Variety (January 12, 1955)

WfdneMlafi January 12, 195S LITERATI 73 Literati Odd Libel Ruling i Under an interesting ruling handed down in N. Y. Supreme Uourt last week, it is libelous to , un a story charging a professional writer with having written an ar- ticle that resulted in a libel suit which another publisher settled for a substantial sum. Decision was made by Justice Matthew M. I cvv is denying a motion made by Walter Winchell and the Hearst Uorp for dismissal of a libel suit brought against them by Eva Har- rison as executrix of the estate of Charles Yale Harrison. Harrison, who died shortly after the action was filed, contended in the complaint that the defendants “falsely and maliciously” injured him by publishing the following scene, item- “Life settled out of court with labor leader Van Arsdale oyer ( has Yale Harrison’s (the plain- tiff’s) ’Van Arsdale’s Tight Little Island’ piece of a few seasons ago. Paid him $17,500.” In his opinion. Justice Levy pointed out that Harrison claimed that the publication is libelous per S e. For, it’s alleged, by such pub- lication the meaning was intended to be conveyed that Harrison’s piece about Van Arsdale in Life mag resulted in libel action against Life, which was settled by pay- ment of a substantial sum to Van Arsdale. Moreover, the court notes, the complaint also main- tains that “in consequence the im- pressions were obtained that the plaintiff had committed a crime by having delivered a libelous article to Life . . . and was a grossly care- less. immoral, inept and incompe- tent writer and public relations consultant.” In the course of his career as a writer and publicist, Harrison had been associated with Harry Van Arsdale. who was business man- ager of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Justice Levy, whose opinion deny- ing the motion for dismissal was a lengthy one, also held that clari- fication of the meaning of the statement published by Winchell and Hearst “would be a matter for the determination of a jury.” minder for any tourist, and a cinch incentive for any potential tourist. elected vice-president of the West- ern Writers of America, an organ- ization of scripters of cowpoke yarns. Richard Aldrich’s chronicle of his late wife, “Gertrude Lawrence Scully on By-Liners Continued from page 2 sale M of' 2 A 000 h ?opfcs P 'Js P of b ' ° ut » franlic (•.ill for voluntoers whose brilliance has rarely failed The French Bureau de Tourisme j with 35,000 copies printed for pub- Novembei he has enough contributions to account foi halt should subsidize it Bennett Cerf’s kingsize “Ency- lication last Friday’ (7) the denuded forests in the western world. Cyril Clemens, editor of the ! earl y December he begins to see the folly of such fear, but it clopedia of Modern American ; Mark Twain Journal at Kirkw ood. is to ° late by‘then to hold back what he himself has started. He has Humor” (Doubleday; $3.95) is just , Mo., is gathering anecdota on his to wade through mountains of paper to get to 154 West 46th St. He that, a treasury of some the best I kinsman. Asks anybody having fa- 1 also has to dodge traffic citations for blocking public highways, light reading by American humor- vorite stories of or about Mark By the time all this copy is sorted and baled, there is enough overset ists. Grantland Rice’s posthumous memoirs, “The Tumult and the Shouting” (Barnes; $5), is subtitled "IVfy Life in Sport,” and a rich, full, never-dull life i{ has been. The dean of American sports writers died at 73 last July but his memoirs are a fine record of per- sonal achievement and an indelible chronicle of the American sporting AbeL Cue’s Travel Dept. Starting this week, Cue mag, N.Y. entertainment weekly, will have a travel section edited by Eric Mann. Plus a 12-page monthly supplement encasing one country or region, the mag will feature a weekly column. First of the monthly specials will take in Italy, the second (Feb. 12) will be de- voted to the Caribbean, and in March the feature will be on spas and festivals. Tied in is a readers’ travel info service. Mann is a travel writer for a number of newspapers and also lectures on the subject. He’s a director of the Institute for Inter- continental Studies. Twain to mail them to him. to start a metropolitan daily—and at the rate of their demise, wouldn’t Stories on Geroge Gobel 'are ap- this use of Variety's excess be a good idea? pearing the next two months in To palliate the army of contributors who were panicked into writing Cosmopolitan, Modern Screen, ]ike mad to meet an emergency, it soon becomes obvious that some- Pageant. Better Homes & Gardens, | TV Revue. TV Magazine. TV Life, TV Radio-Mirror and TV Annual. Edmond M. Hopkins, formerly business manager, succeeds his father, the late Fred M. Hopkins, as publisher of the Fostoria (O.) Review Times. Virgil E. Switzer, city editor since 1931, was named editor. body will have to be a gentleman and pull out. Not being around to fight for his credits, the somebody sure to go first is Scully and his scintillating scrapbook. With his contribution goes a thumbsized photo- graphic image of the handsomest mugg in the paper’s history and of course his season’s greeting. These are all forced to walk the plank as a package deal. In addition to this mad dispersal of loyalists, many one-shot con- tributors are liquidated as well. Many of them are not as hardy as we are. After seeing that their contribution has failed to appear they Metro’s Herb Crooker is author begin to be gnawed by doubts. If they can’t make Variety in an of a new book on yachting. “The anniversary issue, for free, how can they possibly be worth $1,750 a Boatman’s Almanac," being pub-; week writing such gems as, “We’re a little late, so goodnight folks”? lished by Hermitage House for re- lease early in the spring. A fore- Bad News Gets Around, Don’t It? Suppose it gets around that Variety had rejected their prose? Maybe Look’s Upbeat Look Look mag showed a 16% gain in advertising revenue in 1954 over the previous year, with a total revenue of $26,667,514, president Gardner Cowles told Cowles Maga- zines’ annual stockholders meeting last week. He said Look was the only magazine in the major weekly field to show a gain in advertising pages and had the largest revenue gain of any major mag. Meeting elected Daniel D. Mich, v p. and editorial director of Look, to the mag’s board of directors, bringing the board strength up to eight, and also elected Robert Hume, formerly Look auditor, to the post of assistant treasurer. All officers of the mag were reelected. Curtis’ Bride Guide Curtis Publishing Co. is plan- ning a quarterly called Bride-To- Be, designed as a wedding and home-making guide. Mag will # be issued by a newly-formed Curtis subsidiary, Bride-To-Be Magazine Inc., with offices in Chicago and New York. Publisher will be Walter N. May, with Mrs. Marjorie Binford Woods and Mrs. Alice Thompson as co- publishers. Slated to start late in spring, mag will cost $1 a copy. Trump’s Omaha Shift Glenn Trump, Variety’s Omaha mugg, has been named amuse- ment editor and local columnist of the Omaha World-Herald. Trump moves over to the en- tertainment post from other duties on the paper, succeeding John Kof- fend. who has joined Time mag’s Los Angeles bureau. 920,000 Arizona Highways Arizona Highways has a new name at the top of its board. Ern- est McFarland has supplanted Howard Pyle as Governor of Ar- izona. But Raymond Carlson is still editor and George M. Avey, art editor. Mag still gets an appropriation from the Arizona Highway Com- mission and still turns back lots more than it gets. Its Christmas numbers ran to 920.000 copies. Krueger of Milwaukee prints it by mirco-color lithography on offset enamel. Mozart Handbook With the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth coming up next >car, and every musical organiza- tion in the world already prepping for the event, “The Mozart Hand- book” (World; $7.50) comes along most appropriately. But it would be an invaluable guide anytime. Edited by Louis Biancolli, the N.Y. World Telegram ii Sun music critic, who did a yeoman as well as artistic job here, the 629-page tome is a stupendous one-volume jntro and comprehensive guide to *ne gifted man and his music, culled carefully from many authors and sources. Discussing Mozart’s life, times, mves. letters as well as his music, the tome includes closeups from contemporary sources, as well as elaborate discussion of his sym- phonies, concertos and operas * u ‘th background and story) by various experts, for a very inform a, ive, compact handbook. Bron. Thriving Scot Trade The book business is booming at Edinburgh, home of the Scot pub- lishing trade. All firms report a busy year, mainly due to large de- mand for books from West Africa, Malaya and the West Indies. These countries need books in their native lingos to help educate their people. One firm, Thomas Nelson & Sons, received an order for 800,000 cop- ies of two elementary arithmetic books. Nelson’s revised version of the Bible sold nearly 3,000.000 copies in the past few years, while another Edinburgh-produced ser- ies, Chamber’s 20th-Century Dic- tionary, is into its fifth impression. CHATTER Profile on Victor Borge, by Robert W. Marks; in the February Esquire. Lucius Beebe has surveyed Nevada for the February issue of Holiday. First exhibition of American typography opened at Aberdeen (Scotland) Art Gallery. Jason Epstein, Timothy Seldes and Francis K. Price named senior editors at Doubleday word was contributed by Jimmy ^ they can keep the secret, but can their secretaries who typed the pieces and then looked in vain for them? These girls live on such scuttlebutt and it moves up to their bosses. So while the dejected and rejected contrib may keep his disappointment to himself, that doesn’t mean the whole world he lives in isn’t aware of his rejection. He begins to suspect that some new legal or extra-legal committee designed to harass their betters has put the finger on him He wonders if that Variety box, heralding that his contribution would be one of the brighter pieces of the anniversary, didn’t in turn tip off some snooper bent on ruining him. Such doubts are the vitamins of ulcers. It becomes a matter not of what are you eating but what’s eating you? “Sorry, your piece was crowded out in the rush of going to press,” might have served as a plausible explanation in the days when freedom was something nobody talked about because everybody had it. But that day passed out of the world years ago; not long after, in fact, Roosevelt and Churchill announced the Four Freedoms as their main object of the war against the Nazis. Even a literary rejection today can only mean some invisible censor has put his finger on the author and touted the editor off him. He has heard so much about what “one telephone call to the right person” can do, he is fearful some power has made the call in his case. He now remembers that one night, when a little high, he did say he favored a one-party government, but that was when the Republicans had everything anyway. Is he going to be turned in, now that the voters have indicated they prefer a two-party government? Oil For Troubled Waters Among my extra-curricular activities is to convince jitterbugs like this one that his rejection does not imply a lack of literary or even political merit. Variety has no blacklist. It wouldn’t know where to find it in all that overset if some schnook seht one in. Besides, the paper has always been allergic to people who make a living pushing other people around. More than 20 years ago, in an effort to keep from being crowded out of an anniversary issue myself, I actually bought and paid cash for an ad extolling my own column. I thought I was entitled to a trade discount, something agencies get. Fat chance. All or nothing at all was the gist of the front-office. Not even a 2% discount for cash would these leeches grant me. I complained, but nobody even looked up from his desk. They figured it was just a pressagent needled into beefing by his producers about a bad notice. The editor himself doesn’t get these repercussions any longer. Weeks before the anniversary number is actually on the presses, he has his bags packed, and the moment he gets the page proofs and okays them, he’ closes his bags and is off in a cloud of dust—destination unknown. He usually winds up in Florida or California. Those left behind must now play the role of a buffer state. While no one left behind w'ould go so far as to write, “We regret the editor is out of town, but your letter will be brought to his attention when he returns,” that’s only because those left behind realize that the same “time” which wounds all heels also heals all wounds. By the time the editor does return, worn out from a vacation in Miami or Palm Springs, the rejected contributors have got other things to worry about and the chances are the fire department has ordered their letters to be cleaned out of the aisles long before the editor comes home. The only way I know to beat this system is to have a tickler file. Then when the annual pitch comes from Variety to honor a coming anniversary number with your priceless prose, you can pull out last year's rejection and send it in again. « One guy I know made it this way on his third try. The editor, possibly fearing a new contribution might be worse than the old one, settled for the dog-eared copy. At least this one, he reasoned, had stood the test of time. It’s a comforting thought and I leave it with all those who feel that Variety is a greater enigma than the British Admiralty. Durante. Bill Ornstein, Metro homeoffice trade contact, has two stories cur- rent, “Miracle at Moshulu.” in the U. of Kansas City Review, winter issue, and “My Pal, Whitey,” in the American Jewish Times Out- look for January. U. of Nebraska football coach Bill Glassford, who led his team to the Orange Bowl this year after his players threatened to revolt if he was not fired last winter, is authoring a book, “Dear Coach,” to be published next summer. L. Franklin Heald has been named director of magazines for the American Alumni Council. In this capacity, he will coordinate the activities of 540 college and university alumni publications, re- placing Corgin Gwaltney of the Johns Hopkins.Magazine July 1. Paul K. Lapolla, for the past eight years with Doubleday & Co. as special projects editor and a member of the trade editorial de- partment, joins Random House Feb. 1 as a member of the editorial staff. He’ll concentrate on the de- velopment of basic non-fiction titles. A newsman’s closeup of former N.Y. Gov. Thomas E. DeTvey is be- ing readied by Congressman Leo W. O’Brien, of Albany, ex-head of the International News Service bureau at the Capitol and present WPTR-WRGB-TV commentator, for a two-installment printing in Collier’s during March. , A new syndication service, built primarily around entertainment news, has been started. First item to go out was a video column to 500 newspapers called “This Week In TV,” scribbled by outfit’s boss. Chet Whitehorn. Other services expected to follow will be “Quotes of the Day” and “Lighter Side of the News.” Profile of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, titled “Carry Christianity On Your Sleeve,” penned by Kay Campbell, skedded for March is- sue of Christian Herald. Piece is timed to tie-in with release of her next book, “My Spiritual Di- ary,” to be published by Revell. Next Hollywoodite to be profiled for same magazine by same writer is Walt Disney. Rev. James M. Gillis, 78-year- old Paulist Father, longtime speak- er on NBC’s “The Catholic Hour” and former editor of The Catholic World, last w r eek wrote “30” to “Sursum Corda,” a column which he had turned out for Catholic papers since Oct. 22, 1928. The final commentary was his 1.638th. He never missed a week, despite two serious illnesses. Edward M. Waters’ biog of Vic- tor Herbert will be published by MacMillan next April. It’s an Gertrude Brassard, American Home’s merchandise editor, hos- $8.50 item. A Macmillan import, ... . • • Ll .V 4 : ^ M La “ A U /1 fliunncc pitalized with broken hip. Jean Homm, formerly food edi- tor Farm Journal, now off-camera editor with Arlene Francis’ telly show. Disk promoter Buddy Basch to pen the record review column for Magazine House’s recently ac- quired Quick mag. A novelette about Hollywood, “The Man Who Laughed Too Much,” by screenw'riter Lester Cohen, is the lead feature in the February Esquire. Jack W. Robertson, former show publication will be "Alec Guiness (An Illustrated Study of His Work for Stage and Screen)” by Ken- neth Tynan. Another overseas publication via Macmillan is “Eng- lish Wits” from Pope and Dr. Johnson to Beerbohm and Shaw, edited by Leonard Russell. Mexico is one of Latin America’s top publishing countries with an annual output of 1,928 various kinds of periodicals, according to the Mexican postal service, with which they are all registered for secondclass mail rights. The pe- nuvn • nvi/v* ■ — ... . . j . * •« scribe and now editor of Evening j riodicals include 177 daily news- New's, Glasgow, named chairman j papers, 400 weeklies and /Do Art Buchwald, Et AI. Art Buchwald’s Paris” (Little, Brown; $3.75) is Paris on the half- It defies putting down. * ou ve read it all, or most all, sporadically in the Paris edition f the N.Y. Herald Tribune and reprinted a week or so later in l. 10 N.Y. parent edition in New 'ork. but concentrated into some. «... — - , , , , - , ... . . , pages it is high-voltage. French ; the Post a piece on Maurice Evans. . judge of the civil registry in I • . ’ I * _ . . 1. 1 _ /■"* .4 .. Annilnl nl W linhl *1 of West of Scotland district of Brit- ish Newspaper Press Fund. Maurice Zolotovv’s profile on George Abbott to appear in the monthlies. And there is the freak weekly newspaper, El Triburon (The Shark), of which but one copy at a time is issued. It is a social i Saturday Evening Post issue out j pass around, hand written in pen Jan. 25. Zolotow has also just sold I and ink, by Rodolfo Sarmiento, a postcard, vintage-proof in printer’s lnt s it’s a constantly nostalgic re- Charles N. Heckelmann. yeepee ' Puebla City, capital of I uebla and editor of Popular Library, 1 state. February HOLIDAY Magazine salutes THE HOLY LAND TODAY The beautiful Land of the Bible comes to life as Joan Comay, wife of Israel’s ambassador to Canada, tells her dramatic story of the re- birth of Israel. Here is a Holiday report that answers all your questions about the homes, language, religion, business and people of Israel to- day. It’s a vividly written, spec- tacularly illustrated article that you’ll want to read and keep!