The Telephone Booth Indian (23 page)

One evening, during a particularly acrimonious phase of some negotiations with the American Newspaper Guild, the CIO union of editorial and businessoffice workers which now has contracts with fourteen of the nineteen ScrippsHoward newspapers, Howard learned that a Guild leader had spoken harshly of him at a meeting. Around midnight he called up a subeditor who lived in Yonkers and asked him to come to the Howard home in the East Sixties immediately. At about two o'clock the employee arrived. “Joe,” the publisher shouted before the Howard butler had had time to take the man's hat, “tell me, am I a son of a bitch?” The man said no, and Howard seemed reassured. The same sensitiveness came to light after the passage of the lendlease bill, which Howard and his editors had
vigorously opposed. The ScrippsHoward chief telephoned to a number of acquaintances friendly to the administration and asked them if they thought he was an appeaser. “If you ever think I'm getting too far off base,” he told one man, “I wish you'd call up and tell me.”

Despite this concern over other people's opinions of him, the publisher frequently follows courses of action that strangers might consider dictated by selfinterest. There was, for example, the time in 1937 when a Congressional committee was about to investigate loopholes in the incometax law and, it turned out, to name Howard and several other ScrippsHoward officers, along with still other wealthy men, as having set up personal holding companies to cut down their taxes. Howard's particular device, entirely within the law, had saved him eighty thousand dollars in taxes on his taxable income of five hundred thousand dollars in 1936. For weeks before the committee met, Westbrook Pegler, Howard's favorite ScrippsHoward columnist, blasted away at the highhanded and inquisitorial methods of the government's incometax men. Howard must have been tempted to ask Pegler, as a favor, to stop, on the ground that the world might think the excitement more than a coincidence, or to omit some of the Pegler columns from his newspapers. However, the publisher steeled himself against such tampering with the liberty of the press, and the columnist's opinions appeared.

Something in Howard's stature and carriage suggests a jockey, but he would be too big to ride in anything except a steeplechase. Howard blames the late Arthur Brisbane for spreading the impression that he is ridiculously short. “Brisbane once tried to get me into the Hearst organization,” he says, “and he never forgave me for turning him down. After I got well known, he always referred to me in his column as 'little Roy Howard.' Arthur could never understand a man who wasn't interested in money.”
Sometimes, to prove that he is not really small, Howard invites new acquaintances to stand up beside him in front of an immense mirror in his office. The publisher stands straight, lifts his chin, and waits for the caller's cheering assurance that he isn't such a very little fellow after all. He looks a trifle shorter than he is because his head, covered with gray hair that he parts in the middle, is large in proportion to the rest of him. He is five feet six.

Howard has a wedgeshaped face, broad at the temples and tapering toward the chin, and has a short, closecropped, graying mustache. His face is youthful in a curious way, reminding one of a prematurely old boy. He is actually fiftyeight. One of Howard's characteristics is a high, banjostring voice that plucks at a hearer's attention, dominates it, and then lulls it until, like the buzz of a mosquito returning from a swing around a room, the sound increases in intensity and awakes the listener again. He is acutely conscious of prolixity in others. He once telephoned a ScrippsHoward editor in Washington from New York to tell him of a longdistance conversation he had just had with Joseph P. Kennedy, who was in Boston. “That Kennedy talks your ear off,” Howard complained. “I was paying the charges, and he had me on the phone for fortyfive minutes.” When Howard hung up, the editor looked at his watch. The publisher had been talking to him for just about fortyfive minutes. Howard occasionally times his telephone calls with a stop watch so that he can later check his bills. Even with the expensive minutes fleeting before his eyes, he has the same emotional difficulty in hanging up a receiver that a fat woman has in waving away a tray of chocolate eclairs.

When Howard is on a local wire his pleasure is uninhibited by economic considerations, and there are days when he practically edits the
WorldTelegram
, which is at 125 Barclay Street, from his own office at ScrippsHoward headquarters, on the
twentysecond floor of 230 Park Avenue. On these days, Lee B. Wood, the executive editor of the
WorldTelegram
, squirms at his desk in a corner of the newspaper's vast city room, holding the receiver against his ear and repeating “Yes, Roy,” at irregular intervals until his voice sounds as mechanical as the clack of the news tickers. Wood, an extremely tall man, slides forward and down in his seat as such a day progresses, until finally he appears to be resting on his shoulder blades. Howard's voice sometimes seems to have a narcotic effect on the cerebral processes of his subordinates. An irreverent
mot
of the
WorldTelegram
city room defines a ScrippsHoward editor as “a man who walks briskly, smiles a lot, and rearranges furniture.” Top editors have an additional function: keeping down expenses. A good ScrippsHoward editor is never too tired to walk around a newspaper plant at the end of the day and turn out unnecessary lights.

This frugality is a heritage from the reign of Edward Wyllis Scripps, the founder of the newspaper chain, who was accustomed to go into towns where there was an established conservative newspaper and start an opposition sheet on a minimum budget. The Scripps entry would plump for labor as a matter of business principle. Its chances of survival depended on keeping expenses low. The Scripps formula, as expressed by a cynical veteran, was to “hire a shed down by the railroad station, put in a press that Gutenberg had scrapped and some linotype machines held together with baling wire, then put in a kid for twelve dollars a week to be editor and promise him one per cent of the profits as soon as the circulation hit a million.” Scripps's thesis, as he himself expounded it, was that a heavy outlay on a newspaper put a publisher at the mercy of bankers and advertisers. Only a shoestring newspaper could afford to be prolabor, he used to say, but if a prolabor paper could survive for a while, it was bound to catch on. He once said that ninetyfive per cent of
all newspaper readers were not rich and would read a daily published in the interest of the havenots. A profitable amount of advertising would follow circulation. Scripps remarked late in life that he had founded about forty papers on this shoestring basis and that a third of them had been great financial successes. When he died, in 1926, his newspaper chain was estimated to be worth forty million dollars. Since his death, there have been changes in the business concepts as well as in the editorial doctrines of the firm, but a vestigial frugality remains.

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.