My Ears Are Bent Read Free Page A

be the most interesting, industrial leaders, automobile manufacturers, Wall Street financiers, oil and steel czars, people like that. They either chew your ears off with nonsense about how they are self-made (“When I landed in this country all I had was seventeen cents and a poppyseed roll and now I am chairman of the board”) or they sit around and look gloomy. After painfully interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel that it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal. Next down the list are society women. I rank them with the jimsonweed and the vermiform appendix; I cannot see any reason for their existence. Also, they have bad manners. In the line of duty I have had dealings withscores of drunken dowagers and gawky, concupiscent debutantes and it is my belief that the society women of the United States have the worst manners of any women in the world; coffeepot waitresses are gracious in comparison.
    Politicians, as a rule, make work easy for the reporter. Some of them are so entertaining you can write about them under water. (Herbert Hoover is not in this class. He is the gloomy kind. I have interviewed him twice and both times his face kept reminding me of the face of a fat baby troubled by gas pains.) It is perhaps an ugly commentary on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. For his purposes, men like Huey Long and Hyman Schorenstein, a Brooklyn district leader who is reputed to be unable to read or write, are made to order. An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. Also, the American press will string along with the fatuous, attacking only the weak and the eccentric. Even the semicolons are pompous on Nicholas Murray Butler’s mimeographed statements, but the papersnail them to the front page practically every Monday morning in the year. If Nicholas Murray Butler and Peter J. McGuinness made the same identical statement the papers would treat Mr. Butler with a gigantic amount of respect but Pete would be treated as a yap who should keep his mouth shut. It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. J. P. Morgan was always treated with elaborate respect until he played rock-a-bye-baby with a lady midget; then the newspapers were not afraid of him any more.
    Huey Long, as I say, was made to order. Any barely literate reporter could write an epic about him. The last time I saw him he was sitting up in bed in the Waldorf-Astoria with a hangover. He had on a pair of baby-blue pajamas and he was yawning and scratching his toes. There were three reporters in the room asking him questions. To every question he would say, “It’s a lie,” and laugh throatily. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, groaning, and told a long incoherent story about a relative of his who kept a saloon. The politician most lavish with incoherent quotes, however, was former Mayor John P. O’Brien of New York City. It was worth money to hear him orate. Once I heard him speak to a gathering of women and he said, “During the week I have momentousmatters to attend to. I meet great people and I must go here and there to make up