Saved from Obscenity

Editing, the late, Adlai Stevenson once observed, consists of separating the wheat from the chaff--and printing the chaff. Something like that, only worse, seems to have happened at TV Guide when it received a program listing for a now defunct local talk show on San Francisco-Oakland's KTVU. The notice said that guests for the show on Sept. 20,1968, would include Pat Montandon, a well-known Bay Area hostess who had written a book about giving imaginative parties on lean budgets, and an unnamed masked prostitute. TV Guide's condensed version: "From party girl to call girl. Scheduled guest: TV personality Pat Montandon and author of How To Be a Party Girl." Montandon sued, alleging that she had suffered "horrendously obscene phone calls, obscene letters and obscene objects in the mail." Outright strangers, she lamented, had asked whether she really had been a prostitute, and one man even asked how much she charged. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case and therefore let stand a California court's award to her of $151,000 in damages from TV Guide (accumulated interest brings the total to $190,000). Said Montandon: "The money can never compensate for the pain I went through."

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