Saloon Editor

In the days of bustles Earl Wilson would have been called a cad. In these days, 40 newspapers pay around $50,000 a year for his stuff, and 78,426 people have put down $2 to get it in book form (7 Am Gazing into My 8-Ball).

What they seem to like is what Earl Wilson calls the three Bs--Booze, Busts, Behinds. (Sample Wilson leer: Carole Landis looks "like a chiffonier with its top drawer pulled out." Of another buxom girl, he wrote: "only a build in a girdled cage.") What his readers also get, every so often, is some of the most accurately recorded Broadway-and-Sports Americana since the late great Ring Lardner.

Methodist to Madness. At 38, Earl Wilson is a chunky, sad-eyed little (5 ft. 6) fellow with an ear tuned for the casual wisecrack, an eye cocked for the offbeat feature story. The Saloon Editor comes from saloonless Rockford, Ohio, where at twelve he was choreboy for a country weekly, and later taught Methodist Sun-dav school. When he landed on the New

York Post as a rewrite man in 1935. ne bragged that he was the first newspaperman to get "stink" into type.

The war brought him a chance (as amusement editor) to go on--if not up--from there. For a time, with impish delight, he walked the tight wire between good fun and bad taste. On his pub-crawling beat, sipping an occasional dark-rum Daiquiri, he ogled the rhinestone in a stripteaser's navel, tattled on the Duchess of Windsor's powder-room behavior (she left the maid no tip).

On a working night, he and his B.W. (for beautiful wife) get home about 4 a.m. By dawn the doorman of his apartment hotel hails a passing taxi so that Wilson's column can make its 7 a.m. deadline.

Two traits early set him apart from fellow Broadway columnists. He liked to quote people accurately, even if they were talking in their cups. And he did not set himself up as an international answer man. The female form does not loom as large in Wilson's column as it once did. Now he covers events like Bernarr Macfadden's stand-on-your-head religion, Cosmotari-anism. Reported Wilson: "They got mat burns at last Sunday's sermon. . . ." He interviewed Polish Tenor Jan Kiepura after the critics panned his new show, and reported it, in pure Kiepurese: "The public love oss. They dizagree with the critics. The onjost critics hurts only wahn person--his poblisher and himself!" Wilson showed a flair for punch leads: "John Steinbeck said what the hell, he'd see me." He asked tart old H. L. Mencken at the Stork Club why he lived in Baltimore. Replied Mencken: "I need peace. I live in a remote slum surrounded by lintheads, okies and anthropoids ... far from where the respectable profiteers live." Earl Wilson's current ambition is to write "some thing serious, like John O'Hara."

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