Personal Puff

The masculinity of U. S. newspapers is as proverbial as the femininity of U. S. magazines.. For years magazines have catered more and more to women's taste in fiction, fashions, photography, pornography; newspapers have come bravely to the defense of the fading male. Ever since the days when horsewhips and double-derringers dictated the editorial policies of the better southern and western papers, editors have denounced everything that smacked of the foppish, the exquisite, and, above all, the epicene. Last week, to one of the editorial writers of the Chicago Tribune, came an unequalled opportunity to demonstrate his verbal virility.

"Insert coin. Hold personal puff beneath the tube. Then pull the lever."

This sign, printed boldly above a slot-machine in a new Chicago dancehall, was the opportunity. Powder for men. Could you believe it? The Chicago Tribune editorial writer, justly incensed, pounded out a scathing denouncement in which he held up to ridicule the forerunner, the great prototype of the breed that blanched their faces artificially.

"Why," he asked, "didn't someone quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmo (alias Valentino) years ago? . . . Chicago has its powder puffs; London, its dancing men, Paris its gigolos. Down with Decatur; up with Elinor Glyn. Hollywood is the national school of masculinity. Rudy, the beautiful gardener's boy, is the prototype of the American male. Hell's bells! Oh, sugar!"

The editorial was duly printed. Everywhere in the midwest people read it and groaned for the passing of manhood, seduced by the perfumed ways of a cinema fop. Over a hotel breakfast tray a closely muscled man, whose sombre skin was clouded with talcum and whose thick wrists tinkled with a perpetual arpeggio of fine gold bangles, read the effusion with rapidly mounting fury. Then he (Rudolph Valentino) wrote out and mailed to the Chicago Tribune editor a formal note. He said that he infinitely regretted that American statutes made illegal the honorable and historic duello. But he felt happy to be able to offer his correspondent the choice of boxing ring or wrestling mat to "prove in typically American fashion, for

I am an American citizen, which is the better man. . . ." He begged to remain, respectfully, Rudolph Valentino.