The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler, by H. Allen Smith
Bolger, Frank
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler, by H. Allen Smith" And lastly, we can see how foolish it is for us to disregard the Marxist leanings of the "liberation" movements in Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere. For if Rabushka is right in his contention that...
...This caused no major problems at CBS—until the resignation, when Schorr's open antipathy for the President combined with his self-appointed role as First Amendment Protector to run him afoul of the network executives...
...began to look upon himself as a man whose writing talent had gone down the drain...
...he is pious, indignant, angry, moral, humorless, self-righteous, often incompetent, virginal, messianic, and liberal...
...Yet listening to his colleagues after the speech he could not help but feel that, except for Roger Mudd, they had all gone soft on Nixon—and he concluded that the conciliatory tone of Cronkite et al., had been governed by network executives, grateful and relieved to have escaped Nixon's parting salvos...
...fifties...
...For his own part, Fowler reassured the concerned: "I am aware of the surgical consequences that sometimes attend this type of operation...
...Hearst, Fowler cracked, "Go right ahead...
...For Schorr, "reality" in political affairs is seldom, if ever, the way participants perceive it...
...Still, Schorr was angry at having been left out of the postmortem, angry that Nixon had slipped away without a final drubbing, and he clung to his suspicion that CBS management had dictated the attitude of its news stars...
...Above all, he was one of the best reporters in the Golden Age of American journalism, though he modestly deflected such praise during his romp across the continent snapping, "Forget it...
...and while there is some troublemaker in all journalists, the sensible ones know the difference between goading employers or colleagues, and public figures...
...should be hailed as kings of their craft...
...But perhaps Smith's campaigning is justified...
...At work on a Hollywood screenplay, Fowler and a friend were injured in an automobile accident while driving to work...
...He was a brawling, boozing, lady-killing rake with a genius for high living and hearty laughing...
...Pleasantly soused, facing a heady wind, Fowler stepped out onto the two-foot ledge deciding that if one lap around found him on the cold side of eternity he wouldn't fight it...
...Of course his problem is not in taking sides—since the "reality" of an issue is sometimes grasped by one of the disputants—but in assuming the same side will always be wrong...
...It seems that Fowler, whose admiration for Lardner was boundless, showed the ms...
...and after he incorrectly reported that Barry Goldwater wanted to "link up" with the German right wing in 1964, Goldwater cancelled CBS interviews, saying he would not "talk before a CBS microphone again...
...I have the only male organ on earth that is a narcotic addict...
...Hecht has both parents strenuously opposing the relationship, with Fowler nobly bowing out upon being presented by the father with an emotionally loaded set of alternatives...
...Clearing the Air by Daniel Schorr is a good example...
...Those who read the completed manuscript thought it was splendid, but the book was never published...
...ut if Smith's run through the life of .0 Gene Fowler is meager biography, it is a glorious succession of robust and hilarious anecdotes—from an account of schoolboy Fowler's revenge on a beer pilferer by one day refilling an empty bottle of beer with a substance of similar coloration from nature's own nozzle, to a chronicle of his wild excursion into Movieland...
...to the prudish author, who advised him to destroy it...
...Despite protestations that "this is not a critical biography," the attempt to freeze Fowler as another icon on the shelf in the Hall of Neglected Geniuses is rather blatant, and somewhat patronizing...
...When the excited columnist bellowed threats of going to Mr...
...Judging from these stories and the relish with which he tells them, it is clear that Schorr thinks the measure of a good journalist is the number of important people he offends...
...Schorr did not apologize for this last botch...
...The chronology of events, when dates are mentioned at all, is confusing and frustrating...
...The newsman of today venerates the Geraldo Riveras, the "Woodsteins," and Brit Humes...
...It is mostly Schorr's account of what happened when he leaked a congressional subcommittee's secret report on the CIA—and how the ensuing fuss led to his dismissal by CBS News after a 22-year career...
...Black shrouds, it was joked, decorated every whorehouse west of the Mississippi, and a famous madam wired Fowler that the President should declare southern California a disaster area...
...He writes that, "The word 'reporting' was always closely associated in my mind with reality," but it is hard to take him seriously since he also declares that his "keenest enjoyments...came from finding out something that people in power didn't want known...
...He capped off his volley by instructing a copyboy to look over the column and try to "put it in English...
...Fowler cronies recall dozens of such tales, and many swear that somewhere out in the lost and forgotten saloons of the Denver hills there are gin-palace boozers still spinning from the Fowler right-cross...
...As Smith comments, "It seems clear that Gene Fowler, in his later years...
...Fowler did not age gracefully...
...Referring to his own Watergate coverage, he says, "I was aware that I was consistently more pointed in analysis than most of my colleagues, but I knew no other way to conduct myself...
...He is a troublemaker...
...To that end he collected, sifted, and finally set down on paper the story of a notorious Denver madam who, reputedly, had bedded some of the most colorful figures of an era that spanned several decades, from frontier outlaws to latter-day eminentoes...
...He prefers "the people" as opposed to their representatives, and makes a virtue of this prejudice...
...And while you're at it you can tell Mr...
...Indeed, some time later, when word leaked out that Fowler was in search of an expert cutter for the family jewels, reaction was swift and excited...
...Mindful of the Great Constitutional Issues, Schorr retorted, "if [my job] had to be saved, it isn't worth saving...
...We are informed that Fowler and Damon Runyon were no better than friendly enemies for much of their lives, but the matter is not pursued in depth, and the author's only explanation of their mutual enmity is that Fowler resented playing the rube to Runyon's worldly sage (somewhat inconsistent with Smith's assertion that Fowler was constantly in quest of a father image...
...Friendly expected responsible reporting and told Schorr that he had saved his job from an angry William S. Paley...
...He went on to advise Miss Parsons that she didn't "need to be a bitch about this thing...
...For if Rabushka is right in his contention that there is aclose connection between the risk of racial and ethnic confrontation and the level of governmental control over economic activity, then the institution of a Marxist government would encourage that state's descent into racial tyranny or civil war...
...Evidently, Schorr is a man who aches for odium...
...Schorr leads up to the CIA-CBS affair with a career sketch and remarks about the proper function of a reporter...
...More serious are the problems in Smith's account of our hero's romancing of a Colorado debutante...
...Accused at one point of being too wordy and flowery in his prose, Fowler began the story of a murder, "Dead...
...Hearst that I called him a son of a bitch for turning such a bitch as you loose on this town...
...10.00 Frank Bolger Agreat brooding rustic giant, Gene Fowler tramped down from the Denver mountains and into the American panorama in the second decade of this century...
...ax" of a mother did everything in her power to separate them...
...According to Smith, the girl's father gave tacit approval to their courtship, while her "blue-blood battleFrank Bolger is a writer living in South Orange, New Jersey...
...Once more, Hecht's version differs...
...Instead, he had words with Fred Friendly, the president of CBS News...
...He survives principally in the glass jars that Literature provides for its own: biographies, memoirs, and fiction (in Fowler's case the MacArthur-Hecht play The Front Page...
...Sebastian's...
...In the Watergate summer of 1972, Schorr had decidedinstantly that Nixon was guilty...
...Fowler, he writes, was worried that people might get the wrong idea: "I don't want to enter the literary world as an expert on whorehouses...
...He is also one who gets it...
...More important, Hecht isable to put the affair in perspective, observing that Fowler "was baffled by the fact that writers such as Hemingway...and Faulkner...
...When Louella Parsons, the imperious tattletale and Hearst favorite, demanded to know what right Fowler had, as managing editor of the Hearst-owned Daily News, to be "butchering her stuff," Fowler fired back, "I do it because you are totally and incurably illiterate...
...His achievements left him doubting, but there was more of bewilderment than bitterness in his musings of later life...
...Hecht's memoir also recounts a love-sick Fowler departing for a downtown hotel with "only one thought in his head—suicide...
...This virtue had led to other flaps in his career...
...But on the afternoon of Nixon's speech, the network somehow learned this would not happen, and Schorr was cautioned not to be vindictive...
...A string of autobiographical and biographical works (including a tome on John Barrymore, Good Night Sweet Prince) brought Fowler a degree of renown, as a slew of Hollywood screenplays brought him prosperity, but the greater prize of satisfaction eluded him...
...However, should my voice change, I can get a job at the Boy's Choir at St...
...BOOK REVIEW Clearing the Air Daniel Schorr / Houghton-Mifflin / $11.95 Seth Cropsey Sometimes an author's personality over- shadows the events he writes about...
...In another instance, Smith refers to Fowler's dilemma over covering an assignment while Grandma Wheeler, the woman who had raised him (his father skipped out before his birth), lay dying...
...Most likely, his colleagues realized the gravity of the occasion and responded appropriately...
...A remark or two like this could be overlooked, but the book positively wallows in them...
...By contrast, the best way to ease racial tensions, as Rabushka teaches us, is to administer a healthy dose of classical liberalism...
...The memory of this man who swashed so magnificently across our journalistic landscape, seeming always to be living in the teeth of a wind, and loving every minute of it, is growing dim...
...BOOK REVIEW The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler H. Allen Smith / William Morrow and Co...
...He "vented [these] suspicions with unpremeditated candor" at a Duke University speech from which a Washington newsThe American Spectator May 1978 35...
...Smith reluctantly fingers Ring Lardner as the villain...
...Schorr does not...
...The best example of Smith's shortcomings as biographer is his retelling of the Madame Silk episode, One of Fowler's goals had been to publish a book before he reached forty...
...This version differs in several salient ways from the one set down by Fowler's long-time friend, Ben Hecht, in Letters From Bohemia...
...Having received an advance to produce a book, Fowler holed himself up for thirty days, and the result was an autobiographical novel entitled Trumpet In The Dust, published several months after his fortieth birthday...
...What is more, Smith repeatedly drops hints concerning Fowler that could keep a roomful of Freudians buzzing for twenty years: repressed atmosphere, mother complex, yearning for a father image, a love for children that was "well-nigh psychoneurotic"—all the familiar ravings from the atelier of the professor of Vienna are tossed out, but almost as quickly forgotten...
...The Fowler legacy of hijinks, hell-raising, tomcatting, and donnybrooking, along with top-notch reporting, survived his migration eastward...
...Bolstered by liquor, Fowler proceeded to the top floor where he "would put his life down as a chip and gamble for it...
...I was never anything but a half-assed wag...
...A few pages later, the author bumps her off parenthetically...
...The Last Of The Bison," as Ring Lardner dubbed Fowler, was not one to brook stuffiness and pomposities...
...As Nixon was announcing his resignation, Schorr' s first thought was to holler "you deserved it you bum...
...Perhaps this explains Smith's efforts to insinuate Fowler into a higher rank of literati, in the manner of a moviehouse usher sneaking a friend into the matinee...
...Smith likewise alludes to Fowler's lifelong obsession with Egypt, but doesn't bother to trace its manifestations throughout his career, most notably in his writings...
...As biography this book is far from adequate...
...This explanation is as implausible as Schorr's desire for more criticism of Nixon was vengeful...
...Every time I urinate there is a rainbow over the bedpan...
...Fowler soon left the Denver scene for New York City and a job with the 34 The American Spectator May 1978 American, for whom he was to cover nearly every major story of the Roaring Twenties...
...The father dies, and the mother finally convinces her daughter that wedding a man of such low station would be folly...
...And he is unequivocally an ass, as Fowler himself would have been the first to point out...
...He was tossed out of Russia for disobeying censorship restrictions in the Seth Cropsey is a researcher-writer at Fortune magazine...
...Fowler retreated one night to the shores of Fire Island, struck a match, and made a bonfire of his work...
...According to Schorr, CBS worried that in resigning Nixon would attack the media...
...But it was himself Fowler ended up doubting, not Hemingway and Faulkner...
...A mixture of self-pity, self-justification, self-infatuation, and a great dose of huffy First Amendment righteousness, the book is one long wail...
...Bugs Baer, a Fowler cohort facing a similar fate, engaged Fowler in a ribald game of Can You Top This, writing Fowler: "The doctor chalks my cue with cocaine...
...As it turned out, he wasn't given a chance...
...President Kennedy wanted CBS to take him off assignment in Germany because his reports were causing tension between the two governments...
...From the hospital Fowler wired his agent promising "ten per cent of my cuts...
...That was how they found her...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
