Exclusive Murder

Every once in a while there breaks a news story so pregnant with sensation that city editors lick their chops and fervently mutter, "Oh, boy! That's made to order!" The trial of a "lovely society heiress" for the murder of a "noted architect," with a "beautiful nightclub dancer" as star witness for the prosecution would be just such a story. Last week Hearst's New York American was full of it. But the story was literally made to order--an ingenious new circulation stunt.

No mere mystery-serial was "The Trial of Vivienne Ware." The trial itself was enacted for six consecutive nights in National Broadcasting Co.'s studio WJZ over the New Amsterdam Theatre at Times Square. It was reported in shrieking detail in the American each morning. Typical of Hearst smartness and enterprise was the casting of characters for the trial. Presiding judge was no obscure radio performer, but U. S. Senator Robert Ferdinand Wagner, good friend of Publisher Hearst and a onetime supreme court justice in New York State. Prosecutor was Ferdinand Pecora, onetime chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, a name well known to readers of Manhattan crime news. Chief counsel for defense was George Gordon Battle, noted Manhattan lawyer, attorney for the New York Stock Exchange. Other parts were taken by professionals, notably including Rosamond (The Miracle) Pinchot Gaston, socialite niece of Pennsylvania's Governor-elect Gifford Pinchot, in the role of the accused, lovely "Vivienne Ware." For promotion purposes the case was submitted to a jury, the mystery left unsolved. The jurors, of course, were the radio public. Money prizes were offered by the American for the best-reasoned "verdicts" on either side.

Suggestion for "The Trial of Vivienne Ware," which was promptly adopted for other Hearstpapers, came from the American's busy, owlish Editor Edmond D. ("Cobbie") Coblentz, longtime publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. He plucked the idea from a small news item from Copenhagen telling of the broadcast of a murder trial there. Writer Kenneth Ellis of the American's radio-news staff wrote the scenario, packed into it the stuff of which city editors' dreams are made: the knife thrown at Dancer Dolores Divine as she walks to the witness chair; the disappearance of the "mystery gun" from counsel's table while the courtroom lights are switched off (each incident occurring just at the close of a day's session, of course). To make it suitable for broadcast the script was revised by N. B. C.'s continuity writer Finis Farr.

Courtroom realism was heightened occasionally when Prosecutor Pecora or Attorney Battle, falling into familiar character, would improvise upon his lines with angry "objections" or barbed "asides."

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