FYI

I ran across this article while perusing "Old Hollywood Scandals". Those who Love-love NY should find it amusing.

Kisses,
M~.

"April 21, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
New York's School for Scandal Sheets
By MARK CALDWELL

A LOT has been said lately about Jared Paul Stern, the contributor to The New York Post's Page Six gossip column who is accused of trying to extract $100,000 or so from a billionaire. Something that hasn't been mentioned, though, is how relatively puny his alleged misdeeds are when considered against the history of New York journalism. By comparison with the usual practices of New York's gossip-mad newspapers back in the buccaneering 1800's, the Page Six mess looks pallid, even a little genteel.
Consider the 1840's, when New Yorkers buried their avid noses in a series of short-lived scandal sheets with names like The Weekly Rake. Their items were juicy (including lush descriptions of brothel visits), and their intentions were purely larcenous. An example from an 1842 Rake: "Is there a man in town that requested another to shave his legs? Why did he make such a strange request??"
This wouldn't make news today, but it did then, and The Rake was after more than dirt. "We have received a detail of the whole affair," the item continued. "Shall we publish it??" Bald-faced blackmail, surely, the teasing question clearly intended to propel the victim posthaste on his hairless legs to the office, cash in hand.
Then there's Col. William d'Alton Mann, the godfather of American gossip. In 1891, after fighting at Gettysburg, then setting up as a newspaper editor and industrialist in Alabama, he moved to New York and took over a fuddy-duddy weekly, Town Topics. With all the excess of the Gilded-Age robber baron he essentially was, he turned it into a scandal sheet of a brazenness never equaled since.
Mann built a network of paid spies — disgruntled servants, musicians who played at balls for the rich and famous. They bore tales of flea infestations at the Metropolitan Opera; drunken dowagers crashing into tables at cotillions; a young Alice Roosevelt drinking and listening to dirty jokes.
Sometimes names were included, but for truly awful revelations, Mann concocted a new kind of item. It reported binges, adulteries and brawls in lavish detail, but without identifying the participants. Then, immediately following, a short item announced a harmless wedding, a dinner or a seasonal move to the country — naming the participants in the outrage just reported.
This delighted readers in the know, fended off libel prosecutions — and enabled Mann to engineer a huge blackmail scheme. Whenever something particularly explosive sailed over the transom, he dispatched an agent, who confronted the guilty with proof of their misdeeds and gave them a choice: Mann wouldn't publish the bombshell article if they paid in cash, bought ads in Town Topics or invested in its junk stock.
The humiliation wasn't over, though. Paid off, Mann replaced the canceled takedown with coverage so boot-lickingly adulatory as to be tantamount to a public receipt for hush money. And nobody was immune: in his 15-year reign of terror, Mann published items of such telltale fervency about two presidents, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt (what they may have been paying to hide hasn't come to light).
Mann acquired a Manhattan brownstone, a mansion in Morristown, N.J., and an island in the Adirondacks (the best that Mr. Stern's critics have been able to dig up thus far is a nice wardrobe and a modest-looking house in the Catskills). The New York elite loathed Mann, but he showed up everywhere they went, from Newport to Delmonico's, where he inhaled a gigantic daily meal.
Nothing could stop him, it seemed, until he ran up against the young Emily Post, years before she became the nation's etiquette doyenne. Post's husband, Edwin, had been keeping a chorus girl as his mistress. When Mann's inevitable agent showed up to apply the screws, Edwin apparently decided Emily was scarier than the colonel, and told her the sordid truth.
Unfazed, she sent him to the district attorney, who set up a sting and arrested the agent at Edwin's office. The ensuing press frenzy lasted nearly a year, ending in a sensational 1906 perjury trial, throughout which the colonel remained coolly defiant.
Acquitted, Mann went back to a somewhat chastened Town Topics. His trial was a watershed; blackmail and extortion became an occasional sideline rather than the gossip industry's raison d'être. Even the great tabloid wars of the 1920's and 30's, between The Daily News and Hearst's Daily Mirror, observed rules of decorum at which Mann in his heyday would have sneered.
And no doubt he would have shrugged at the accusations against Mr. Stern. After all, next to the scandalous past of New York gossip, the Page Six affair seems as unremarkable as an account of an Elks smoker.
Mark Caldwell, an English professor at Fordham University, is the author of 'New York Night: The Mystique and Its History'."