Variety (Mar 1947)

Wedneedbiyt Mareh 5, 1947 61 In re N«W«prt«t Shortace Large newspapers and the Amer- ican Newspaper Publishers Assn. were blamed for the serious news- print situation by Sidney Lavine, veepee of llogowski Press, N. Y., and chairman of the Newsprint Consumers' Assn., in hearings be- iore a subeoHimittee of the Senate Small Business Committee yester- day (Tuesday) in Washington. Lavine declared that the large papers are getting most of the news- print while the little papers are be- ing squeezed. Lavine said a serious situation was created when the Gov- ernment lifted all controls on news- print, and asked that controls be re- turned. Lavine stated, "Free enter- prise at the expense of our free press Is too high a price to pay, That is not American by our stand- ards. The remedy and solution is the e(iuitable distribution bt news- print by way o£ control either by I legislation or return of the quota system as was done during the war- ^ time emergency." ' Lavine said that production is at i peaic levels. Fault* is not in thei weather or .boxcar, shortage but with i distribution. Lavine represents pub- j lishers of trade papers, community, j veterans, technical and religious I papers. Variety in the group j printed at the Rogow.ski Press. ' : Others testifying included Ed. M. 1 Anderson, chairman of the National Editorial A^it.' legislativ commit-1 : tee, vvto estimated 1946 newsprint i production in North America at 5,276,953 tons, as against 4,316,849! tons in 1945, and 4,785,577 tons in | 1941. Anderson said that of the 600 large dailies published in the U. S., 200 papers consume 68% of the out- \ .■■put. i prices of American mags in the Dominion, or a tax of 25c a pound on that part of the U. S. periodicals devoted to advertising. Canadian publishers point out that treasury would reap the benefit of pvei $2,- 250,000 in annual revenue on some 20 American mags coming into Canada. Idea is that; such a tax would en- able Canadian mags to build up their circujations but general opinion is that, although the magazine-buyers would still be in the middle, they'll still buy American periodicals and the Canadian publishers will still have to meet that competition they say they cannot meet. Highest cir- culation of any V. S. mag in Canada is Ladies Home Journal, with 211,- 612. McCaJls follows with 207,995; the SEPost with 139,784. ■ Most Writers tn Hollywood Pointing up growing importance of Hollywood to the book publishing busine.ss, : Richard P. Ettinger, Prentice-Hall prexy, and Gorha'm Munson, editor of the P-H trade book division, are slated to leave for the Coast next Tuesday (10) to make final decisions for the publiSation of as many books by California resident.'! as possible. P-H exfecs thiis hope to save the time consumed in having the author send their manu- scripts to N. Y. for a final okay. Ettinger believes the most writing talent in the U. S. is now concen- trated in Hollywood and hopes, via his trip, to speed up the process of the Coast offices. 'Variety's' D. C- Burean , Washington Bureau of Variety and DaiiY Varusiy (Hollywood) has moved to 1292 National Press Bldg. there, headquarters of the capital's press corps. Bureau will continue under Herman A. Lowe, who has just resigned as Washington corre- spondent for the Philadelphia In- quirer. Others on Variety's Wash- ington staft' include Florence S. Lowe and Dorothy Hollo way, Lowe wiil iilso represent other publications. Ko liiternaUonol Incident The American Embassy has been ■advised that cameras of New York Times photog LelWoine and Inter- national News Service lenser Mo- reau were broken when the -men were jostled by crowds during Paris street disturbances. They were covering the cohtiriu- ing new.spaper strike here. JParis lilews Strike: IVrecks B^O. The French new.spaper strike, now in its third week, is depriving Paris amusements of their best advertising medium, and causing a heavy dent In the grosses. This, added to bad weather, and the fact that French radio, out of sympathy, is cutting the news broadcasts, is raising b.o. havoc. dSicial notices are publicized by small posters printed on government orders. The papers are vvilling to grant increased raises to the em- ' ployees and pressmen, but they have | been prohibited to do .so by the ; Cabinet, which is set for a policy of ' deflation without increasing salaries. | A roundabout way has been sug- i gested,—figuring the paychecks as i including an extra hour Of work; which would not have to be per-! formed, without raising the hourly | rate—but it has not worked yet. i Some papers are attempted print- ; ing in Belgium, but the French ' workers have enlisted the help of the Belgian union. Some Belgian papers are reaching Paris, carrying articles of French newspapermen. The Belgium Phare has a tie-up with Paris-Presse and the Belgium Cite Nouveile with the French Aube. Part of the Paris shipments are destroyed on ai-rival by the strikers. Papers which sell for 9 Belgian francs in Brussels are sold for eight French francs in Paris, the normal local rate. Chcck-Up of Checks Arrow Publications .have written to authoi-s paid between Jan. 1, '41 to Jan. 31, '47, to come in and inspect all checks issued in their names, to $ec which are false and which okay, since "two of our editors have pleaded guilty of forgery of checks drawn to authors and artists who purportedly submitted material to the ma,gazines published by us." Company explains that it must make a detailed report to the fede»-al and state governments so that tax check-up may be made. It is as- sumed, too, that check-up of authors will change the company status as regards taxes. Wilton Mathews, and Kenneth Hutchinson pleaded guilty to forgery and their date of sentencing was set for March 26. The biowoff came when a writer named Ford received a .' tr.tcment that he ha;d been paid scvcr.-3l thousands for mSs. he had not sold to the magazines of Arrow Pubs. An examination of the books thus far has set $96,000, as the amount known to have gone astray. Mrs. Luce's lOG gift Ex-CongresSwoman-author Clare Booth Luce, has donated the $10,000 she received for a series of articles in McCall's on "Why I Joined the Catholic Church," to a $100,000 Ne- gro maternity hospital which will be constructed in Mobile, Ala. The Most Rev. T. J. Toolen, Bishop of Mobile, in making the announce- ment, also disclosed that Jock Whit- ney contributed $5,000 to the same hospital "by way of apology^' for .statements he made in a debate on religion with Mrs. Luce. Raymond Clapper Memorial Award in Washington Saturday night (1). The scroll and $500 check were pre- sented to him by President Truman at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Assn. at the Statler. Award carries on the mem- ory of Clapper, who died in an air- plane crash during the war, Aifair also saw the induction of Felix Be- lair, of the New York Times, as president of the group. Friday night, in Washington, the Wendell L. Willkie Awards for Jour- nalism to outstanding representatives of the Negro press were presented by President Truman at the National Press Club. Among the winners were: the Norfolk Journal and Guide, for the best example of public serv- ice contributing to greater enjoy- ment of the democratic way of life: Ralph Malthew.s, Washington cor- respondent of the Afro-American newspapers, for objective reporting, and William O. Walker, editor of the Cleveland Call and Post, for the best writing other than news reporting, Belair White House Head Felix SBelair, Jr., member of N. Y. Times Washington staff, was elected pr esident of the White House Corre- spondents Assn. there Saturday (22). He succeeds Edward F. Folliard of Wa.shington Post. Other winners were Paul Wooten, of New Orleans Times-Picayune, re- elected secretary-treasurer; Ernest B. Vaccaro, AP, vice-president; Rob- ert 6. Nixon, INS,' executive com- mittee chairman; Joseph H. Short, Baltimore Sun, and Paul F. Healy, N. Y. Daily News, members of the exec committee. Assn.'s annual dinner to the Presi- dent will be held at the Statler next Saturday night. Koussevitzky Plea Nixed In the first'case of its kind in N. Y. State, Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Bo.ston Symphony orchestra, was denied an injunction to enjoin publication and distribution of his biography, "Koussevitzky" by Moses L. Smith. Justice Bernard Shientag of the N. Y. supreme court ruled that Kousscvilzky's life and accomplish- ments were sufficiently in the pub- lic orbit to make him a figure of public interest. Koussevitzify declared that this unauthorized biography invaded his right to privacy. Court, however, ruled that right of privacy does not apply to. an unauthorized biography Of a public figure, unless treatment is novelized or fictional. Court de- clared the Smith tome did not fall into the fictiorial category^ Toronto Star Cuts Ad Space Because of current newsprint .shortage, the Toronto Daily Star, Canada's larg^est daily (300,000 circ), has adyised tjieatre advertisers that they must retUro to the wartime pol- icy of a maximum of 600 lines daily per house. Newspaper is turning down hun- dreds of columns of display adver- tising weekly but prefers to give the amusement industry as much of a break as possible. Believed that other Toronto dailies will follow the lead in space rationing. Can. Tax ti>r V. S. Mags? Canadian Magazine Publishers' | Assn. has submitted a brief to the ; Canadian minister of finance a.sking for a 33%% tax on the new.s.stand | LITERARY ILIATION Top New York agency, opening Coastcffice. look- ing for fop N<ftw York lifer- ciry agenf, to represent them on Coast. Address: Box' 465, Variety, 154 West 46f!i St., I'lew York 19. Foreign Newsies In H'wood High j Regardless of film quotas over-i .seas, the number of foreign cor- j respondents in Hollywood has i reached an all-time high and is still i growing. Arch Reeve, secretary of. the motion picture industry's pub- | licity committee, disclosed that 78 accredited columnists' and reporters arc currently thumping out news and views o£ doings in . the Holly- wood studios. They are covering for 140 syndicates, in addition to dailies, weeklies, monthlies and fan mags, Correspondents numbered 60 be- fore, the war. a record at that time, and later dropped to 45. Now they are coming in from all sectors of i the globe, except Ru.ssia, Germany, , China, Japan and: the Middle-Europe .. countries. Stokes Wins Clapper Award Thomas L. StcJkes, political cqI- xmniki for the United Features Syn- dicate, received the tbird annual CHATTEE Orders for Laura Hobson's "Gentle- men's Agreement," on the fourth day after publication, mounted to 75,000. David Brown new ed of Liberty. Edward Maher resigning, but will continue to contribute. » Matt Weinstock, L. A. News columnist, has "Los Angeles Inside Ouc" upcoming via A. A. Wyn. Jack Hallstrom, RCA-Victor's gen- eral merchandising m a n a g e r , authored "Relax and LLsten," slated for April 10 putilication by.Rinehart. Tbrne" deal.* with music for the lay- man. Maurice Zolotow sold the Sateve- po.st a three-parter on Tallulah Bankhead and another piece on tip- ping (cab drivers, waiters, etc) for Cosmopolitans / , Josef Israels II, Satevepost, Col- lier's and Newsweek corresjiondent in the, Balkans (also quondam Variety mugg), was married to Uqn- ka Windisch ori Dec. 28, 1946, jn Vienna. Harold Field, former executive editor for a series of boy's niags published by Parents' Institute; will resume work in mid-March on a "Ripley Believe it or Not" mag to be published by Simon & Schuster. . Script, a California weekly founded in 1929 by the late Hob Wagner, was sold by his widow to Ralph K. Davies and Robert L. Smith. Transfer of ownership goes into effect April 1. Smith is veepee and general manager of the Los Angeles Daily News. Davics was a -Wartime director of the Federal' Government'sPetroleum Adminis- tration,,.^ ' ' ■ ^ • . »♦»♦ ♦«♦»♦ >» « M l I» » ♦ t»»I» f t ♦»t M I > >» f t ♦« M» »»I n t» I SCULLY'S SCRAPBOOK j tMM > r r< iM » M» gy py^^ Scully ♦-•-•^^^♦♦^♦^ Hitching Post, March 2. j The subject of love having taken a beating aroimd Hollywood of late, I : thought I ought to check on the starry-eyed couples floating down mid- ; stream. Five out of six marriages in Los Angeles end in divorce, No i fooling. Last year there were 41,700 marriages and 35,'rai divorces. Only I 141 divorces—^not counting Laraine Day's—were denied. So if there is anything that may shove soap operas deep into their own suds, it ought to be encouraged. The fission of "Life Can Be Beautiful," "John's Other Wife," "Pepper Young's Family," "Ma Perkins" and "When a Girl Marries" may rest on programs like "Hope Chest," "Bride and Groom," "Honeymoon In New York" and "Married For Life." On "Glamour Manor" Don Wilson and Kenny Baker fenagle well-married couples into re-enactmg their proposals. This is about the lowest point in theise programs, .The highfest is "Bride and Groom." It plays an impor- tant and lucrative part in at least 280 marriages a year and so far has a fine record of keeping them married. The program reports only one divorce. This is important because the program has been panned for commer- cializing marriage, as if that were a novelty. Actually, though a squfid big enough to represent Notre. Dame on the gridiron has its hand in this program, none.,of them bears witness to the marriage itself. This, is a pri- vate affair to which only the bride and groom dnd their iriends aftd rela"- tions are invited. - Actually the producers of "Bride and Groom" are not even agents px'o*. vocateurs, let alone marriage brokers. They merely catch couples on their way to be married and give the kids productiOn-value. They get about 500 applications a week, out of which they have to select one couple for each day's take, meaning 495 rejection slips a week. Formal Like a Clambake The invitations to the wedding reception are laid out in formal style, with Messrs. Nelson, McElroy and the American Broadcasting Co. re- questing the honor of your presence at the wedding procession. Currently, the program has a full coast-to-coast hookup of 250 stations, broadcasting to the east from Hollywood at 12 o'clock and rebroadcasting by transcrip- tion for the west coast at 8, ■ , ■ ' ^ The day I caught the show the couple came from AuSti'alia and New Zealand, had met aboard ship and had learned enough about each other after three weeks to want to get married in America. They were the first couple where neither party had been an American, and returning with them to Australia were not only the bride's trousseau, the memory of a plane trip to Las Vegas and a week at the Last Frontier hotel, with all cjcpenses paid, but a set of sterling silver, a seven-foot refrigerator, a camera, a washing machine, luxury eliairs and several'other household items, not to forget a heautiful wedding ring. Same Audience? Could be! That such largesse could do anything but extend the Good Neighbor policy of the late FDR, I doubt. Certainly at the wedding party 1 saw everybody was, in the best of spirits, and the audience, which packed the room, was certainly better than you'd find packing courtrooms to catch details of the latest horror murder, or even the latest divorce action. They were overwhelmingly women of mature years, and what few men there were, were obviously weil»seasoned and obedient hcnsbaiids. Alto* gether, out of 300, not more than half a dbzen were unmarried, and they were there to catch the bridal bouquet. That the program is not confined merely to starry-eyed nobodies might be illustrated by the fact that the first show played host to a Navy flier named Grady Gean, whose bombing helped sink the Japanese dreadnaught, Yamato; Jg^e McGehee, the marine who planted the fii'st flag of Iwo Jima, and Captain John Watts, Legion of Merit man for an invention, vital to B-29S. A sightless couple, and a pair, both 75, who had met at the Town- send Clvib meeting and had decided to go the rest of the route together, were-also among the lucky pairs. Four of » Kind vs. a Pair ' The creators of this program are mostly Tom Breneman boys. They' consist of Jack Reddy, who manages the show and used to be with CBS as a top feature writer; Jack Nelson, who m.c.'s the show; Jack McElroy, who does the spieling and the singing, and Jack Masterson, who produces it. Masterson and Nelson both spent some years with Breneman atid have fnany of his msinnerisins and much of his production technique. It waS figured no matter how handsome the young couple might be, four jacks could always beat a pair. Or two pairs, for that matter. Nelson is, of course, much handsomer than Breneman, and even if that seems like faint praise, he has a smoother way of handling people. Ac- tually, quizzing people unfamiliar with radio is a nervous business at best, but when it is within minutes of their getting married, you can imagine how hard it is on the m.c. to keep the pretty kettle of fish from boiling over and scalding the entire audience, As one groom expressed it, "1 feel as if I just s'Wallowed a golfbaU." J. Nelson, the m.c, a former waval lieutenant himself, father of twins, bills himself now as "the second best man" at the daily wedding. In the early days the program received a lot of panning, but it has smoothed out its routine so well that it's difficult to brush it off any longer as "the bad-taste derby." Fred Allen's crack, "The lovely bride is regal in a flouncing double- breasted mother hubbard of stained cheesecloth with an organdy belt drooping in the back, and peeping throiugh the cheesecloth we see my lady is wearing lavender herringbone puttees, while over her shoulder is a bear cloth, courtesy of I. J. Fox," won't stand up on a retake, Mr. Allen Beportine Bill Moise, of the Portland Oregonian, cracked, "At first glance, the dimly-lit room with graceful candelabra set among white chrysanthemxims looks like some stiff is going to get buried," but actually, even where mar- riage is a sacrament, the general atmo.sphere between a marriage and a funeral is not so far apart, and the program certainly is several cuts above those where characters get squirted with seltzer Water Or have eagles. Using their shoulders as a rest room. (Ah, there, Mr. Allen!) Nelson keeps the conversation very clean and he stresses that no ques- tion of his, if it is not as innocent as he intends it, is to be answered. Of course, he cannot always tell if the answers are going to be that innoceni. For instance, he asked one groom where he was when he proposed. ^ "Lying on the lawn with my girl," replied the groom, "I get the picture," said Nelson', trying hard to cover. "You were lying on your back oh the lawtt, gazittg up at the blue sky and the clouds." "No, I couldn't see the sky," corrected the guy, "my girl was in the way.'^ The gifts, including the plane rides, strangely etiough, are donated. l?iey' average around $1,000 a couple. Though it may be argued as irrelevant in a divorce-ridden town like L. A., all the "Bride and Groom" hustlers are one-take happily married boys. They all went to school together at Gonzaga. where Bing Crosby also "studied," as the phrase goes. Nelson and Crosby, in fact, started to be attorneys. ■. 'Sponsored By Aspirin ■ ^ .-.. .^ \ There must be something about Qbhza'ga.' fOr Neison too &. % t^t talker. In fact, Nelson has a claim in for 438 wotAs a minute. Mastersoft got hinv on the Breneman. show in 1940 as the announcer. li was' imder this canopy that the Four Horsemen cooked up "Bride and Groom." Sterling Drugs Sponsors the program. The boys plug Bayer "aspiWn, and Phillips toothpaste. The commercials are given in another rOom from the wedding feast so that only those listening on the air know about them at all. Come to think Of it, tying aspirin and matrimony may be the secret ot the program's success. The day I caught it on the air we were brought down to earth immediately after the wedding by a spot announcement which told us to see "Child of Divorce" now playing at the Marcal theatr*. We were back in the City of Fallen Angels.