Where Is the Tra-La-Lo?

France Dimanche is Paris' liveliest and yellowest weekly (in a field of 270). And it has one of the hottest-tempered editors --by name Max Corre. A reader once tried to see Editor Corre when he was too busy to be seen. When the caller just stood there, the editor screamed, "Go away!" then knocked him cold. Staffers dragged the limp form to an elevator; Editor Max Corre shrugged, muttered, and went on with his work.

His France Dimanche is equally violent. Every week it hits 565,000 Frenchmen in the eyes with Corre's "American-style journalism." He was among the first to import American tricks: crack rewrite-men sharpen his news, splashy pictures--occasionally nudes--and sassy headlines decorate it, personality angles and impious gibes at national heroes help sell it. And a racy Gallic sauce--far hotter than anything U.S. tabloids dare dish out--flavors it. For balance--or to confuse the reader--Corre has printed Steinbeck on Russia, and serialized such books as Mr. Adam.

Street Fight. Last week, in a bitter circulation war, France Dimanche was within 100,000 subscribers of its rival Samedi Soir, biggest (650,000 a week) paper in France. Max Corre had helped found Samedi Soir and thought he had enough tricks to lick his old paper at his own game. In weeks of racing to get on the streets a day ahead of the other, their press deadlines had been juggled three times. Now, under a truce, they will come out the same day--Wednesday.

As a cub on the old Paris Soir, flashy Max Corre, now 35, took his creed from a sign above an editor's desk: "1) Where is the fact? 2) Where is the human interest? 3) Where is the tra-la-la?" The thing that most impressed him was the tralala. When France fell, Corre managed to miss the occupation's hardships by going to Lyon. But he turned up as an eleventh-hour Resistance soldier under General Leclerc and rode into Paris as a private in one of the first jeeps behind Leclerc.

Maxim for Max. In June 1945 Corre began to edit Samedi Soir. Paris took to it like a dance craze; its circulation was soon 370,000. He quit a year later after a squabble and called on his old boss, Pierre Lazareff. Corre wanted to take over the dull Sunday edition of Lazareff's profitable France-Soir (TIME, June 23). "Take it," said Lazareff, "it's yours." With five hours to make his first deadline, Corre slapped together an edition that tripled France Dimanche's circulation, then 30,000. When Samedi Soir's editors saw it, they sighed: "Now we're respectable."

For all its sensationalism, France Dimanche keeps a certain perspective. It rarely runs rape stories. They are all right for prudish U.S. and British papers, Corre thinks, but the "sexually enlightened" French are uninterested in such sordid affairs unless they have an amusing twist. His curled-lip philosophy of journalism: "A newspaper is scandalous if it doesn't print scandal."

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