Westbrook Pegler

Logansport Press/September 18, 1956

Fair Enough

LOS ANGELES. “Come in, come in,” said a cheery voice and with a sense of awe I entered the study of Gene Fowler, which clings to a hillside like a hornet’s nest, a politico-theatrical museum with a property broadsword once used by Mary Pickford and plug hats worn by Woodrow Wilson and W. C. Fields, and adorned with a stained glass window from the chapel of the Old Tombs in New York.

“I am proud to say I came by this window dishonestly,” Mr. Fowler said. “A priest who is a friend of mine stole it from the wreckers and I stole it from him.”

I SAID, “DON’T TELL me you can get any work done in here.” He said, “No. This is just for tourists. I work in the old maid’s room. We used to have a maid and now I work in her old room. She was not so very old. About 40. She said she used to work for Ziegfeld. So Agnes fired her. I hated to see her go.”

I asked: “What in your opinion, is the most important essential of good journalism? Integrity, courage, honesty?”

“Stop; stop!” the old sage roared. “The most important essential of good journalism is the expense account. Back in 1926 when I was with King Features, Moses Koenigsberg, our president, assigned me to present a gavel to Doctor Walter Williams, president of the University of Missouri, who had founded the school of journalism. He was a terrible old quack, but a great politicians. The worst reporters I ever knew came out of his school. Homer Croy was a Missouri man but he didn’t graduate. He was too good. I saw they forced a diploma on Homer last spring. A great pity. He didn’t deserve that.

“MOE KOENIGBERG heard Williams collected gavels so he figured it would be good promotion to send him a special gavel, made of pot metal and covered with radiator gilt with the figures of our comic strips dancing all over—Jiggs and Maggie; Tillie the Toiler; Happy Hooligan. I never understood why Williams collected gavels. I think it something sexual, myself. This one would smash a banquet table except nobody could lift it. It weighed about 40 pounds.

“So I went down to Missouri and Williams asked me what the topic of my speech was. I said, ‘expense accounts.’ He said, ‘Oh, do not be frivolous. These are serious young journalists.’

“I SAID THE EXPENSE account is the most important thing in a reporter’s life. I want to expound Fowler’s law, honesty is the best fallacy. That has since been distorted by my enemies into honesty is the worst policy. Williams said he could not let me profane his school with this wisdom so I phoned Moe in New York. He said, ‘Oh give him the one about truth is mighty. Do not antagonize him, because he is graduating a lot of editors and publishers and we want to sell them our comics.”

“SO I LECTURED 12 minutes on the dangerous tendency of editorial writers to confuse ‘ingenious’ with ‘ingenuous.’ But afterward I rounded up six undergraduates in a speakeasy and gave them Fowler’s Law. I told them never to wear a new suit into the office within two weeks after coming back from an out of town assignment. Shoes, okay, a city editor never looks at your shoes. I go on an assignment want to be a credit to William Randolph Hearst and live in luxurious dignity. If I have the misfortune to lose at poker I figure that I would not have lost if I had been at home. We have mirrors in our living room.

“I told-them about the time we had that terrible explosion in Weehawken and our auditor phone in from uptown and yelled, send Fowler to Jersey. He will buy a ferry boat.”