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Swollen Mandarin. Cronin promises to relate, in future installments of People, the "even more trying times that were still ahead." But some Britons had already seen enough. Cassandra, the terrible-tempered columnist of the London Daily Mirror, dubbed Cronin "this swollen mandarin of backstairs protocol," and railed against his "miserable etiquette, his tawdry patronage and his backbiting desire to make money at the expense of his late employers." British butlerdom reeled with shock. Samuel Bretson, head of the nation's only school for butlers, was in despair at Cronin's repeating "tittle-tattle—and about the royals, too." Cried Bretson: "He is guilty of causing a shameful disturbance, and he didn't ought to have done it!"
The babbling butler's exposé seemingly closed all doors in Britain against him. But Thomas Albert Cronin could scarcely care less, at least for the moment. Last week he was in the U.S., appearing on Jack Paar's TV show, and wending his leisurely way to Florida, where he is promised another palace job: as a $17,000-a-year host at a jai alai palace in Dania, a tourist center north of Miami.