Sleep, Baby, Sleep

Greedy photographers for weeks had been circling silently, hungrily around a little house in Manhattan's tangled Greenwich Village. They had prowled darkly through abutting houses, peering out of windows, climbed walls, offered bribes. The bait was a baby. The baby's mother was Grace Mailhouse Burnham. The baby's father was unknown. Baby Vera had been eugenically conceived and born. Intelligent, well-to-do Mother Burnham had wanted a baby. These facts she admitted freely (TIME, Jan. 30). Newspapers empurpled columns with the history, speculated as to papa, collected opinions from bigwigs and gumchewers. To deepen the secret of her collaborator's identity, who had been chosen because he "had the proper eugenic background," Mother Burnham refused to pose her progeny for photographers. Picture papers pined.

Last week Mother Burnham awoke one morning horrified. Plastered hugely across the first page of the Daily Mirror, Hearst tabloid, was Vera's picture, heavily headlined, triumphantly copyrighted. Mother Burnham eyed it narrowly; saw it was no fake.

Within, the sheetlet gloated. Columns aired triumphantly the doings of Photographer Richard Sarno in stealing the picture. Obtaining a top floor apartment next door he climbed out the skylight and crept to the roof edge. Patiently peering at the baby porch a floor below him, fortified with a roof repairman's tools and a bland air of industry in case he was surprised, the hours slipped by. Swaddled thickly the baby slept below. It was dusk, and no picture. The next day Sarno crept out on his roof again. Late in the morning Baby Vera stirred, tossed. The tiny head, free of loving covers, lay exposed. Sarno swiftly exposed his picture plate, scuttled happily down the skylight, "beat" the town on the most difficult picture story of the week.