The Social News

An American . . . is afraid of ranking himself too high; still more is he afraid of being ranked too low.

--Alexis de Tocqueville (1840) Since James Gordon Bennett launched the first society page in his New York Herald in 1840, the job of ranking Americans in "society" has fallen increasingly to the society pages. Many a U.S. daily gives more space to society news than to foreign dispatches; few parts of newspapers are read with more scrupulous devotion by woman readers. Once, metropolitan society newshens concentrated on the doings of the very few--a group rigidly defined by such social dictators as New York's Ward McAllister. Chicago's Mrs. Potter Palmer, Denver's "Unsinkable" Mrs. Margaret Tobin Brown,* San Francisco's Ned Greenway. But changes in American life and the hard realities of newspaper circulation-building have transformed the face of U.S. society news. Running a society page, explains Detroit News Women's Department Director Gordon Dixon, is "something like running a restaurant. If you have only fancy food and high prices, your clientele is limited." Last week, all over the U.S., society editors, reporters and columnists were busy showing how varied the new society menu could be. In New York the Herald Tribune ran a story and picture on the engagement of Miss Mary Hanson Yergan, an attractive Negro student at Columbia University. In Washington, society reporters lined up in evening gowns at the White House to cover the annual Presidential diplomatic reception, one of the top social events of the year. In Dallas the big story was the annual Terpsichorean Ball. In Miami it was the opening of Hialeah race track with "former Ambassador to England Joseph P. Kennedy and his family, Mrs. Russell Firestone, Mrs. Robert Cudahy and, of course, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt." The Big Change. Who are in the new society page's society? The New York Times and Herald Tribune still report on the Social Registerites. But they also print all the announcements they have room for about the engagements, weddings, births, parties, etc.. of others who are "eligible in terms of their respectability, accomplishment and educational background." For the other papers, society is a mixture of Social Registerites, cafe society and stage, screen and other entertainers.

Such society gossipists as Igor (Cholly Knickerbocker) Cassini of Hearst's New York Journal-American operate on the principle that "there is nothing more deadly boring than a group of people who have just social position and nothing else." In his syndicated column of elegant keyhole peeping and pub-crawling, Cassini is far from boring. He not only covers the fanciest parties and loudest brawls, but his columns also include such items as: "When the Jelke trial opens--the chi chi neighbors along 72nd Street will hear all about the $300-a-month apartment [call] girls operated there." In San Francisco, Chicago and many another city, charity is the springboard.

"A woman gets on one committee," explains San Francisco Examiner Society Editor Frances Moffatt, "then you notice she's moved up to a better one. Her name begins to show up on party guest lists, then better party lists." To keep tab on the climbers, society reporters in San Francisco turn out every Monday for lunch at the Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel. There, the headwaiter's placement of socialites at tables in the center or corner of the room is as good a rating as any blue book.

In Atlanta "the club you belong to counts"; in Washington "anyone 'official' is society"; in Detroit it is "who you are in the auto industry"; in Miami "it's simply your Dun & Bradstreet rating." In Los Angeles the new society is intertwined with the movie colony. "One thing that's forced us to change," explains the Los Angeles Examiner's Society Editor Lynn Spencer, "is that now when Eastern socialites come West, they're more interested in seeing our movie stars than in meeting our own Western society." Most society news still comes into papers over the telephone or through the mails in the form of wedding announce ments, bridge-party lists, etc. Papers. have few hard and fast rules on what they print, although almost no dailies in the South and few in the North carry Negro society news. In papers like the Milwaukee Journal, scarcely a bridge or tea escapes the paper's home-town style society net.

In New Orleans and many other cities, coverage is so thorough that a hostess seldom arranges a dinner party without first checking the local newspaper's social calendar to find out whether any big parties are planned for the same date.

Background Shotgun. Society report ing has its own brand of booby traps. A sharp-eyed New Orleans Times-Picayune staffer once killed a wedding photo just in time: a photographer had carelessly posed the couple in front of a mantel over which a shotgun was prominently hanging. The late Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish once became outraged at the New York Herald after a makeup man inadvertently transposed her party list with a Manhattan boxing program.

Since most society news is considered a service to readers, society reporters are more considerate about those who make the news than are other reporters. Detroit News Society Editor Eleanor Breitmeyer has a rule never to take pictures of guests at a cocktail party with glasses in their hands. Furthermore, "if a prominent industrialist is having an outing with his family aboard his yacht, and we ask if we may take pictures, he might say that he would rather we'd not because he was in the midst of labor negotiations in his plant. In such a case, we might take a shot just of the youngsters and forget the yacht as far as pictures go."

Human Race. The change in society coverage has made a big difference in the social acceptability of reporters. Many a society leader, engaged in charitable work, has learned the value of publicity. No longer do reporters have to stand outside the door, like little match girls, trying to find out what is going on inside. Said Denver Post Society Editor Patricia Collins: "We are well accepted everywhere." In Washington there are so many parties, says Washington Post and Times-Herald Society Editor Marie McNair. "that I live all winter on canapes and don't get a green vegetable a month."

In covering the new society, some papers have actually gone out and made society news. For example. Chicago Daily News Society Editor Athlyn Deshais last year ran a contest to select the "New Queen of Chicago Society" (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954); it proved to be one of the paper's most popular special features. With readers finding their own names and those of their friends on the society pages, newspapers have found that expanded society coverage is paying off in increased circulation. With the change, many a society reporter and socialite has belatedly come to recognize the truth of Alva Johnston's sardonic definition of "socialite" as "a technical tabloid term meaning a member of the human race."

* Who earned the title when she survived the Titanic sinking and even lent a hand at the lifeboat oars.

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