The Press: The Front Page Revisited

WITH their 1928 play The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur set the stereotype of the fast-talking, hardbitten, wisecracking newspaper reporter that seems destined to endure forever. The play was made twice into movies,* was revived this season on Broadway and has been taped for presentation on TV next season. As a police-beat cub reporter ten years ago, TIME Associate Editor Ray Kennedy worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times when the brassy style of Windy City journalism was still very much in vogue. This summer, Kennedy returned to the scene of his crime-reporting days and found some changes. His account:

Newspaper eras, like political eras, depend on the men who make them. And Harry Romanoff, 73, who retired in June as an editor of Chicago's American after more than 40 years, was quite a man. His reporters tell, for instance, the time in 1966 when Richard Speck was accused of murdering eight nurses (missing only Corazon Amurao, a Filipina), Romy assumed an accent and began phoning around town as the Philippine consul. For a follow-up story, Romy decided to dig up details of the accused man's marriage and troubled early life. He got the phone number of Speck's mother, called and identified himself as Speck's attorney. Speck's sister began talking, and Romy got his story. He once observed: "They said I constantly posed for somebody else. It's not my fault if they misunderstand." As Harry tells it, his time was actually up years ago, when a tantalizing story broke and he was stopped from switching headlines. "What do you mean, there's a war in Yemen?" he roared. "They just stole $25,000 worth of jewels from Ann Sheridan!"

Before then, Harry would have had his headline—war or Armageddon notwithstanding. In Romy's heyday, foreign affairs meant DIPLOMAT FOUND IN LOVE NEST! In recent years, however, Chicago newspapers have expanded their serious coverage of national and international news; now they tend to bury all but the most sensational crime stories in the back pages or, more often, the wastebasket. "Police-beat news," explains one Daily News rewrite man, "is what runs on a dull day."

Murdered Mistresses. A dull day! The very thought would make Hecht and MacArthur spin in their rolltop desks. Their "supermen with soiled collars" were a callous, cynical lot, born of an era when circulation wars raged and when a condemned man was not simply hanged but, as one daily bannered, JERKED TO JESUS. Armed with phony search warrants, police badges and wiretapping devices, reporters got the story one way or the other—usually the other. They climbed through windows to steal the diaries of murdered mistresses, kidnaped suspects to get exclusive interviews, and planted clues to sustain a sordid rape story for another day.