Editor Bares All

For the man who reads the New York Times there is little if anything to choose between Patterson s Daily News and Macfadden's Evening Graphic. To him both are tabloids and thereby tarred with the same brush of blatant sexationalism. The fact is that the News has definite pretensions to being a newspaper; the Graphic none. Somewhere between the two but perceptibly nearer the News, falls the Hearst-Kobler Daily Mirror.

If the distinction between Mirror and Graphic is hazy to the chance observer, it is bold as a banner headline to Editor Emile Henry Gauvreau of the Mirror.To him it is the difference between outmoded pornography and the beginning of a new "Tabloidia" in which he implicitly believes. He was the porno-Graphic's first managing editor. He stuck with it for five years until, sick of dishing up nothing but sex, scandal, crime, faked news & faked pictures to an illiterate circulation, he quit and went to the Mirror (TIME. July 22, 1929). There he could print at least some legitimate news along with sex and crime. There he was permitted to write a .column called "Now and Then," on the pattern of Brisbane's "Today." There too he found opportunity to dis- gorge some of the bile which his pornoGraphic experience had secreted within him. He wrote, in his office after working hours nearly every night for a year, a version of his five mad years on the Graphic. Last week the story appeared as a novel, Hot News (Macatdey, $2).--

Obviously autobiographical is Hot News although the exploits recounted are a composite of all Tabloidia. Probably for fear of libel. Author Gauvreau has veiled his characters with flimsy disguises which re quire no seasoned newsmen to penetrate. Himself, as protagonist, he calls Jonathan Peters, his tabloid, The Comet.

Familiar to most newsmen but perhaps difficult for laymen to believe is Editor Gauvreau's account of how sensational stories were deliberately cooked up and kept alive by artificial respiration in the dizzy scramble for circulation. Notable was the case of "Uncle Cocoa" Rodgers ("Daddy" Browning) and "Sugar Plum'' McGinnis ("Peaches" Heenan), whose queasy romance and parting were practically engineered in the Comet's editorial rooms. With the eager connivance of the exhibitionist Uncle Cocoa, the Comet's reporters wrote his and his wife's "own stories" of their honeymoon, contrived new bedroom stunts to keep them on the front pages. So, too, for need of a current "master mind of crime," a dullwitted hoodlum named "Bum" Cadman was built up into a king of outlaws. So, too, were girls in the street paid by photographers to sob publicly at the funeral of Cinema-sheik Adolphe Valerino. (Few days before, Editor Peters had sold out an entire edition by the ingenious banner-line: VALERINO DEAD--followed by small type reading: Says Rumor Fortunately Not True.)

Naturally, a paper like the Comet is practically barren of reputable advertising despite the hiring of mercenary or publicity-hungry clergymen to write daily editorials. But on the theory that a million circulation--no matter what its class-- will force advertisers to buy space, the Comet and its competitors push on, trying to outdo each other in nauseous antics. And that weird battle robs Editor Peters of his bitterest competitor and closest friend--Editor Anthony Wayne of the Lantern. Here Author Gauvreau makes no attempt to obscure the figure of the late Editor Philip Payne of the Mirror, to whom the book is dedicated. Beaten at every turn by Comet (as Payne was frustrated in business and love), Wayne goes as a passenger on an attempted nonstop airplane flight to Moscow sponsored by his paper (as Payne went in Hearst's Old Glory}. Excerpt: "He wanted to win a signal victory, not through some unsavory sensation, but through an exploit that would redound to his honor and that of the Lantern. [He said:] . . . 'Peters, I have nothing to live for. We are both wrong. Keeping up newspaper circulation with stunts is like reviving a dying man with oxygen tanks. I couldn't keep it up and I wouldn't. My flight will be a relief. If I make it, my paper will have something to talk about. If I don't . . . what the hell's the difference?' " Soon afterward Editor Peters' endurance breaks. He quits, goes to Paris, tries to shake off the fever of Tabloidia, finds himself too deeply infected. Finally, in an improbable transoceanic telephone conversation with his most loyal reporter who has gone over to the Lantern, he consents to return and succeed his old friend Wayne there. Exultantly cries the reporter: "Sugar Plum is suing Uncle Cocoa and we've got it exclusive. . . . What kind of a head shall we put on it?" To which Editor Peters replies: "Keep it down to seventy-two point, and make room for other news besides Uncle Cocoa. Let's get out a well rounded paper . . . with all the news. . . . And listen, you pack of delightful bastards ... tie your hats on because we're all going for a fast ride." Editor Gauvreau is 39, lean, gimlet-eyed, hardboiled, literate. He walks with a limp, the result of "shellshock" suffered as a youngster when practical jokers set off a Fourth of July cannon under his bed room window. He was schooled on the ultra-conservative Hartford Courant, of which he was managing editor when he went to work for Macfadden. The Mirror had less than 400,000 circulation when he joined it. It has now about 600,000. In September Editor Gauvreau will inaugu rate a Sunday edition to compete with the Sunday News.

1/2%

Most thoroughgoing newspaper in the world is the august New York Times. Last week on a financial page appeared hilt-high proof of its claim to that title. Under the headline CALL LOANS IN JUNE HELD AT 4% RATE appeared a story beginning: "Call Loan rates on the New York Stock Exchange were at H per cent throughout all of June. . . . The renewal average for call loans in June was 1.500 per cent. . . ." Below came a complete, full-length table showing the \% call loan rate on each & every one of June's 30 days, arranged in this manner: June Renewals High Low Last

Lest some Times reader failed to grasp the significance of the report, this in formation was summarized:

"Monthly range: High i^, low i^. "Average daily mean, new loans, 1.500%.

"Average renewal rate 1.500%."

-- Chapters of Hot News readily identified Editor Gauvreau as author of the anonymous serial "A Venture in Tabloidia," published last month in the Saturday Evening Post.

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