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The Author. Around tall, big-eared Gene Fowler, 40, legends of newspaper life hang like tin balls on a Christmas tree. Newsmen love to relate how he left the Denver Post and made his way to Manhattan in 1917 by escorting the body of an old woman shipped East for burial; how he became rousing drunk on the way and lost the body (which he had named "Nellie") in Chicago; how Federal agents, acting on a telegram from Fowler's Denver cronies, arrested him for transporting a woman from one State to another; how, as a reporter on Hearst's New York American, he covered the rescue of a lost balloon crew near Hudson Bay and later submitted an astonishing expense account including such items as hire of husky dog team, hire of husky bitch for the dogs, medical attention for husky bitch, flowers for husky bitch's grave ; how he was made managing editor of the American over night and scandalized the office by playing the accordion at his desk whenever the press of business became too trying; how he was removed as suddenly as he had been appointed, and later returned to work as a reporter, reputedly at his managing editor's salary.
Three years ago he was made managing editor of the sporting paper Morning Telegraph which then aspired to be the town's smartest sheet. He hired David Belasco, Ring Lardner, Ben Hecht, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell and a dozen others. When the scheme failed and orders came to "cut down," he fired himself.
Author Fowler lives with his wife and three children on Fire Island, a nearly deserted sand bar off Long Island, where he wrote his first novels, Trumpet in the Dust and Shoe the Wild Mare.
Clever Chap
MEMOIRS OF A POLYGLOT—William Gerhardi—Knopf ($3.75).
If cleverness annoys you, you had better not read Author Gerhardi: people have been known to throw his books across the room. Another possible cause of annoyance is his casual assumption that he is already a Most Important Author. But his artful candor is less likely, on the whole, to outrage you than to win your interest, to reduce you often to paroxysms of delight.