The first nine days of December, 1936, will probably go down in newspaper history as the period of Famine in the Midst of Plenty. Confronted with the greatest news story of our time, the papers could get no news. Tantalus, up to his neck in a pool of water which he could not drink, was living the life of Riley compared with the editors of our great newsgathering agencies.
With an empire tottering at their very doorstep, and royal hearts openly aflutter with all the emotions known to common man, with a public clamoring with outstretched hands for crumbs of information and the very ether gaping to be filled with news flashes for a waiting world, our mighty organs of international dissemination found themselves impotent, standing about, like Christmas waits, outside doorways and gateways in the rain, peering into automobiles as they sped in and out, and avidly scrambling for wisps of rumor and old handouts. Their readers cried out for news, and what they got was “The Real Mrs. Simpson” by Adela Rogers St. Johns, and twenty-year-old snapshots of the girls at Miss Charlotte’s summer camp.
Not that, from a perusal of their columns, you would have guessed that the newspapers were starving. They were very plucky about the whole thing, even cocky in their profligate distribution of bad checks of gossip and old photograph albums. They knew that the situation demanded hundreds of columns of type, and, by God, they filled them. The fact that they filled them with the greatest conglomeration of ensilage ever dumped out did not prevent them from doing it with all the manner of a cub reporter rushing in with a scoop.
In lieu of news (which you really can’t blame them for not getting), they not only ran tons of irrelevancy and tripe, but they repeated the same story two and three times, and pulled up the same cut of Mrs. Simpson from two to four to six columns as the world tension increased. (The Post went hog-wild one night and ran a six-column cut all over the front page, showing just two pairs of enormous, but easily identifiable, eyes, with the newsy caption: “Their Eyes Gaze Into the Future.”)
Not only did the baffled editors delve into the memory books and bureau drawers of former classmates of Mrs. Simpson, but almost anyone in the Society, Ship-News, or Numismatic Department was held suitable to write an intimate history of her life. If the unhappy lady has felt equal to running through any of her clippings, she certainly has had her memory refreshed (if “refreshed” is the word), and may have learned some things about her past that even she did not know. (She must also have wondered what she ever saw in that hat back in 1916, although God keep any snapshots of the hats of today from falling into the hands of their owners in 1956.)
The mad scramble to print Simpson photographs, old and new, over and over again culminated in a nervous breakdown on the part of the American, which on December 8th flew into a hysteria and just scrambled sixteen Simpson heads all into one half-page spread, thereby shooting the works and winning the game. They were the same old heads, but there was something cathartic about the American’s frantic gesture which made one suspect that at least the editor felt better after it, as if he had screamed, “There! There they are! Now look at ’em!” and then had fallen in a faint.
With nothing to print and everywhere to print it, and no clue as to what was really happening behind those closed doors, the papers, naturally, dragged out the old “reliable authorities” and “unimpeachable sources” and gave them the workout of their lives. There should be a dinner of “reliable authorities” in London this very week, if they are not all too done in or have not all flown to Cannes. (Do you realize that reports from “reliable sources” about Edward and Wallis are only just beginning! This thing is going on for years. Think of that, Hedda!)
The News was about the only paper whose “reliable source” was evidently under the table at one of the vital conferences between the King and Mr. Baldwin. On December 7th, it printed a vivid stenographic report of the conversation at Fort Belvedere on December 5th. Its language is so noble that we might quote some of it for those of you who do not read the News:
At this point, the King and Mr. Baldwin evidently moved out of earshot, leaving the News’s Reliable Authority under the table with his stenographic pad, for the conversation comes to an abrupt end here.
It must be admitted, however, that the News, through Dan Rogers of the United Press, was the only paper to call the turn on the fateful 9th, the last day of the Drought, for it came out that morning with the assurance of “a source usually unimpeachable” that the King definitely would abdicate, while its rivals, the Mirror and the American, lay alongside on the stands equally confident, “through a plain hint given Universal Service,” that “King Edward VIII will remain on the British throne.” The opposing headlines were (Mirror) “king to stay but may wed wallis later,” (News) “edward decides for love: baldwin gets his answer.”
This gives the News and the United Press a clear lead of one point, and rather a big one. It would seem, however, that Dan Rogers alone of the U. P. staff was privy to the “source usually unimpeachable,” for the U. P. dispatches in the evening papers went back to the old hedging, joining the Times and the Herald Tribune of the morning in not knowing what to think. The Associated Press, during all of this, seems to have been not very interested, except in Mrs. Simpson at Cannes.
It all boils down to the fact that nobody knew anything, not even the King or Mr. Baldwin, and it makes up into quite a frightening situation when you come to think of it. It is the first time that the Press has been stumped enough to show it, the mighty Press that tells us what is what, and in its bewilderment it behaved just as any group of baffled citizens might behave when confronted with a brand-new impasse. It was a brand-new impasse for everybody, nothing like it had ever occurred before; and nobody did anything particularly efficient about it because nobody seemed to know what to do. A lot of people had opinions, but they changed them overnight, and the net result of the whole affair is not very reassuring. Thank God, it wasn’t a war that was the issue, or anything really important. ♦
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