Gossip Monger

About a year ago portly, wealthy William Brown, vice president and general counsel of Radio Corporation of America, was visited in his Manhattan Woolworth Building office by a suave stranger as yet unidentified. The stranger thought Lawyer Brown would be interested in buying some stock in American Social Registry, Inc., publishers of a "Directory of American Society"* and also of the bi-weekly Town Topics, self-styled "Journal of Society." Lawyer Brown, a graduate of West Point, a businessman of good repute, a onetime Chicago rail-road counsel, wanted no stock. Fortnight later Town Topics printed an insinuating story in which Lawyer Brown believed he recognized himself, his wife, and another woman. Last week Augustus Ralph Keller, president and editor of Town Topics, was under indictment for criminal libel. He denied attempting to sell stock to Lawyer Brown, declared he had been out of town when the offending story was written. Publisher Keller's regime on Town Topics was until recently, relatively inconspicuous. Five years ago he succeeded the late Mrs. Emma Mann-Vynne who. five years previously, had inherited control from the founder, her father, Col. William D'Alton Mann. Under the direction of the baldpated, snowy-whiskered, plug-hatted Colonel, the magazine had a stormy 30-year career as Society's gossip-peddler. The Colonel died in 1920, leaving an estate of $500,000.

*Not to be confused with long-accepted Social Register, published by Social Register Association.

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