Le New York

Down the gangway of S. S. Paris as she docked in Manhattan one day last week cautiously stepped a small dark man whose face wore the faintly perplexed expression of a foreigner. As he has done each year for the last 19, Laurence Hills was returning to his native New York City to report on the condition of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, of which he is editor and general manager. Three facts made this trip different from its predecessors: 1) Laurence Hills was sick, 2) Europe was sick, 3) his paper was not too well.

Probably the most storied newspaper of its size in the world, the Paris Herald, as most Americans call it (Parisians call it Le New York), has lived through three distinct careers, under three publishers. Each career has reflected the condition and aspirations of its readers--the Americans who live in Europe. Founded in 1887 by the late great James Gordon Bennett, it was for three decades a society paper for those expatriates of whom Henry James liked to write. It carried whole pages of yachting news, maintained its own coach to Versailles, was written in two languages, with the somewhat quaint idea that people who spoke both French and English liked to read their news the same way.

Laurence Hills was Washington correspondent for the New York Sun in 1920 when Frank Andrew Munsey bought the New York Herald and with it the Paris edition. Hills asked Munsey to let him run the Paris Herald and got, with the job, Munsey's blunt opinion that "there is no need of a first-class newspaperman on the Herald." Laurence Hills, then 40, remade the paper nevertheless. He threw out the French departments, put in United Press service, used airplanes to get his paper to London and Amsterdam, upped daily stock quotations from five or six to 600. Hills wanted to make the Herald an international paper, and did, but at the same time it remained a small-town sheet, written by small-town newspapermen for the army of small-town Americans that took Paris after the War.

The Herald in the 1920s was a newspaperman's alcoholic dream. The pay was not much ($40 a week was top) and the turnover was fast, but the work was easy and two big staffs (afternoon and night) of rewrite and copydesk men could spend half their time in the bistro on the corner or playing cards on the copy desk. The Herald was published in an old building in the Rue du Louvre, adequately covered by insurance, and it was considered all right to light fires in the wastebaskets and put them out with imitation champagne. Only permanent fixtures on the staff were Managing Editor Eric Hawkins (who, being an Englishman with a French wife, was adept at suppressing what the French wouldn't like and correcting the more objectionable misspellings of the native composing room crew); Sportswriter "Sparrow" Robertson (who sent his copy over from Harry's New York Bar), and Laurence Hills himself (who was a little aghast at it all, except when he added up the profits). The Herald's, legion of homesick readers gladly paid 5-c- to read its cabled news from New York, its "Letters From the Mailbag" (occasionally staff-written), its classified ads for apartments and friendships, its homey items from Sioux City and Dallas.

In 1930 the prosperous Herald moved into a nine-story skyscraper in the Rue de Berri. But by then the stockmarket had crashed and the small-town army was evacuating Paris. Shorter & shorter grew the Herald's list of prominent Americans who dined at Giro's, harder & harder it became to publish an American newspaper in Paris at a profit. The Herald's most engaging competitor, the Paris Times (which padded 50 daily words of wireless into a full page of U. S. news) had folded in 1929. The Herald absorbed its more serious competitor, the Paris Chicago Tribune, in 1934. But even with only one English-language rival (the British Continental Daily Mail), the Herald dwindled in circulation. For the last few years its daily press run has averaged only about 11,000 copies in winter, twice that number in summer. With the post-War legions gone from Montparnasse, the Herald again became a paper for exiles and Cook's tourists.

The Herald's chief source of revenue is steamship advertising, with resort ads running a close second. Biggest advertisers: the German and Italian Governments. Pro-Fascist bias has inevitably crept into the paper. It supported Italy in its Ethiopian snatch, banned the frontpaging of Loyalist news from Spain, and on the day Hitler entered Vienna ran an editorial on mothers-in-law. English-speaking residents of France, few of whom like the dictators, became dissatisfied with the Herald's news. Laurence Hills, who has an autographed photograph of Mussolini on his office wall, became highly unpopular in his profession, and when he was made director of all the New York Herald Tribune's European correspondents in 1937, there was talk of mass resignations. A lonely man, he would like to be popular. Last June he went to the American Hospital at Neuilly, since then has had two abdominal operations.

With Laurence Hills in Manhattan, the Herald is being run as usual by Assistant Publisher Hubert Roemer and Managing Editor Hawkins. Mr. Roemer's chief interest is advertising, Mr. Hawkins' rugby football. The editorial staff has been cut to five day men and ten at night, chief of whom are Editorial Writer Vincent ("Booj") Bujeja, a cultured Maltese who just missed being a Jesuit and now calls himself a Communist-Fascist; Night City Editor Ed Haffel, who likes to boast that he was once boss; and ubiquitous, imperishable Sparrow Robertson, who at 75 still works under the unbreakable contract Frank Munsey gave him, still calls everybody "my old pal." The rest of the staff is itinerant; it thinks of the Herald as a caravansary, where there is always the same number of guests but never the same people.

The Herald still stoutly insists there will be no European war. If there is war, it will lose most of its steamship and resort advertisements, and it could hardly survive without them. Last week, though barely able to get about, Laurence Hills was planning to sail for France in another fortnight. This was a bad time to be away.

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