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¶Current in Manhattan was a legend, impossible to check, that William Randolph Hearst was daily in personal touch with Mrs. Simpson and the King by transatlantic telephone. Hearstpapers, playing their publisher's favorite story and reputed personal scoop with great enthusiasm and unwonted decorum, exclusively declared: "Queen Mary has approved the proposed marriage of King Edward VIII and Mrs. Wallis Simpson.... The Queen Mother has promised to help iron out the difficulties of State. . . . King Edward, convinced of his right to marry the woman of his choice, will endeavor to have his brother, the Duke of York, declared heir to the Throne.*. . . King Edward has no intention of upsetting all court precedent by proclaiming Mrs. Simpson Queen, but is determined that, as his wife, she will share his life in all except royal functions of State.... He intends to make Mrs. Simpson the Countess of Renfrew."
¶Editor & Publisher, leading U. S. newspaper trade organ, disclosed last week that the story of the King & Mrs. Simpson has served to break much of the previous hold of British officialdom over foreign correspondents in the Kingdom. Once it would have been necessary to believe or affect to believe denials that the Archbishop of Canterbury had broached the subject of Mrs. Simpson to King Edward but today it has been found "necessary to handle the story on the basis that anything might happen and the only way to meet such developments is to follow every tip and attempt all known mediums to obtain news. This method resulted in the story about the Archbishops of Canterbury and York calling on the King. Three days of checking reports finally resulted in definite confirmation. . . .
"Reaching King Edward directly is impossible. His small group of assistants and secretaries say little. They are highly intelligent gentlemen trained for years in dealing with the press and presenting only the most favorable picture of the British Monarch. . . .
"Today no American reporter in London, except a few fortunate ones assigned exclusively to a financial run or sports, gets through the day without thinking about Mrs. Simpson and working on the story. . . . Reporting the Simpson story demands clear, deliberate thinking and the highest type of careful reporting because of the stringency of British libel laws. . . . The story never seems to end. It has been daily front page copy for weeks and will continue to be so for months, perhaps years."
¶Since many veteran foreign correspondents years ago settled into easy habits of skimming local papers for their stories and swiveling around in their chairs occasionally to telephone official sources, editors were inclined to view the King & Mrs. Simpson story this week as likely to give the foreign field a renaissance of brainwork, legwork and much wider gathering of carefully checked facts. It was most belatedly established last week, for example, that the fur-lined coat in which King Edward followed the bier of his father from Sandringham was the late King George's own fur-lined coat, and that His Majesty only put this on at the insistence of Mrs. Simpson.
"But I haven't a fur coat here!" expostulated the new King at first.