Bad News

"Day in, day out

I'm worryin' about those blues.

Day out, day in

I'm worryin' about bad news.

I'm so afraid

My man I'm going to lose."

Moanin' Low was written especially for a lawyer's daughter from Cincinnati named Elsbeth Holman. Singing it in a throaty voice that could turn the male will to quivering aspic, Libby Holman captured Broadway when she was only 26. It was a strangely prophetic song.

At 27, Libby Holman became the wife of 20-year-old Zachary Smith Reynolds, moody, eccentric heir to $28 million of the Camel cigarette fortune. Seven months after the wedding, he was shot through the head at a drunken party. Libby and a friend of Reynolds' were indicted for murder, then freed because of lack of evidence against them, and because there were indications that Reynolds had been thinking of suicide.

Bodyguards & Great Danes. Six months after his father died, Christopher Smith Reynolds was born, a sickly infant of only 2 Ibs. 11 oz. He got $7 million of the Camel fortune (Libby got $750,000), from which his mother might spend about $75,000 a year to keep him in a $450,000 house near Stamford, Conn., protect him with seven bodyguards and three Great Danes, and provide him with the best in doctors, teachers, clothes and travel.

As "Topper" Reynolds grew up, Libby stopped singing Moanin' Low, Body and Soul and the other torch songs that made her famous. She studied serious drama, collected American folk music, and learned from left-wing Negro Balladeer Josh White how to sing with the proper guttiness. In 1939, she got married again, to Ralph Holmes, an actor eleven years her junior. But that marriage, too, ended in the moody sadness Libby used to sing about. Holmes died in 1945 from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Theaters & Mountains. More than ever, her son--a slender, reserved and intelligent kid--became the center of Libby Holman's life. They went on long trips together and worked at summer theaters, Libby as a performer, Topper as a stagehand. She visited him often at Putney School in Vermont, and stood by proudly last June when 17-year-old Topper, chairman of Putney's student council, graduated near the top of his class. This summer, Libby toured Europe. Topper went to California with Stephen Wasserman, a classmate, to work in one of the mines owned by Stephen's father (wealthy Manhattan Broker William Stix Wasserman) and to do some mountain climbing.

Fortnight ago, Topper Reynolds and Stephen Wasserman packed their climbing gear and headed up 14,496-ft. Mt. Whitney, highest peak in the U.S. About 10,000 feet up, they abandoned the easy trail to the top and decided to scale Whitney's sheer, slippery 1,400-ft. east face, a cliff which had been scaled only once. They did not return.

One afternoon last week, searchers found the broken, frozen body of Stephen Wasserman. He had fallen 800 feet. Two days later, searchers found the body of Topper Reynolds jammed into a crevice high up on the cliff. Libby Holman, who had hurried home from Europe, got the bad news as she stepped from her plane, and a few moments later she collapsed.

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