In the Days of the Runyonesque

Westbrook Pegler

The Idaho Statesman/February 6, 1961

Gene Fowler’s farewell is here, a story of Park Row in the ’twenties, called “Skyline.” On my pillow late at night I slowly realized with sorrow that I had known a saintly man whose goodness glows with a supernatural light as of a halo. His recountal of little matters among reporters long ago is a rosary of trivialities made spiritual and precious by an apostle who never knowingly hurt anyone. 

Why didn’t he wear sandals and a cowl? 

I criticized Gene for condoning guilty wrongs by notorious public men of his time and circle which had an important aggregate harmful effect on the morals of the rabble. He implied that the charm, the shocking abandon, luxurious wantons compensated the harm they did far, far beyond the company of those who knew them.

I agree with Damon Runyon on the vocation of the reporter and the reporter’s duty to walk alone shunning popularity. Which reminds me, there is a studio and factory a block from where I often work on 45th Street, where shields, plaques, and medals are designed, graven, and washed in gold for presentation in considered recognition of the glory of heroic columnists who savagely condemn racism, bigotry, and McCarthyism. This is now a commerce. The banquet departments of big hotels run it. 

Once, in a thoughtless moment, the honoree of such a tribute invited me to sit among the elect at his recognition in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf on a Sunday night. I had known him in the first war so I accepted. But when I showed up, he panicked. The chart disclosed no seat for me in the ranks of the great, and he seemed to hope I would get the idea and get lost.

I did get the idea, but I did not get lost. I dogged him and his manager until, at last, they wedged in an extra chair in the fifth or sixth row from the front in rising bleachers about 20 rows deep. I was at the very end until some other Dutchman, as they call inconvenient creatures, came in late and became the end man. 

It is not vanity, I assure you, but irony which reminds, after all this time, that although the occasion was loaded with leaders of the Roosevelt cult, when our names were called, only Jim Farley’s decibels measured up to mine. I will never forget the rage and consternation in the dark visage of Fanny Hurst as she swiveled around in unbelief. Cheers for Pegler! Here was McCarthyism running riot. 

Damon Runyon ran with the underworld but he wrote and made his fortune interpreting the brutality of criminals of the bootleg era. He never blew the whistle but rather endeared his rodent associates to the public by his skill, but as well by an innate sympathy which he brought to Broadway from water tanks and jails in Pueblo and Denver. 

If Damon had had any of the district attorney in his nature he would have written the truth.

But he was not a crusade or campaign reporter. He was a description-reporter, and his fiction also was reporting of that kind. 

Probably all men know fear and so, I suppose, did he. But he had soldiered as a skinny kid volunteer with the 13th Minnesota in the Philippines, and he had never stepped back in any casual quarrels around Madison Square Garden. So he was true to his principles and not afraid in his failure to write the truth about the Broadway underworld.

Ed Sullivan, however, now an institution, a great man of brotherhood, wrote on Nov. 22, 1953, a confession that would make me writhe. Ed Sullivan said in his column in the New York Daily News: “That not one of the newspaper men covering the Broadway beat in those days was shot is an index of the lousy jobs each of us turned in as reporters. Winchell, Hellinger, Runyon, Sobol, Skolsky, and Sullivan each relied on mob protection during the machine gun era. We were ‘right guys,’ a happy compliment when you’re young and actually a savage indictment viewed through the other end of the telescope a quarter of a century later.”

I hasten to dismiss the others from this roster. We have only Sullivan’s word that they relied on “mob protection,” and his word is not enough. But he can speak for himself and does.

Runyon in his own name wrote a fine, honest testament on the proud but lonely honor of reporters who write the truth and walk alone. I will present it in my next dispatch with my compliments to Sullivan and to others who, last year raised a suspect chorus of welcome to Josephine Baker, the antique sepia squirm who came back from Paris to the fine country which she had repudiated with scorn—to make some easy money. In the vulgar idiom of their world and hers, she laid an egg.