About eight o`clock one evening in April 1927 it occurred to me that I was out of a job, that I had a little money, and that I had long wanted to go to France. At noon the next day I was aboard the SS President Harding steaming down the Hudson, outwardbound. I had no definite plans. If anyone had asked me how long I expected to be away, I suppose I would have said a few weeks, possibly a few months. I stayed thirteen years, and it took a world war to send me home.
A mutual friend in New York wrote Ernest Hemingway that I was due to turn up in Paris and asked if he could suggest a good place for me to live.
Hemingway`s idea was that the best introduction to France was to throw oneself into a completely French atmosphere from the start. It was a good way to develop command of idiomatic French, which is not always identical with the French that is taught in the textbooks.
Toward the middle of May, awaking lazily and gradually in my comfortable bed in Ernest Hemingway`s pension de famille, I rang for breakfast. When the maid brought the tray it carried not only the customary cafe au lait, croissant and brioche, but also a small sheet of discreetly folded paper. I opened it and read: ”Payable May 31, half-pension, 450 francs.” It was nice of them, I thought, to give me this much notice. The sum of 450 francs, $18 at the time, did not seem unreasonable for nearly a month`s bed and board, less lunches, but I was down to 200 francs. It seemed advisable to earn some money before May 31.
Armed with a letter of reference from Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York Morning World and the friend of a friend, I called on that newspaper`s Paris correspondent, Arno Dosch-Fleurot, a man who concealed behind ferocious eyebrows the kindliest of characters. He apologized for being unable to offer me a job himself since the World was already adquately represented in Paris. He gave me, however, three of his business cards, each bearing a message to a friend at one of three American dailies of Paris, describing me inaccurately as a New York World reporter personally recommended by Swope, then held in awe by American journalists as being responsible for what most of them considered to be the best-written newspaper in the country. ”Go to the Paris Herald first,” Dosch-Fleurot told me. ”They pay best. If you don`t make it there, try the Paris Times. They`re second best. If worse comes to worst, you can always fall back on the Chicago Tribune. Bad pay, but some people manage to live on it.”
It was about 10 in the morning, but I headed straight for the Paris Herald, too green to know that morning newspapers are produced at night and that their editorial offices are often deserted until noon. Dosch had given me a card to the publisher, Larry Hills, who was of course not in. I was advised to come back in the afternoon, so I went on to the Paris Times, an evening paper, where I discovered that evening papers are in the throes of creation at the end of the morning, so no one has time to talk to a job-seeker. For the second time I was told to come back in the afternoon.
In view of Dosch`s advice, I should logically have knocked off for the time being, to make another stab at the better-paying papers before I sounded out the last resort. But I was afraid that my zeal for finding a job would wear off if I paused, so I went on to the Chicago Tribune, a paper that–from the isolation of New England–I had never heard of. It was a morning paper too and I half hoped, perhaps, that it would be deserted also. It wasn`t–exceptionally, as I learned later.
Dosch-Fleurot had addressed the Tribune card to Hank Wales (his name was Henry, but I never heard anyone call him that). Theoretically Wales had nothing to do with the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune; actually, he carried a great deal of weight there. He was chief Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune of Chicago, the parent paper of the Paris Edition, with direct access to Colonel Robert McCormick, its publisher, before whom everybody quailed. They quailed before Wales too, as the colonel`s ambassador, so his word came close to being law for the Paris Edition. I interrupted him in the act of performing one-finger exercises on the typewriter, an instrument he had never managed to domesticate. He did not look like a foreign correspondent, whatever a foreign correspondent ought to look like, but a police reporter, which was exactly what he had been before coming to Europe in 1915 to cover the world war. He read Dosch-Fleurot`s card and said in the rasp that served him for a voice, emitted through the hole worn into the righthand corner of his mouth by the cigar that, lighted or unlighted, usually occupied it, ”New York World, huh? Comwa me!”
I came with him and was led into the city room of the Tribune, inhabited, despite the unseemly hour, by Bernhard Ragner, the paper`s managing editor. Ragner stumbled to his feet, oozing servility. Wales stabbed the card at him, said ”Feller from the New York World. Canyer givem a job?” ”Yessir, Mr. Wales,” Ragner said to Hank`s retreating back, and to me: ”Can you start tomorrow?” I had steeled myself to going back to work but this was a little sudden. ”Could we make it Monday?” I asked. ”All right,” said Ragner, relieved that I had consented to work for him. ”Monday. Report here at eleven o`clock and ask for Mr. Kospoth. He`s the city editor.” He hesitated. ”We can`t pay very much, you know. Starting salary is 1,500 francs a month.” He sensed that I was struggling with the mysteries of foreign exchange. ”Don`t bother to work it out,” he said hurriedly. ”Everything`s cheaper here, you know. It`s enough to live on in Paris.”
It turned out that I would be beggaring the Chicago Tribune at the rate of $60 a month, a little less than $15 a week. But that was enough to live on in Paris, provided you were a fresh arrival with enough clothes to last until you could manage a raise.
I had signed on with the poorest-paying paper in Paris–one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me.
At eleven o`clock on Monday I arrived at 5, rue Lamartine, headquarters of the European edition of the Chicago Tribune (its official name, but everybody called it the Paris Edition), fearing that my spurious claim to newspaper experience would be swiftly demolished. I felt a trifle reassured by a familiar odor escaping from the basement windows beside the iron door, a perfume compounded of printer`s ink, damp proof paper, and acrid fumes from the stereotyping department, known to me since my college days, when I edited the Tufts paper. I pulled open the heavy door and jumped quickly back into its shelter just in time to escape an unidentified flying object hurtling down. When it, and my heart, had settled down to a controllable rhythm of oscillation, the object became identifiable: it was a wicker wastebasket, dangling from a long cord. This was a laborsaving device invented by the employees of Paris-Midi, a French newspaper situated one floor above the Chicago Tribune. To save themselves the effort of walking down six flights of stairs to pick up mail, newspapers, or other deliveries and then toiling up again, Paris-Midi had improvised a dumbwaiter from a wastebasket on a long rope, which was tossed into the void of the stairway and hauled up again from time to time with the catch.
The city editor eventually turned up, faithful to his theory that he should try to reach the office in time to go out for lunch. B.J. Kospoth was the Tribune`s mystery man, the first mystery being what the ”B.J.” stood for. Nobody knew.
Kospoth was 50ish, lean, wore a small moustache, and gave the impression of being sand-colored. He was a meticulous dresser. His laugh was mirthless and dry, an expressionless paroxysm, like a soprano horse whinnying, that burst from him without warning. On my first day at the office Kospoth took me to lunch at an excellent Touraine restaurant, Au Petit Riche, where I have been eating ever since. It has not changed much since 1927, and I have been assured that it was the same two generations before my time. Kospoth`s figure was spare, but his appetite was good and discriminating; he was at his most amiable while eating. He never invited me for a meal again, and it may be that his motive this time was reconnaissance. The appearance of someone he believed to be a big-city newspaperman on his staff may have struck him as a potential threat to his own privileged position in the hierarchy. After looking me over he must have decided that I was not likely to endanger anybody.
One of his sinecures was the editorship of what the Tribune called, somewhat pretentiously, its Riviera edition. The Paris edition of the Tribune reached the Riviera with its general news one day late but, as this part of France, during its high season, accounted for the largest segment of the paper`s circulation after Paris, a single page devoted to up-to-date news of Americans` activities on the Riviera was printed in Nice and folded into the Paris paper when the leisurely trains of those days got it to the
Mediterranean. Producing this single sheet involved a minimum of effort, for most of its news was phoned in by social climbers who hoped to see their names in the paper. Editing the Riviera edition thus meant a paid vacation in a pleasant part of the world.
Kospoth`s sinecure in Paris consisted of writing a weekly article about art. Its quality was high and it did credit to the paper. His regular duties were not onerous, which was the way he liked it. A considerable proportion of his work consisted simply of finding and delivering to the stereotyping room the papier-mache mats, mailed by the Chicago paper, from which the Paris edition produced many of its features–pictures so little afflicted by timeliness that their printability had survived the slow passage from Chicago, the bridge article, the crossword puzzle, and, most important of all, the comic strips. Kospoth was not a man of order. His method of filing the mats was to chuck them into a closet when they arrived and paw through them daily to find the right ones for that particular date. The characteristic image of the city editor that remains in the memories of Tribune alumni today is the view of his rear protruding from the closet to the accompaniment of the anguished wail: ”Where`s `The Gumps`? Who`s taken `The Gumps`?” (It was the most popular of the Chicago Tribune comics, followed closely by ”Little Orphan Annie” and ”Gasoline Alley.”)
The most delicate task entrusted to the day staff, to which I was attached at first, was selecting the next day`s editorials. These were reprinted from the home paper, which meant that they were seldom fresh, since they arrived by mail, a week or more after they had been printed in Chicago. The alternative, however, would have been to cable the editorials (too costly) or to let the Paris staff write them (too risky). The colonel did not trust his Paris minions to write editorials. Their opinions might run counter to his own; indeed, they frequently did. So the colonel personally clipped from the home edition such editorials as he considered suitable for publication in Paris, marking each with a large blue A or B. Others bore a large red NO. An editorial marked A had to be run, outdated or not. An editorial marked NO was not to be used in any circumstances. When the A`s were exhausted, a modicum of initiative was permitted: Paris could pick and choose among the B`s. If we ran out of B`s, we could reprint from the Chicago paper any editorial on which the colonel had not deigned to express an opinion.
A single linotype operator arrived in the afternoon to set this routine material, plus what we called resort copy, since the term ”tourism” had not yet been invented. A respectable proportion of the paper`s revenue came under this heading, obliging us to create appropriate reading matter to place beside the ads. The raw material was usually provided by publicity men whose opinions of the places for which they worked were so unrelivedly dithyrambic that they had to be rewritten to become even barely credible.
As my duties were explained to me, my fear of being unequal to the task faded away. The two day staff men unoccupied with resort copy divided between them the embassy beat and the hotel beat. The first meant checking daily, weekly, or occasionally with official or semiofficial sources of news–the American Embassy, the American Chamber of Commerce, the American Club, the American Legion, The American Hospital, the American Library. The hotel and boat-train beat was more interesting and it produced more of our interviews. The publicity men of the steamship companies sent us lists of the important personages they were delivering to our shores and we tried to intercept them when the boat trains came in. A dozen hotels frequented by Americans were visited daily and the reporter picked up at each desk a slip thoughtfully providing the names of guests the hotel thought newsworthy. If the reporter agreed, he nipped upstairs to interview his subject or, in his absence, tried to make an appointment.
Into our cut-and-dried routine, real news stories would break unpredictably from time to time–accidents, embezzlements, crimes, scandals
–but the best of them were off bounds for us. If they were important enough to interest Chicago as well as Paris, the Chicago Tribune Foreign News Service would cover them and give us their carbon, to be printed in the Paris Edition credited to the FNS. French politics was almost automatically beyond our jurisdiction. Any diplomatic development worth a call on the press services of the Foreign Ministry, for example, would be handled by our betters of the Foreign News Service. What few news stories the day staff did turn out were not processed by it. They were transfixed on a large spike placed in the center of the copy desk for the inspection of the night staff, which would decide whether to use the story and what prominence to give it, or even to have it rewritten by more competent journalists. The night staff had a low opinion of the ability of the day staff and, after a few days on it, so had I. I need not have feared that I would be out of my depth; the waters were shallow.
During those first few days I went home each night having seen the development of no news more important than the names of the prominent people taking the cure at Vichy and wondering what in the world could be found to fill the paper the next day. Yet each morning there was delivered to me a Tribune bursting with news of the city, the country, the continent, America, and the world. It seemed a miracle and indeed the Paris Edition would one day be described as just that–the daily miracle.
During my first days on the Paris Edition, I was still isolated from the matter-of-fact world by the euphoria of finding myself in Paris, above which I seemed to be floating without touching the ground. Oblivious to mundane matters I entered the office one morning in the first or second week of my employment by the Chicago Tribune to be met by unusual behavior on the part of Kospoth.
”The crazy fool,” he said. ”He`ll never make it.”
”Who`ll never make it?” I asked.
”Lindbergh,” Kospoth answered.
”Who`s Lindbergh?” I inquired.
