Shirer Cashes In

Good reason had CBS to rub its corporate hands with delight last week as it watched its correspondent William Lawrence Shirer's Berlin Diary nudging up to a sale of 400,000 copies. Keeping a baby spot trained on its former Berlin man, CBS since last July has had him covering home plate in its nightly European news roundups, named him last week to substitute for vacationing Commentator Elmer Davis. Meanwhile, plans were going ahead to feature him a fortnight hence on a Sunday-evening show (5:456 E.D.S.T.) called William Shirer and the News. After three weeks as a sustainer, Shirer's Sunday program will be taken over by Sanka Coffee at about $1,000 a week.

Big, mild-mannered, 37-year-old Newscaster Shirer, blind in one eye from a skiing accident in Switzerland, is a radio phenomenon. Before he joined CBS. in 1937, he had an eventful, but by no means dazzling, career as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Universal News Service. High point of his career in foreign-news service was a period he spent in India for the Tribune, which netted a close friendship with Mohandas K. Gandhi. A product of that time was a novel about India. He didn't think about publishing it until he scored with Berlin Diary. Now several publishers are dickering for it.

When Bill Shirer was hired by CBS, he didn't expect to get far in radio. But his slow, earnest voice and competent reporting from the world's political hot spots made his name. Now he is cashing in on the by-products of his reputation. Besides his take from writing and broadcasting, he is getting a fee reported to be around $20,000 for nine weeks' work as technical adviser for an RKO film called Passage from Bordeaux (adapted from a novelette by Budd Schulberg). Shirer was offered a small part in this refugee drama as a radio broadcaster but turned it down on the grounds that his screen face is depressing.

Busy as he is, Bill Shirer still has time for an occasional lecture, at a going rate of $500. Added to his estimated royalties of some $114,000 on his Berlin Diary, it all adds up, even after taxes, to quite a sizeable advance over the $150 a week which he used to average for airing the news from Berlin.

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