Tex & Jinx

Tall, dark & handsome Lieut. Colonel John Reagan ("Tex") McCrary, 35 and out of the A.A.F., had to decide a typical veteran's problem: did he want his old job back? His old job was chief editorial writer for Hearst's tabloid New York Mirror. He asked himself a loaded question: "Why waste your time trying to in fluence people who move their lips when they read?" That did it.

There was another thing Tex McCrary didn't want: to be known merely as beauteous Jinx Falkenburg's husband. Last week he fixed that one too, by getting Columbia Pictures to release Jinx from her movie contract. (She had to promise to say nothing against Columbia in the two years her contract had to run. "That spiked an article she was doing for Collier's,'" said Tex. "She was going to say she'd graduated from the movies, where she had made straight Bs.")

For himself, he found a new job as executive editor of the American Mercury. He replaced nobody; sparrowlike little Publisher Lawrence Spivak created the job.

One of the first things he would learn would be the shrewd formula by which promotion-wise Larry Spivak has lifted the Mercury to 95,000 circulation, from the 33,000 to which it had sunk when Editor H. L. Mencken wearily stepped out in 1933. It had long since lost all the sudsy sarcasm it had under Mencken, was now an excitable cross between Reader's Digest and an expose sheet. The Spivak formula: find a man with a promising cause, and exploit them both. Sample "discoveries":

Major Alexander P. (Air Power) de Seversky; Jan (Out of the Night) Valtin; John Roy (Under Cover) Carlson.

One new Mercury cause is right down Airforceman McCrary's alley: "Sink the Navy." An air-power zealot, he won a public-relations victory for the A.A.F. with his "flying circus" that sped correspondents into Shanghai before the surrender, into Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the atomic bombs.

McCrary began his newspapering as a copy boy on the New York World-Telegram, kept secret the fact that he was a Yaleman. His only magazine experience: a period "during which I lived in an oxygen tent" on the old Literary Digest.

The McCrarys now inhabit a guest house on the Jock Whitney estate at Manhasset, L.I. While Tex learns the magazine business, ex-Model Jinx will write, have a baby, "go into a play next season," play tennis again--in that order.

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