Back to Abnormal

For the price of three sticks of gum, the New Yorker can escape his harried, subway-riding existence and enter the gaudy, slam-bang world of the tabloid Daily News and Mirror. There life can be newsy, glamorous, compassionate and sinful all at once. In Hearst's Mirror one morning last week, millions of readers of a paternity-suit story met a long-lashed brunette who

TELLS OF TRYSTS WITH OPERA TENOR FERRUCCIO TAGLIAVINI. Across the page, they found a handsome "Raffles," who had allegedly stolen $1,000,000 in furs and jewels, and kept mistresses on both coasts and "was said to resemble Ronald Colman" (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). In the News, they read all about a tenacious housewife whose 2-YEAR, $7,000 HUNT FINDS LOST HUSBAND--and who obviously did not intend to let him get away again.

The tabloid's customers raced on to read about five-year-old Gail Nicoletti, a front-page picture of health (see cut). Her demented father had thrown her and her brother from a 125-ft. bridge, then jumped himself. She had survived, though her mind had become blank. Now, the Daily News reported: MEMORY STIRS

IN TOT HURLED OFF SPAN. "The SUnshine streamed in--Gail is getting well." Jujitsu & Tears. In a nearby column was a "blonde Portia" who was her own lawyer in her suit against her father and stepmother. They wanted to "railroad" her to an insane asylum, she said, purportedly to get their hands on her cash. One day she used jujitsu on an opposing lawyer; the next day she "became the traditionally soft woman--tears and all ... broke down . . . and wept freely . . . several jurors and spectators wept with her."

Next, tabloid readers paused over the pictures of three sad-eyed youngsters gazing at their bandage-wrapped sister in a hospital bed. Fourteen-year-old Roberta Lee Mason had saved her five brothers and sisters from death when fire destroyed their home in a Chicago suburb. The "fire heroine," said the Mirror, was "wrapped in her white badge of courage."

Then there was the Bermuda-bound airline pilot who emptied his father's ashes in flight. "That's what Dad wanted," the News said he said. "He wanted me to fly him to Bermuda, but I never got the chance. This was the only way . . ." And for a more solid tug at the heartstrings, there was a Harlem mother in tearful collapse after her daughter, little Carmelita Rodriguez, and her playmate had been killed by a coal truck in a "safe" play street.

If they learned only the barest details of the North Atlantic pact, tabloid readers learned a lot about life's triumphs, travail and heartbreak that readers of the Times and Herald Tribune (which chose to run Tenor Tagliavini's troubles on its music page) often missed in their news.

Pacts & Punditry. During the war, when cable desks were more important than city desks, the tabs had also tended to pass up the "LIVE WIRE KILLS CHILD IN HOUSE HEXED BY WOE" for pacts, problems and punditry. Last week there were signs that the tabloids were reverting to type. They had sensed--more quickly than other U.S. papers--that the "news" and the public taste in news might be changing. (In England it was London's feature-packed Daily Mirror that had profited most from the lifting of newsprint controls.)

The New York Daily News had good reason to sniff a new trend; its massive circulation was slipping a bit. The News was still the biggest U.S. paper (2,175,000 daily, 4,500,000 Sunday). But some of its boldness, impudence and razor-keen sense of what the public wanted had died in 1946 with Founder Joe Patterson. To some longtime News readers, it seemed as though the paper had lost the exact formula for Patterson's magic elixir, and was trying to concoct a substitute. Manhattan newshounds speculated that the editors were even poring over old files in search of the missing ingredient.

Leads & Eyes. If so, the News editors weren't the only ones. In his weekly Mirror column, veteran (65) Editor Jack Lait put a finger on one trouble with postwar journalism. "The emphasis on 'leads' . . . seems to have largely evaporated," he wrote. "In my journalistic salad days reporters sweated to create dramatic, amusing or literary leads ... It was a problem of clutching the reader by the throat, quick, and giving it to him while his eyes bulged."

As if to show what he meant, Mirror Editor Lait clutched his readers by the throat in the first paragraph of a spicy divorce story:

"When Floral Park's handsome society physician, Dr. Herbert J. Bernhardt, broke into the apartment of his estranged wife, Mary, brandishing a crowbar and followed by five ax-wielding minions, the woman from downstairs screamed, the two babies woke up crying in the back room and the dance instructor dropped his demitasse and fell off his chair." Tabloid readers just had to read to see what happened after the instructor and the demitasse hit the floor.

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