Short Takes: Readers Choice of the Best Columns of America's Favorite Newspaperman , livre ebook

Short Takes
by Damn Runyon

First published in 1948
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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SHORT TAKES


by Damon Runyon
NOTES FOR MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Insidious I
My autobiography, or life story, is one thing you canbet I will never write.
If I told the truth, a lot of persons, including myself,might go to jail. If I held out the truth or just told it halfway, a lot of my pals who now have confidence in me wouldbe saying:
"That Runyon is a scaredy-cat and a phony bum. As longas he was going to write his life at all, why didn't he writeit on the emmus." *
Of course an even more potent reason why I am nevergoing to write my own tale is that there is no sure moneyin that tripe. It is purely speculative. It might sell but theodds are against it.
It is pretty difficult to find a bookie in New York nowadaysto get a market on this proposition but I imagine theprice of publication against any book selling to a profit iseasily 50 to 1, depending on the author.
I think you could write your own ticket on an autobiography.
I am frankly a hired Hessian on the typewriter and havenever pretended to be anything else and when I write somethingI want to know in advance how much I am going tobe paid for it and when.
I am aware that there are many other writing fellows,especially in the newspaper columning dodge, who writeout of sheer altruism and who pick up their weekly wageenvelopes merely as a matter of form. But not ProfessorRunyon. The professor wants his. I think I am less spuriousthan those muggs who let on that their journalistic pursuitsare guided by motives far above mere gold.
However, a note from a publishing house which says it isinterested in my autobiography helps solve a mystery forme. For years I have been wondering who tells people towrite autobiographies. Many a time as I have skimmedthrough the pages of such a tome, I have said to myself,How can anybody as inconsequential in the world and withas little to say as this guy have the gall to spoil all this whitepaper?
Well, obviously the publishers tell them, which partlyabsolves a number of persons against whom I have beennursing the most sinister designs. I do not know who tellsthe publishers. That is something I am going to investigateat the earliest opportunity.
Maybe many a fellow is going along through life mindinghis own business and keeping his affairs to himself as heshould when some publisher or his representative sneaksup behind the poor bloke and whispers in his ear:
"Look—why not write your autobiography?"
That does it.
The fellow immediately becomes a frightful bore.
I say there ought to be a national committee to whichbook publishers should be required to submit the names ofpersons they contemplate asking for autobiographies, thecommittee to survey each candidate on his experiencesbefore a single line is permitted to be set down on paper.The approval of the committee should be something noteasily secured.
I do not think my material would ever pass on the basisof importance. My life has been made up of trivialities. Ihave accomplished no great deeds. I have met no considerablenumber of the high muck-a-mucks of the world,and when I did I was always too self-conscious to hear whatthey said.
Of course, I could tell about the time Butch Tower wasplaying vaudeville in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when afurniture dealers' convention was being held there and heshot craps on a blanket on the floor with them with suchsuccess that after examining both sides of the blanket andall sides of the dice, they suggested that Butch ought togive them a handicap by hanging the blanket on a lineacross the room like a sheet up to dry.
So the blanket was rigged like the walls of Jericho in themovie It Happened One Night when, as you probably remember,Clark Gable, the lucky dog, was in bed on one side ofthe blanket and Claudette Colbert was in bed on the otherside. And the furniture dealers made Butch stand on oneside of the blanket and which was hung head high and hurlthe dice plumb over it.
And what do you think happened? What do you thinkhappened?
Why, Butch cleaned those furniture dealers from top tobottom. If they had been betting their own merchandise,he would have been able to furnish a ten-room house.
* Meaning on the level. Hollywood talk.


Is Write Right?
There is the disquieting rumour going the rounds that theowners of the newspapers were contemplating an effortto take their publications back from the columnists. I wantto be on hand to protect my interests.
I hear the feeling among the newspaper owners is thatthey have given the columnists the personal and politicaland even the sociological freedom of their public prints longenough and that the owners would now like to use the spacefor other purposes, such as news and perhaps a little paidadvertising, a most presumptuous attitude on their part, asyou can see.
I am also informed many owners have been brooding overthe way some columnists pass out advertising gratis toprivate business enterprises. It seems these owners take theposition the enterprises used to contribute to the newspapercoffers before the free-loading became the fashion and mightbe induced to do so again if the liberality of the columnistscould be restrained.
It is said one owner has figured out that a certain concernthat formerly spent $100,000 a year in advertising with thenewspapers now saves $90,000 by hiring a press agent at$10,000 per annum to plant mention of it among thecolumnists, but even if this statement is true I think itreflects a mercenary spirit in the owner that is most reprehensible,and I hope and trust it is not shared by his fellows.
I am told that this unrest among the owners over thecolumnists started when an owner wanted to publish tothe world certain of his own opinions with reference tocurrent problems, believing the opinions to be right, or atleast worth submitting, only to find his newspaper had somany columnists there was no room for him.
Now while I don't think the owner had any legal rightto trespass on the columnists, I do think it would havebeen smart for one of them to move over a trifle and givehim a couple of inches. I mean look, fellow, the racket hasbeen pretty soft so why stir up those muggs?
This particular owner is noted for an inclination tosurliness on slight provocation and his exclusion causedhim to reflect, a thing that could have been avoided. Hereflected that his columnists are all contrary to his own andare in support of men and conditions that he believes falseand harmless and his reflection has brought him to theconclusion he has been a sucker to lend his typographicalresources to his opposition.
But even at that, he might have cooled out and forgottenthe incident had he not repaired to a famous night club tocontinue his reflection abaft a flagon of Scotch. He wasdenied admission on the ground the joint was filled upthough in the background he could see four or five of hiscolumnists at prominent tables.
This served to remind him of the frequency of theirmention, without charge, of this deadfall in his paper. Thenhe really sizzled. However, this phase of the situation comesunder the head of a bad break. Yet by the exercise of a littlediplomacy on the part of the columnists, the guy wouldnot have reached the night club in bad humour.
The columnists got possession of the newspapers someyears ago by promoting the theory that an owner whopermitted the promulgation of political and social opinionscontrary to his own through his paper was a great liberal.The owners were convinced that being known as liberalswas good for their souls and also for business. I am speakingof the hefty-thinking columnists, of course, not the lightweightslike myself. I got in a raincheck.
It is my thought that in sacrificing their own editorialvision and expression and their local news and the fruitsof their years of hard work and effort generally to thecolumnists, the owners were dopes, but naturally I will helpresist them to the death. I would hate to get thrown outand have a heavyweight like Lippmann land on top of me.


The Wisdom of not Being Wise
I am a lot smarter than I sometimes let on and when youread something of mine that seems to be an effort to putmyself away with my customers as a naive homespunfellow you may be pretty sure that afterwards I will begreatly ashamed of the attempted deception. I do not knowwhy I keep doing it. It must be force of habit.
I say attempted deception because I doubt that any of myreaders are ever deceived. They know there is nothingnaive or homespun about me, that on the contrary I amwiser than a tree full of owls, that I am hip to all dodges,larcenous and otherwise, and that I have been breathingagainst silk, as the saying is, for many years.
I doubt, too, that the contemporaries I often notice tryingthe same role are any more successful in hood-winking theirpublic. The average newspaper reader probably realizesthat a newspaperman who has achieved the distinction of abyline must have been around newspaper offices for sometime and that in newspaper offices are human beings ofordinary intelligence and some sophistication and that fromthem the writer fellow must have learned something of life,else he is a complete boob.
It could be I occas