A Guide to Syndicated Survivors

Gossip will always be around and so, apparently, will gossip columnists. Among the syndicated survivors:

AILEEN ELDER MEHLE, better known as "Suzy," has been tracking the prominent for 23 years. She worked her way up from the Miami News to the New York Daily News in 1967, and is today syndicated in 89 papers. Suzy is not above mixing with mere movie stars for her chatty "Suzy Says" column, but prefers writing about diplomats, heiresses, princes and other members of what used to be called the jet set. She can be a bit saccharine ("Fatesingh, the Maharajah of Baroda . . . goes by the impossible nickname of Jackie") but is rarely arch. "Everyone I meet is a story," chirps Suzy. "I have fun with everyone, including myself."

ED SULLIVAN, 71, has been turning out a warm, newsy column, "Little Old New York," for the Daily News since 1932. Over the years, he has shifted from a loose, rambling monologue to a terser, more telegraphic style ("Redd Foxx getting Vegas divorce . . . Bobby Hackett very ill . . ."). He kept the column going during the 23 years he emceed his television variety show, but has cut back from five pieces a week to two. Unlike some other columnists, Sullivan does not use a ghostwriter for his items, many of which he obtains from a network of famous friends. "I call people like Henry Fonda, Jack Dempsey, Richard Rodgers and many more," he says. "People trust me. They know I won't use any malicious or scandalous information."

EARL WILSON, 67, has been equaling Lyons' prodigious output a few pages away in the same New York Post for more than 30 years. Wilson's 1,000-word column, "It Happened Last Night," appears six days a week and is now syndicated in nearly 200 newspapers. Wilson treads his ex-stable mate's old path around Manhattan and keeps the same strenuous hours. The fruit of all that effort--a dollop of show business shoptalk and a few bon mots from the stars, wrapped around a demi-cheesecake photo of some starlet--may not always seem worth it. But occasionally he comes up with a genuine hard-news scoop, like his 1953 disclosure that Dr. Jonas Salk was working on a polio vaccine. Wilson heard it from Helen Hayes, whose daughter was a polio victim.

JOYCE HABER, 41, an exceptionally literate gossip, tattles about movie stars and camp followers five times a week in the Los Angeles Times and 58 other papers. An alumna of TIME'S Beverly Hills bureau, she replaced Hedda Hopper in 1966, and West Coast wits began referring to her as Hedda Haber. At first she adopted a bitchy, initial-cluttered style ("What was Miss P.P. doing with Mr. V.V. at... ") that earned her many enemies. Later the scourge of Celluloid City dropped the initials and developed a more serious reportorial approach. In the past few weeks, for example, she has reported on management shake-ups at Screen Gems and the William Morris Agency, and interviewed the husband of a woman with whom Richard Burton recently had an affair.

DOROTHY MANNERS is the proprietress of Hollywood's other jungle telegraph, which transmits six times a week to 89 newspapers. From her perch at Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner--the one she inherited when Louella Parsons, her boss of 30 years, retired in 1965--Manners writes about the same film folk as Joyce Haber, but in a fluffy, flowered-hat style reminiscent of her mentor. A typical Manners-ism: "Between sets at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Burt Lancaster was talking to Gilbert Roland about a top part in Burt's next." Haber fans find her home-town rival's columns dull. "Some of them are frankly a little flat," Manners concedes. "But how many people in this town make news any more?"

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