New York Graphic
Encyclopedia
The New York Evening Graphic (not to be confused with the earlier Daily Graphic
) was a tabloid newspaper
published from 1924 to 1932 by Bernarr "Bodylove" Macfadden
. Exploitative and mendacious in its short life, the "pornoGraphic" defined tabloid journalism, launching the careers of Walter Winchell
, Louis Sobol, and sportswriter-turned-television host Ed Sullivan
.
and in Montreal, Quebec, the eldest son of an itinerant French Canadian war hero. Gauvreau, a high school
drop-out, began his journalism career as a cub reporter on the New Haven Journal-Courrier, - alongside part-time Yalies such as Sinclair Lewis
- during World War I
, and by 1919, had moved on to become the youngest managing editor in the history of the Hartford Courant, after only three years on the job. He was fired when an investigative project hit too close to the mark, embarrassing Boss Roraback - Connecticut's state Republican boss, utilities tycoon J. Henry Roraback. In 1924, Gauvreau made his way to New York to seek his fortune on The New York Times
under Carr Van Anda
, when, as he relates in My Last Million Readers, he was introduced to Macfadden through the publisher's editor in chief, Fulton Oursler
, an almost chance encounter which became "the most violent turning point of my life."
Macfadden announced the forthcoming Graphic in page announcements in New York papers as the most unique daily that would ever be seen since Johannes Gutenberg did his first printing. Behind this venture the publisher definitely had a new idea. If it had been possible to apply it to daily journalism. In all of its editorial branches, the Graphic might well have reached a million circulation in a comparatively short time. The plan was a revolutionary treatment of the news, influenced directly by True Story
, which had been Mcfadden's inspiration, and already had produced for him a great fortune. The magazine devoted itself entirely to stories of human experiences told in the first person, by those who had undergone them and eventually had a wide influence on important publications which copied the technique. As applied on the Graphic, the account of the man who had killed his wife was not to be written in the third person from a police report. The prisoner was to be interviewed and his confession printed under his own signature. The headline over such a story might have been:
by Walter Winchell
and when he quit in 1929, Louis Sobol. In 1931, Ed Sullivan
debuted his column, Ed Sullivan Sees Broadway. Film director Sam Fuller worked for The Graphic as a crime reporter.
The Graphic, which sported the motto "Nothing But the Truth", often exploited a montage technique known as the composograph
to create "photographs" of events it could not obtain actual photos of, such as Rudolph Valentino
's corpse, or Valentino's spirit being greeted in heaven by Enrico Caruso.
In his 1931 autobiographical novel, Hot News, Gauvreau's takes personal credit for the invention and for launching "a new chapter in the history of tabloid journalism". Gauvreau, the Graphic's contest editor Lester Cohen, and Fulton Oursler
, Macfadden Publications
' second-in-command, later claimed the images were intended to catch attention, present the news in pictorial form, and sell newspapers, but not to deceive. Gauvreau, however, said his staff had to create news to maintain its circulation, and composograph pictorials helped move things along. "We could no longer wait for calamities to happen. "Characters were built up and paraded. Hot news became the wild, blazing, delirious symptom of the time." Cohen credits art department staff member Harry Grogin as "the inventor of the composite picture." The New York Graphic, p. 97 (1964).
In 1929, TIME
magazine in a profile of Winchell, wrote:
homes, there to read it in polite seclusion. They have reason: the Graphic's gossip-purveying, scandal-scooping, staccato-styled Monday column, "Your Broadway
and Mine."
Further evidence that the Graphic was secretly enjoyed by the intelligentsia is provided by a 1929 Cole Porter
lyric, in which the heroine asks “Should I read Euripides
or continue with the Graphic?”
in 1981 called the trashy, enormously popular daily, "one of the low points in the history of American journalism", offering sample headlines: “Aged Romeo Wooed Stage Love with a Used Ring", “Weed Parties in Soldiers’ Love Nest", and “Two Women in Fight, One Stripped, Other Eats Bad Check". Yagoda quotes “one reader” as saying “The only value ever claimed for it was that it educated readers up to a point where they were able to understand the other tabloids.”
In 1930, Time, after saying that “Publisher Bernarr Macfadden's feelings are hurt by any suggestion that he or any of his publications are pornographic”, added that recent Graphic headlines included “Girls Need Sex Life for Beauty” and “Rudy Vallee Not So Hot In Love's Arms”.
Barry Popik notes that the New York Public Library
believed the Graphic to be trashy and didn't collect the issues, which are now lost.”
page, page, the Graphic had trouble securing advertisers who feared being associated with the scandal-fed image of the pornoGraphic. Some advertisers claimed the Graphic's readers had no buying power. By 1929, however, the Graphic's racy editorial had become mainstream in New York's tabloidia, but competition with papers such as the Tribune's Daily News, William Randolph Hearst
's Journal and New York Daily Mirror
had become cutthroat and the Graphic's cost structure was out of control. The Great Depression
further exacerbated the paper's economic troubles.
In Gauvreau's 1956 obit, TIME filed a choice anecdote illustrating his freewheeling indifference:
Some half-hearted attempts at implementing cost-cutting measures – re-use of crossword puzzle engravings, for example – served only to alienate its loyal readership, and a dispirited Gauvreau met secretly with Hearst and signed on to take the helm at the Mirror.
Having secured Winchell's services for the Mirror before he jumped ship, Gauvreau's every move was trumpeted by TIME:
Released from one tabloid hell, he entered another. Armed with Hearst's considerable checkbook, he then proceeded to gut the Graphic of its best remaining talent and, living up to his billing as a "freewheeling editor", set about implementing " the pledge of ' 90% entertainment and 10% news ', (accumulating) circulation ' by pushing into the back of my mind all that I had learned about the value of constructive news ' and by studying the techniques of the '(New York Daily)News. '".
As the Graphic began its final decline, Macfadden was also distracted by his risible and ultimately futile quest for the Republican
presidential nomination. The Graphic finally folded on July 7, 1932, after years of losses, as much as $
11,000,000, according to his wife and business partner, Mary Macfadden.
The Graphics demise was precipitated by pressure from other rising New York tabloids and financial pressures throughout Macfadden's faltering publishing empire. Author Helen MacGill Hughes draws on Gauvreau's Hotnews to conclude that Macfadden's late entry into the tabloid game was a key contributing factor in the Graphic's difficulty in competing with the New York genre's first movers, Patterson's Daily News and Hearst's Mirror: "What does seem probable, however, is that the latter two already had most of the advertising suited to the sort of readers that tabloids attract."
Guavreau never tired of reminiscing on the phenomenon that was "the newspaper that never was," dwelling at length on his remarkable experience in his 1931 novel Hot News, a second novel, The Scandal Monger in 1932 (the basis for Universal's Scandal for Sale, 1932, starring Charles Bickford
), his 1941 memoir, and later, in Dumbbells and Carrotstrips, a vilfying book on Macfadden himself, co-authored with Mary Macfadden, whom Bernarr Macfadden had sued for divorce in 1933.
Daily Graphic
The Daily Graphic: An Illustrated Evening Newspaper was the first American newspaper with daily illustrations. It was founded in New York in 1873 by a firm of Canadian engravers and began publication in March of that year...
) was a tabloid newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
published from 1924 to 1932 by Bernarr "Bodylove" Macfadden
Bernarr Macfadden
Bernarr Macfadden was an influential American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories...
. Exploitative and mendacious in its short life, the "pornoGraphic" defined tabloid journalism, launching the careers of Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell was an American newspaper and radio gossip commentator.-Professional career:Born Walter Weinschel in New York City, he left school in the sixth grade and started performing in a vaudeville troupe known as Gus Edwards' "Newsboys Sextet."His career in journalism was begun by posting...
, Louis Sobol, and sportswriter-turned-television host Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan
Edward Vincent "Ed" Sullivan was an American entertainment writer and television host, best known as the presenter of the TV variety show The Ed Sullivan Show. The show was broadcast from 1948 to 1971 , which made it one of the longest-running variety shows in U.S...
.
History
The New York Evening Graphics founding editor was investigative reporter Emile Gauvreau, a classic outsider who grew up in ConnecticutConnecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
and in Montreal, Quebec, the eldest son of an itinerant French Canadian war hero. Gauvreau, a high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
drop-out, began his journalism career as a cub reporter on the New Haven Journal-Courrier, - alongside part-time Yalies such as Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
- during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, and by 1919, had moved on to become the youngest managing editor in the history of the Hartford Courant, after only three years on the job. He was fired when an investigative project hit too close to the mark, embarrassing Boss Roraback - Connecticut's state Republican boss, utilities tycoon J. Henry Roraback. In 1924, Gauvreau made his way to New York to seek his fortune on The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
under Carr Van Anda
Carr Van Anda
Carr Vattel Van Anda was the managing editor of The New York Times under Adolph Ochs, from 1904 to 1932....
, when, as he relates in My Last Million Readers, he was introduced to Macfadden through the publisher's editor in chief, Fulton Oursler
Fulton Oursler
Charles Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an notable author of mysteries and detective fiction.-Life:...
, an almost chance encounter which became "the most violent turning point of my life."
"In a few moments he introduced me to Bernarr Macfadden. I was astonished to discover the physical culturalist, whom I had imagined to be a giant with bulging muscles was of medium height. He looked even smaller as he reclined behind his desk. He possessed sharp features, a rapid glance and was endowed with a certain quick intelligence, an ability to reach the core of a problem without wasting time.
"My departure from the Courant, as a result of the medical diploma-mill revelations had injected my name into newspaper stories of investigation. A number of those accounts pictured me as some sort of martyr. MacFadden, who had no use for doctors, quack or legitimate, was keenly interested in the fight I was waging. As a result of our conference I was engaged to organize an afternoon tabloid newspaper to be published in New York under the name The Truth.(...) He spoke of his projected newspaper as a crusading daily, which would tell the truth under all circumstances, and I listened to him with enthusiasm."
Macfadden announced the forthcoming Graphic in page announcements in New York papers as the most unique daily that would ever be seen since Johannes Gutenberg did his first printing. Behind this venture the publisher definitely had a new idea. If it had been possible to apply it to daily journalism. In all of its editorial branches, the Graphic might well have reached a million circulation in a comparatively short time. The plan was a revolutionary treatment of the news, influenced directly by True Story
True Story (magazine)
True Story was an American magazine published by Dorchester Publishing. It was the first of the confessions magazines genre, having launched in 1919...
, which had been Mcfadden's inspiration, and already had produced for him a great fortune. The magazine devoted itself entirely to stories of human experiences told in the first person, by those who had undergone them and eventually had a wide influence on important publications which copied the technique. As applied on the Graphic, the account of the man who had killed his wife was not to be written in the third person from a police report. The prisoner was to be interviewed and his confession printed under his own signature. The headline over such a story might have been:
I MURDERED MY WIFE
BECAUSE SHE COOKED
FISHBALLS FOR DINNER
I Told Her I Would Never
Eat Them Again But She
Defied Me To The End
by Jonathan Peters
Notable content
From the beginning, the paper featured a gossip columnGossip columnist
A gossip columnist is someone who writes a gossip column in a newspaper or magazine, especially a gossip magazine. Gossip columns are material written in a light, informal style, which relates the gossip columnist's opinions about the personal lives or conduct of celebrities from show business ,...
by Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell was an American newspaper and radio gossip commentator.-Professional career:Born Walter Weinschel in New York City, he left school in the sixth grade and started performing in a vaudeville troupe known as Gus Edwards' "Newsboys Sextet."His career in journalism was begun by posting...
and when he quit in 1929, Louis Sobol. In 1931, Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan
Edward Vincent "Ed" Sullivan was an American entertainment writer and television host, best known as the presenter of the TV variety show The Ed Sullivan Show. The show was broadcast from 1948 to 1971 , which made it one of the longest-running variety shows in U.S...
debuted his column, Ed Sullivan Sees Broadway. Film director Sam Fuller worked for The Graphic as a crime reporter.
The Graphic, which sported the motto "Nothing But the Truth", often exploited a montage technique known as the composograph
Composograph
Composograph refers to a forerunner method of photo manipulation and is a retouched photographic collage popularized by publisher and physical culture advocate Bernarr Macfadden in his New York Graphic in 1924....
to create "photographs" of events it could not obtain actual photos of, such as Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik...
's corpse, or Valentino's spirit being greeted in heaven by Enrico Caruso.
In his 1931 autobiographical novel, Hot News, Gauvreau's takes personal credit for the invention and for launching "a new chapter in the history of tabloid journalism". Gauvreau, the Graphic's contest editor Lester Cohen, and Fulton Oursler
Fulton Oursler
Charles Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an notable author of mysteries and detective fiction.-Life:...
, Macfadden Publications
Macfadden Publications
Macfadden Communications Group is a publisher of business magazines. It has a historical link with a company started in 1898 by Bernarr Macfadden that was one of the largest magazine publishers of the twentieth century.-Macfadden Publications:...
' second-in-command, later claimed the images were intended to catch attention, present the news in pictorial form, and sell newspapers, but not to deceive. Gauvreau, however, said his staff had to create news to maintain its circulation, and composograph pictorials helped move things along. "We could no longer wait for calamities to happen. "Characters were built up and paraded. Hot news became the wild, blazing, delirious symptom of the time." Cohen credits art department staff member Harry Grogin as "the inventor of the composite picture." The New York Graphic, p. 97 (1964).
In 1929, TIME
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine in a profile of Winchell, wrote:
Not all readers of that gum-chewers' sheetlet, theNew York Graphic, are gum-chewers. Some of them snuggle the pink-faced tabloid into Park Avenue
Park Avenue (Manhattan)
Park Avenue is a wide boulevard that carries north and southbound traffic in New York City borough of Manhattan. Through most of its length, it runs parallel to Madison Avenue to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east....
homes, there to read it in polite seclusion. They have reason: the Graphic's gossip-purveying, scandal-scooping, staccato-styled Monday column, "Your Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
and Mine."
Further evidence that the Graphic was secretly enjoyed by the intelligentsia is provided by a 1929 Cole Porter
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre...
lyric, in which the heroine asks “Should I read Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
or continue with the Graphic?”
Criticism
The Graphic was dubbed the "pornoGraphic" by critics of the time and Journalist Ben YagodaBen Yagoda
Ben Yagoda is a professor of journalism and English at the University of Delaware.Born to Louis Yagoda and the former Harriet Lewis, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and entered Yale University to study English in 1971...
in 1981 called the trashy, enormously popular daily, "one of the low points in the history of American journalism", offering sample headlines: “Aged Romeo Wooed Stage Love with a Used Ring", “Weed Parties in Soldiers’ Love Nest", and “Two Women in Fight, One Stripped, Other Eats Bad Check". Yagoda quotes “one reader” as saying “The only value ever claimed for it was that it educated readers up to a point where they were able to understand the other tabloids.”
In 1930, Time, after saying that “Publisher Bernarr Macfadden's feelings are hurt by any suggestion that he or any of his publications are pornographic”, added that recent Graphic headlines included “Girls Need Sex Life for Beauty” and “Rudy Vallee Not So Hot In Love's Arms”.
Barry Popik notes that the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
believed the Graphic to be trashy and didn't collect the issues, which are now lost.”
Decline
Despite the enormous popularity of its puzzle contests and lonely heartsPersonal advertisement
A personal or personal ad is an item or notice traditionally in the newspaper, similar to a classified ad but in nature. In British English it is also commonly known as an advert in a lonely hearts column. With its rise in popularity, the World Wide Web has also become a common medium for...
page, page, the Graphic had trouble securing advertisers who feared being associated with the scandal-fed image of the pornoGraphic. Some advertisers claimed the Graphic's readers had no buying power. By 1929, however, the Graphic's racy editorial had become mainstream in New York's tabloidia, but competition with papers such as the Tribune's Daily News, William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
's Journal and New York Daily Mirror
New York Daily Mirror
The New York Daily Mirror was an American morning tabloid newspaper first published on June 24, 1924, in New York City by the William Randolph Hearst organization as a contrast to their mainstream broadsheets, the Evening Journal and New York American, later consolidated into the New York Journal...
had become cutthroat and the Graphic's cost structure was out of control. The Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
further exacerbated the paper's economic troubles.
In Gauvreau's 1956 obit, TIME filed a choice anecdote illustrating his freewheeling indifference:
He "exposed" the Atlantic City beauty contest as a "frame-up," thereby pushing the total libel suits filed against the Graphic to $12 million. When the treasurer complained wistfully, Gauvreau cracked: "Take it out of my salary."
Some half-hearted attempts at implementing cost-cutting measures – re-use of crossword puzzle engravings, for example – served only to alienate its loyal readership, and a dispirited Gauvreau met secretly with Hearst and signed on to take the helm at the Mirror.
Having secured Winchell's services for the Mirror before he jumped ship, Gauvreau's every move was trumpeted by TIME:
" 'It probably won't be long before I'll become editor of another New York newspaper. I hope so, anyway. I have no intention of retiring at the age of 37. I resigned from the Graphic because I disagreed heartily with Mr. Macfadden on vital and essential matters of policies, not only of his newspaper but of his other publications as well. I would never work for Mr. Macfadden again under any circumstances.'"
"Further discourse on what he meant by "vital and essential matters of policies" Mr. Gauvreau would not give. Other newsmen guessed that Editor Gauvreau, a real newspaperman at heart and no Macfaddist, had gotten sick of the daily freak he had created to please Publisher Macfadden. The Graphic, a pink tabloid with the slogan "nothing but the truth," is scarcely newspaper. Torch murders, gang war, divorce cases, scandal, gossip, rumor, crime, are its main contents, dished up for an illiterate public with girl pictures, fantastic "composographs" and "editorials" by unique Bernarr Macfadden.
"As everyone knows, Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden's most famed magazines concern themselves with "confessions" of sex-conscious girls who go wrong, see the light, reform. They are: True Story, True Experiences, True Romances, Dream World. To comply with postal laws, intimate sex details are usually represented by three asterisks (* * *)."
Released from one tabloid hell, he entered another. Armed with Hearst's considerable checkbook, he then proceeded to gut the Graphic of its best remaining talent and, living up to his billing as a "freewheeling editor", set about implementing " the pledge of ' 90% entertainment and 10% news ', (accumulating) circulation ' by pushing into the back of my mind all that I had learned about the value of constructive news ' and by studying the techniques of the '(New York Daily)News. '".
As the Graphic began its final decline, Macfadden was also distracted by his risible and ultimately futile quest for the Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
presidential nomination. The Graphic finally folded on July 7, 1932, after years of losses, as much as $
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
11,000,000, according to his wife and business partner, Mary Macfadden.
The Graphics demise was precipitated by pressure from other rising New York tabloids and financial pressures throughout Macfadden's faltering publishing empire. Author Helen MacGill Hughes draws on Gauvreau's Hotnews to conclude that Macfadden's late entry into the tabloid game was a key contributing factor in the Graphic's difficulty in competing with the New York genre's first movers, Patterson's Daily News and Hearst's Mirror: "What does seem probable, however, is that the latter two already had most of the advertising suited to the sort of readers that tabloids attract."
Aftermath
Lester Cohen, the paper's contest editor and Gauvreau confidante, chronicled its rise and fall in his 1964 book, The New York Graphic: The world's Zaniest Newspaper:"The paper was doomed by Macfadden's temperament. But it had the most brilliant staff, I think, of any paper of its time. That staff lived on to make some of the history, some of the books, some of the entertainment of the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s.
"Lyon Mearon (one-time editor of True Story and other Macfadden publications) called the Graphic "the newspaper that never was." But one thing that it was, like all of life, an experiment - and on many of its days, the liveliest paper in town. "I closed the paper," Howard Swain said (he had become managing editor). One day in the spring of 1932, Mr. Macfadden called him up and said, "This thing has cost me seven million dollars and I've gotten tired."
"Gauvreau tried to make it sensational, Winchell tried to make it amusing, (Louis) Weitzenkorn tried to make it semirespectable, but it remained one thing overall: Macfadden.
Guavreau never tired of reminiscing on the phenomenon that was "the newspaper that never was," dwelling at length on his remarkable experience in his 1931 novel Hot News, a second novel, The Scandal Monger in 1932 (the basis for Universal's Scandal for Sale, 1932, starring Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford was an American actor best known for his supporting roles. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for The Song of Bernadette , The Farmer's Daughter , and Johnny Belinda...
), his 1941 memoir, and later, in Dumbbells and Carrotstrips, a vilfying book on Macfadden himself, co-authored with Mary Macfadden, whom Bernarr Macfadden had sued for divorce in 1933.
External links
- The Evening Graphic's Tabloid Reality
- TIME Magazine (1932): The Press: Colored Bodies
- My Last Million Readers by Emile Gauvreau
- Tabloids, Gossip, and Celebrity Journalism (bibliography)
- Sauce For The Gander-by Frank Mallen (The history of The New York Evening Graphic) Published 1954.