Reader Response

Reader Response PUBLISHER EDITED BY RIFLE? With that playful headline, the Los Angeles Mirror-News last week joined other U.S. tabloids in joyful coverage of an event long prophesied, widely awaited and plainly relished: the shooting of Robert Harrison. 52, publisher of Confidential, whose formula of sinnuendo about celebrities has built up the bestselling (circ. 3,674,423) magazine on U.S. newsstands (TIME, July 11, 1955).

A shotgun charge caught Harrison not in his natural habitat of Broadway fleshpots, but in the Dominican Republic. But the shotgun, sure enough, belonged to a man written up in Confidential's latest bimonthly issue: a 35-year-old professional hunter named Richard Weldy, who, according to Confidential, had lost his wife to Actor John Wayne in Peru in 1952.

Miss Cheesecake. Weldy had met Harrison twice before. The first time was two months ago, when Harrison talked vaguely of hiring him for an Amazon expedition but also assiduously pumped him about his ex-wife Pilar Palette and Actor Wayne. Then last week he met Harrison in a Ciudad Trujillo hotel casino, raised such a row about the Confidential story that bouncers escorted him out.

Two days later, 90 miles away in the jungle near a mountain resort hotel, Weldy came upon Harrison again. This time Harrison was accompanied by Confidential's Managing Editor A. P. Govoni and a blonde nightclub singer, Geene Courtney, 30, onetime Miss Cheesecake of New York. The party carried guns for hunting, but as a Confidential spokesman put it, " It was a sort of a lark in the mountains; you know what I mean?"

Weldy began to argue again with Har rison. "He was gesticulating and nearly hysterical," according to Harrison, who had never come up against an armed reader before. "The gun flew from his hand and hit a rock. Courtney screamed. I felt an awful pain and fell down. Weldy beat it like a shot out of hell." Govoni, who was armed, lit out fast, too. Like Weldy, he said he rushed off to get help, though both seemed equally eager to get out of gunfire range. That left Harrison, clutching a flesh wound in his left shoulder, and Miss Courtney.

Deplorable Shot. When Govoni started back to the jungle with help, he could not find the couple. Soon fog and darkness closed in, and the searchers gave up for the night. Next day, parties of 4,000 civil guards, police, soldiers and Boy Scouts beat the bushes until they found Harrison and Miss Courtney, both exhausted after a sleepless night and suffering from exposure. While they recovered in a Ciudad Trujillo hospital, the police put Weldy in a cell until they could check his story that the shot was an accident.

After three days in jail, Weldy was set free when the others backed up his story. Reluctantly, the tabloids did a slow fade-out on the exotic tropical scene, leaving readers to chew on some memorable quotes. Said Actor Wayne: " Weldy is a nice fellow, but I deplore the fact that he is such a poor shot." Said Weldy: "I'm going up the Amazon and get lost." Said Harrison: " I have had enough of the goddamned jungle for the rest of my life." Said Miss Courtney: "I wasn't in love with either of them."

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