Long Good-by

FAREWELL TO FIFTH AVENUE--Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.--Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

The tabloid mind, piously supposed to be plebeian, is no respecter of family. Last week, if further proof were needed, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. hastened to clinch the matter. Scion of a name that in three generations has become legendary to U. S. gumchewers as the label of aristocratic wealth, Author Vanderbilt did his feebly sensational best to throw his tribe into scareheads. It was his tenth book; the only real news about it was that smart Publishers Simon & Schuster were bringing it out.

Author Vanderbilt (now 36) bade a tentative farewell to Fifth Avenue some years ago, when, against the advice and consent of his family, he first tried to become a newshawk and turned out to be a decoy. Like an ocean traveler on a slowly departing liner, he continues to wave good-by long after the shore crowd's handkerchiefs are dry. Farewell to Fifth Avemie rehashes, in pseudo-Northcliffe journalese, the high spots of Author Vanderbilt's career as poor little rich boy. Vanderbilt readers may find it annoying; to non-Vanderbilts it will seem either shocking or pathetic, or both.

Reporter Vanderbilt does not increase his reputation for accuracy when he remarks (hat Rolls-Royce was the only make of car his family ever used, and then prints a photograph of his father driving him in a pre-War Packard. He becomes incredible with such an anecdote as the one in which he has the late Sir Douglas Haig tap him on the shoulder and inquire: "I say, American, how long do you think this bally war will last?" He admits he lost his entire share of the family estate ($1,903,000) in his ill-advised venture into tabloid publishing. He repeats the story (for which General Smedley D. Butler was afterwards rebuked by the Navy Department for retailing in a public speech) that Mussolini was a hit-&-run driver, asserts that he was in the car when II Duce, going 90 m. p. h. around a sharp curve, ran over a child and refused to stop. The late silver-tongued Lord Balfour may well writhe in his grave at Author Vanderbilt's alleged quotation of him: "A war's a war and a fool's a fool and all that sort of rot, but a chap should not go around sinking the auxiliary floating hospitals."

Most notable disclosure in Farewell to Fifth Avenue is the statement that U. S. Society contains only some 225 names--of which 150-odd are known (presumably by the Vanderbilts) as "The Outer Fringe." Author Vanderbilt prints both lists, modestly but sensibly excluding himself from each.

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