Satira, Tirana & Mee

In conservative U.S. papers the sultry little tale from Havana got what it deserved: decent burial on an inside page, below the fold. In the tabloids, and such dailies as are tabloids under the skin, the life, loves and death of one John Lester Mee got top billing as the season's spiciest mixture of sin, sex, masochism and mon-keyshine justice. It was the type of news the U.S. press tells only too well, and loves to tell.

The plot was tailor-made: two Navy veterans, cruising the Caribbean in a 75-foot yacht, acquired a sloe-eyed little belly dancer from Toledo. Her name was Patricia Schmidt, but she had wiggled her way along the honky-tonk circuit from Chicago to Trinidad as "Satira." When she moved aboard, to share Mee's cabin, his pal Charles Jackson obligingly moved to another. One day Mee told her to pack up; his wife was coming down from Chicago. They fought, Patricia shot Mee, and a few days later he died.

A story like that was too good to leave in the hands of Havana's 22 dailies, so a covey of U.S. newsmen flew in to take over. When Satira was taken aboard the yacht to "reenact" the shooting (before a perspiring judge and a mob of curious

Cubans), photographers put her through endless retakes in the humid cabin, until she fainted. Again & again, she told her "own story." (Sample quote: "I was in bed alone every night I was away from Jack.") Correspondent James Desmond of the tabloid New York Daily News gravely reported that her shipboard life was not all ecstasy, but "something too unglamorous for the fragile fabric of illicit love." (The headline: TIGHTWAD LOVER HAD ME SWAB DECKS: PAT.)

Take it Easy; Take it Off. Reporters fought grimly for exclusive "angles." Hearst's New York Mirror revealed that Satira's father, "a law-abiding apothecary," had "blown the contents of his piggy bank" to go to her aid. "Take it easy on my Dad," she told the Mirror. "He's never been outside Toledo. . . . Please buy him a beer." In court she exposed her back ("an official striptease," said one leering account) to show the judge and photographers her bruises.

Just when the story seemed about to sag, enterprising journalism revived it. Desperate Reporter Desmond and the Chicago Tribune's Norma Browning got a scoop on Mee's moody diaries, by putt-putting out to the yacht in a launch and swiping them. The Daily News and Trib rushed juicy excerpts into print, and the press feverishly tracked down the sexy-looking women that Mee, as a PT boat skipper, had saluted with purple poesy and erotic prose. One (whom he called "Tirana") was a nightclub singer named Lorraine De Wood; the Daily News found her in Milwaukee and hustled her to Manhattan, where Hearst's Journal-American headlined her story MEE PERFECT LOVER.

At week's end Mee's diaries and love letters had been picked clean, Satira was in jail awaiting her trial, and Tirana was packing them in as a special attraction at a Greenwich Village nightclub. The press got ready to change the subject.

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