Curtis Follows Hearst

Hearst Curtis Coolidge Long Schuler

About Calvin Coolidge's name last week swirled the names of two great publishers and two editors. Mr. Coolidge was, as usual, impassively the centre. He was the author. His job had been to write a story for each editor. He did, and each paid him well.

Of the editors, one was stocky Ray Long, whose April Cosmopolitan appeared early in March galvanized by a Coolidge-penned story, swift, personal, moving. The other was Loring Ashley Schuler, whose April Ladies' Home Journal also carrying a Coolidge-penned story appeared only last week. The Schuler-Coolidge story was, of course, dulled because antedated by the Long-Collidge story. But what really killed the Schuler story was Author Coolidge himself. In the Cosmopolitan he was dynamic, in the Ladies' Home Journal he was tedious, general, rambling,

But behind the two editors loomed the two great publishers, dictators of policies and style. One was William Randolph Hearst, whose correspondents constantly supply him with expensive but startling scoops,* whose vital pungency has won him more millions of daily readers than any other individual publisher can hoast. The other was Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, the white-bearded little "man from Maine" whose Saturday Eve- ning Post and Ladies' Home Journal are as essentially sound and quiet as the Maine homes into one of which Publisher Curtis was born. Last week had Publisher Hearst seen Publisher Curtis he might well have been patronizing. The Hearst editor had won the most exciting journalist race of the year, although the field was publisher Curtis': magazines.

But keen readers of both stories last week were inclined to give Author Coolidge credit for fitting his prose to his medium. For Cosmopolitan readers the Coolidge pen had raced intimately. For Ladies' Home Journal readers it had dealt ponderously with peace, defense, good gov- ernment. Publisher Curtis might have felt last week that he, like William Randolph Hearst, had gotten just what he wanted for his readers.

Eva Lindbergh Christie

Suddenly last week rotogravure sections throughout the U. S. carried, and many featured, pictures of Mrs. Eva Lindbergh Christie (half-sister) and her chil- dren: George Jr., Lillian. Manhattan's World captioned in capitals:

MEMBERS OF THE LINDBERGH FAMILY WHO HAVE HITHERTO ESCAPED THE LIGHT OF PUBLICITY

Other papers used even larger capitals. The Boston Globe ran pictures and story five columns wide. Yet Mrs. Christie had done nothing unusual, was just housekeeping at Red Lake Falls, Minn. Why, then, news?

A story about Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. had been printed not long before (TIME, Feb. 25). Soon Mrs. Christie wrote her thanks to TIME, and the letter too was printed. The press picked it up, sent it broadcast. Editors in far-away cities editorialed. The alert Minneapolis Star sent a pleasant photographer who snapped a very good likeness --the one used by nearly all the rotogravures.

By this time every tentacle of the press was alert, vibrant. Feature writers rushed pellmell out to Red Lake Falls on a jerkwater train, half box cars. They gleaned little enough, wrote much. In a letter to TIME not for publication Mrs. Christie presently said, among other things, that she has given no personal interviews, ex cept some long ago on economic subjects. That fact did not stop the feature writers, but they went a little easy, because Mr. Christie is a country editor, one of the craft.

That was how the machine leaped into action -- the billion dollar U. S. press. But why? Not because editors had not known that Col. Lindbergh has a half-sister. Not because Mrs. Christie wrote a letter, or because it was printed, or because TIME printed the story about her father. The cause lay deeper.

In her letter Mrs. Christie said that she, like her radical Congressman father, is opposed to "the system which has fostered the present great concentration of wealth in the hands of a small per cent of the population." That was the big news: the fact that there is actually alive a child of the late Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. who opposes what he called the Money Trust! That was the electric, potent shock which set editors editing, rotos rotating.

Bankruptcy de luxe

"We'll give $300,000 for Amazing Stories and Science and Invention," said the gentlemen who represented Robert Medill McBride, publisher of James Branch Cabell's delicate indelicacies, relation of Liberty's and the Chicago Trib- une's Joseph Medill Patterson.

"I'll give $30,000 cash for Science and Invention," wired Publisher Roscoe Fawcett (Screen Secrets, True Confessions, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang).

"We will give $200,000 cash and $250,000 in notes, pay all creditors 100 per cent on the dollar, for all the publications," said Publisher B. A. McKinnon (Plain Talk).

Lawyer Emory Roy Buckner remarked: ''This will be a case of bankruptcy de luxe."

"We will give $250,000 in cash, pay creditors who claim $3,000 or less, pay the rest 100 per cent less the cost of the receivership," said the Macfadden Publications Inc.*

"All the publications" were those of the Experimenter Publishing Co. (Your Body, How to Make It, Aero Mechanics, Radio News, Amazing Stories, Science and Invention). Also there are radio stations WRNY and 2XAL. Last week the Experimenter Company declared bankruptcy. Falcon publishers swooped down to Manhattan law courts to buy its magazines, which still appear regularly. No bids were accepted.

The brothers Hugo and Sydney Gernsback are the conceivers of the Experimenter Company. Hugo was one of the first publishers in the U. S. to exploit the radio in print. The covers of his radio magazine show white-coated scientists listening to the growth of roses by radio, monster ships propelled by radio. ... In editorials Publisher Gernsback speaks of radio in broad cosmic terms, prophesies vasty futures.

Before his radio ventures Publisher Gernsback issued an Electrical Experi- menter. His Your Body is a quarterly which treats the body and its organs in mechanistic terms, strives ponderously to be matter-of-fact about seldom-mentioned subjects. Profuse among the pages of the Gernsback publications are full-page advertisements for Gernsback-owned books (Short Wave Manual, Houdini's Spirit Exposes, Beauty Secrets, Popular Card Tricks). Observers of the bankruptcy pro- ceedings last week noticed particularly this unusual tangling of private interests with the interests of a company. Of course, Publisher Gernsback did not pay for the advertising space that his magazines gave his side-issue books.

Figaro-Gaulois

In Faubourg St. Germain homes le Gaulois was acceptable because it was slightly Royalist. And to sippers of vermouth cassis on the boulevards it was also acceptable because it seemed gay, true.

Founded when Louis Napoleon was emperor the newspaper was first royalist, then conservative, then under the late great Editor Arthur Meyer, pungent like the boulevards where it was most popular. Under the ownership of Perfumer null Coty, le Gaulois seemed somewhat to lose heart. Last week it disappeared from kios-ques and homes. Perfumer Coty merged it with his Figaro, intends a larger, more potent newspaper called simply le Figaro.

* Recent Hearst scoops: The terms of the Anglo-French naval pact, first news of the papal-governmental reconciliation in Italy.

*Bernarr ("body-love") Macfadden was also planning last week to increase the number of his publications by issuing a daily Manhattan financial tabloid. His editor: Clarence A. Hebb, onetime City Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. The new Macfadden paper will advise its readers, explain Wall Street jargon, describe financial news in simple graphic terms. Publisher Macfadden now owns six dailies, 14 magazines.