A Present for the Boss

The staffers of Hearst's Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express wanted to give their boss a birthday present, perhaps a plaid shirt like the gaudy ones he usually wears. Managing Editor John Bayard Taylor Campbell, whose loud & lusty journalism had given the paper (circ. 410,470) its bumptious slogan--"The biggest daily west of Chicago"*--last week was celebrating his 69th birthday and his 50th year in the newspaper business. But when the party-loving reporters got started on the celebration, there was no stopping it.

As unsuspecting Jack Campbell walked into the city room in the garish green Moorish castle that houses the Her-Ex, Red Nichols' band struck up Happy Birthday, and the staff presented the boss with a ten-foot bull whip and a wristwatch. As he took them, tears rolled down the grizzled cheeks of hard-boiled Jack Campbell. Before long, more than tears was flowing: friends had sent over a supply of liquor. By the time the gang got through a fancy buffet lunch (courtesy of the Southern Pacific), a woman sword swallower had dropped in from a circus to swallow three swords, and Mayor Fletcher Bowron had read a proclamation making Campbell "mayor of the day." The Chamber of Commerce sent a chamber pot as a good-natured gag, and W. R. Hearst wired his congratulations.

No Body. The durable Hearstling who caused all this commotion had been tempered in a harsh and gaudy school. At 19, Jack Campbell got a $6-a-week reporter's job on the San Francisco Chronicle, and covered the Barbary Coast when there was at least one good murder story every week. After one man was kidnaped and shot, Campbell hired a pack of bloodhounds and set out to follow the bloodstains. When the dogs yelped their way to a house, Campbell burst in the door and found a woman nursing a nosebleed. But after this false start, Campbell scooped Jack London, reporting for the rival Examiner, by fishing the victim's severed head out of San Francisco Bay. He was arrested for removing evidence, but the photographed head made Page One, and in San Francisco the gruesome exhibit made Campbell the reporter hero of the day.

When Campbell exposed the prostitution racket and its City Hall connections, racketeers lured him from a barroom and gave him a terrific beating. With his ribs broken and his lungs punctured, Campbell went to Tucson to recuperate.

While he was taking things easy, Campbell joined the Thirteen Club ("All lungers--twelve of 'em died"), became editor of the Tucson Citizen, and went to Mexico to cover a revolution. When the Republican National Committee bought the Citizen, Campbell, though a Republican himself, quit ("I couldn't take dictation from any pressure group").

No Names. In Los Angeles, he landed a job as city editor on the run-down Herald, which Hearst had just bought to make war on Millionaire E. T. Earl's evening Express. City Editor Campbell printed his Page One on a green newsprint, and circulation climbed. When the Express imitated his stunt, Campbell headlined: E. T. EARL TURNS GREEN WITH ENVY. The Herald's big break came when the Express tagged Campbell's choice for mayor the candidate of "women of the underworld." Campbell sent reporters out to ask the candidate's clubwomen supporters how they liked being called prostitutes. They didn't, and the Herald picked up thousands of canceled Express subscriptions. In 1931, the slowed-down Express merged with Hearst's Herald, and two years later Campbell became Her-Ex managing editor.

No Mystery. In the Her-Ex city room, bald, stoop-shouldered Jack Campbell breathes down the neck of City Editor Aggie Underwood (TIME, June 30, 1947) as the copy comes in, picks every picture himself, likes to ask her: "What have we got for the stenographers today?"

For them, and all the other Her-Ex readers, he plays the latest murders for all they are worth--and more. He dresses up his crime stories with phony montages, demands a new angle for the lead story in each of his seven editions. He has a talent for tagging big crimes with a headline catchphrase; two of his trademarks-- on the "Black Dahlia" murder and the "White Flame" murder--were promptly picked up by other papers. But "if you give the readers something sensational on one side of the page," Campbell says, "you ought to give them something solid on the other." His solid matter includes such stories as Arizona's side of the current water squabble with California.

His riproaring approach has made the Her-Ex one of the biggest moneymakers in the Hearst chain. Campbell doesn't think there is any mystery about how he has done it. Says he: "I try to see what the people are thinking and talking about, and give it to them."

* By the latest (September) Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, the morning Los Angeles Times (412,319) was bigger.

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