The Old Campaigner

With three women in tow, a Hearst reporter and photographer strolled into a deserted Los Angeles bar. They moved the bar stools (required by California law) to one side, and the photographer shot a waist-to-toe picture of the reporter and women, standing with their feet planted on the rail.

Last week a picture suspiciously like their faked shot turned up in a full-page layout that replaced the editorial page in most of the Hearst papers. Cried its caption, in a single horrified breath: "Throughout the nation, this scene is being reenacted on a scale increasing at a rate that has brought a rising tide of demand for a law to end promiscuous drinking by women." Brayed a banner headline: AMERICA'S TRAGEDY--THE FEMALE BARFLY. As if to show the world--and his editors--that there was life in the old boy yet, aged (84), ailing William Randolph Hearst was bending his elbows in another campaign.

Mixture as Before. Such synthetic crusades, a trademark of Hearst journalism, are unlikely to survive their inventor. No one else in his empire would dare show such a grand, bland disregard of news values. The campaigns come in three basic sizes, to fit local, moral and national issues. But the strategy is always the same.

Last week, prompted by Hearstlings, prominent citizens gave out statements for symposiums swatting the barflies. Pastors preached in favor of the campaign, and judges anxious to get their pictures in the paper took it for a text in lecturing defendants. As a moral crusade, it was taking its place alongside such other newsless Hearst favorites as antivivisection, anti-cockfighting and the whipping post for wife-beaters. Before it was over, it might even take on some of the trappings of the political campaigns: front-page stories from Washington, front-page editorials, Hearst-written resolutions for passage by American Legion posts and civic groups, and follow-up letters lauding Hearst, for double-column display on editorial pages.

Ready, Set, Go. The barflies campaign evidently started when Hearst, who disapproves of women in bars, called up the Los Angeles Examiner's Editor Ray T. Van Ettisch from his Beverly Hills villa. As the campaign got rolling, there was a spate of headlines like BABY ABANDONED BY BARFLY MOTHER. Hearst reporters knew, without anyone telling them, that they could get space with stories about women in bars. But it was a little hard to whip up public indignation. "The whole thing sounds as old-fashioned as the pink lady, sniffed a San Francisco woman, ordering another oldfashioned.

Hearst trained seals, cartoonists and columnists, who could not afford to laugh it off, got into the act as gracefully as possible. Amiable Rhymester Nick Kenny wrote a poem ("Loafing in a barroom, see them in a row; Silly women barflies, putting on a show. . . .") The doggerel brought Poet Kenny a nasty note from a woman in Brooklyn: "Confidentially, I think you're going nuts."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.