The Press: The Common Touch

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tentative issue. But a day or two before the deadline, Wallace may toss out a third of it and put in something else. He makes the final decisions, when he is at Chappaqua. But he is often away: he and Lila may pick up suddenly and go off on a three months' trip to Honolulu or Pago Pago, and no one will hear from him until he walks back into the office.

Upset Apple Cart. Wallace, as his wife says, "likes to upset the apple cart." He periodically rejiggers the masthead, rearranging the Rovers' names according to their performance. He does not like too many hard & fast rules, and he does like to keep everybody guessing.

Despite the missionary flavor of his magazine, Wallace does not go to church. Despite his famous anti-cigarette crusades ("One cigarette," quoted the first Digest, "will kill a cat"), he smokes steadily. He also likes to drink, and regularly used to sit up all night playing poker. He learned to fly his own plane, and, until the Army commandeered it during World War II, liked to scare Lila by buzzing their house. He drives his car so recklessly that few who know him will ride with him. He still likes to play pranks. Once, on his way to a Halloween party, he sent word that he had been hurt in an auto accident. Then he tottered in, in Mercurochrome-splashed bandages. On another occasion, calling on a Digest editor to meet his new bride, Wallace broke the ice by starting a game of leapfrog with her on the lawn.

He is not an expansive man; he does more listening than talking, and when he does talk, it's short and to the point. He is the boss but not the tyrant of the Digest. Says one of his senior editors: "Several of us don't hesitate to argue with him." Managing Editor Dashiell helped organize a chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action, which the Digest has attacked as the advance-guard of Communism. An unpretentious man, Wallace not only answers his own office phone (Chappaqua 1-0400), but may chat with a subscriber complaining that he missed an issue.

Wallace does much of his work at night at High Winds, the five-bedroom, castle-like stone house he and Lila built on a bluff above a small lake five miles from the Digest. They have little social life outside occasional cocktail parties for the staff. In the evening, after dinner, they like to dance for 15 minutes in their rumpus room.

Then, while Lila reads, Wallace walks up a winding staircase to his medieval-tower workroom. Beneath its hewn beams, soothed by soft music piped in from a control-panel below, he works, usually till midnight, at the sprawling mountain of manuscripts piled on his desk. Memos have been known to molder in the pile for years, before Wallace got around to scrawling in the margin: "Sure. Go ahead. Wally." But the stuff he regards as important does not linger there long. Next morning, Wallace loads his completed work into his briefcase and careens off to the office in his battered old 1941 Chevrolet.

Winged Horse. Lila Wallace no longer does much editing, although if Wallace is unsure of a manuscript he may ask her to read it. But the traces of her hand are all over the Digest offices. She planned their decoration and amenities herself: soft pink and green pastel walls, patterned linen draperies, 18th-Century Georgian tables and leather-topped desks, fresh-cut flowers changed twice a