Variety (December 1954)

Wednesday, December ly 1054 PfaiRmfY LITERATI 17 . * Look’s $1,800,900 Issue . * Look’s publisher, Vernon C. My- ers, made it a festive occasion with 'a split of vintage grape and a champagne glass from Plummer’s (5th Ave. fancy crockery establish- ment) to celebrate “the biggest ad revenue ($1*800,000) in Look’s hisr tory.” This is the 168-page (plus covers) Dec; 14 issue, which splits the cover billing between the Rev, Norman Vincent Peale and. Bishop Sheen. The prime cover story is cap i oned “Religion’s Best Sellers." Gleason’s NEA Moppet Stint Jackie; Gleason, on behalf of NEA news syndicate, will present first - place award . to the winner of NEA’s “Little Peo- ple” coloring contest for children. Presentation will be part of a cir- culation promotion for NEA and will'take place On GleasOn’s Dec. .18 show. “Little People’’ Is one of NEA’s top comic strips. The winner*, who will be chosen from a national competition in- volving about 125 newspapers sub- scribing to the NEA service, will be flown to New York apd be the guest of Gleason for the Dec£* 18 Weekend. Musical ’Bedside Esquire* “The Private Lives of Great Composers.’’ an Omnibus volume containing 1,000 stories and anec- dotes about composers, conductors and musical, artists, is being pub- lished in London by Rider & Co.,, next Monday (6). Authored by-Bernard Grun, com- poser and musicologist, the book surveys four centuries of musical evolution from Palestrina to Cole Porter. It’s described abroad as a musical “Bedside Esquire.’’ • Chi Chez Paree Mag* Chez Paree, in Chicago, is Ven- turing into the publishing biz with a new entertainment mag called Fanfare. While the 10 or 12-pager will have current Chez attractions oh its covers and be distributed per the nitery’s mailing list, it's not being conceived as a house brgan- Book will sell space to adver- tisers and will contain local tv listings and guest articles by per- sonalities. Editor is Larry Teeman, and first issue is being prepped for January. Fla. Press Gives ‘Oscar’ Florida Press Assn., at its an- nual meeting in Silver Springs, awarded Marie Natvig its editorial “Oscar” for “The Blackest Week In The Redlands,” written, when ahe was on the staff of the Home- stead Weekly News last March, and which attracted national at- tention at the time. ' Subject was the discrimination against white Puerto Ricans im- ported as laborers by tofhato and citrus growers in the area. Time magazine reprinted che editorial In an April Issue. Mrs. Natvig was recently in the news when she testified before the Federal Com- munications Commission in the Ed- ward Lamb case; she claimed she had seen Lamb at three state Communist meetings in Columbus, O., adding that on one occasion •he was l\is guest at a* hotel. Mrs. Natvig is currently a resident of Miami Beach. Shulman’s PR for PM According to the Benjamin Son- nenberg PR office, author-play- wright - scenarist Max Shulman (“Tender Trap,” “Barefoot Boy >With Cheek,” etc.) is “pouring his heart-out these days doing an off- beat campus column for Philip Morris.” Column is titled “On Campus With Max Shulman” un- der latter V copyright. In an Intro rote to college eds, Shulman: said re the ad schedule (175 lines or 1214-inch depth by two-column width), “Turn to. such-and-such a S age, snap open a pack of Philip [orris and light up while you read my first stimulating column . . . It’s got to be a Philip Morris be- cause’ they’re paying the freight bo you Can read this vintage prose. Besides, what other cigaret; offers you just the. right . amount of sun- shine and rain?” PM is hot only worked into the .pillar but there’s art italic tagline reading,.. “This column is brought to you by the makers of Philip Morris who think you should enjoy their cigaret.” Rebirth of Marie-Claire Marie-Claire was one of the big- gest femme mags before the war. With over a 1,000,000 circulation in France, A Weekly, it was a main- stay female thinking and fash- ion until the Liberation. It was es- timated that with multiple readers the glossy weekly reached over 8,000,000 women. Mag was the brainchild of Marcel Auclair arid publisher Jean Prouvost.„ Prouvost-turned to the pic mag, Paris-Match, after this arid latter is now one of the top weeklies. He then decided to return to Marie- Claire, whose name is still a potent factor. After two numbers, though now a: monthly arid, different in format, it looks like another pub- lishing success. Style is .strongly influenced by UIS. femme inags. Make-Ready FOr Big Week - ^ Part of the extensive work that goes into promotion of the observ- ance of Brotherhood 'Week (Feb. 20-27) is reflected in a magazine kit sent out this week by. Claire, Glass of Parent Institute, who is chair- man for magazines. Kit contains numerous articles by-lined by out- standing names in the literary, show business, political, etc;, fields. There’s; also a collection of filler quotes and cartoons. All for planting in behalf of the National Conference of Christians and Jews’ Brotherhood campaign, in which show business takes part. A. S. Kany’s Wife Killed Arthur S. Kariy, Dayton: Jour- nal Herald amusement editor for more than 25 years, is recovering from an automobile accident in which his wife was killed^^ Kany suffered'severe shock arid a possible back Injury at a Dayton intersection.... Saturday, Nov;: 20, when another car ran a red light and struck the Kany car broadside. The driver is charged With second degree manslaughter, Mrs. Kany, the “constant com- panion” mentioned in many of her husband’s columns, was killed al- most instantly. The couple had been married 43 years. She was 70. Kany, after 30 years as a Jour- nal Herald reporter, is the dean of working newspaper reporters in Dayton. J Barrault-Renaud Books practice of the Jean Louis Bar- rault-Madeleine Renaud Co. of publishing a 130-page souvenir book with each new Presentation, or on various facets of their activi- ties as a leading private repertory company, has become a theatrical publishing staple in Paris. These are paperbound books sold along with programs at each performance for 50c, and go into the back- ground of the play, the authors and interpreters. Feature was started last season with presentation of Paul Claudel’s “Christoph Colomb” arid will ap- pear at least four times per year. Section is run. by Andre Frank and is published by the Editions Rene Juillard. “Colomb” had articles by Claudel and Barrault on the play arid on background of various aspects of the life of Columbus, Second volume is on Jean. Girau- doux’s “Pour Lucrece.” One is on Anton Chekhov and “The Cherry Orchard,” another is on . the voy- ages of the troupe, and another on the little theatre movement. All are well compiled and written and worth further taking up by other rep companies or regular theatres. Mosk. On Revealing News Sources The Quebec, Labor Relations Board last, week ignored a recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada by upholding the right of a reporter to refuse to divulge the source of his information. Labor Board’s decision came about in a hearing on Communisrii in unions. Frank Kennedy of the Montreal Herald was called to identify^ a story in which he had quoted a Vhjgh union official” as saying that a number of Communists Were temporary officers of: a plumbers union. .Board upheld Kennedy’s stand that he couldn’t name the union official. Supreme Court ruled recently that under certain circumstances, reporters must reveal the identity of their sources. . accumulated at .the,U. of Iowa, (Iowa was at the heart' of the Chautauqua movement). The author touches upon the riiannei* in which local literary societies and town forums became part of nationwide Lyceum wheels. He discusses > several early, lecturers and entertainers, devoting consid- erable space to the greatest tent attraction of .them all —William Jennings Bryan. Horner’s style Is easy-going, almost chatty. He may not supply the definitive history of Chautau- qua, but his book has value as the personal narrative of one who participated in the social and cultural phenomenon that reached its peak in 1922, /only te vanish half a dozen years later because Of relaxed platform standards, a plethora of attractions; and due to the Onslaught of radio and talking films. " Down. Joey Adariis’ Dual Feature . Comic Joey Adams is fighting time to deliver two book manu- scripts to Frederick Fell; marking his fourth and fifth books, by Jan. T. Both are slated for successive publication but the deadline is the year's end. One is “Cindy arid I,” referring to his wife; Cindy Heller; book is said to have a “The Egg arid 1” parallel. The other book is “Strictly for Laughs," a hqmor. anthology but differing from his last “Joey Adams’ Joke Book.’’ , First two were “Gags to Riches,” autobiographical, and “The Cur- tain Never- Falls,”. 1st Int’l N. Y. Press Ball New York’s first International Press Ball, slated for the Waldorf- Astoria, for Dec. 23, under Foreign Press Assn, auspices, will be a $50-per-plate benefit, with funds going to the United Nations Chil- dren’s Fund, the N. Y. Herald- Tribune Fresh Air Fund, the N. Y. Journal-American’s Christmas Vet- erans’ Fund and the Free Milk Fund for Babies. Entertainment will consist of an international variety, show headed by Victor Borge arid dancing to four bands. Banquet will consist of culinary^ specialties and wines from five continents. Okinawa Daily Bows Initial issue of the Okinawa Morning Star rolled from presses last, week (23). New daily is the only English-language paper pub- lished on the island. Publisher is Ed Kennedy, former Philadelphia and Tokyo newspaperman. Editor, and managing director is Bob Vermillion, for 18 years a staffer with UP who was last as- sistant chief of UP’s Toyko Bu- reau. Bob Prosser,: former AP man in Tokyo, is news ed. Story of Chautauqua “Strike the Tents”.by Charles F. Horner. (Dortance; $2.50), is sub- titled “The Stdry of Chautauqua,” yet the volume does not offer full treatment on a subject that is probably too.vast, for a single tome. In its heyday, Chautauqua units played to 40,000,000 Americans in nearly 10,000. towns. Horner, who. entered Chautauqua after teaching school in Nebraska, properly cred- its Hugh Orchard (author of “50 Years of Chautauqua,” published in 1923) as a more thorough his- torian of the great Redpath-Vawter days of the under-canvas Lyceum circuits. Horner also states that he writes from his own experiences, without recourse to the mass of material on Chautauqua that has been CHATTER Dial Press prexy George Joel’s daughter, Susan Barbara, married Barrie Beere, N. Y. stockbroker. Murray Garrett and Gene How- ard are new Hollywood fepreserita- tives for the London Week-End Mail. Ramsden Greig, show scribe of Glasgow Evening Citizen, switch- ing to Evening Standard, London, as tv columnist. Gordon Irving,. Variety’s Scot- tish mugg, penned profile of Morey Amsterdam in English theatre weekly, The Stage. The Nation inadvertently omitted its 333 6th Ave., N. Y. City ad- dress, from that paper’s advertise- ment in Variety last Week. N.Y, Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg has .article, “Music and Modern Ballet in America,” in the December Dance News. Alan Curthoys, Liverpool (Eng.) scribe, having new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” preemed at David Lewis Theatre, Liverpool. Frank Owen, London scribe, in Scotland to boost sales of his book on Lloyd. George; English politi- cian, currently being serialized in Sunday Express, London. Roger Angell, associate editor on Holiday mag, upped to senior editor, in charge of the: N, Y. Office. Other Holiday senior eds are Harry Sioris and Loring Dowstr Little, Brown is following up its “Circus Doctor” (by Henderson & Taplinger) with another circus l SCULLY’S SCRAPBOOK : By Frank Scully ;: Palm Springs. if I were an up-and-coming young writer, I believe I would drop putting words together that enjoy a splendid isolation by themselves, and fashion a new kind of bomb instead. It would be a Boomerang Bomb and it would be put in. the hands of old and disgruntled writers to throw at editors, and blow them both up. , That way the road would be cleared for young Writers, and since I have all my Own hair and teeth, ifo pot, arid am brown as a berry, I believe I could pass as ari up-and-coming young writer. Scarcely. a week passes but what some publication crowds out young -writers by regurgitating the contributions of old hacks in an anniversary number. Some, like /the Readers Digest, attain the permanency of book-binding, sewn with a cross-stitch called “The Best.” These are published presumably because nostalgia is a sign of blooming health instead of a disease of old editors and older, writers. Some of the stuff is dreadfully dated, museum pieces really. Some of course retain their vitality as living literature. But in the main, reprints jam the conveyer belt arid keep young writers from moving up as, say, cadets move up from West Point to the. General Staff In the Pentagon. Now and then, of course, a young writer breaks through, climbs over sleeping seniors on the jahuried con- veyer belt and gets on top before editors have realized what hap- pened. But this is about as rare, or rarer, than a day In June. When The Old. Republic Was New The latest of these anthologies is the 40th anniversay number of the New Republic. Anything in this world for 40 years might in all, fairness to the English language be called the Old Republic, but ther it is—the New Republic. Tlie droppings and rimne-droppings ran all the way from Sherwood Anderson to. William Butler Yeats. Hey wood Broun, Elmer Davis, John Dewey, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Waiter Lippinan, H. L. Mencken, Edna St’ Vincent Millay,'George Orwell John .Reed, James Harvey Robinson; Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, George Santayana, Bernard Shaw,. Lincoln Steffens; Janies Thurber. H. G. Wells, William. Allen White, Edmund Wilson and Virginia Woolf wer among those enjoying big type on .the cover. Faulkner was, in there only for a sonnet and his Was not as good as Dorothy Parker’s. George S. Kaufman and Eleanor Wylie made th book as compleat letter-writers, both of them taking belts, at Edmund Wilson, : Miss Wylie wished the then Ne\V Republic would, make it clear to the magazine’s readers that “E.W.” was not Eleanor Wyii she all ways signed her full name. Kaufman had a better beef. Wilson wrote a long indictment of Hollywood arid its writers but singled out only Kaufman and Mater-' linck, which should have mollified George with a feeling of gilt-by-as- sociation, but didn’t. George S. Kaufman Answers a Critic “In my entire life,” Kaiif protested, “I have spent something like three moriths working for the movies, I didn’t write *A Day ^At The Races,’ with which Mr. Wilson so gleefully credits me, and it is"untrue that I ‘went back for more’ after ‘Once In a Lifetime’ because up to that time I had never seen the place and neither had Moss Hart, And I see no reason why I should blandly remain silent because Mr. Wil- son is too lazy or too. indifferent to look up his facts.” ' That was on Aug. 7, 1937. In the light of history it would have been possibly better fer George if he never went back. He should of stood in bed. His own, that is. Others whose works stood out on Broadway but were not featured in the New Rep’s Arini were Clarence Day, Francis Hackett (one of the original New Rep writers), Stephen Vincent Beri.et and John Gals- worthy. Ring Lardner never seems to have written a piece for it Worthy of reprinting, but he is/remembered in a two-page obit, by F.. Scott Fitzgerald which had a macabre fascination for me, because it was written in 1933 and I was writing a similar obit of Fitzgerald 1 1941; .. . Never having seen Scott’s obit of Ring until this reprint,. I felt' relieved that no one to date had charged me not to use vain repeti- tions, for there Was a similarity of treatment and a melancholy too deep for tears. Both of them got over wanting to drink themselves to death. Scott took his depressing destiny like a man and surrendered to the au- thorities in Hollywood, where he was assigned to doctoring scripts on what turned out to be a life sentence. He Was dead by the time he was 44. By then, he was. practically drowned in obscurity anyway. Parallels Can Be So Deadly He knew Lardnei* vastly better than I did, though my acquaintance ran back as far. as 1916. They were drinking companions in the early ’20s arid Fitzgerald thought Ring at that time had a quiet vitality that would outlast his contemporaries; Many a night they talked over a case of Canadian ale until dawn, when Ring would rise and yawn, “Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time, so I. might as well go home.” He wrote letters that ran 1,000 to 2,000 words, theatrical gossip, literary shop talk, seemingly saying little of the best for his work. But the last 10 years of his life were not urilike Fitzgerald’s. He. re- viewed radio from bed. started a crusade in The New Yorker against pornographic sprigs and made small forays against big evils. Fitzgerald regretted that Ring had not written down a larger por- tion of what was in his mind and heart. The Same, of course, could be said of any great humorist and was often said' of Mark Twain. Ring’s son and namesake tried to fill that gap and it landed, him in jail. . It would not have, done so for Ring because the climate, was freer between wars, as a reading of a piece by Walter Lippmann called ‘The Legendary John Reed” will easily prove, Reed was a radical whose roots seemed Watered by each passing cloud rather than the good earth. He, too, burned himself out very young and is now buried he- rb ind the Kremlin wall, but Lippmann retreated to much more ground. Heywood Brouri's piece, “How I Became a Red,” had an analgesique effect not matched, by anything else in these twicertold tales. Tri Speaker arid the. Boston Red $ox. did it. They played, the kind of ball book ^ “Elephant Tramp ” by* wanted to see on the political level. Today that stuff couldn’t be George (Slim) . Lewis, in collabora-> written even in fun. tion with Byrori Fish, for February publication. December Issue of Coronet mag is heavy on show biz personalities, with articles on Liberace, Patrice Munsel, John Wayne, Arthur . God- frey arid Helen Hayes and contri- buted pieces by Dave Garroway, Ray Bolger and, Betty White. December Cosmopolitan , load- ed With show biz stuff, including Joe McCarthy’s cover story on. Imogene Coca; John K6bier’s col- orful closeup on the Hotel Excel- sior, Rome; and Richard G. Hub- Ier’s pieee on “Liberace and His Women.” First annual . Ohio Valley Writ- ers’ Conference will be sponsored Menck’s exaggeration, humor and style that might still prove enigmati to Abilene, Kans. Michael Straight, the current editor, has a piece in the issue too, but readers Would do better to read his “Trial By Television,” (Beacon Press, Boston; $3.50). It showed better than anything else what has happened to liberty of expression between 1914 and 1954. by Marietta (O.) College Aug. 28- Sept. 3, 1955. Anne Chamb.erlairi Brown; whose first novel, “The Tall, Dark Man,” Will be published early in 1955, will serve as confer- ence director. "Art For The Family,” a hoW- to-do book for children and grown- ups, will be published by the Museum of Modern Art;" N. Y., Dec; 10, It’s written by Victor D’Amico, director of the Museum’s Dept, of Education, with two teachers; Moreen Maser and Frances Wilson. Simon & Schuster is distributing.