Who Hit Me?

When a newspaperman gets beaten up while on the job, his colleagues usually have a sympathetic word for him. But last week, in Hearst's New York Mirror, Columnist Walter Winchell cracked: "The attack on a newspaperman by 'unknown' assailants . . . reminds the wags of critic [Alexander] Woollcott--of whom it was quipped: 'If that guy's ever found murdered--half the population of N.Y. will be held under suspicion!' "

The newspaperman Winchell was talking about was his Mirror colleague, Nightclub Columnist Lee Mortimer, 45, whose previous publicized licking was administered by weedy Crooner Frank Sinatra at Hollywood's Ciro's nightclub. This time Welterweight (138 Ibs.) Mortimer was beaten by an unidentified thug at 1:45 a.m. in the washroom of New Jersey's Riviera nightclub, while another thug stood by. When Mortimer came to, with two black eyes and a swollen jaw, he asked: "Who hit me?" But later, he told the Mirror that it must have been a gangland beating in retaliation for Mortimer's occasional stories on underworld affairs. The Hearstpapers' lurid stories described his assailants as "paid mobsters," who had done the job with brass knuckles and a pistol. (Playwright Sidney (Detective Story) Kingsley, a wartime MP who was also in the washroom, said the beating was done with fists, couldn't recollect a gun.)

Despite Mortimer's insistence on the revenge motive, Fellow Columnist Winchell, who also knows a gangster or two, pooh-poohed the claim: "Underworlders can't believe 'any of the Mob' did it--on the grounds that beating up newspapermen 'is hard luck.' "

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