The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  None of this frugality is evident in Howard's private office, which is a loud version of an Oriental temple in redandblack lacquer and gilt, with a chandelier in the form of a Chinese lamp trailing red tassels. The walls are decorated with scrolls addressed to the publisher by admiring Celestials. They are long, vertical strips of parchment covered with large calligraphy, and Howard, who reads no Chinese but knows an English version of each of the texts by rote, likes to translate them for visitors. “The Chinese send them instead of autographed photographs,” he says. “That one there, for instance, is from my old friend Tong Shoyi, who was slated to be President of China if Wu Peifu had beaten the Kuomintang, but the Kuomintang beat Wu Peifu, and Tong Shoyi was killed by hatchet men in Shanghai. He was a great friend of Herbert Hoover's. The scroll says, 'To make love to a young woman is like feeding honey to a baby on the point of a knife.' “ In his house in the East Sixties, which looks something like a branch public library, he also has a Chinese room, and Mrs. Howard has a threehundredyearold Ningpo lacquer bed that was imported in a hundred and twentythree pieces, with directions in Chinese for putting it together. “The only Japanese stuff in my house,” Howard says, “is a dressingtable set of pigeon'sblood cloisonne that Mrs. Matsuoka gave Mrs. Howard.” Until recently, Mr. Matsuoka was the Japanese Foreign Minister.

  The surface of the huge desk at which Howard works in his office, and which looks long enough for him to sleep on, is so brightly polished that it mirrors his face, and a caller sitting across from him may have the sensation of being talked at simultaneously by two identical faces, one perched on Howard's neck and the other spread out on the desk. There is always a small bowl of dark magenta carnations on the desk, and Howard usually has a carnation of the same shade in his lapel, day or night. When he dines out, he has been known to wear patentleather Russian boots, an evening cape, a red tie, a checked waistcoat, and a dinner jacket. His business suits are shortwaisted and doublebreasted, and have long, pointed lapels like the ears of an alert donkey. Although the suits in themselves are notable, people usually remember them only as accessories to his haberdashery. Beholders recall chiefly the winered shirts with large plaids of shrill green; the shirts of turquoiseandgold squares; the orange, mauve, and pistachio shirts; the shirts of jade, rust red, and tangerine, lovingly picked out with electric blue, and, invariably, the matching bow ties and pocket handkerchiefs cut from the shirting. A fascinated colored washroom attendant who once observed him in the clubhouse at Saratoga stared for a minute and then said with awe, “All that man need is a gold horseshoe front and back and he have the prettiest racing colors in America.”

  Whenever Howard gets an idea he considers good, he walks into an office adjoining his own and tries it out on William W. Hawkins, chairman of the board of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, who has been his closest ally inside the organization since both were youngsters working for the Scripps wire service, the United Press, thirty years ago. Hawkins is a broadbodied, placid, redfaced man who gazes at you benignly through goldrimmed spectacles. There is nothing exotic about his office. It is traditionally Americanexecutive in motif, and is adorned with a large portrait of Will Rogers by Leon Gordon. Howard owns 13.2 per cent and Hawkins 6.6 per cent of the stock of the E. W. Scripps Company, which holds over fifty per cent of the voting stock of each of the more than fifty separately incorporated ScrippsHoward enterprises. According to its financial statement for 1939, the E. W. Scripps Company's net worth was $43,161,753, making Howard's and Hawkins' stakes in it roughly $5,611,027 and $2,805,513, respectively. Its net earnings in that year were $1,530,000. The other 80.2 per cent of the stock is owned by the Edward W. Scripps Trust, which was established by the Scripps will. Robert Paine Scripps, last surviving son of the founder of the company, was sole trustee during his lifetime. The stock now is held by the trust for his three sons. The present trustees are Howard, Hawkins, and George B. Parker, the editorinchief of all the newspapers. The three are to be relieved of their duties in turn as Robert Paine, Jr., Charles Edward, and Samuel H., the three sons of Robert Paine Scripps, reach the age of twentyfive. Hawkins will retire as trustee in 1943, when the eldest boy reaches that age. Parker will yield his place to the second son in 1945. Howard is slated to remain until 1952 before giving way to the youngest Scripps son. Since Howard and Hawkins always vote alike, the arrangement leaves the two partners, as complementary and alliterative as a gentile Potash and Perlmutter, effectively in control of a property which includes nineteen newspapers, several newspaper syndicates, and the great United Press. Parker is a sternlooking, whitehaired man, conspicuously decorated with a Phi Beta Kappa key He was graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1908 and is the cultural force of the triumvirate.

  Until shortly after Robert Paine Scripps' death, Howard and Hawkins had no share in the parent E. W. Scripps Company, but possessed large interests in several of the individual properties it controlled, particularly the WorldTelegram. Since, as trustees of the Edward W. Scripps Trust, they might have been suspected of favoring certain subsidiaries at the expense of others, they exchanged their holdings for shares in the E. W. Scripps Company.

  If Howard and Hawkins constituted a vaudeville team, Howard would be known as the star and Hawkins as the feeder. Flashy, mercurial, and enormously energetic, Howard, in conferences with Hawkins, characteristically walks around his seated partner like an ocean traveler circumambulating a deck. Hawkins intones only brief, bass responses to Howard's rapid tenor litany and speeds or slows Howard's gyrations by increasing or diminishing the degree of what seems to be apathy in his voice. Howard expresses great faith in his intuition, but he usually seeks reassurance from others before he acts on it. He doesn't expect to be contradicted, but he does gauge the intensity of an associate's approval. A couple of unadorned yeses from an editorial writer, for example, would indicate the man's deep conviction that Howard was wrong. Hawkins is actually four months younger than Howard, who was born on January 1, 1883, but he sometimes refers to his partner as “the boy.” “We would have had the boy dressed up if we'd known you were coming,” he once said to a visitor when Howard stepped into his office wearing a relatively subdued arrangement of suit, shirt, and tie all in a large blackandwhite hound'stooth pattern. Hawkins has an idea that Howard's yacht is bad publicity for the firm and does his best in conversation to make it sound like a dory. “It's really not much of a yacht,” he says. “I don't know what the hell he wants it for.” The Jamaroy is a 110foot power vessel which once belonged to C. F. Kettering, a vicepresident of General Motors.

  Howard and Hawkins made their way up in the newspaper world with the United Press, which the elder Scripps established in 1907 after buying out a news service known as the Publishers' Press Association. They both went to work there that year. Howard's flashier qualities got him off to a faster start than Hawkins, and they assumed their present roles in the combination almost instinctively. When Howard became president and general manager of the United Press in 1912, Hawkins became second in command. When Howard resigned in 1920 to become chairman of the board of the Scripps newspapers, Hawkins succeeded him as president of the United Press. Hawkins followed Howard to the ScrippsHoward main office in 1923. The current Directory of Directors lists Hawkins as an officer or director of fifty separate organizations, all within the ScrippsHoward group. Howard, possibly because of diffidence, is listed only fortyseven times.

  Among the eighteen ScrippsHoward newspapers, aside from the WorldTelegram, are the Cleveland Press, Pittsburgh Press, Cincinnati Post, Memphis Commercial Appeal, San Francisco News, Washington News, and papers in Birmingham, Indianapolis, and Columbus. Of these, the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Memphis papers are believed in newspaper circles to be extremely profitable and the others less so. The combined circulation of the nineteen papers is about 1,500,000, which is around three quarters that of the New York Daily News and approximately three times that of the New York Times. Howard and Hawkins have said repeatedly that the profits of the WorldTelegram,
despite its 400,000 circulation, have been negligible. On one occasion in 1935, Howard, addressing a group of editorial employees, said that Heywood Broun's salary of approximately forty thousand dollars was larger than the profits of the newspaper in the previous year. The United Press, a newsgathering organization that sells its news to 1460 papers in the United States, South America, and Japan, as well as to five hundred radio stations, has been said to earn a million dollars a year. There are also complementary organizations, like the Newspaper Enterprise Association, or N.E.A., a syndicate which sells newspaper features; the Acme picture service, which sells news pictures, and the United Feature Syndicate. Every ScrippsHoward paper pays a fee to the central office for “national management.” Sometimes a paper which, considered as a single corporate enterprise, is just breaking even is actually a profitable ScrippsHoward property because of this fee and the fees it pays as a customer of the ScrippsHoward syndicates.

  Howard says that he has not been in an office of the United Press for years and that its policy is controlled entirely by Hugh Baillie, its president, who has a much larger financial interest in that organization than either Howard or Hawkins. The E. W. Scripps Company, which Howard runs as an officer and trustee, although he owns only about thirteen per cent of its stock, holds over half of the stock in the United Press. Baillie has worked for the United Press for thirty years. It now has fifteen hundred fulltime correspondents and fiftyfive thousand contributing parttime correspondents. The subscribers include a hundred and fiftyone papers in twentyone LatinAmerican countries, the Japanesegovernment news agency, the Osaka Mainichi and Tokio NichiNichi, which are two of the most widely circulated newspapers in the world, and a cluster of customers in Europe, including thirtythree papers in Germany.

  Howard and Hawkins are less inseparable in social life. This may be because Howard tries to regulate the bigbodied Hawkins' intake of food and drink for what he considers Hawkins' own good. He takes a maternal interest in the private life of everybody he knows. A United Press correspondent, explaining a fondness of his employer's for Orientals, once said, “Roy likes to teach them how to use chopsticks.” Another time, when Howard was on a cruise ship, the vessel's social director fell ill, and the publisher spent a satisfying week introducing apathetic men to patently antagonistic women and making people play deck tennis when they didn't want to. Not long afterward he bought the Jamaroy, on which he could be social director officially. He is never happier than when he has guests on his yacht to organize. Merlin H. Aylesworth, former president of the National Broadcasting Company, who was an important ScrippsHoward official for about two years after he left the radio corporation, says he once saved a leading Howard columnist from being killed by the publisher's solicitude. “Roy wanted him to go on the wagon,” Aylesworth says, “and I told him, 'Roy, if that fellow goes on the wagon, he'll die.' “ The columnist is still in good health.

  The publisher freely volunteers advice to political candidates, plans complete careers for young women he has known three minutes, and for a year tormented a Russian portrait painter he knew with instructions for the improvement of a left eye in one of the painter's works. The maddened painter finally turned on him and shouted, “Yah, and I know who designs your shirts! The Congoleum Corporation of America!” As a matter of fact, Howard has them made for him by WalterMcCrory, on West Fortysixth Street. Howard's willingness to run things sometimes rises to the international plane. Matsuoka, whose wife sent Mrs. Howard the cloisonne, was chief of the Japanese delegation to Geneva at the time Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. Howard was also in Geneva then. “Matsuoka never could sell me on the idea of taking Japan out of the League of Nations,” Howard says, “but he tried like hell.” Another Japanese project of which Howard disapproves is the appointment of Wang Chingwei as puppet President of China. “I am personally acquainted with Wang Chingwei,” he says, “but I do not think he would make a good president.”

  Howard prefers as friends men whom he considers leaders in their field. This includes not only businessmen like Barton, Bernard M. Baruch, and Bernard F. Gimbel but Howard Chandler Christy and Leon Gordon, the artists; Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster; Rex Beach, Rupert Hughes, John Erskine, and Hendrik Willem van Loon, the writers; and Kent Cooper, general manager of the Associated Press. Of the entire group, Baruch is the only one who might be called a representative of finance capital. Howard grew up in Indiana with a pious, Midwestern fear of Wall Street. In general he finds the Eastern or pseudoEnglish type of rich man a bit stiff and prefers the company of transplanted Midwesterners like himself. Many of his friends are members of the Dutch Treat Club, a sort of Kiwanis of the arts. Howard likes the Rotarian congeniality of the club and doubtless approves of the house rule that every man pays for his own lunch. He has a feminine reluctance to part with money for anything except clothes. Sometimes he tries to make this characteristic amusing, saying blithely, “I'm Scotch,” as one of his employees pays the fare for the taxi in which they have been riding or picks up a check for drinks. On other occasions, in restaurants, he determines the tip by dividing the amount of the check by ten and leaves the exact tithe, down to the penny. “The soandso gave us the worst service I ever saw in my life,” he is likely to say afterward.

  The event in his life to which Howard most frequently refers in ordinary conversation is the time he had an audience, in 1933, with Hirohito, Emperor of Japan. This privilege, as the United Press was careful to explain in sending out Howard's account of the meeting, had never before been enjoyed by an American newspaperman. Howard was unfortunately unable to quote the Emperor in his newspapers, because court etiquette forbade it. However, his account of the colloquy, which ran on the front pages of all ScrippsHoward papers, left no doubt that the publisher had favorably impressed the Emperor. Howard often dates events by the momentous day. “That was two and a half years before my interview with the Emperor of Japan,” he will say to a woman he meets at a dinner party, while discussing almost anything, and one associate unkindly says that Howard thinks of the Christian era as something that began 1933 years before the historic encounter.

  According to Howard's own story of the interview, Matsuoka, who, after maneuvering the Japanese out of the League of Nations at Geneva, barnstormed the United States in a dignified fashion, explaining Japan's position, suggested that the publisher come to Tokio sometime and meet the Mikado. One gathers that, having business there a few months later, he dropped in on Matsuoka casually and the statesman practically dragged him through the palace gates, insisting that Hirohito would be offended if he didn't call. Newspapermen who were stationed in Tokio at the time are wont to state openly that however easy it had been for Howard, it hadn't been much of a cinch for Miles Vaughn, the United Press correspondent there, who had gone through months of diplomatic toil arranging the audience. Howard was not permitted to write much more than such general statements as “JapaneseAmerican friendship, understanding, and cooperation are of the utmost importance to peace not only in the Far East but in the world, in the opinion of His Imperial Majesty Hirohito, Emperor of Japan.” As one looks back, it is doubtful if the interview can be considered a milestone in the old endeavor of the Occident to understand the Orient.

  Howard, in some moods, likes to deprecate the importance of his scoop as a journalistic accomplishment, although it is naturally impossible to deprecate anything without mentioning it. He does not wish it to obscure other achievements. “Nobody ever says anything about my knowing anything about Russia,” he often complains. “I interviewed Stalin too.” The Stalin interview was in March 1936. The publisher submitted a written list of questions before the interview, and the dictator was ready with prepared answers which were read off by an interpreter. Stalin spoke harshly of Hitler and the Japanese. “The interview was devoid of forensics and dramatics,” Howard wrote. “…the informality and ready humor which characterized the conversation are silk gloves covering an oftendemonstrated iron will.” Although Stalin didn't divulge much informa
tion, Howard felt that his time had not been wasted. He believed that he had a clearer understanding of the Russian situation. On his return to New York he told shipnews reporters that Russia had the kind of government the people wanted and that any businessman could see that it was going to last, a statement he has since referred to as illustrating his openmindedness. “Stalin is a little fellow,” he told the shipnews men, “not as tall as I am.”

  Howard also had an interview with Hitler in 1936, but his impression of him was not so happy. “I only got a chance to say four or five words,” he says. “Every time I said something to the interpreter Hitler let loose with an oration in German.” It was one of the rare occasions in Howard's life on which he has been talked down.