Exit Blushing

To the editors of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, the beefy, flashily dressed stranger introduced himself as Bob Patterson, an all-round newshand. He'd just breezed in from Atlanta, he said, via Hollywood, where he had written Brute Force for Mark Hellinger. He wanted a job.

In March 1946, he got the job--writing the new society chitchat and gossip column that W.R. Hearst had ordered. As "Freddie Francisco," Patterson filled his column with racy penthouse scandal and jive talk, was soon earning $15,000 a year as the Examiner's prize drawing card. Once, when he called a lady Oakland evangelist "sexy-looking," her congregation picketed the Examiner. A great gagster, Freddie rented a beard and paraded with the pickets. He also crusaded against Elmer ("Bones") Remmer, owner of San Francisco's three biggest gambling houses, and drove Bones out of business. (When offered a $500-a-month bribe to lay off, he hid a microphone and got a transcript of the offer; it made juicy reading.)

One day last month, Freddie's column casually mentioned an obscure and unappetizing Los Angeles weekly called Hollywood Nite Life. It was nothing but a "brash, often spiteful publication," he wrote, and its swart and droopy-lidded publisher, one Jimmy Tarantino, struck him as a man who liked to toot his own horn.

Last week Tarantino struck back. Shipping thousands of extra copies of Nite Life into the Bay area, he gave San Franciscans a shocking story under a black, front-page headline: FREDDIE FRANCISCO--EMBEZZLER--THIEF. Who was Freddie Francisco? Why, said Tarantino, he was a man of eight aliases, with a 20-year criminal record studded with seven arrests (forgery, robbery, grand larceny, theft of Government property) and four convictions for theft, forgery, and fraud. A four-time loser, he was on parole from the federal prison at Atlanta, and was an "accomplished shakedown artist." What was Hearst going to do about him?

For five days, nobody did anything. The San Francisco papers passed up the story, while Freddie (real name Robert Lawson Preston, 44) tried to bluster it through. "Some of it's true," Preston conceded airily, "and some of it isn't."

Actually, Nite Life had the cold dope on Freddie. Like other newsmen, Examiner Managing Editor William C. Wren had known for two years about his columnist's record, but he had not been disturbed. But at week's end, the column vanished from the Examiner. The order to fire Freddie Francisco, said Hearstlings, came from the Chief himself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.