Along the Rue Regret

SKYLINE (314 pp.)--Gene Fowler--Viking ($5).

The kind of newspaper assignment Gene Fowler relished in the 1920s was to be told by his managing editor to find a deserving old gentleman for a monkey-gland rejuvenation operation. When a scholarly greybeard named Mr. Bacon came into the New York American's offices primed with schemes of calendar reform and admitted, conversationally, to two carnal thoughts a year "at the most," Fowler knew he had his man. He went to a pet shop and procured "a nasty-tempered fugitive from an organ-grinder's beat," though in his columns Fowler called the monkey "Ponce de Leon." The operation went off with a burst of flashbulbs and headlines. Unfortunately, Mr. Bacon looked ten years older after his rejuvenation:"One result of the operation was the complete riddance of his carnal thoughts. He retired to a monastery, and finally died there while reading a Latin version of The Temptations of St. Anthony." Thus was news made in "the era of wonderful nonsense."

Scored for Fields. The late Gene (A Solo in Tom-Toms) Fowler, who died last year at 70, has here bottled some 96-proof nostalgia. A series of discontinuous an ecdotes, Skyline almost asks to be read aloud in the elliptical nasalities of W. C.

Fields, a great crony of the author's. Mostly, Fowler reminisces about New York newspapering circa 1918-29, during which time he was managing editor of Hearst's Daily Mirror and American, and drops footnotes to big names and no-names.

The monkey-gland business was a little unusual for W. R. Hearst, who never knowingly shook the hand of anyone remotely connected with vivisection. Even the rats at San Simeon were trapped in cages and transported several miles to be released. "The Chief" was less tender toward his editors. The best story of the fear he inspired in them is probably apocryphal. One frequently terrified editor, "Bugs" Tuttle, begged an assistant to open a telegram one day. "Your mother is dead," read the message. "Thank God!" Bugs Tuttle reportedly said. "I thought it was a wire from Mr. Hearst."

Fowler was always pleasantly known to his boss as "that young man from Denver." He remained young, or at least he retained an impishly boyish notion of what constitutes a great moment in history. He could remember Queen Marie of Rumania's being presented with an honorary headdress by the Dakota Indians and telling her lady in waiting to "get rid of that damned thing." He remembered lean Eamon De Valera, clad in long underwear, donning huge boxing gloves and sparring with his bull-necked secretary in a sitting room of the old Waldorf. It sometimes seems that Fowler had the kind of mind that files what other people forget. If one wants to know it, Skyline is the place to find out that a buck-and-wing dancer named Charles B. Lawler composed and sold The Sidewalks of New York for "a few dollars" and afterward went blind.

Camelot-on-Hudson. To Fowler, the Manhattan of his day was Camelot, and his fellow newsmen--Grantland Rice, Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, Arthur Brisbane--were knights of the round table, which was usually a bar. Fowler's personal idol and friend was Alfred Damon Runyon. Despite his Broadway camaraderie, Runyon was a brooding, lonely man, and there were distinct traces of rube in his makeup. He believed that to count as a New York know-it-all, he had to unearth a champion heavyweight. Over the years he maintained a series of fighters who ate like lions and fought like lambs.

One of these disgraces to Cro-Magnon man was stabled at the Gotham Hotel. "This canvas inspector finished several breakfasts one Sunday morning," Fowler tells in one of the book's funnier anecdotes, "and was trying to read the comic pages of the American. He had just about mastered the spelling of the hard word 'Wow!' in a Barney Google episode when the bells of nearby St. Patrick's began to ring.

Down went this fighter to the rug. He roared out 'Foul!' The house dick burst in upon him to see the splendid athlete holding his groin, moaning like a busted pipe organ, and refusing to come out for another round." To Fowler's generation of writers, New York was always the Big Town, a drink was spiritus frumenti, and Broadway was the Rue Regret. Reading Skyline with or without spiritus frumenti, one question is bound to arise: Where are the monkey glands of yesteryear?

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