Fleet Street Wizard

From London Daily Expressmen overseas came congratulatory cables for plump, pink, self-confident Editor in Chief Arthur Christiansen. London staffers and Fleet Street competitors bought him double Scotches at Poppin's and The Bell and The Codgers, his favorite pubs.

There was a spirited (and spirituous) dinner party at London's glossy Dorchester Hotel, and a private lampooning edition of the Daily Express, devoted entirely to "Chris." From Express Owner Lord Beaverbrook, now busy with Britain's postwar air problems, came this message: "As long as you remain editor you will have . . . the happiest proprietor."

Reasons for all this huzzahing: 1) 39-year-old Arthur Christiansen last week began his eleventh year as top editorial executive of London's biggest daily; 2) his first ten years had been terrific.

When he took the job, he said his goal was to increase Express circulation (then 1,700,000) by one million in ten years. He almost did it in five. Were it not for wartime paper shortages, Express circulation (now 2,800,000) would be much larger. When English publications were granted 10% more paper several weeks ago, Express circulation shot up 250,000 almost overnight.

Hard Work and Schmalz. Editor Christiansen's success is due partly to hard work, partly to his unchanging conviction that folks like to read about events which burst from the emotions of men & women, partly to "The Beaver's" penchant for young hustlers in top jobs.

Personally kind but professionally exacting, Chris ceaselessly pinpricks his "Beaver's Eaglets" into working harder. He does not hesitate to fire them for repeated blunders, is just as quick to spread praise on thick for jobs well done. His men swear by him, call him Chris, like the way he hobnobs with the greenest beginners in off-hours, buying drink for drink with them.

Nightly in the "reporters' room"--frenzied and cluttered with teletypes, telephones, stale sandwiches, cups of tea, personalities, smoke, temperament, bitter grins and rush--he helps build the next day's Express. With a talent unrivaled in Fleet Street, he picks out of heaps of copy the stories that fit his line, plays them for all they are worth, with a fine disregard for what his staider competitors do.

The Express is no scandal sheet, but Arthur Christiansen's brand of journalism has a distinctly yellow hue. There is nothing in the U.S. quite comparable to it. In appearance and content it is more like the Hearst papers than anything else--copiously illustrated, splashy with black headlines, trickily laid out.

Its four pages are usually crowded with war news from crack correspondents like Alan Moorehead in Algiers, C. V. R. Thompson in New York. But the Express is at its best on stories about murders, sex, abandoned babies and the more maudlin doings of Soho underworldlings. The U.S. staff (three reporters in New York, a man each in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles) files about 3,000 words daily, is never surprised to get a cable like: "RUSH

FULL STORY DEANNA DURBIN'S ROMANCE."

Up from Hot Pots. Arthur Christiansen -- grandson of a Danish grocer and son of a Liverpool shipwright -- started newspapering by covering parish council meetings, funerals and hot pot suppers for the Wallasey (Cheshire) Chronicle. By 1929 he was assistant editor of the Sunday Express. In that job he distinguished himself the night the British dirigible R-101 crashed in France in 1930. He leaped from his bed at 2 a.m., sped to his office in pajamas, remade his paper, scooped all England.

As Daily Express editor, he gets to work in midmorning after having read all other London papers, works often until after midnight, with time out for large and lengthy lunches and dinners. His lone bow to sartorial propriety is a black Homburg hat, the high-toned effect of which he habitually voids by wearing with it a fuzzy, natural-color camel's hair coat.

He weekends at his house at Holland-on-Sea, in Essex, where he entertains friends by cooking a saucy chafing-dish concoction he calls "Steak Diane." Few besides himself can really stand it. He has a wife and four children, including twins. His oldest boy, Michael, only 16, recently became head of the London Daily Mail's Liverpool bureau. Say British newsmen: an inkling of the same type.

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