Never a Dull Moment

Anna Roosevelt Boettiger went to swish Miss Chapin's School--but she had an eight-year postgraduate course under Hearst. She will always be F.D.R.'s daughter, but her Phoenix Arizona Times last week looked more like W.R.H. The resemblance was unmistakable--and a shocked Arizona bought all the papers Anna could print. The story she was playing up was a natural for yellow journalism: a messy divorce case involving some of Arizona's best people.

Dark-haired Gioia Barker Grimditch, 23, was a poor (and thoroughly spoiled) little rich girl, daughter of the late Gloria Gould and a great-granddaughter of Robber Baron Jay Gould. Her husband, Harvard Law Student William H. Grimditch Jr., onetime U.S. junior figure-skating champion, was a Union Leaguer from Philadelphia. The "other man," Blake Brophy, was the son of Banker Frank Brophy, one of Arizona's biggest wigs.

Anna Boettiger ran the story at length, for nine days, under front-page headlines such as GIOIA TELLS HOW DIARY STOLEN. The rival Gazette and Arizona Republic buried the story in a few paragraphs way back among the want ads. But tabloid editors from coast to coast followed Anna's lead.

Pure Joy. On the witness stand, Gioia ("it means 'joy' in Italian," explained Hearst's New York Mirror) conceded that she'd done a lot of drinking (she had her first drink at five at a party of her mother's) and necking. She once loved Brophy, or thought she did; but she said she hadn't been unfaithful. The New York Daily News headline: 15T CHAMPAGNE AT 5, STILL PURE AT 23: GIOIA.

The high point of the trial, for Anna and the tabs, came when Mrs. Grimditch's diary was read in court. (Sample printable entries: ". . . Lost Weekend. Blake and I might live in a Tahiti tent. . . . Blake called tonight 'dronk'; rough night looking at moon 10 p.m. . . . Never a dull moment. . . . Double-bed. What a life. To Flagstaff for dinner.") Some of the scribbling was in French; Mrs. Grimditch said it didn't mean what it said in literal translation. Cackled the Daily News: IT JUST SOUNDS BAD IN FRENCH, GIOIA DEFENSE.

Pure Motive. Many Phoenicians objected to Editor Boettiger's energetic flapping of this dirty linen. Church leaders and friends of both families warned her to tone down her stories. Gioia's stepfather, Rancher W. MacFarlane Barker, is an officer of the bank from which the Boettigers recently got a $200,000 mortgage. And Frank Brophy's Bank of Douglas is a regular Times advertiser.

Last week, when one of Anna's ad salesmen called on the Brophy bank, he was told that it had canceled its ads. Anna was a little worried: "I hate to lose it, [but] this is not going to bust us up financially." The bank turned out to be more worried. At week's end, it put the ads back in again, lest it be criticized for pressuring the press.

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