My Ears Are Bent Read Free

president of the W.C.T.U., I give her to understand that I am a far greater enemy of rum than she is.
    Some people—Gertrude Stein, Emma Goldman, Gilda Gray, Eleanor Holm and Peter J. McGuinness, Sheriff of Brooklyn, are an assortment—can unload enough quotes for a story at any hour of the day or night. (Gilda Gray, the Polish shimmy-shaker, is nice. Once I went up to see her about a rumored engagement to some scion or other. She sensed there was no particular story in that and told me instead about a visit she made to the convent in Milwaukee in which she was educated. She had lunch with the nuns and before they sat down to eat she gave them a few movements of the black bottom, a dance from the twenties. “I gave the sisters a few tosses just for old time’s sake,” said Miss Gray. “They sure did enjoy it.”) Two classes of humans whose quotes are alwaysamusing are frustrated, spiteful old actresses on the down grade and people with phobias, especially people who predict the end of the world. (There used to be a disappointed man named Robert Reidt out on Long Island who was always going up on a hilltop near East Patchogue with his family to await destruction. Predicting the end of the world was an obsession with him. One dull day I called him up to ask if he had any advance information on the crack of doom and the telephone operator said, “Mr. Reidt’s telephone has been disconnected.”) A woman whose conversation was always unpremeditated was the late Mary Louise Cecilia (Texas) Guinan. Once I went with her to Flushing where she and her “Gang of Twenty Beautiful Guinan Girls” were filling a vaudeville engagement. We rode out in her bullet-proof limousine, an automobile previously owned by Larry Fay, the cutthroat. Someone was planning to produce a play based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson and Miss Guinan had been asked to play the lead. I remarked that Mrs. McPherson certainly would sue the producer. “That,” said Miss Guinan, “is no skin off my ass.”
    I am pleased when an interview starts off like that. I admire the imagery in vulgar conversation. I wish newspapers had courage enough to print conversation just as it issues forth, relevant obscenity andall. Some of Mayor La Guardia’s most apt epigrams, for example, cannot be printed in any New York newspaper. If a reporter tries to get anything unusually hearty in a story some copyreader or other will trim it out. There are scores of admirable copyreaders on New York newspapers, but most of them seem to be too bored to give much of a damn about anything. They don’t have to be censored; they willingly censor themselves. They appear to prefer the nasty genteelism to the exact word; they will cut the word “belly” out of your copy and write in the nauseating word “tummy.” I have seen a pimp referred to as “a representative of the vice ring.” On the newspaper for which I work the reporters write “raped” and it always comes out “criminally attacked.” Also, copy-readers appear to like tinsel words, words such as “petite.” Day after day in one newspaper I have seen Lottie Coll referred to as “the petite gun-girl,” and Lottie is as big as Jack Dempsey and twice as tough. A good copyreader would rip a word like “petite” off a sheet of copy just on general principles. Once I covered a political rally at which a tipsy statesman cursed his opponent for fifteen violent minutes. His profanity was so vigorous I expected it to leave cavities in his teeth. I used some of his milder remarks in my story, but the copyreader cut it out and wrote in, “Commissioner Etcetera declared that his opponent was not aware of the issues.” There is no fury whichcan equal the black fury which bubbles up in a reporter when he sees his name signed to a story which has been castrated by a copyreader or one of the officials on the city desk.
    The least interesting people to interview for an afternoon newspaper are the ones who probably should