For Maury was the last of the great society editors and newspaper arbiters of the formal world of wealth and fashion. Indeed, the function of society reporter practically perished with him. Neither he nor his “Cholly Knicker-bocker” column nor his incredible authority has any least counterpart in the modern scene. The great society editors have all vanished from the picture: Frank Leslie Baker, the amiable autocrat of the New York Times, (he used to be known as “Free Lunch” Baker to the impertinent, and rumor held that he had rubber pockets sewn in his tail coats to facilitate taking home food from bountiful affairs) is gone, and so is Charles Alexander, austere arbiter of the old and also vanished Boston Evening Transcript, and Howard White of the Herald Tribune is virtually in retirement. Indeed, the Herald Tribune itself has undergone a sea change toward the class of New Yorkers which gives it its best excuse for publication. Its “Personal Intelligence” column, once accounted the most valuable space in proportion to its size in any paper in the world, has been suppressed (only to be snapped up by the not-so-dumb New York Times simply as “Notes”), and the Tribune, on its society pages at least, is bravely skirmishing with the enemy in the Second World War, so that social identification is established for young ladies who “organized dinner dances to aid Poland” or otherwise contributed mightily to the war effort.
And with these curiosa toward in the rest of the newspaper world, Maury's own space on the Journal American is maintained precariously by a friend of the younger Mrs. Hearst and devoted largely to names which few readers have ever before encountered, let alone their persons.
In the light of these changes, none of which is for the better so far as the gusto of the New York scene is concerned, Miss Brown's chronicle of Paul's feuds, favorites, successes, failures, and pretensions, most of them preposterous, all of them hilarious, is a breath of the old times of only ten years ago. Miss Brown pulls no punches; she frankly admits that Paul's editorial and personal allegiance (they were the same thing) could be persuaded by sheer overwhelming expenditures of money and effrontery, as in the case of Mrs. Luara Corrigan, or that he was not above needling social characters into improbable antics for his own news beats, as in the case of the elopement of Charlotte Demerest and the Count Zichy, whom he encountered in the restaurant of the Plaza, personally escorted to City Hall, and afterward kept under secret wraps for twenty-four hours until he had set the town by the ears with his own exclusive story of their marriage. Nor does Miss Brown pull her own personal punches as when, and with every justification under heaven, she refers to “the ill-mannered Howard Shelly of the Daily Mirror, or touches upon the person and attainments of Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh as even the invincible Earl Wilson might well hesitate to do.
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