Denver Desperado

THE GREAT I AM-Lewis Graham-Macaulay ($2).

The many enemies of the late notorious Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, owner-publisher of the Denver Post, said that he wore his yellow journalism with a difference--as protective coloration over an armor of blackmail. Few men have received such audibly frank obituaries. Last week Denverites were forcibly reminded of the "Old Dragon of Champa Street" when newsboys, billboards, burgees, street ballyhoos and all the paraphernalia of a high-pressure sales campaign launched The Great I Am, a thinly-veiled story of Publisher Bonfils' rackety career.

Author "Lewis Graham" (Lou Goldberg) tells his gaudy tale in gaudy journalese; his book is not written for the ages but for Hollywood. Knowing Denverites may amuse themselves in sorting fact from fancy; others who enjoy cinema previews or who like their scandal freshly killed and not too well-done, should relish The Great I Am.

Garr Fallson headed west for Prairie City and his career. He was making good money there, booming worthless real estate and running a crooked lottery until his partners, whom he had tried to cheat, exposed him. He moved on, established himself in Mineral City, and bought a moribund newspaper, The Chronicle. Garr took to yellow journalism like a rat to a sewer. By sensational news stories, circulation-forcing dodges, in a month he had quintupled the Chronicle's circulation. He tried to drive the competing paper off the streets by bribing or terrorizing the newsdealers. He reprinted every want-ad in his rival's columns, then claimed the largest want-ad section in the city. His reporters got him the scandalous facts on the city's key men, then he got the key men. ... In five years he had cleaned up a million dollars.

Garr had his ups & downs, of course. Once or twice he was outbluffed. A race-track owner who had threatened to shoot Garr if his name was ever mentioned in the Chronicle started to act on his threat, camped in an office across the street with a rifle in his lap, waiting for Garr to appear. Warned in time, Garr sneaked in a back entrance. Day after day the patient rifleman waited. After a week's slinking Garr, worried lest the story of his plight leak out and raise a laugh at his expense, called off his ambusher by printing an apology. When Carrie Watson, his mistress but a madam in her own right, bore him a son whom she refused to surrender, they parted coldly. Garr balanced their account when she died of an overdose of laudanum and the Chronicle announced: CARRIE WATSON COLLECTS WAGES OF SIN-CRIME NEVER PAYS. An enraged mob once wrecked the Chronicle's plant; at 10:30 next morning the Chronicle was on the street, with a full story and pictures.

Garr himself lived to a prematurely ripe age, died the owner of $40,000,000, the biggest newspaper west of the Mississippi, a reputation so sinister that it made men hold their noses but pretend they were simply using their handkerchiefs.

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