Mr. Peeve

What he wanted out of life, said Novelist John O'Hara when he started writing a column for Long Island's Newsday and its syndicate last year, was to be as "indispensable to historians of the future as Dickens was to the historians of the 19th century." Newsday, which paid O'Hara $1,000 a column, found him to be something less than a Dickens and quite dispensable. Largely because 27 newspapers have dropped his column, Newsday dropped him--after exactly one year. "I regard him as an outrage as a columnist," says Larry Fanning, executive editor of the Chicago Daily News, undoubtedly speaking for many of those who dumped O'Hara. "He turned his column into a personal pulpit, which bored me and bored our readers."

Drub-a-drub-drub. As a preacher, O'Hara ran heavily to bile. He played on a vast range of peeves--from the present times ("The Age of the Jerk") to a movie producer who had hard words for one of his scripts (he even "bombed out of television"). O'Hara has no use for President Johnson ("An uninspiring, uninspired man, whom no one loathes and no one loves"), or Bobby Kennedy ("There is something pathetic about a man who turns on the charm when he has none"), or the general run of newspapermen ("Only the game of politics contains more men who are afflicted with venality, envy and gutlessness"). In the course of a year's column writing, he also managed to drub Hubert Humphrey, Elizabeth Taylor, John F. Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Pearl Bailey, James Baldwin, Bishop James Pike, balletomanes, Abraham Lincoln, Sukarno and Frank Sinatra, to name a few.

He had kind words for Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles de Gaulle, and Goldwater supporters. "I think it's time that the Lawrence Welk people had their say," wrote O'Hara. "The Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie people have been on too long. When the country is in trouble, like war kind of trouble, man, it is the Lawrence Welk people who can be depended upon, all the way."

Fired all the Same. O'Hara had some special ink for the men who canceled him. "When syndication is involved," he wrote in his final column, "a bush-league editor likes to king it on his remote little throne. His paper may be paying something like $15 a week for a column, but the editor can play big shot by 'firing' a writer he has never met, is not likely to meet, and never should meet. The editor has convinced himself that he, like my movie producer, can bang out as good a column if he had the time." For all that, O'Hara ruefully admitted: "For the tenth time, I am an unemployed newspaperman."

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