"Find Livingstone"

THE SCANDALOUS MR. BENNETT (335 pp.) --Richard O'Connor--Doubleday ($4.95).

Press lords, like great generals, are expected to be a trifle mad, but the maddest of the lot, and one of the lordliest, was James Gordon Bennett Jr. Of the two James Gordon Bennetts (the father founded the New York Herald, the son added the New York Evening Telegram and the Paris edition of the Herald), Elmer Davis once wrote that "they invented almost everything, good and bad, in modern journalism."

Bennett the elder was a crabbed Scot who founded the Herald in 1827. The newspapers of the time were timid and dull, sycophants to power, lively only when used by their editors for inter-paper squabbling. Bennett, armed with the heretical notion that a newspaper should be "impudent and intrusive," invaded two untouched news areas--finance and society--exposing the market swindles of the moneyed and reporting with little respect the social pretensions of their wives. On dull days, he twitted blue noses; one editorial guffaw at unmentionability taunted : "Petticoats-petticoats-petticoats; there, you fastidious fools, vent your mawkishness on that." Old Bennett was horsewhipped with a frequency startling even for a time when this was a customary way for readers to suggest disapproval. He showed little resentment of the whippings and reported them fully.

Naked Horseman. By 1841, when James Gordon Bennett Jr. was born, his father was on his way to becoming rich. The boy was raised like an Asiatic prince, and the training took firm hold; he lived like one for the rest of his life. Onetime Newspaperman (New York Mirror) Richard O'Connor tells his story well in this appropriately slapdash biography.

Young Bennett lived in Europe for most of his childhood; his mother could not abide the ostracism of a polite society that noticed her husband only when it horsewhipped him. Returning to New York as a tall, well-built, unbelievably arrogant young man, he eagerly took up both whoring and yachting, and when not thus occupied careered recklessly around Manhattan in a coach-and-four. He liked to handle the reins himself--on occasion, while stark naked.

By his mid-20s, Bennett's only accomplishment was the winning of a transatlantic yacht race. But at his father's insistence, he put in some time in the Herald city room. There was no nonsense, of course, about starting from the bottom. When he was 26, his father retired, and he took over--not so much by settling down to hard work as by stirring the Herald to his own pitch of capriciousness. As he was to do throughout his lifetime, he hired and fired people according to whimsey, and terrorized staffers with a system of office spies (called "White Mice" by their victims).

Bad Grace. One of his decrees was that all Herald troops were to be clean-shaven and shorthaired. During a stay abroad, he received information from one of the White Mice that a long-haired music critic had just been put on the payroll. TELL MELTZER TO CUT HIS HAIR, he cabled back. Meltzer refused. Bennett meted out his punishment by cable: SEND MELTZER

TO ST. PETERSBURG.

But only half of Bennett was nonsense. Earlier than anyone else, he saw the value of spending freely to get news. He chartered launches to meet incoming liners from Europe and cheerfully paid vast cable bills for full accounts of distant sensations. By the time he was 35, the Herald was easily the best paper in the U.S., and no one was surprised when it scored a four-day beat by printing the complete news--denied by the War Department--of Custer's annihilation at Little Big Horn. It was part whim and part genius that prompted him to tell an obscure correspondent named Henry Morton Stanley to search Africa for the missing missionary, Dr. David Livingstone.

Typically, Bennett took it with bad grace when, two years later, Stanley actually found Livingstone (who, incidentally, had not been aware that he needed finding) and became famous overnight. Bennett's cable of congratulations, which Stanley received during a leisurely and triumphal return to the U.S.. read: STOP

TALKING. BENNETT.

The Lost Owl. The publisher introduced polo to the U.S.. won a walking match and a $6,000 purse, and built the Newport Casino after being barred by an exclusive club, the Reading Room, for riding his horse into the front hall. His personal income approached $1,000,000 a year, and he had no trouble finding all the companionship he wanted among the girls of the Tenderloin. But at 35 he became engaged to Caroline May, a Maryland society girl. Perhaps thinking better of this, he got drunk at a New Year's party at his fiancee's New York home. Here accounts differ. Some say that, in full view of everyone, he urinated into the fireplace. Others say he urinated into the grand piano. The engagement was off. Bennett and the girl's brother fought (halfheartedly) the last duel in the U.S., and the publisher exiled himself to Europe.

There, while keeping a tyrant's control of the parent paper, he founded the Paris Herald. Typically, the sheet was eccentric (for some reason, Bennett was amused by a letter written by an "old Philadelphia lady" who wanted to know how to change centigrade degrees to Fahrenheit; the letter ran, without explanation, in every issue until Bennett died 18 years later). Typically also, under his editorship, the Herald's Paris edition became one of the best papers on the Continent.

The New York Herald covered the Spanish-American War far better than the papers of Hearst, whose jingoism touched it off. Its circulation swelled to more than half a million. But when Hearst forced Bennett to stop publishing a hugely profitable page of classified ads inserted by prostitutes (the columns were nicknamed "The Whores' Daily Guide & Compendium") the paper went into a decline. In 1920, the limping Herald (along with the Evening Telegram and the Paris Herald) was sold for $4,000,000. Bennett had been dead for less than two years.

The only flaw in the Bennett legend is that he did not get the mausoleum he wanted. This was to be a statue, 200 feet high, in the shape of an owl (Bennett liked owls). It was to be far grander than Grant's tomb on Riverside Drive (Bennett did not like Grant). But Architect Stanford White, who was supposed to design the bird, got himself shot by Harry Thaw. Bennett lost interest, and Manhattan lost an owl.

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