Words without Music

Westbrook Pegler found a friend. The name was Petrillo--James Caesar Petrillo, boss of U.S. musicians. Last week Hearst readers rubbed their eyes as Peg, the usually caustic carp of organized labor, was caught cheering a strike.

Petrillo's A.F.L. musicians, turned down after asking 25% more pay, had walked off the bandstands of over 50 New York hotels (including the Waldorf-Astoria, St. Moritz, Savoy-Plaza). Cried Pegler: ''I hope the hotels and the musicians' union never come permanently to terms."

Pegler, it seems, has a scunner against the modern hotel: it is no longer a home away from home. In Pegler's eyes, it is "a combination dance hall, vaudeville house, nightclub and rat race for disorderly elements. . . . We who rent the rooms . . . have been imposed upon grievously ... to accommodate . . . casuals off the streets who come to dance, drink and marvel in alcoholic stupor at ... the tough blonde griping hoarsely into a tin can mounted on a pipe . . . and pretty little thrips who sing mischievously about adultery . . . while Ollie Twitch and his reefer boys are tearing the atmosphere to bleeding tatters from the platform and some agile mugger with greased hair is twining a boneless female around his neck and exhibiting an impersonal patch of leg meat, hers."*

"Dear Mr. Putrilluh." But New Yorkers did not share the Peglerian appetite for musicless meals. Business dropped in Manhattan's huge, noise-deadened ballrooms. Out-of-town affiliates of struck New York hotels were hit by sympathy walkouts. Chicago's Palmer House, part of the Hilton chain, bravely put on its Empire Room show without an orchestra. The handful of customers groaned.

Petrillo flew from Chicago to New York to pull out all the stops. Muzak Corp. agreed not to pipe in canned music to silent hotels, A.F.L. electricians pledged themselves not to install jukeboxes. As Petrillo, dressed in two-tone shoes and a cream-colored silk shirt, made the rounds of unmusical bars, another friendly columnist, the New York Post's Earl Wilson, stalked him behind a glass of beer at Toots Shor's non-union spot.

"I like one of Jimmy Durante's jokes," Petrillo grinned. "Jimmy says, 'Fellows listen to this here indignunt telegram I sent Putrilluh. I sure told him off. It reads Dear Mr. Putrilluh: Quote. Unquote.'"

With or without quotes, Caesar Petrillo was sure that no one else would tell him off, until he got what he wanted.

*In another column last week Pegler sought to expose F.D.R.'s capacity and taste in liquor. Wrote he: "The President drank Martinis ... a horror to all well-mannered drinkers." Peg erred. F.D.R. was an Old-Fashioned man. Apropos his own bottle habits, Pegler, like a small boy writing on a blackboard, once repeated, for an entire post-New Year's Day column, a pledge not to mix his drinks.

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