Five Star Final

In New York last fortnight someone knotted a clothesline around the shapely neck of Benita Franklin Bischoff, alias Vivian Gordon, strangled her and threw her dead body into the bushes of Van Cortlandt Park. She had been about to testify in the city's vice investigation. Vivian Gordon became the story of the week.

In Audubon, N. J., Vivian's daughter, Benita Bischoff, a dark, homely, boyish girl of 16, read the newspapers. In her diary she wrote:

"What an awful mess mother got herself into. . . . They are saying such terrible things. . . . I just can't live any longer. This has got to be too much for me. I am going to end it all. . . . I am in my right mind, and I'm going to turn on the jets."

Then Benita lay on the kitchen floor and inhaled gas from the stove until she was dead.

The tabloid press had, indeed, turned up Vivian Gordon's past much as a bear snouting for ants turns over a stone. Even the conservative papers devoted column upon column to the murder mystery and its ramifications. But the sensational papers tackled Vivian's story with a mad gusto, especially Joseph Medill Patterson's big little Daily News.

On one day when the News printed more than four pages of story and pictures concerning the dead woman, her daughter might have read: "A gigantic love racket which netted the slain Vivian Gordon half a million dollars in three years. . . . She had her own private call list . . . of 40 to 50 lovely girls. In her 'catalogue' were photographs taken in the nude of the various girl-wares Vivian had to offer. . . ."

Publisher Albert J. Kobler's Mirror gave less space but equal "juice" to the story. One of its big headlines read: SLAIN GIRL VICE WITNESS IS LINKED WITH SHOOTING OF "JACK" DIAMOND.

Bernarr Macfadden's Evening Graphic shrieked its loudest in great front-page streamers: ROTHSTEIN MURDER CLUE BARED BY VIVIAN'S PAL, and 20 MEN OWED VI $100,000; DIARY REVEALS LOVE RING.

Publisher William Randolph Hearst's Journal nearly outdid the tabloids in baring the VICE GIRL'S SECRETS. Two days later it was its lot to headline: JURY GETS VICE MURDER DIARY; VIVIAN'S CHILD KILLED BY SHAME.

Nearly every newspaper in Manhattan printed an editorial of pity for little Benita Bischoff. But Mr. & Mrs. Ogden Reid's Herald Tribune ventured a trifle farther. Said their editorial:

"One has only to quote some of the things which this girl--or her friends-- might have bought to read at any newsstand:

" 'Hitherto undisclosed chapters in the mad love life of the ravishing redhead, Vivian Gordon, were revealed exclusively to the----today.' . .

" 'In the tangled web of clews uncovered in the investigation of the strangle murder of beautiful Vivian Gordon, three things stood out in sharp relief against the murky background of the dead girl's past: Dope. Stock racketeering. Vice. "If these lines, taken from New York daily newspapers,* no doubt make sensational and, for its purpose, effective reading matter, one's admiration for the effectiveness vanishes when one thinks of a child reading them. . . ."

If the Herald Tribune's editorial demonstrated that the sensational press is growing more sensational, it also demonstrated that the conservative press is growing more conservative. In an earlier, lustier day, when the two extremities were not so far apart, a bombastic editorial writer would have shaken an accusing finger at his neighbors with the cry of "Murderers!"; would at least have named the papers from which he was quoting.

On the morning that the Herald Tribune's editorial appeared, as if in reply the Daily News's editorial writer appraised the Gordon murder and Bischoff suicide as "not so raw material for a tremendous play or novel."* And the News said:

"On the day Benita Bischoff killed herself, President Hoover vetoed the Muscle Shoals bill. As we see it, that wasn't much of a story. . . .

"Yet the large size papers played down the Gordon drama while they gave column after column to the Muscle Shoals story. The News did opposite. We did it because we believe any actual happening is more interesting to most people than any non-happening. . . . Maybe our theories about what is news and what isn't are all wrong. We've often been told they are all wrong.

"But this does seem to us a fair question: 'Doesn't the large size papers' playing down of the Gordon story and playing up of the Muscle Shoals give a hint at the reason why six large size papers have folded up in New York City since 1919, while three tabloid papers have come to life in the same period?' "

Next day Benita was buried in Philadelphia. The sensation-mongers of the Press followed her even to the grave. The girl's father, John E. C. Bischoff, said that reporters had tried to bribe gravediggers to disinter the body, in the belief that the girl's diary had been buried with her.

P: The week closed with no tangible progress visible in the investigation. It was disclosed that Pinkerton detectives had been called in to check up on the city's detectives.

P: Upon demand of the City Club of New York, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered an investigation into the fitness of District Attorney Thomas C. T. Grain to remain in office.

P: About to depart for a "rest" in Palm Springs, Calif., Mayor James John Walker aroused his critics to fury by remarking to a group of social workers: "I will confess that I have been more or less shocked by the reports of the framing of innocent women."

* New York Journal

* Many a Manhattan playgoer was reminded by the Bischoff girl's suicide of the plot of Five Star Final, the year's newspaper melodrama on Broadway. In that play, written in anger and bitterness by Louis Weitzenkorn (onetime managing editor of Macfadden's Evening Graphic), the managing editor of a New York tabloid undertakes to find out what has become of a famed courtesan of 20 years back, who had been acquitted of murder. The newshawks find her respectably married. Their screeching story breaks on the wedding day of the woman's daughter. Grief-stricken, the mother and her husband commit suicide. An important difference between the play and the Gordon case: no managing editor wilfully dug up the Gordon woman's past without provocation.

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