"Annie Laurie"

No woman writing for the daily press has more readers than a portly, hearty, white-haired old lady who lives in a little house high above San Francisco's Golden Gate. Nearly blind, ailing from diabetes and shingles, she celebrated her 72nd birthday last week in bed. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors stopped work long enough to pass a resolution wishing her "many happy returns." The Chief of Police sent flowers. So did Mayor Angelo Rossi, who is by trade a florist. But what warmed the old heart of Winifred Sweet Black Bonfils most was a pair of solemn little Kerry Blues shipped by special plane from William Randolph Hearst.

First and most famed sob-sister in the U. S., Mrs. Bonfils is known to readers of the Hearst syndicate as Winifred Black but to readers of the San Francisco Examiner she is "Annie Laurie." Nearly 50 years a Hearstling, she dictates an average of nine articles a week--six "heart & home" pieces for the syndicate, three or more "Annie Laurie" columns for the Examiner. Much of her work is done from her bed. Over her bedroom mantel hangs a faded old photograph inscribed: "To my dear friend and associate, Winifred Black Bonfils, from her sincere admirer, William Randolph Hearst."

Forty-five years ago when Winifred Sweet was a slim, pretty young woman with red hair and blue eyes, the Examiner assigned her to a children's playground party. There she met a "tall, handsome, well-groomed young man" who helped her quiet a howling moppet. Back in the office she met the tall young man again, answered brusquely when he asked: "What became of the Bull of Bashan?" She then learned that the tall young man was her boss, William Randolph Hearst, who had lately bought "that new paper on Montgomery Street." Since then she has never been brusque with "W. R."

"Annie Laurie" was born in Wisconsin, daughter of Civil War General Benjamin Sweet. Educated at swank finishing schools, she went on the stage, quit when she was handed a burlesque role. On the strength of several letters she had had printed in the Chicago Tribune, she got a job there, held it a week. In 1890 she went to San Francisco, was hired by the Examiner. She had a theory that "a woman has a distinct advantage over a man in reporting if she has sense. . . . Men always are good to women." One of the first things she did was to pretend to faint on the street. Taken to a hospital in a hearse, she investigated the emergency ward from the inside, wrote an expose which caused a thumping scandal, cost most of the hospital staff their jobs, resulted in ambulance service.

At the Galveston flood in 1900 she put on male clothes, shouldered a pickax, was the first reporter through the lines. Climbing over piles of corpses, she filed an exclusive story, organized an emergency hospital, got Publisher Hearst to send relief trains. Another time, disguised as a Salvation Army lass, she visited the "lowest dives" of the Barbary Coast, wrote a stirring series on vice. She covered the Thaw murder trial, interviewed everyone from Sir Henry Irving to President Harrison, visited the leper colony at Molokai. When Mr. Hearst's mother died in 1919, "Annie Laurie" wrote the official press obituary, later turned out a 54,000-word biography of Phoebe Apperson Hearst in twelve days.

She took the name "Annie Laurie" in imitation of her celebrated contemporary, Joseph Pulitzer's globe-trotting "Nellie Bly." Her first husband, a newshawk named Orlow Black, died. She has long been separated from her second, the late Publisher Fred Bonfils' Brother Charles. Her two sons are dead, a daughter, married. Today she lives alone, except for her secretary and a Cherokee Indian maid.

A vigorous opponent of sentimentality towards criminals, Mrs. Bonfils grows saccharine over little domestic tragedies. Nonetheless she hates being known as a sob-sister, snorts: "Most of them are sap sisters." A curious holdover from a bygone age, she still regards her professional harness with the romantic aura of an old firehorse: "I like newspapers and newspaper people and newspaper standards, and I like newspaper news too, and I'm just foolish enough to say so. . . . I'm proud of being, in a very humble way, a member of the good old newspaper gang--the kindest-hearted, quickest-witted, clearest-eyed, most courageous assemblage of people I have ever had the honor and the good fortune to know. . . ."

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