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Gunther's explanation for the financial situation: "I've eaten every book by the time it's published." He helps support "13 females," counting his secretary, relatives, and a cinnamon poodle named Josephine, has fixed expenses of $21,000 a year "before buying a single hamburger." More to the point, he prefers filet mignon. A check-grabbing bon vivant, he turns pale at the thought of scaling down his caviar-and-cognac way of life—and managed to stay in the pink in Russia, where caviar cost $1.35 a portion, cognac up to $2.25 a snifter. He wears custom-made suits from London and monogrammed shirts from Paris (though they do nothing for his built-in rumples). Asked his favorite color, Gunther beams: "Smoked salmon—Prunier's, of course, not Reuben's." Nor would Host Gunther dream of serving domestic champagne at his massive parties. For one gala, co-hosted at the Gun-thers' house by Claude Philippe of the Waldorf, liveried footmen carried scrolls to invite the 80 guests.
Child in a Hurry. John Joseph Gunther was born Aug. 3, 1901, in North Side Chicago. From his father, Eugene Mc-Clellan Gunther, a convivial drifter, he inherited big-boned bulk and heroic alcoholic capacity. From their schoolteacher-mother, Lisette Schoeninger Gunther, John and sister Jean took on lifelong respect for book learning. As a sickly eleven-year-old, John showed precocious talent as a rewriteman by compiling a children's encyclopedia from John Clark Ridpath's Cyclopedia of Universal History. Contents: "All the Necessary Statistics of the World," "World Battleships," "Greek and Roman Mythology with Genealogic Tables of Gods," "List of Species of World Animals."
Gunther remembers himself as "an appalling, monstrous child who wanted to do it all." In the Lake View High School magazine, he broke into type at 16 with an essay on the Russian Revolution. At 20, English Major Gunther wrote 20 U.S. publishers that he would review their books in a literary column he had started in the University of Chicago's Daily Maroon, followed up by soliciting puffs on the column from such critical luminaries as H. L. Mencken and Harry Hansen.
He was in such a hurry to be on his way that he left the university without bothering to pick up his Phi Beta Kappa key. In 1922, after a bicycling trip through Europe, he went confidently to work as a $15-a-week cub on the Chicago Daily News. When the Teapot Dome scandal broke in 1924, he landed one of his first out-of-town assignments by observing that none of the news stones said what Teapot Dome looked like. In a breathless Inside report from Wyoming that made Best News Stories of 1924 and foreshadowed a familiar Guntheresque ploy, he wrote: "Teapot Dome has no resemblance whatever to a teapot [or] to a dome."