Converted Wise Guy

As columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain and 152 other newspapers around the U.S., Robert Ruark, 37, makes close to $75,000 a year with a brew of simple ingredients. "I'm cute, angry, loud, puckish or perverse every day in print " he says. But Ruark feels he has outstayed his welcome as a New York columnist. Furthermore, he isn't "having any fun."

Last week, back in Manhattan from an African hunting trip, he announced that he is pulling up stakes, moving to Rome and radically changing his column. Says he: "I don't think a man can be a fresh provocative writer in the same pattern for more than seven or eight years. And I think the public is getting tired of being told what's what by pundits and columnists like me ... I have a yen to be what I was [i.e., a reporter] before public demand perverted me into a wise guy."

Instead of writing his weighty opinions on women, politics and Scotch-on-the-rocks, Ruark is going back to reporting and expects to cut his column from five times a week to three, make it a "kind of global feature," reporting what he sees. From his base camp in Rome (where he will pay no U.S. income tax), Ruark plans to travel the world, starting off in Spain to fish and see the bullfights."

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