What's News?

It was the kind of story that nightclub pressagents lie awake mornings trying to contrive, knowing that the tabloids will lap it up if it can be made to look like hot news. One morning last week, while other Manhattan papers were playing photographs of the Northwest's earthquake (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) on their front pages, the New York Daily News coolly threw its quake pictures on the floor. It had exclusive, newsstand-shocking news of its own; on Page One, the Daily News slapped a full-page action shot of Stripteasers Georgia Sothern and Joann Collier, zestfully clawing each other outside a nightspot where they both worked.

Inside, in a story unerringly aimed at the subway set, the News disclosed that the battle began when Miss Sothern was accused by Miss Collier, a "seminude novelty dancer," of wearing "falsies." For News readers, Georgia sniffed: if anyone needed falsies, it was Joann. "Some got 'em and some ain't--and she ain't."

A carefully telephoned tip to the News at 3:40 a.m. had sent Photographer Bob Costello hustling to the nightclub. When he got there, he found the fight under way. The girls obligingly battled on until he had shot all the pictures he wanted.

At week's end, Columnist Walter Winchell sneered in Hearst's rival Mirror that the brawl was just "a neat press [agents'] stunt." The News, which didn't care, gratefully prepared to send $10 to the nightclubber who had tipped it off.

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