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Last week Publisher Hearst's smutty little New York Mirror (for which Cornelius IV now writes and edits) published a page of gossip about Cornelius IV's cousin,— Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney II.
Someone had seen "Sonny" Whitney in a Broadway night club talking to Evan Burrowes Fontaine, a dancer who caused him much trouble after he was graduated from Yale in 1922, by asking a million dollars for having borne him, allegedly, a son out of wedlock. Swift as a rat, the Mirror published a photograph of Mr. Whitney and his wife (nee Norton) with the caption "Not traveling companions" and the screamer, " 'SONNY' WHITNEY HEEDS BROADWAY CALL." Some one in the Mirror office with an intimate knowledge of the affairs of the Vanderbilt family supplied the Mirror's female scandalmonger (by name "Hettie Fithian Cattell") with a glib recital of "unlucky first love marriages of the Vanderbilt clan." The implication was that Mr. & Mrs. "Sonny" Whitney were estranged, an implication for which not even the Mirror could ferret out more than a "jinx" for substantiation.