Let's Be Amusing

At 83, William Randolph Hearst had fallen hard for male society gossip columns.

Los Angeles society was apprehensive, and the Los Angeles Examiner's society staff was in a pout. Without consulting either group Hearst had ordered a newsy, nosy, plain-speaking society column called "Artie Angeleno Observes." Hearst's San Francisco Examiner already had a "Fred die Francisco." Both were patterned after the New York Journal-American's long standing "Cholly Knickerbocker." In Los Angeles, Hearst picked a newspaperman, and a social unknown at that, to do the job.

"Artie Angeleno" is green-eyed Jack (short for Jacquin Leonard) Lait Jr., 3 7 -year-old son of the New York Mirror's editor. A onetime screen writer and free lancer, he went to New York last summer to help his dad do vacation relief for Walter Winchell. He was a night-shift city deskman when his bosses shifted him to society a fortnight ago, set him up with an assistant and a telephone of his own. His assignment: to treat real society in cafe-society style. Lait's maiden column, sent to the Chief on approval, came back with minor blue-penciling and a marginal note: "Let's be amusing, but not vicious." *

Like Igor ("Cholly") Cassini, his Manhattan opposite number, Lait does most of his work at night, gleaning items from bar tenders, waiters and customers in Mike Romanoff's restaurant and at Giro's, the Mocambo and the other "Sunset Strip" clubs. So far he has stuck to items about society celebrities (the Herricks, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers, etc.) and feature stories about forgotten heiresses and play boys. But some of his pieces have sent Princess Conchita Sepulveda Pignatelli, pillar of the Examiner's society staff and of local society, flouncing into the editor's office to complain about Lait's irreverent treatment of her friends. The friends were not amused, but the Examiner's tradition ally dull society page was getting more readers.

* Freddie Francisco also had to be toned down, after he wrote about a gay party at a many-bedroomed house on the San Francisco peninsula, concluded that before the evening was over all the rooms in the house had been pressed into service. The Examiner publicly apologized to the matron and her guests, thereby dodging a libel suit.

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