Decades of Dix

Forty years ago, when Editor Nathaniel ("Nat") Burbank hired Mrs. Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer to write a weekly women's article for the New Orleans Picayune, he gave her a definite idea of what he wanted. "We'll call this feature 'Sunday Salad,' " he told the brown-eyed young gentlewoman from Tennessee. "Make its base of fresh, crisp ideas. Over them pour a dressing mixed of oil of kindness, the vinegar of satire, the salt of wit, and a dash of the paprika of doing things." They also decided they would henceforth call Mrs. Gilmer, "Dorothy Dix."

Last week famed Dorothy Dix, now 66, was resting at her country place near Pass Christian, Miss. As soon as she could go to New Orleans, three big parties, organized respectively by the Times-Picayune, the Tulane University School of Journalism and her friends, were to honor her four decades of newspaper work, during which time her journalistic salad had grown from a side dish in one New Orleans paper to a main course in 200 throughout the world. Hired in 1896 for $5 a week and now retained for $70,000 a year as personal counselor to some 13,000,000 readers, Dorothy Dix unquestionably has become the world's No. I newspaper confidante.

Graduated from a genteel ladies' seminary at 16, married at 18, Dorothy Dix was thrown on her own resources by an invalid husband. Fear of the poorhouse produced a nervous breakdown, to recover from which friends sent her to balmy Bay St. Louis, Miss. There Mrs. Gilmer met Mrs. Eliza Poitevent Nicholson, owner of the Picayune, to whom she showed a dialect piece called How Chloe Saved the Silver. It so impressed Mrs. Nicholson that she bought it for $3, told Editor Burbank to hire the author.

On the Picayune, Dorothy Dix was soon covering general assignments, as well as writing her weekly article for women. "Sunday Salad" slowly gathered such an audience that in 1901 Dorothy Dix was hired away by the Hearstian New York Journal.

In Manhattan she developed into one of the most fabulous sob sisters of the gaudy, pre-War journalistic era. She covered many a killing in & out of Manhattan, sobbed her way in print through so much murder testimony that a courtroom bromide attached itself to her: "Dorothy Dix has arrived. The trial may now proceed." By 1908, Dorothy Dix's feature ("Dorothy Dix Talks") was appearing daily.

In the past 20 years her method has changed little. Her counsel on domestic problems and affairs of the heart is usually characterized by a firm practicality. When two youths asked whether they should marry rich or poor girls, Miss Dix candidly told them, that while love was the basis of happy marriage, always to remember that money was a handy thing. Each young man married a prosperous lady. One later complained that he had been wrongly advised. Hedged Dorothy Dix: "He couldn't have been very much in love with her in the first place."

With frilly feminism she has no truck. "Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands never make love to them," she has said. "These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly all their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a husband should treat a wife into the discard. . . . A man marries to end romance."

More disillusioned than most of her heartthrob imitators, Dorothy Dix is nevertheless a stern foe of sexual irregularity among her readership. "Often a girl writes me that I have turned her back just as she was starting down the primrose path, and married men and women tell me I have kept them from the sin and folly of the double life," she says. To women who have been jilted by married men, she has a standard reply: "Quit befooling yourself with false hopes. . . . Now, when his romance with you is as stale as his marriage, he hasn't the remotest idea of going through the mess of a divorce. . . . Nine times out of ten a man clings to his wife with both hands and wouldn't part with her for the world, because she is his perpetual alibi."

Since 1923 this line of hardheaded domestic common sense has been nationally syndicated by the Philadelphia Public Ledger's feature bureau. And since the Hall-Mills trial of 1926, Dorothy Dix has devoted herself exclusively to her perplexed public. To her handsome town house on New Orleans' shady Prytania Street now go some 500 daily letters, carried from the post office by her Negro chauffeur in an ample, well-worn market basket. Every inquiry is answered by letter or in print. Dorothy Dix spends the morning sorting mail, penciling notations on routine queries to be replied to by her devoted chief secretary, Mrs. Ellen Bentley Arthur. Knottier inquiries are answered by dictation direct from the oracle's mouth. A few howlers are preserved for the edification of Miss Dix's friends. One which the childless adviser particularly ikes: "My baby's navel looks downcast. What can I do to naturalize it?"

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