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After breakfast (orange juice, two eggs, and milk, but no coffee), he has another go at the Merry-Go-Round, on the trusty Corona his father gave him in 1922. He scans the Washington Post and the New York Times, the only papers he reads. Then he goes through the mail, checks with his staff (five secretaries and three legmen, Tom McNamara, Jack Anderson, Fred Blumenthal), and by late morning starts making the rounds in his Buick, bearing District license K-13. (He is sometimes tailed, he says, by Army, Navy or FBI cars.)
He drops in on such favorites as Senators Barkley, O'Mahoney and Bridges, Speaker Joe Martin and Speaker-to-be Sam Rayburn. He never bothers to visit Treasury Secretary John Snyder or Forrestal; they are on his long list of "enemies." Lunch is usually with politicos at his regular corner table at the Mayflower.
Back at the office in the afternoon, he goes over The Column, double-checking for libel, while Cinder, his black cat, sits on his desk. When the Merry-Go-Round, written three days in advance, is ready, it is teletyped to Manhattan and Pearson goes on his rounds again.
Call Michigan 4321. He drops in at cocktail parties, then heads back home for dinner with his blonde second wife, the former Luvie Moore. At home, Pearson uses "thee" and "thy" with his relatives, and at strictly family dinners, everybody joins hands while grace is said. The Pearsons also give many small champagne dinner parties. At other parties, the yawning Pearson often slips away to get his sleep—or pore over his files—leaving Luvie to come home later.
All day and far into the night, calls keep coming into the ten telephones at Michigan 4321. Sometimes at night Pearson imitates his Negro butler's voice on the phone until he is sure he wants to talk to the caller.
Pearson, who thrives on leaks from other offices, wants none from his own, and his $2,000-a-week payroll, including big salaries and fat expense accounts for his loyal staff, helps to keep it incorruptible. He suspects that his office wires are tapped. Sometimes, gags a legman, the line "has so many taps on it that we're thinking of selling spot announcements."
When they can, the Pearsons and Tyler Abell, Luvie's 16-year-old son, retreat to a 280-acre Maryland farm, 17 miles up the Potomac. The farm boasts a modernistic farmhouse, a rustic swimming pool, a 49-stall cowbarn, riding horses, and a Holstein bullock named Harry S. Truman. A prize Hampshire boar, Edward R. Stettinius, gets the pick of the garbage from the Georgetown house; Pearson takes it out with him in the car.
Skunk Trapper. The farm is Drew Pearson's only hobby—except for an incurable love of circuses. (Last spring he did a one-night turn as a clown with Ringling Bros.) When Pearson was a boy at Swarthmore, Pa., he had another (and perhaps prophetic hobby): trapping skunks. His father, a Methodist minister turned Quaker, was a speech professor at Swarthmore College. Drew and his brother Leon made their first pocket money trapping skunks in a patch of woods called Whiskey Run, then became door-to-door butter-&-egg men. Shy Drew always made Leon go up to the door and do the selling.