The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  After the Republicans had renominated Hoover, the ScrippsHoward editorial convention at French Lick endorsed him. The publisher showed no warmth for Roosevelt until the summer after the inauguration, when “New Deal” had become a password to popularity. He then threw himself on the President's neck with all the shyness of a hostess in a navy cafe. “Roy is a fellow who likes to climb aboard a band wagon,” one politician said awhile ago, “and then gets mad if the fellows who were on first won't let him drive and play the bass drum at the same time.”

  Howard's infatuation with the President ended with the “breathingspell” letters they exchanged in the summer of 1935. Alarmed by the administration's tax program and quietly relieved by the Supreme Court decision which terminated the NRA, Howard proposed to Stephen Early, the President's secretary, that Mr. Roosevelt grant him an exclusive interview. The President was to furnish prepared answers to a questionnaire previously submitted by Howard. The affair was to be on the grand scale. There would be photographers, newsreel cameramen, and probably a broadcast, and the purport of the President's answers would be that recovery had already been achieved and that reform was something business might thenceforth cease to worry about. The President demurred, but agreed to answer a letter from Howard and permit publication of the letter with his reply. The publisher wrote that largescale industry, harassed by taxation which it considered “revengeful,” felt there should be “a breathing spell and a recess from further experimentation until the country can recover its losses.” The President answered, “The 'breathing spell' of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.” He also said, “The tax program of which you speak is based upon a broad and just social and economic purpose—this law affects only people who have incomes over fifty thousand dollars a year.” Howard published Roosevelt's reply, but his editorials soon indicated that he thought the President had trifled with his affections. “I was never so thick with the President as people said,” he now remarks modestly, and adds, rather defiantly, “and I'm not so thin with him now as some people would like to have you think.”

  In the 1936 presidential campaign, Howard gave nominal support to the administration. George Morris, a shrewd old political writer whom he had inherited with the Telegram when it was a wardheelers' Bible, assured him from the start that Landon would carry only two states. The publisher nevertheless took occasion during the campaign to visit Landon on his special train in Buffalo to pay his respects. “Our bark is worse than our bite,” he told the Republican candidate. The fight over the Supreme Court made the division between Howard and Roosevelt definite. In the course of this struggle, the WorldTelegram expressed extravagant admiration for Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, who helped beat the President's proposals. The praise bounced back in Howard's face in 1938, when Lehman ran for reelection against Thomas E. Dewey, the publisher's favorite adolescent Republican. A typical WorldTelegram editorial of those days might begin with some such statement as “The State is indeed fortunate to have a choice of two such equally remarkable candidates” and then go on to the end praising Dewey. After Lehman's reelection, Howard may have felt that both men owed him gratitude, but the Governor refused a request of his to remove the Brooklyn district attorney from office. This proved that Lehman was no more to be depended on than Roosevelt or that earlier ungrateful protege, LaGuardia.

  The great German offensive of 1940 may well have annoyed Howard, as it practically insured the President's nomination for a third term. The publisher, who had looked to 1940 to deliver him from the insubordinate Roosevelt, suddenly found himself in the dilemma of a racing trainer who has to beat something with nothing. Dewey, whose prestige had steadily declined since his defeat by Lehman in the gubernatorial campaign, was too callow for a crisis President. Senators Taft and Vandenberg had demonstrated a remarkable knack of inspiring apathy. The kingmaker was standing on a corner waiting for a hitch on a band wagon when Oren Root, Jr., and Russell W. Davenport, Henry R. Luce, and a group of other men on the staffs of Time and Fortune came along with Wendell L. Willkie. Howard's wooing of the large, talkative Indianan was tempestuous. He appeared so consistently at the same dinner parties Willkie attended that Willkie, trapped once into playing a freeassociation parlor game and suddenly presented with the word “Howard,” answered, “Soup.” “Howard wore those nineteen newspapers in his lapel with that red carnation,” a member of the original Willkie group has said. “He talked about them as if he were going to give them to us.” Howard now says that he is sorry the election provided no clearcut test of public opinion on intervention in the war. When Howard went to the Republican convention in Philadelphia as one of Willkie's most vociferous rooters, Willkie had already declared himself for full aid to Great Britain, but Howard, like many other Willkie admirers, may well have believed that Willkie was not really in earnest. One close friend has said, “Roy doesn't believe anything that is not told to him confidentially.” At any rate, Howard seemed to think of the candidate's later demonstration of consistency as one more betrayal. As in the case of Roosevelt, Howard saw the first sign of ingratitude when he moved to help take charge of his new protege. Davenport, Root, and Luce, discoverers of the new white hope, refused to cut Howard in for a big enough piece. Howard, the TimeFortune people say, seemed to think that about ninetyeight per cent would be right. Howard encouraged General Johnson to make a trip to Colorado Springs, where the candidate was resting, to write Willkie's acceptance speech for him. This was a mistake, because if there is one thing Willkie is sure he can do, it is write. The clash of literary temperaments was intensified by Johnson's insistence that Willkie include a plan for farm relief the columnist had thought up and that he should mention the Virgin Mary someplace in his speech. The Elwood, Indiana, stylist felt hurt, and said so. Johnson returned to the East and wrote a couple of columns calling Willkie's advisers political amateurs. Howard, boarding the campaign train soon after Willkie's first tour had started, remained enough of a businessman to complain that the candidate was timing his speeches to break in morning papers (eighteen of the nineteen ScrippsHoward newspapers appear in the evening). As a political expert, he also gave some constructive criticism about the setup of the train and the itinerary.

  Meanwhile, Pegler and Johnson, after the General had recovered from his irritation, wrote columns in boiling oil, invoking the wrath of a just deity who had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah upon the subversive activities of Mrs. Roosevelt, who belongs to the American Newspaper Guild. They discussed the third term in a clinical style that reminded readers of the Daily News campaign against syphilis. The General fumed over the appointment of Elliot Roosevelt to a captaincy in the army. For comic relief, he went on the radio and told funny stories in Jewish dialect, a lapse which brought a disclaimer of responsibility in the WorldTelegram. Howard, talking recently about the activities of his columnists during the election, said that they had run away with him. “You know, I would not interfere with any man's freedom of expression,” he said solemnly, “but I thought they were very unfair to Franklin.” Among the columnists, Raymond Clapper, the WorldTelegram's accredited liberal, in a relative sense, remained almost neutral until near the end of the campaign. Finally he came out for Willkie, too, like the white horse in the circus chariot race who loafs along behind the others until the last lap. “When I looked in the paper and saw that Clapper had come over too,” Howard says, “I said, 'Oh, my God!' It made us look partisan.”

  In his experience with public men, Howard has been betrayed so many times that he sometimes must feel like the cockney girl in the song “Once Again She Lorst 'Er Nime.” Last January, when the administration began to propose a lendlease bill, Howard telephoned to Willkie at his home, asked him to prepare a statement attacking the bill, and indicated that this was a chance to make up for the mistakes he had made during the campaign. “All the other boys are going to jump all over this bill, Wendell,” Howard said in effect, “and I don't want you to get left at the post. I have a reporter with Tom Dewey writing hi
s statement for him now, and I'm having lunch with Hoover tomorrow.” (Howard has always had a tender spot for Hoover. He has given unlimited publicity to all the Hoover projects for sending food through the British blockade, despite the possibility of embarrassing the administration, which has tried to coordinate its foreign policy with Great Britain's.) Willkie told Howard that he could not decide until he had read the bill. The next day, after he read it, he said he would be for it if minor changes were made in it. The publisher and the ungrateful candidate had a resounding argument later at a dinner party given by John Erskine. It wound up by Howard's telling a blackface story to Willkie. The punch line of the story was “Wait till I get my razor on you tomorrow!” Willkie, more ingenuous than a LaGuardia or a Roosevelt, was astonished at such disrespect. “A man like that is too flippant to have so much power,” he told friends later. He has as large a capacity as Howard's for feeling that his affections have been trifled with. Immediately after Willkie's return from England, Howard sought a reconciliation. He succeeded in getting Willkie to come to dinner at his house, but their twanging wrangle continued all through the intended love feast. “To tell you the truth,” Howard afterward remarked to a friend, “as long as one of them had to be elected, I'm glad it was Roosevelt. Willkie is a fellow you can't depend on.”

  • “Pull His Whiskers!” •

  ew American industries have suffered so spectacular a decline as wrestling, which had its happiest days during the early years of the general depression. In the winter of 193132 ten wrestling shows were held at Madison Square Garden, and drew an average gate of twentyfour thousand dollars. These indoor shows merely served to prepare the wrestling public for outdoor bouts at the Yankee Stadium and the Garden Bowl, which occasionally drew sixty thousand dollars. The last match in the Garden was promoted on March 30, 1938, by an old acquaintance of mine named Jack Pfefer, and it attracted less than five thousand dollars' worth of patronage. If a promoter tried to rent the Yankee Stadium or even Ebbets Field for a wrestling show this summer, sporting people would think he had been overcome by the heat. Pfefer, however, is still conducting wrestling matches in a small way, and feels that from an artistic point of view they are superior to those of the great era. The trouble, according to him, is that the moneyed clientele has ceased to believe in wrestling as a sport and has not yet learned to appreciate it as a pure art form, like opera or classical dancing.

  Pfefer holds shows in neighborhoods like Ridgewood, in Queens, and the region just south of the Bronx Zoo, and they draw fairly well at a general admission of a quarter or forty cents. Several nights a week he leads his wrestlers out of the state to places like Jersey City and Bridgeport. Pfefer's wrestlers do not make big money, but most of them work five times a week even in summer. The promoter has been celebrated for years as the most unrelenting foe of the English language in the sports business. “You never heard it of an unemployment wrestler, didn't?” he asked me when I visited him awhile ago in his office on the tenth floor of the Times Building. “For wrestlers is no WPA.”

  In the trade, Pfefer is believed to have retained money despite the debacle. He was one of the four partners who controlled the wrestling business in New York in the golden era, and when the money was rolling in he lived frugally. His present enterprises, although on a very small scale, are often mildly profitable. He is a tiny, slight man, weighing about a hundred and twenty pounds and possessing the profile of a South African vulture. His eyebrows rise in a V from his nose, and he wears his hair in a long, dusty mane— a tonsorial allusion to a liking he has for music. On the walls of his office, among pictures of wrestlers, he keeps a death mask of Beethoven and signed photographs of opera singers.

  He never opens a window in this office and wears a vest even in summer. In the street he always carries an ivoryheaded cane presented to him by an Indian wrestler named Gafoor Khan. Pfefer's entire office staff consists of a worried, middleaged exnewspaperman named Al Mayer, at one time a successful manager of prize fighters. When the wrestling business was in its majestic prime, the partners in the local syndicate, besides Pfefer, were the late Jack Curley, a promoter named Rudy Miller, and a former wrestler called Toots Mondt. Miller and Mondt are among the little man's competitors. In the good days, it was Pfefer who had charge of the department of exotica—he was responsible for such importations as Ferenc Holuban, the Man without a Neck, Sergei Kalmikoff, the Crashing Cossack, and Fritz Kley, the German Corkscrew. Most of the foreigners were built up into challengers of Jim Londos, the syndicate's perennial champion, who would throw them with his spectacular “airplane whirl.”

  Pfefer blames Londos' rapacity for the decline of the wrestling industry. After the syndicate had for several years informed the public that Londos was the greatest wrestler on earth, the Greek began demanding most of the gate receipts. The promoters had but two equally unpleasant alternatives. They could become virtual employees of Londos or destroy the edifice of legend they had built around him by declaring he was not much of a wrestler after all. They chose the second course. Within a year the country swarmed with champions, each group of wrestling promoters recognizing its own titleholder. At last reports, there were in different parts of the United States fifteen wrestling champions, including Londos, who has been performing for at least twentyfive years. The New York State Athletic Commission acknowledges no world's champion, and for that matter refuses to admit that wrestling is a competitive sport. The commission refers officially to all wrestling bouts as “exhibitions,” and will not allow them to be advertised as contests. Pfefer says he is glad the commission doesn't permit a champion, because it saves hard feelings among his wrestlers. When they perform, they know it is just a night's work and they can concentrate on their histrionics.

  I went up to Pfefer's office late one Wednesday afternoon a couple of summers ago, having made a date by telephone to go out to the Ridgewood Grove Arena with him and see his current band of wrestlers in action that evening. He was in a bad mood when I entered. A rival promoter had hired a wrestler to hit Pfefer in the jaw on the previous evening, as Jack sat in a restaurant on Fortyfourth Street. Evidently, to judge by the absence of facial wounds, Pfefer had been able to fall down before being seriously damaged, but it wasn't the blow that had hurt—it was the insubordination the blow had implied. “A wrestler should hit a promoter!” Jack wailed. “Because they don't like me, those loafers are breaking the wrestling business down to little pieces!” The chief reason for the bitterness between Pfefer and his rivals is his agreement with the Athletic Commission that wrestling is a form of show business. “A honest man can sell a fake diamond if he says it is a fake diamond, ain't it?” he yelled, appealing to me. “Only if he says it is a real diamond he ain't honest. These loafers don't like that I say wrestling is all chicancery—hookum, in other words.”

  There are three small rooms in Pfefer's suite of offices. While he was telephoning to a couple of city editors who, he felt, had underplayed the news of the assault upon him, I went into one of the outer rooms and talked to two wrestlers who were sitting there. They were looking at their own pictures in a copy of Ring. Both of them were in their middle twenties, a couple of solid young men wearing slacks and sports shirts. Both had the fantastically mangled ears which mark their trade. They were heavily tanned, because, one of them explained, they were living at Coney Island for the summer and exercised on the beach every morning. One introduced himself as the Italian Sensation. He came from up Boston way, he said, and had started wrestling ten years ago in the Cambridge Y.M.C.A. “The girls like these ears,” he said selfconsciously. The other wrestler, blond and jollylooking, said he was the Mighty Magyar. He came from St. Louis and had begun wrestling in a boys' club there. “Both my parents were born in Hungary, though,” he said.

  People of foreign birth provided the chief support for wrestling during the preLondos era, before the general public became interested. It was a popular form of vicarious suffering in Europe before boxing was known there. Now that the public
has abandoned the industry, it again depends largely on the foreignborn, and to excite the small clubs a performer must claim some European affinity. “You can't get rich wrestling nowadays,” the Mighty Magyar said, “but you can afford to drive a car.” After a while the boys went out to eat. I was to see both of them wrestle later in the evening.

  Not long after the Italian Sensation and the Mighty Magyar left, Pfefer said it was time to start for Ridgewood. Al Mayer, Pfefer's factotum and publicity man, came with us. Mayer, a short, plump man with graying hair and mustache, carried a large framed picture of a wrestler named King Kong, the Abyssinian Gorilla Man, which was to be hung in the lobby in Ridgewood. The picture restored Pfefer's spirits. “Look at him,” he said to me, pointing to King Kong with his cane, “a great funny maker!” King Kong wears a full black beard, and the picture showed him in a kind of regal robe, with a crown on his head, looking a little like Haile Selassie. “He's a Greek,” Pfefer said, “but during the Fiopian war I made him for a Fiopian.” We took the B.M.T. under the Times Building and rode down to Union Square. En route, I asked Jack how the wrestlers knew who was supposed to win each bout. Jack Curley used to evade this question with a grin. Mr. Pfefer, however, is forthright. “I tell them,” he said. “I treat them like a father, like a mother beats up her baby. Why should I let some boys be pigs, they should want to win every night yet?”