End of a Scoop

To the London Daily Sketch (circ. 1,304,892), chronic boudoir skulker and chronicler of overcrowded love nests, the juicy tidbit was irresistible. For sale by Freelance Reporter Lee Benson: the ghosted lament of auburn-haired, toothsome Jane Buckingham, 23, on-and-off model and nightclub hostess, who declared that she had reigned in the heart of Prince Shiv of Palitana until dethroned fortnight ago by another of Shiv's girls, slinky Hungarian Actress Eva Bartok.

Even by Sketch's dustbin standards, this was not much of a story. Shiv, an Indian maharajah's son, is a bush-league playboy--not, say, in Porfirio Rubirosa's class. Jane was an insatiable romanticist who could, if need be, wriggle through a love affair in five minutes. What's more, she had a husband and two-year-old daughter in the West Indies, where she had left them nearly two years ago.

Sketch bought anyway, visualizing the journalistic impact of Jane's thighs and sighs ("Shiv is mine! I won't let her take him away from me"). The editors packed her, Reporter Benson, a photographer and a staff sob sister onto the next plane to Naples, to confront the unsuspecting Shiv. Twenty-three thousand feet over Anzio, Italy, minutes short of Naples, the Viscount bearing Jane and company and 22 other passengers was rammed by an Italian air force jet. Dead with all the rest: the Sketch four, in pursuit of an essentially phony story.

"She must have been crazy," said the prince. But the Sketch was a little kinder than that. Laying out a second-page black-bordered mass obituary, it paid homage to its own enterprise. "This," mourned Editor Herbert Gunn, "was the end of a scoop."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.