Joint Story

David Charnay was sitting in a midtown Manhattan spot last week, tending to his business (interviewing a Broadway character for the New York Daily News) when a friend phoned with a hot tip. There'd been a brawl over at La Conga and--guess who--Peggy Hopkins Joyce was mixed up in it. Reporter Charnay flagged his office and went after it. Rewrite Man Henry Lee got busy at the telephone. Next day their joint story--the kind of story only the Daily News could or would do--ran three columns, a sort of extra dividend that gave 2,400,000 tabloid readers their full 2-c- worth. (Same day, the U.N. site story rated a paragraph in the News.)

Peggy's story was worth one line in a gossip column until the News went to work on it: a stranger had planted kisses on Peggy Joyce's shoulder, proposed to her, and had been knocked cold by her escort, Comedian Joey Adams. Methodically, Legman David Charnay tracked down all hands, helped them say quotable things.

Said Peggy, practically in her own words: "All I know is that someone came up on me from the rear. . . . Hands and lips on my shoulders! And then Joey popped him one. . . . These people who think they own you because you're a public figure! . . . Never in all my years! It's just not de rigueur for me."

The body had landed in the lap of a lady two tables away, so Charnay looked her up too. She was one Marion Grimes Langford, prominent widow (of a 1945 murder victim).

Said she: "I'm not drinking these days. Two tables away was this woman--what's her name? Peggy Joyce? ... I never heard of her. Before I knew it they were brawling--you know how I hate brawls. . . . I walked out like a lady."

Educated Ear. Tabloid journalism would never get off the ground without such quotes, and such ears for them as smooth, chain-smoking David Buckley Charnay's. Newsman Charnay, 34, is a quiet fellow whom people like to confide in. He went to Public School 184, Walter Winchell's alma mater, and matriculated, like Winchell, on Broadway.

Early in his tabloid career (at Hearst's Mirror), Charnay once bawled out wizened Editor Emile Gauvreau for printing off-the-record information that Charnay had promised not to use. The boss rang for a guard and Charnay, still protesting, was hauled away. But in losing his job, he won a reputation on the main stem as a man who could keep a secret. Charnay once posed as a murderer's attorney to get an interview in a cell at the Tombs, hid in a French actress' stateroom closet to get an exclusive story on her "life with Mussolini."

A reporter like that was no man to stop halfway with the Peggy Joyce item. There was Joey Adams to see ("I just didn't know my own strength"), and he who got socked ("I just walked up behind her, and kissed her once, and said something about 'How about marrying me, Babe?' Really, I don't remember. . . ."). Then there was Eyewitness Jorge Benavides. a Peruvian delegate to U.N. Said he: "In Peru, we do what you do here in America. We bop him on the nose, like you say. Is that correct? Please do not involve me in any fights."

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