Columnar Freedom

Walter Winchell is an editorially free man so long as he keeps his signed column to Broadway trivia. Let him pick up from his liberal friends a political notion at odds with the prevailing Hearst policy, and Walter Winchell might become as voiceless as a $35-a-week Hearst reporter. Rare, however, is such smothering as Winchell got last week.

When newly-serious Poet Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, both highly paid Hollywood scenarists, returned from a Spanish junket last fall, their strong feminine sympathies were all on the side of the Loyalists. Fortnight ago, in a restaurant tete-`a-tete with her good friend Mr. Winchell, Miss Hellman told a harrowing tale of mad nights in Valencia and Madrid when she saw non-combatants dodge into shell-pocked doorways to escape death from the sky.

"Write it for me, write it!" Columnist Winchell snapped anxiously. She did. Friend Winchell was enthusiastic over her story, but his enthusiasm was wasted. King Features Syndicate, which distributes Winchell's work, spent two days thinking about it, then flatly rejected Miss Hellman's guest column. Hearst editors condemned her account as Loyalist propaganda and brushed aside Host Winchell's stubborn defense of his guest. Two days later the Hearst New York Journal and American favored ex-Japanese Ambassador W. Cameron Forbes with a big headline: "EX-ENVOY FORBES HAILS FRANCO RULE--People Happy and Have Plenty in Nationalist Spain, He Says."

Mr. Hearst's official dictum to all editors: Don't take sides in Spain.

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