Bull on the Loose

Disquieting rumors eddied through the quiet corridors of slick, Hearst-owned Town & Country. There was talk of a staff shakeup, a new editor perhaps, and possibly a change in policy. Last week a fact filtered down from the seat of empire at San Simeon: the resignation of slight, bright Editor Henry Adsit Bull, 42, had been accepted, "with reluctance."

Richard E. Berlin,* straw boss of Hearst periodicals, passed the word, and purred that "there will be no change whatever in the magazine." But without dapper Harry Bull, 100-year-old Town & Country was bound to change. In his dozen years as editor, he had tailored it to his own well-bred tastes; the Chief (a fellow alumnus of St. Paul's and Harvard) had never so much as peeked over his shoulder. Bull had tried to restore the savoir-vivre of the magazine's good old days (TIME, Dec. 16), had given "the wellborn, the rich and the able" a nodding acquaintance, at least with such dressy writers as W. H. Auden, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Ludwig Bemelmans, Alec and Evelyn Waugh, Oliver La Farge.

Town & Country made money at it: frozen at 25,000 during the war, it doubled its circulation last year, cleared almost $500,000. Editor Bull wanted to plow the money back, give raises to some underpaid staffers and boost his authors' payments. He also asked an end to the stepchild treatment that withheld paper and press time from Town & Country in favor of other Hearst magazines. Instead, his bosses threatened to give Town & Country a mixed-salad section of architecture, interior and exterior (cosmetics) decorating. Now they are free to do it, and Harry Bull is free to write a book about a town-&-countryman's New York.

* No kin to Songwriter Irving Berlin.

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