Hearst Ups & Downs

Hearst Ups & Outs

Two more top men moved out of the huge, churning Hearst organization last week, and two moved up.

Connolly for Mason. A dapper little man with a lot of luggage walked across the gangplank of the Leviathan, Europe-bound. With the same proud little steps he had left the Hearst fold five days before. After the resignations of Col. William Franklin Knox from Hearst-papers' general managership and Editor Ray Long from Cosmopolitan Magazine (TIME, Dec. 29 et seq.), Frank Earl Mason was the third major executive to leave the Hearst banner in eight months.

Selected to replace him as president of important International News Service was Joseph V. Connolly, editor & general manager of King Features Syndicate.

Frank Earl Mason was one of the few U. S. soldiers to get to Berlin. By the time hostilities had ceased he found himself attached to the U. S. Embassy there. He was not a trained newsman but he felt he could do anything anyone else could. So in 1920 he persuaded INS to give him a job in Berlin. Shortly thereafter he made Page One hi almost every U. S. paper by unearthing the log of submarine U-2O which sank the Lusitania.

From Berlin he went to London, then to Paris. He made himself valuable to William Randolph Hearst by flying all over Europe with commissions to buy antiques. He did not know much about antiques, but he learned quickly, did his job well. Almost as flashy a dresser as Publisher Roy Howard, Frank Earl Mason was known as the only correspondent who ever travelled with a shoe trunk.

When he returned to the U. S. he had with him a Croix de Guerre and a Swedish wife. First he was made business manager of INS; in 1928 he became its president and general manager. Like most Hearstmen, he was sensitive to the vast organization's undercurrents. Year before last he said he was going to resign to direct publicity for Abraham & Straus, Inc., Brooklyn department store. Whether or not that is the job he will take when he gets back from Europe, Newsman Mason would not say.

Samuels for Towne-- The magazines of William Randolph Hearst challenge the magazines of Publisher Conde Nast on two fronts: Harper's Bazaar v. Vogue, Home & Field v. House & Garden.

Last year Publisher Hearst thought of revamping his Smart Set to compete with Publisher Nast's civilized Vanity Fair and the bright New Yorker (TIME, June 16, 1930). Out of work at the time was bald, sociable, fortyish Arthur H. Samuels. He had written the first newspaper advertisement for The New Yorker five years prior, had urged Publisher Raoul H. Fleischmann to keep up the magazine during its dark early days. In 1928 he was made The New Yorker's associate editor and penny-watcher. Caught in a crossfire between Owner Fleischmann and Editor Harold Ross, he went to Europe. When he got back his job was gone.

Magazineman Samuels never got a chance to give Publisher Hearst the benefit of his New Yorker experience. The smarter Smart Set idea fell through. So Publisher Hearst made him editor of Home & Field. Editor Samuels did his job capably and last week his abilities were rewarded when Publisher Hearst made him editor of Harper's Bazaar. Founded in 1867, Harper's Bazaar has been a Hearstsheet for ten years. It cannot boast the circulation of rival Vogue (103,135 monthly as against 133,931 semimonthly) but under Editor Chester Van Tassell, who now publishes Asia, it became a valuable property.

Retiring editor of Harper's Bazaar is that New Yorker of New Yorkers--plump, good-natured Charles Hanson Towne, 54. Bespectacled, a bachelor, he is the town's poet and crier (Manhattan, This New York of Mine), knows everybody. He is the sort of man one might imagine every member of the Lambs and Dutch Treat Club to be. A polished and exuberant parlor entertainer, he likes to give extemporaneous plays in blank verse. He tells how he "discovered"' James Branch Cabell, how he boosted the stories of William Sydney Porter ("O. Henry"), how Theodore Dreiser used to prowl about his editorial office in the Delineator like a caged saurian. But bubbling, sentimental Editor Towne's New York is not moribund. "I know that down this very street this morning," he will say. "Edna Ferber is working on a new novel, and across the Park Fannie Hurst is doing the same. Up in the Rockefellers' Institute a great doctor is working quietly at his search for a cure for cancer. . . . There is a New York for everybody!" Successively editor of The Designer, Smart Set, managing editor of McClure's, he joined Harper's Bazaar five years ago. Gliding gracefully toward 60. he talks more & more about the girls he almost married when he was young and poor. He is quite sure that he is not sorry he has never married, claims he has developed a strong domestic sense by himself. "I enjoy open fire and books in my home. . . . You might call me a slipper man."

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