate space allotment, to let the standard-size journals publish 1,000 words or 1,500, whatever might be the equivalent of 500 words in a tabloid. It was an offer in thorough good faith--which the Graphic well knew would never be accepted. Having accomplished her triumphal entry, the notorious lady discards her robe of dignity and revels in the kind of costume she really likes best. Having let off a lot of loud sincerity, and furnished itself with blank ammunition to fire at the crime commission in future, the Graphic assembled its most unscrupulous picture fakers and prepared to make its Hall-Mills, "Peaches" Browning, Rhinelander and Valentino exploits look amateurish.

Other Manhattan dailies were not, however, wholly eclipsed by the Graphic's grandstand play. The cohorts of Publisher Roy W. Howard were on their toes for this first great chance to do something, in his lately-purchased Telegram, that would show Manhattan what the 25 other Scripps-Howard chain newspapers mean to the vast U. S. hinterland. The Telegram devoted whole pages to its announcement that bearded little Will Durant (who once studied to be a priest but later became a pagan philosopher) had consented to "analyze the amazing details contained in this story of a wife's alleged intrigues. . . . And into this strange web, Durant will weave some of the philosophy of life that has made him an outstanding figure in world-- literature." Associated with Analyst Durant were two smart young women--Maurine Watkins, author of a murdery play, Chicago; and Jane Dixon, "who well deserves the title of 'New York's leading newspaper woman' "--a snappy "smart-cracker" and an infallible "sob-sister."

The Hearstian Journal fell back on the loud-speaking, blatant Rev. John Roach Straton and his Fundamentalist fulminating. "Appalling wave of vice and crime," it paid him to rave beforehand. "Menacing the very foundations of our republic . . . the moral and spiritual lessons . . . dangers should be unveiled. . . . An earnest note of warning should be sounded . . . etc. etc."

The Times, World, Herald Tribune made no great announcements but arranged carefully for front-row seats and complete court transcripts, ready to play up the story to the last hot slug. Of the quality press, Cyrus Hermann Kotz-schmar Curtis' Evening Post was the only one to tumble over itself for a "feature," and in so doing it gave itself, to its admirers' sorrow, a rather nasty black eye.

The Post engaged Writer W. E. Woodward, a heavy-witted, self-important person who has gained a kind of reputation by stating blunt facts about U. S. institutions like Big Business and George Washington. An able reporter, Mr. Woodward has climbed out of obscurity by calling himself a man who "debunks" things--gives them he-man treatment, looks them in the eye, gets brutal sooner than sentimental. The Post promised that Mr. Woodward would "debunk" the Snyder affair: "When a woman goes on trial for murdering her husband a false glamor is cast around her. The 'sob-sisters' weep glycerine tears. It ceases to be a case--it becomes a cause." Leave it to Mr. Woodward. He would be "refreshing."

Mr. Woodward went out to the Snyder cottage in Queens Village, L. I., before the trial began. He described the house: ". . . very feminine ... no tobacco jars or old pipes lying around; nor does one observe golf clubs or fishing tackle or he-books. . . .

"The Snyder library consists of about 20 volumes ranged in an imitation mahogany bookcase. The central feature of this intellectual exhibit is a resplendent edition of the Holy Bible in eight volumes. By the side of it stand the masterpieces of James Oliver Curwood and Elinor Glyn."

Mr. Woodward sneered refreshingly at the dead man, picturing him as an impotent dullard who had let himself be crowded out of the house by his wife. He snooped through the late Mr. Snyder's attic and cellar workshops and said: "Snyder appears to have been an unobtrusive, untalented man. . . ."

Next he bestowed his attention upon Mrs. Snyder's mother, a Mrs. Brown, staying in the house to care for small Lorraine, and upon a policeman stationed there at Mrs. Brown's request. The policeman, "infinitely bored, sits all day in the dining-room and studies the comic pictures in a newspaper with the intense gravity of a mathematician tackling a heavy problem. . . . Mrs. Brown's skin has a doughy pallor. She is a large-hipped, blue-eyed, spectacled woman about 60 years of age. Apparently without much education, she is almost inarticulate of speech."

While making these observations, Mr. Woodward engaged Mrs. Brown in conversation. He reported her as saying, "People can stand purty near anything when they have to," and his own apt reply: "They certainly can. I've stood some grand slams myself."

Small Lorraine was eating buttered toast. "She cuddled up against me. . . . 'You'll choke yourself if you don't look out,' I said to her." He asked her it she liked her father and mother. "'. . . Sure. . . And I like you, too.'"

"You're a pretty good liker, aren't you, dear?"

She ignored this sally so Reporter Woodward showed her his watch. The Post's readers learned that he had told her his watch was thin because it was made that way. Thin watches, he had said, are always thin. The Post's readers were informed that refreshing Mr. Woodward's thin watch came from Geneva, Switzerland. The Post's readers were made sure that Loraine's unfortunate intellect was no match for her masterful interrogator's and Mr. Woodward passed on to give the Post public its money's worth of illicit passion-- "hot lovers, the throbbing tom-toms of jazz and the tawdry splendor of night clubs . . . the rhythmic beat of heart's desire." He explained the motive for Mrs. Snyder's action -- avarice -- and, for Salesman Gray's impulse, suggested that "a plausible theory is that he slayed [sic] ... to show his superiority, to prove to his ladylove that he, a real heman. . . ."

Readers of Cyrus Hermann Kotz-schmar Curtis' Evening Post were not just sure that this he-manly "new departure in journalism" was not the most distasteful thing that had appeared in Manhattan since Bernarr Macfadden.

Vanderbilge

Among primitive tribes, when a quarrelsome youngster betrays his clan, mocks and reviles it to a large audience of strangers, the strangers are usually disgusted and show no surprise if the youth's relatives gently strangle him. But civilized society feels differently about strangulation. Civilization is thus to some extent an annoyance to the Vanderbilt family, mocked and reviled as it is in the public prints by its disaffected, loudly yelping, self-martyrizing young member, Cornelius IV.

Last week Publisher Hearst's smutty little New York Mirror (for which Cornelius IV now writes and edits) published a page of gossip about Cornelius IV's cousin,-- Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney II.

Someone had seen "Sonny" Whitney in a Broadway night club talking to Evan Burrowes Fontaine, a dancer who caused him much trouble after he was graduated from Yale in 1922, by asking a million dollars for having borne him, allegedly, a son out of wedlock. Swift as a rat, the Mirror published a photograph of Mr. Whitney and his wife (nee Norton) with the caption "Not traveling companions" and the screamer, " 'SONNY' WHITNEY HEEDS BROADWAY CALL." Some one in the Mirror office with an intimate knowledge of the affairs of the Vanderbilt family supplied the Mirror's female scandalmonger (by name "Hettie Fithian Cattell") with a glib recital of "unlucky first love marriages of the Vanderbilt clan." The implication was that Mr. & Mrs. "Sonny" Whitney were estranged, an implication for which not even the Mirror could ferret out more than a "jinx" for substantiation.