No More Elastic

After over 4 1/2 years of writing his breezy, brassy columns, Billy Rose this week called it quits. In his farewell, Rose wrote: "I may feel differently about it one of these days, but as of this writing--propped up in bed and with a magnum of morphine sloshing around in my veins--I've about made up my mind to stop." Rose underwent an operation recently, and "I found that, for the first time in my 51 Novembers, I wasn't snapping back the way I should--that the ever lovin' elastic wasn't there any more . . . Three weeks after the patch-up job, I've still got a headful of fog and a skinful of ache."

Rose hated to give up columning and said so. One reason was that the column that started as a paid ad in the New York Daily News (TIME, June 24, 1946) had spread into 400 daily and 2,000 weekly newspapers and was netting Rose about $3,500 a week. Another reason was "an old show-off like me doesn't like to leave the stage with that big an audience in the house." But the tough little showman, who has been sandwiching his writing in between running his nightclub and theater, finally learned what every good columnist knows: that turning out a column three times a week is close to a full-time job. Concluded Rose: "And now, as the sun sinks in the West and the nurse shoves a thermometer in my face, I reluctantly say farewell to the lovely land of green eyeshades and printer's ink. It's been a real nice clambake and--who knows--maybe we'll bump into each other again."

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