The Press: Life of a New Yorker

Nothing so intrigues a reader of London's illustrated press as a good, meaty article on the daily life of a cinema star, an Earl's daughter, an Indian Raja. On sale in the U. S. last week was the latest U. S. edition of London's Picture Post (dated a fortnight later than the British edition), containing an English journalist's solemn pictorial record of the life of an average New Yorker.

Picture Post's reporter was a pale, cadaverous Briton named Douglas MacDonald Hastings, who last spring spent two weeks in Manhattan with a cameraman. According to Journalist Hastings, an average New Yorker lives in suburban Larchmont, "goes up to work" on the subway. His grandfather was a German immigrant: "where he came from nobody knows."

Gertrude, the average New Yorker's wife, came from an old New England family. "In Gertrude's home in the South it was felt that she might have done better for herself." They were married as soon as they had the price of an automobile, for "in America you'd no more propose to a girl without a car than marry her without a ring."

Joe's air-conditioned Park Avenue office, said Picture Post's Hastings, "is equipped with a dictaphone, a telephone extension system which takes 20 incoming calls at the same time, and a brass spittoon. Joe has no use for the latter, but the utensil is traditional in every public place in America." For breakfast he has coffee, toast, fruit juice and cereal; for dinner, swordfish.

On Fridays Joe takes his wife to the movies with some friends "from up the road." They gather in Joe's house before the show "so that the men can split a tin of canned beer together." Once a year Joe meets "the alumni of his school fraternity," and on rare occasions he takes Gertrude "uptown" to the theatre. "They spring a dinner at one of the smart Manhattan joints, jostle in the crowds, and rubberneck the lights of the Great White Way."

In London last week Douglas Hastings admitted that in his two weeks' inspection he might have missed some aspects of a New Yorker's life. Said he: "New York is a hellish place to live, but it's the greatest sideshow on earth."