Hustling Hearstling

The editor of the tabloid New York Daily Mirror was up at 7, to scan his own paper and his opposition over a cup of coffee. He checked in at the office by 9, got up to St. Patrick's in time to cover Babe Ruth's funeral, walked over to the Waldorf-Astoria men's bar for a reminiscent lunch with Mourners Leo Durocher and Mel Ott. Back at the office, he wrote the funeral story (see above), took 35 minutes to peck out a syndicated column that goes to 600 newspapers, and wrestled his first edition to press. That night, in his apartment, he worked on a book he is writing, while Mirror messengers came & went with late pictures for his approval.

At 65, gravel-voiced Editor Jacquin Leonard Lait thrives on the pace that kills. Last month, when he began his eighth "annual stand-in stint" for Gossip Walter

Winchell, he jeered: "Winchell calls that work. To me, it's fun. After heavy reporting on two national conventions, turning out froth and fripperies is relaxation and relief." He will lose that job next week, when Winchell returns from vacation to turn out froth and fripperies of his own, which are more spiteful and more readable. Turn of the Screw. One of the most prolific writers in the business, an expert in the sentimental, tough-guy school of prose, horn-rimmed Jack Lait has inherited Mark Bellinger's crown as king of the hacks. He figures that he has pounded out 1,500 short stories, besides 17 books, eight plays and millions of words of news. "Fiction," he rasps, "is a cinch, automatic. I just set the screw in my head for 2,800 words, and out it comes. Not only do I not rewrite, I don't read 'em."

He has no illusions about his stories' immortality, although he thinks that Book No. 17, New York: Confidential! (Ziff-Davis; $2.75), may last a little longer than some of the others. It is a cynical, side-of-the-mouth guidebook that prices everything from pizzerias to call girls; Lait wrote it with his nightclub columnist and protege, Lee Mortimer (the man Sinatra socked). Having sold 20,000 copies in its first fortnight, and sold to the movies for $50,000, it is off to a better start than Lait's The Big House (200,000 copies).

Tough School. Jack Lait is one of the hard-schooled, shrewd, and devoted $52,000-a-year men who make the Hearst-papers what they are. Born in lower Manhattan, Lait went to school in Chicago with the late Eleanor Medill Patterson. He broke in on the police beat for the late Chicago American, covered the rise of gangs, lived through the rough & tumble Front Page days.

He had graduated to the editorship of King Features Syndicate in Manhattan when a friendly Chicago cop telephoned him a mysterious summons in 1934. Lait rushed to Chicago and got his most famous scoop, standing a few feet away when G-men shot down Badman John Dillinger.

Two years later Lait succeeded Walter Howey, a Chicago contemporary, as editor of the Mirror. Against the toughest competition in the country--the tabloid Daily News--he has doubled the Mirror's circulation (to 1,054,000 daily, 2,206,000 Sunday). Lait's Mirror has one big advantage over all other Hearstpapers: it is the only one that does not have to run Hearst editorials (because the afternoon Journal-American does).

Editor Lait runs the Mirror in shirtsleeves, from behind a massive, littered desk; as the first edition begins to shape up, the boss moves out to a steel desk in the newsroom. Sometimes he abandons both desks for the family's 14-acre place back of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Hollywood. But he has no plans to retire there.

Instead he is planning (for around 1951) a new Mirror building south of the United Nations headquarters on the East River.

It will have a penthouse apartment for the editor, who now has to walk five blocks to work. "Then," he grins, "I can just slide down a pole to my desk."

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