Again, Macfadden

When public figures marry, it is customary for the U. S. press to make them share their happiness with the public through descriptions and photographs of the ceremony and sleuthy reports on the honeymoon. James A. ("Bud") Stillman Jr. and Backwoods Girl Lena Wilson were beleaguered in their Manhattan hotel after his mother had thrown plates at news photographers (TIME, Aug. 8, 1927). The Charles A. Lindberghs were hounded along the New England coast, spied on in Maine (TIME, June 17). The John Coolidges received kinder treatment but were "covered" even in the hamlets of rural Vermont.

Last fortnight Helen Newington Wills, world's foremost lady tennis player, quietly married Frederick S. Moody Jr. in Berkeley, Calif., and departed immediately for a Pacific cruise on the yacht Galatea. The press followed her in a perfunctory fashion, told how a yacht club gave the pair a private dining room, how the Galatea had touched at Catalina, how they sailed away again headed south, etc., etc. There was, perhaps because of Mrs. Moody's well-known composure and lack of flair, remarkably little pother made for so newsworthy a person at so newsworthy a time.

But Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden's New York Evening Graphic, a pink tabloid devoted to its owner's cult of things physical published an epithalamic editorial, based upon pure assumption, dealing with a subject into which not even the most nosey newspapers are accustomed to intrude. Under the heading "When Athletes Marry," the Graphic publicly discussed Mrs. Moody and her husband as follows:

"There is something ideal in this marriage of immense interest. Many marriages fail for reasons other than those given in the court records*. . . When athletes of the Helen Wills type marry you can rest assured that the basic natural law of physical perfection in mating has been fulfilled. Little Poker Face is a young woman whose physical condition must be nearly perfect by virtue of the strenuous sport at which she excelled.

"Her husband bears every evidence of bringing to her a not-unequal degree of masculine perfection. Why is it not possible for all young men and women when they make the trip to the altar to be as physically perfect as Helen Wills and young Moody? . . .

"Let us look . . . at Helen Wills, a champion of tennis and a champion of life, whose physical perfection may be the mainspring for her life of happiness."*

*Italics the Graphic's. The Graphic denied that Publisher Macfadden had written the editorial personally, declined to reveal the author.

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