Buoyant Buccaneer

THE MAN WHO ROBBED THE ROBBER BARONS by Andy Logan. 260 pages. Norton $4.75.

"New York society," declared Colonel William d'Alton Mann, "is inhabited by jackasses, libertines and parvenus." Not that he minded. For one thing, they made sensational copy for his scurrilous, scandalous Town Topics. For another, the publicity-shy Four Hundred provided him with a lucrative sideline: Publisher Mann was the nation's most notorious blackmailer. He was also a Civil War hero, a talented inventor and a bon vivant. Nearly forgotten since his death in 1920, he re-emerges in this witty, engaging biography by The New Yorker's Andy Logan as a prize addition to the gang of robber barons.

Mann looked like a nightmare version of Santa Claus: a mop of white hair, a red, emphatic nose, and a tangle of untamed whiskers that parted beneath his chin. He also had the noisy energy of a stern-wheeler and the predacity of a buccaneer.

Trailing Cloud. Born in Ohio in 1839, he left home at 16 to be educated as a civil engineer, turned up again at 20 as manager of a dilapidated hotel in Grafton, Ohio, left town trailing a cloud of debts. In the confusion of wartime mobilization, he was made a colonel at 23, organized the 7th Michigan Cavalry, later fought heroically under General Custer at Gettysburg.

After the war, the colonel really began to find his footing. Armed with a suitcase full of promotional handbills and a bottle of lubricating oil, he sold $57,500 worth of stock in a nonexistent oil well. The shareholders finally caught on, and Mann was brought to trial; but the judge dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction. Encouraged, Mann packed his carpetbag in 1866 and moved on to Mobile as Federal Assessor of Internal Revenue. In 1872 he patented a design for a railroad sleeping car (consisting of a series of stateroomlike compartments) and sailed for Europe. There he leased his cars to rail lines in half a dozen countries. Eleven years later he returned to the U.S., several times a millionaire, to compete with George Pullman for the American market. Pull man won, and Mann went bankrupt. But not for long. By 1891 he had acquired full control of Town Topics from his young brother Eugene.

The Buyers. Half the magazine was given over to fiction, light verse and criticism. The rest was primarily the colonel's own leering, impertinent gossip. ("Mr. Henry Sloane has been looked upon as a complacent husband who wore his horns too publicly." "Miss Van Alen suffers from some kind of throat trouble--she cannot go more than half an hour without a drink.")

Everybody talked about Mann, but nobody dared do anything, since his facts were unerringly accurate. Mann had his price but he rarely used direct blackmail. Instead he "sold" his victims advertising in Town Topics, stock in his corporation (which never paid a dividend), or subscriptions to his Fads and Fancies of Representative-Americans, the colonel's hypocritical who's who in society. John Jacob Astor bought. So did J. P. Morgan, Mrs. Collis Huntington, Clarence Mackay, three Vanderbilts and scores of others.

Mann finally met his match. Infuriated by a Mann-handling of Alice Roosevelt, Publisher Robert Collier mounted an all-out attack on the colonel in Collier's Weekly. Mann retaliated with a suit charging criminal libel, and fashionable New York flocked to the court room--and hooted--as Mann's operations were exposed by an unsympathetic district attorney. But Town Topics survived exposure, and so did its editor, who lived happily on hush money to the ripe old age of 81.

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