House Detective

In Hollywood, Edith Gwynn's "Rambling Reporter" is called an orange-juice column. Its citrus-tart gossip, cinema news and gags are usually gulped at the breakfast table along with the columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

Until recently, the "Rambling Reporter," which keeps a house detective's eye on cinemactors and cinemactions, appeared only in a powerful trade sheet, the Hollywood Reporter (circ. 7,500). But last week Edith Gwynn's column was being syndicated. Seven newspapers had already signed it up: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Boston Post, the Indianapolis Times, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Morning Telegraph and the Pottstown (Pa.) Mercury.

Edith Gwynn, a short, beryllium-hard brunette, in her late 30s, writes with the brash confidence of a columnist who knows she can't be fired. Her job, which pays about $300 a week, is guaranteed by her divorce settlement with the Reporter's Publisher W. R. ("Billy") Wilkerson. Natty, collie-eyed Billy has had plenty of experience with divorce settlements (his present wife is No. 5), but he never made a better one. Edie Gwynn's scatterbrained manner, quick bursts of nervous laughter and lavishly indiscriminate endearments ("lambie pie, beautiful cookie") hide a razor-sharp nose for news. She has established herself as the mother confessor for Cinemaland, but it is other people's sins the penitents usually confess. Edith's column is the Reporter's biggest selling point.

Dammed-Up Gags. Edie worked on Judge magazine before she married Billy and, in 1930, helped him found the paper. She wrote movie reviews and a gossip column, kept up the column after the divorce ("I don't remember whether we got unhitched in 1935 or 1936 and whether it was in Yucatan or Honduras"). But Publisher Wilkerson, who once ran a speakeasy and later the Trocadero nightclub and is now part owner of L'Aiglon and LaRue, is a man of unshakable principle: never knock an advertiser unless he forgets to advertise. When Billy retracted an accurate Gwynn item in 1937 because it offended an advertiser, Edie quit. For 4 1/2 years she went into semiretirement; she "threw hundreds of sensational parties," which usually found her at the piano--"a lethal weapon in my hands." In 1942, bursting with dammed-up gags and gossip, Edie went back to columning for Billy.

Edie's hard-hitting column often sounds libelous. But apparently she has the facts behind her strongest innuendos, because no one has ever sued. Yet she rarely checks an item. If someone gives her a wrong steer, she crosses the tipster's name off her list. She is more often in bad taste than in hot water. For syndication, Edie blue-pencils double-meaning quips and purely local items (sample kill: "A starlet is worried that her husband has been untrue. Her baby doesn't look a bit like him").

The Torrents of Evening. Edie spends her mornings in a pink satin double bed in her Beverly Hills home, gathering her column over two telephones. Out of the ripe grainfield sown by studio executives, wives, movie stars and pressagents, she may reap 30 or so printable bits. She never goes to studios or press parties, because "they bore the you-know-what out of me." But at night Edie goes everywhere with one of her bewilderingly large number of escorts, considers three parties or as many nightclubs a routine evening. Her nimble tongue can hold its own with Hollywood's best. (Just before Errol Flynn's acquittal on charges of consorting with a minor, she quipped: "I hear you took a party of 14 to the Mocambo and couldn't get a table.") One of the few times she came out second was when Restaurateur Mike Romanoff ended an argument by kicking her in the foot.

Edie prefers to drink coffee laced with rum, never lets the house pick up the check. Says she: "When a guy takes me out, he takes out a girl --not a column." But the "Rambling Reporter" goes along too. As Edith says: "Everything I hear goes in one ear and out the column."

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