Memoirs of a Great Editor

MORRILL GODDARD '85 CIRCULATION BUILDER AND A GENIUSOF MODERN JOURNALISM

MORRILL GODDARD had only two photographs taken of him in the 70 years of his life, ended last fortnight at his Maine Summer place. One he tore across its face, the plates of the other he ordered destroyed.

This was the man who for 50 years had dealt heavily in pictures, almost always sensational pictures—pictures which with their accompanying text produced the largest magazine circulation in the world-The American Weekly's 5,979,576 copies every Sunday.

To Goddard and his astonishing skill, the American Sunday newspaper is unendingly in debt, the magazine field along with it. He knew, possibly, with greater surety than any editor of his time, what interested people and why. On that knowledge he built a vast circulation and an enormously profitable property for Hearst (it made around $3,000,000 last year), with it earned for himself some $150,000 a year, and because of it he left behind a long, fabulous train of legend and fact about himself.

Fresh out of Dartmouth at 19, he landed in New York in the 'Bo's. Failing to get a job at once on the World, he decided to free-lance. He soon found the City Morgue was inadequately covered, hobnobbed there night after night with the one-legged keeper, "Peg Leg Fogarty," where he was in the way of so much news he quickly landed a staff job on the World. Of vast reportorial enterprise and resource, he became city editor when he was only 21 years old.

The World tried him out as Sunday editor within a year, where he began to experiment with the now familiar technique which he subsequently developed to such perfection. That is:

UNACCOUNTABLE DISAPPEARANCEOF LOUISVILLE PRETTY WIDOW

Young Mrs. McDowell Rogers Said Goodbye to Her Banker Friend, Stepped Downinto the Dark Cellar of the ApartmentHouse, Screamed Three Times and Vanished

"My idea," said Goddard to Hearst biographer John K. Winkler in about the only interview he ever gave, "was to give pictures that would focus and force the attention. Circulation began to go up, three and four and ten thousand a week. The more timid editors of the World sought to curb my layouts but the sales figures told the story and Mr. Pulitzer, after much pondering, stood back of me."

Young William Randolph Hearst arrived in town with a blank check on his patrimony of $7,500,000 around this time. A few weeks after he had bought the Journal, an artist's model walked into Goddard's office at the World, to earn, if she could, the price of a new hat by giving a tip.

Winkler continues:

" 'Mr. Goodard,' she exclaimed, 'there was a marvelous party last night in Jim Breese's studio! Mr. Breese and Stanford White were the hosts. At the end of the banquet they brought in a great big pie. Mr. White and Mr. Breese pulled ribbons and who should step out but Susie Johnson. And, Mr. Goddard, what that girl didn't have on!'

"Susie Johnson was also a model. Goddard drew what details he could from his visitor, and then turned his staff loose. The following Sunday he printed two pages of the startingly illustrated feature that came to be known as the 'The Girl in the Pie' story.

"Within a day or so Goddard received a message from Hearst asking him to luncheon Hearst offered him the Sunday editorship of the Journal and told him he would like to hire his entire staff.

"The new owner of the Journal seemed so inert, so bashful, so flaccid that Goddard hesitated.

" 'Your proposition might interest me, Mr. Hearst,' he explained, 'but I don't want to change a certainty for an uncertainty. Frankly, I doubt if you will last three months in this town.'

"Hearst smiled faintly and, without a word, reached into the pocket of his vest. He fished about and pulled out a piece of paper carelessly crumpled. This he tossed across the table. Goddard opened it and found it was a Wells, Fargo & Cos. draft for $35,000.

" 'Take all or any part of that,' said Hearst quietly. 'That ought to convince you I intend to remain in New York quite some time.' "

Goddard yielded to this persuasion; this raiding by Hearst of his rival's great editor was one of the skirmishes which precipitated the costly and now celebrated journalistic warfare between him and Pulitzer in the last years of the century. Goddard's seduction was almost immediately to Hearst's profit. Goddard's prowess helped send the Journal's circulation spectacularly forward; sometimes it was doubled weekly; in a year it had grown from 20,000 to 400,000.

Ever afterward Goddard was left completely to his own device—he was one member of the Hearst command never bothered with ukases or criticism. Hearst paid him large sums, but Goddard was conscientious to a degree, a characteristic a story told around the Hearst offices documents.

About 10 years ago, the tale goes, he decided he wanted more than the $3,000 weekly he was getting, and, without much difficulty negotiated a contract for $5,000. Some time afterward he decided he was working too strenuously (he was then around 60), needed three months' vacation a year. Instead of taking it on his new salary as he very easily might, he voluntarily proposed a new contract under which his salary would return again to $3,000.

Goddard made no speeches to journalism classes, received no degrees, lived quietly in Manhattan or on the water, latterly on a Canadian mine sweeper he bought and renamed the Rowena.

Fact is, the only relaxations of his own personal proscriptions against talking about himself occurred at meetings of TheAmerican Weekly sales staff each December, where for six years annually he discussed "What Interests People and Why," explained why he printed what he did in the magazine, discoursed speculatively about the psychology of human behavior and appetites.

Earlier in its history, complaints were frequent that the material in the Weekly was "sensational," a characterization Goddard was the first to admit—he maintained that "the great news events of history have been sensational," that "it was not possible to gather the audience" he did in any other way.

He maintained likewise that the Weekly, "in spite of its limited space, gives its readers more columns of informative, educational, religious and generally worthwhile matter than any publication in the world not dedicated to a special cause."

Great as Goddard's genius was, his formulae and techniques are now so well established that a lesser man could likely follow in his tracks without faltering. Hearst apparently has no doubts on that score; last week he made sure the Weekly would be editorially as vital as ever by naming as its editor Abraham Merritt, 52 years old, for 26 years Goddard's associate. Of him, Goddard recently wrote that he was the only man he'd ever found who "saw eye to eye with me in the magazine feature field," adding that sometimes when he picked up "an issue that Merritt had gotten out I have had to look it over twice to be sure it wasn't my own."

[This description of the career of one ofDartmouth's most successful graduates, butlittle known by the alumni, is reprintedfrom Tide, magazine of advertising andmarketing. Morrill Goddard '85 died July I.—ED.]

THIS STORY STARTED MORRILL GODDARD ON WAY TO FAME AND FORTUNE