The Golden Hack

"Can Lippmann do what I'm doing?" asks James Alonzo Bishop. "Can Pegler do what I'm doing?"

What Jim Bishop is doing is writing a new thrice-weekly newspaper column that, as Hearst's King Features Syndicate explains with a gush, "opens to readers his heart-warming world of laughter, love and tears." The column, "Jim Bishop: Reporter," is already running in 66 dailies. It has landed Bishop a contract that, with other assignments for the Hearst press, guarantees him a minimum $65,000 a year, has earned him syndicate billing as "The HOTTEST Writer in America" and the opportunity to "go anywhere, write anything."

Famed chiefly for his bestselling recreations of great events (The Day Lincoln Was Shot, The Day Christ Died), Author Bishop insists that he is "not to be confused with a pundit." "Most of all," he assured readers, "I like to write stories about little people . . . A story a day. Each one, I hope, with a thought-provoking moral." In its first three weeks the column heart-warmed readers with stories about Bandleader Frankie Carle, "little man at the big piano"; Bishop's little mother, "a short, stout woman [with] a beautiful figure"; his two little daughters; an auto accident involving a carload of little victims; and a little spaniel that became addicted to alcohol and died a thought-provoking death.

Bishop also devoted two columns to people who, though far from diminutive, could be classified as Little People's People: Pope Pius XII ("he has the bone hurting handshake of a farm boy") and the late Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger--who gave Biographer Bishop (The Mark Hellinger Story) early, well-heeded lessons in Hearstmanship. Sample Hellinger commandments to Bishop: "Use only short words"; "the way to write a sob story is to be callous"; "before writing, always read a few hundred words of your favorite author."

Speedy Stories. Another large-sized little person (5 ft. 7 in., 160 lbs.), silver-haired Jim Bishop, 49, talks in terse, side-of-the-mouth sentences that often sound as if he read Hemingway before writing, also brings to his craft an Irish eye for sentiment and a memory for "all the important little tiles of fact on every story of consequence." He is a tenacious reporter, with a disarming manner and a glib way of dramatizing. Bishop on Bishop: "I'm a reporter. A pretty good one. A pro. If my work is memorable, it's because I've revived the ancient art of storytelling."

As an $81.50-a-week rewrite man on Hearst's New York Daily Mirror before the war, Newsman Bishop learned the even more valuable art of turning out his stories at breakneck speed. In the next year, he will not only pound out 156 Little People columns (average writing time: 35 minutes each) but will write ten feature articles for Hearst's American Weekly, e.g., a series on Kim Novak, and handle six such reportorial assignments as his tear-speckled coverage of Marine Corps Sergeant Matthew McKeon's "death march" trial last year. (On Christmas Eve, after he had been reassigned to duty, McKeon called Reporter Bishop to thank him for his sympathetic stories.) By June 1958 Bishop will also have researched and written Time of the Traitors, a book on the Rosenberg spy case. For The Day Christ Died, Bishop this week won a special Christopher Award and the Catholic Institute of the Press annual award. Next week Bishop's biography of sorrowful Funnyman Jackie Gleason, The Golden Ham, will get a Benjamin Franklin Prize from the University of Illinois.

Research in Bed. Bishop's bestselling books have popularized a reportorial technique that he learned from his father, a police lieutenant in Jersey City. "I'd be doing my homework," he recalls, "and Dad would sit across the kitchen table and make out his reports. He'd start at the beginning, where he spotted suspect, Bostwick and Jackson Avenues, 9:40 a.m., and tell his story so neatly and concisely that he made it sing for me." From his sensitive, fact-crammed accounts of the last 24 hours and 22 minutes in the life of Lincoln and Christ's last 22 hours, Bishop will have earned $550,000 in royalties by year's end. In between, Bishop wrote The Golden Ham, which sold only 7,000, garnered the author $40,000, and deeply wounded Jackie Gleason. Cracked Bishop: "I went from Lincoln to Gleason to Christ, and neither of the other subjects has complained yet."

A teetotaler, Bishop works in a pink-and-black oceanside house at Sea Bright, N.J., sees his wife and family in Teaneck only on weekends. He divides his time between writing and research (which he does in bed), his 34-ft. Richardson power cruiser and the local bar, where he drinks endless pots of tea and gets many of his story ideas from chatting with clam diggers and fishermen, "the sneaker set." Unlike most columnists, Jim Bishop has no nightmares about running out of material. The world is full of Little People.

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