Oddballs & Eccentrics – Page 2

The Wickedest Man in the World

In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it

All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name, with all other free souls in Christendom, I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed me they pay not in thy name. Now, at last, I have thee: the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom. Thine hour is come; as I blot thee out from this earth, so surely shall the eclipse pass; and Light, Life, Love, and Liberty be once more the Law of Earth. Give thou place to me, O Jesus, thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus has arisen by the Magick of the Master, the Beast that is Man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six.

Then he condemned the frog to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and crucified, and it was done.

The Beast had landed in New York in late October 1914, after an uneventful voyage from Southampton aboard RMS Lusitania, and settled on West 36th Street. He had come to sell copies of his more esoteric published works to John Quinn, the lawyer and Maecenas of prewar New York.

Some thought Crowley a poet and adventurer. In 1900, he had scaled Mexico’s 17,000-foot extinct volcano Ixtacihuatl and the 14,000-foot Popocatepetl. A year later, he climbed the Himalayan peak known as K2, going higher than any man had before, without oxygen cylinders or elaborate equipment. In 1905, he attempted Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world.

But others knew him as an occultist. They thought him a fraud, pervert, traitor and black magician. Some whispered he was a Satanist. A few thought him the Antichrist.

Thus, Somerset Maugham’s The Magician, published in 1908, had presented Crowley, very thinly disguised, as the monstrous Oliver Haddo. After the book’s publication, Crowley murmured to Maugham, “I almost wish that you were an important writer.” He then published, under the pen name Oliver Haddo, an article illustrating Maugham’s flagrant plagiarism of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau as well as books on magic and medicine.

Edward Alexander Crowley (from early manhood he had used the Gaelic equivalent of his second name, Aleister) was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Warwickshire. He was the only son of a wealthy brewer. His parents were rigidly puritanical. Crowley seems to have been a difficult child: By his own admission, at the age of eleven, he tested his cat’s nine lives on Christmas Eve 1886 by poisoning, chloroforming, gassing and defenestrating the animal, which failed the test.

His father died while Crowley was young, and Aleister inherited 50,000 pounds when he came of age, roughly equivalent to two million dollars today. He went through it in fifteen years.

His talents were undeniable: He was intelligent, poetic, and skilled at mathematics, chess, and mountaineering. He was witty: During Crowley’s stay in America, Theodore Dreiser, hunting for the word for a young swan, asked Crowley, “What is it? What would you call a young swan?”

“Why not call him Alfred?” Crowley replied.

But he was unstable. Perhaps there was not one but many Crowleys. He seemed to imagine himself a different man at every moment: the English gentleman and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; the visionary; the mountaineer; the world teacher; the debauchee.

He was a superb poetic technician with an exquisite, jeweled Swinburnean style. He also delighted in inventing witty, if obscene, limericks on the spur of the moment. Thus, his clerihew on the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni de’Bazzi ended: “They called him Sodoma/ Which was not a misnomer.”

One may imagine where ends the poem whose lines include “my mistress, my Great Dane, and I,” or the content of “Necrophilia” and “A Ballad of Passive Paederasty.” Most of these appear in his best-known collection, White Stains, first published in 1898 by Leonard Smithers, then Britain’s leading pornographer.

He reacted to his parents’ religious fanaticism by rejecting Christianity. Yet his work’s effect relies on Scripture, even to his self-assumed title, from the 13th chapter of Revelations: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

He was fascinated by magic (or, as he spelled it, magick). This was wholly different from mere prestidigitation-the parlor tricks of a David Copperfield, for example. Crowleyan magic might be defined as the disciplined exercise of a wholly focused and trained consciousness upon a given task, summoning an occult force to influence the effects of natural law. This is done by a particular ritual which must be correctly performed at a cosmically suited time to put the desired force into action. As Francis King wrote in Ritual Magic in England, “All the adjuncts of Ceremonial Magic-lights, colors, circles, triangles, perfumes-are merely aids to concentrating the will of the magician into a blazing stream of pure energy.”

To these, Crowley added drugs and sex. He experimented with peyote and other psychedelic drugs long before Timothy Leary, or before Aldous Huxley wrote Doors of Perception. Crowley believed his lust drove him to commit acts of magic, not perversion. He wrote, “Some see a phallus in every church spire. Why not see a church spire in every phallus?”

It is simply factual that he engaged in animal sacrifice, heterosexual orgies, bloody scourgings, bestiality and sodomy. Though he considered his more intimate male relationships to be such as “the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life,” he did not shun promiscuous, anonymous bathhouse sex. He liked to think he had revived the religious mysteries of classical times and that his “Orgia,” whether with woman, man, dog or goat (or any three together) were like those in the Golden Age.

Yet despite what might seem (and what might have been) self-indulgence, he did not lack self-discipline: He had learned to meditate with a profoundly focused contemplation; he had learned yoga in Ceylon, mastering through the day-to-day drudgery and discomfort of repeated practice the positions, the breathing, the mantras by which he forced his mind into concentration.

But he lacked humility and true self-knowledge. His growing self-confidence swelled into megalomania, and he believed he had so developed his occult talents as to rise beyond the human: He wrote of passing over the Abyss, the gulf between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, and then of becoming first a Master, then a Magus, and finally Ipsissimus, which is to say a god.

Thus, according to Crowley, on April 8, 9 and 10, 1904, while he was in Egypt, a nonhuman entity named Aiwass dictated to him a prose-poem in three chapters totaling 65 pages, Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law. It referred to the Beast, who appears in the Book of Revelations, as the prince priest of a new age and to the Scarlet Woman as his partner. It enunciated the dogma, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Crowley saw this book as the basis of a post-Christian religion. To further its cause, he created an order, an occult fraternity (after all, a magician without an order is like a politician without a party). He borrowed from the ritual and degree structure of the Golden Dawn, in which he, William Butler Yeats, and others had been initiates, and drew on its teachings and practices, rewriting them into a more comprehensible form while grafting onto them his interests in yoga and other Oriental practices.

But he exhausted his funds, and so he came to New York. He published occasional articles in Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, including a series entitled, “The Revival of Magick.” More importantly, he was reintroduced to George Sylvester Viereck, a fine poet and writer who was also a hopeless Germanophile. Crowley, with his usual gratitude for material favors, described Viereck as approaching him “with extended hands, bulging eyes, and the kind of mouth which seems to have been an unfortunate afterthought.” Viereck offered him a job writing pro-German articles for the magazine The Fatherland, which was probably subsidized with German secret service funds. Crowley was also hired to edit another Viereck magazine, The International, which he largely wrote himself; it was the only salaried job he held in his life.

Crowley later argued he was in no sense a traitor to his country; rather, he was serving it by writing propaganda so silly as to bring Germany into disrepute. He might have been telling the truth. He wrote an article in which he compared the Kaiser to Parsifal. In another, he wrote about German air raids on London: “A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.”

In the meantime, he sought a Scarlet Woman to be his regular partner in acts of sex magic. Several of them came and went, more than one repelled by Crowley’s insistence on anal sex, which he called intercourse “by the unspeakable vessel.” He treated them without tenderness: One mistress, whom he named the “Dog-headed Hermes or Anubis,” was usually called the Dog for short; he called another the Camel.

In January 1919, he met Leah Hirsig, a New York City schoolteacher whom he found overpoweringly attractive, and asked her to be his Scarlet Woman. She accepted, no doubt considering this more agreeable than life in the classroom. Then he marked her with the Sign of the Beast. John Symonds, Crowley’s biographer and literary executor, wrote in The Great Beast, “He branded her breast with a Chinese dagger already heated in the fire, with the Mark of the Beast: the cross within the circle, or the sun, moon, and balls dependent.

Thereafter, they lived together at 63 Washington Square South.

He saw the third volume of his magazine, The Equinox, through the press. In December 1919, the Great Beast sailed for England, leaving a trail of bouncing checks.

Ahead lay his adventures in Sicily, where he attempted to perform a rite Herodotus had observed in a temple in Egypt of the Pharaohs: a priestess copulating with a goat. Leah, who may have endured as Scarlet Woman longer than anyone else, was more than willing. The goat, not having been brought up to respond to a human female, refused. “I atoned for the young He-goat at considerable length,” wrote Crowley in his diary.

Mussolini’s government expelled him, and he became a penniless wanderer, living on the fees and offerings of his followers, still writing, publishing and teaching. Even his signature became obscene, as he chose to form the A as a penis, with a small loop at the base of each arm of the letter. He went from one furnished room to another, spending his last two years in Hastings, a seaside resort town, at Netherwood, a boarding house run by a man with an odd sense of humor. His “House Rules” included:

Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts.

Breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. to the survivors of the Night.

The Hastings Borough Cemetery is five minutes walk away (ten minutes if carrying body), but only one minute as the Ghost flies.

Guests are requested not to cut down bodies from trees.

The Office has a certain amount of used clothing for sale, the property of guests who no have no longer any use for earthly raiment.

Here, the Ipsissimus died of bronchitis and cardiac degeneration on December 5, 1947. At his funeral in the chapel of the Brighton municipal crematorium, an old friend recited Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, including the violently pagan and erotic “Hymn to Pan,” and closed with this collect:

Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life has fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labor and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills.

Then they gave up his body to be burned.

New York Press, September 7, 1999

Albert Jay Nock, Superfluous Man

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In a sense Nock was describing himself.

His secrecy achieves epic grandeur in his brilliant autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). He does not disclose the place and year of his birth (Scranton; 1870), the names of his parents or the occupation of his father (Joseph Albert Nock, an Episcopal clergyman, and Emma Jay, a descendant of John Jay), the name of his college (St. Stephen’s, now Bard), his twelve years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage (he left his wife after his second son was born in 1905), or his brief career in minor league baseball. He felt such information was unnecessary. Memoirs, the book’s publisher noted, was a “purely literary and philosophical autobiography.” A reader might know Nock’s mind through his work without needing to know him.

To our culture, Nock’s secrecy is unnerving. When he worked for The Nation during World War I, he refused to provide his superiors with his home address. During the early twenties, when he was editing The Freeman (a peer of H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, Harold Ross’ New Yorker and Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair for consistently brilliant writing), his editorial staff believed, according to his literary editor, Van Wyck Brooks, that Nock could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park.

Nock read by the age of three. He taught himself in his father’s library until he was eight, when he began studying Latin and Greek with some slight assistance from his father. At fourteen he began formal classical studies while developing his taste for German beer and the local “alfalfa-fed” girls. Then he went to St. Stephen’s. According to Nock, the college was, outside of certain Jesuit institutions, “possibly the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” At graduation Nock felt himself prepared for living, albeit in proud ignorance of the natural sciences since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, or any history since 1500, including that of the United States. His education, he believed, had left him without a “lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away.”

Nock then bounced among universities, receiving an advanced degree almost by accident, and played minor league baseball. He was ordained in 1897 and served in various parishes until he left the priesthood in 1909. As a journeyman muckraker in New York, Nock wrote memorably about William Wirt’s experiments in progressive education in Gary, Indiana and the lynching of an African-American millworker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He knew offbeat reform politicians, including New York Governor Martin Glynn and Mayors William J. Gaynor of New York and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, Ohio.

In 1915, during the first year of WWI, Nock traveled to Europe as an agent of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. According to Michael Wreszin’s The Superfluous Anarchist, Nock was to investigate State Deptartment employees’ surreptitious cooperation with British agents. Apparently, Bryan had no one else he could trust. However, Nock returned to America on Bryan’s sudden resignation on June 9, 1915. What he found and would have told Bryan is unknown.

Nock then worked for The Nation, which so strongly opposed American intervention that the government closed it down. In 1920, he organized The Freeman, which he intended as a radical publication.

Great editors inspire great magazines. Nock claimed only two gifts as an executive. One was judgment of ability: he claimed, “I can smell out talent as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge.” The other was his belief that “a good executive’s job is to do nothing, and [one] can’t set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully.”

Nock never gave orders, assigned subjects or set general policy. He sought merely writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using “eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.” He told one would-be contributor, “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”

Nevertheless, the paper had a distinct point of view. When The Nation welcomed The Freeman to “the ranks of liberal journalism,” Nock replied that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful, “but we hain’t liberal. We loathes liberalism and loathes it hard…”

Within two years, success became a bore. On February 10, 1924 after an extended sick leave and a dispute with his backers, Nock announced the magazine would fold with the issue of March 4, 1924. A day later, he sailed for Brussels, his favorite city, where he largely remained for fifteen years.

In 1926 Nock published Jefferson, the first of three biographical studies that occupied him for the next thiteem years. Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics,dismissively suggested Nock had created a Jefferson with the inner vision, aspiration and values of Albert Jay Nock. Nonetheless, the critics found it “provocative and insightful” and “sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock’s inimitable prose style.”

After lecturing on education at Bard and the University of Virginia, Nock published The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). Education, to Nock, was a preparation for living, to see things as they are. Getting a living is merely a question of training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others: to Nock, this was simply a fact of nature, such as one’s height.

Nock argued that the distinction of education and training had been destroyed because the meanings of equality and democracy had been perverted. The first now meant “the rabid self-assertion…of ignorance and vulgarity.” Similarly, as he later wrote in Memoirs, “…the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. Hence, despite human experience, everybody must be educable.”

Nock’s intellectual framework shifted in 1932 when the self-professed radical and Jeffersonian stopped believing in the improvability of man. This was catalyzed by Ralph Adams Cram, a distinguished architect, whose essay, “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings,” appeared in the September 1932 issue of The American Mercury.

Cram’s reputation as an architect (he redesigned the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights) obscures his social criticism. In his essay, he argues that most men do not behave like human beings because they are not human. They are Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. In Cram’s view, the doctrine of progress—that the most recent stage of human development is superior to earlier stages—is unsupported by recorded history. Cram argued that anthropologists had erroneously categorized all men as human.

Nock soon professed his new faith. He wrote of momentary distress at seeing a man scavenging in a garbage pail. A few minutes later, he was undisturbed at seeing a dog do the same thing. Then he realized his erroneous presumption: that the man was a human being, rather than merely a man. Now, he no longer found any anomaly in a man’s behaving as a brute and not as a human being. To Nock, the distinction between the mob (which he called “mass-men”) and the few who were a glory to the human race (which he called the “Remnant”) was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Oddly, he claimed he no longer hated anyone or lost patience with anybody. He wrote in Memoirs, “One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them reveling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious… One can hate human beings…but one can’t hate subhuman creatures, or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly… If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, for you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity… The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil they do?”

In this frame of mind, he wrote Our Enemy, the State (1935). Nock saw the state as antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of “mass-men” to legalize their appropriation of the product of others’ work without compensation. Revolutions merely reapportioned “the use of the political means” for such exploitation. He argued that most liberal reforms, such as the income tax, merely enhanced state power to further exploitation. If “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism,” he asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

From 1933 to 1939 Nock contributed a current affairs column, “The State of the Union,” to The American Mercury. He consistently assaulted the New Deal’s swineries, both foreign and domestic, and after 1936 argued American foreign policy was conducted to provoke war. In 1941, he published “The Jewish Question in America,” a two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly. Wreszin calls it “subtle and restrained.” Indeed, the prose is elegantly polished; the tone is serenely analytical; the venue is respectable; and the argument favors excluding the Jews through apartheid. Nock claims, as Wreszin says, “that he wished to launch a meaningful dialogue whereby intelligent Americans might probe the bigotry that infested not merely the lower orders but all society…” He claims to be charting “quicksands and rock formations so the piers of some future structure might be secure.”

He argues that Jews, being Orientals, cannot understand or communicate with Americans, who are Occidental. He suggests the Jews have failed to know their place, and anticipates seeing the “Nuremberg Laws reenacted and enforced with vigor.” Finally, Nock dismisses criticism by claiming Jews would be peculiarly unable to understand his meaning.

Thereafter, fewer editors accepted Nock’s articles. He began appearing in Scribner’s Commentator, an odd mixture of general essays and Nazi apologia, until it folded after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he was reduced to reviewing books in the Review of Books, published by Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, a front for the few rightists openly opposed to the war after Pearl Harbor.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man appeared in 1943 to great praise. Clifton Fadiman, that most energetic of second-rank men of letters, wrote, “I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it. He is a rare bird, one of an almost extinct species, and as he very properly puts it, a superfluous man. We are not apt to see his like again.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Isabel Paterson wrote, “Whether for instruction or for entertainment, this is a unique book, of instant timeliness and permanent value.”

In Memoirs, published two years before his death, Nock wrote of being asked what he thought were the three most degrading occupations open to man. He replied that the first was holding office in a modern republic. The second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper. As for the third, he was unsure whether it was pimping or managing a whorehouse. He died on August 19, 1945, ten days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

New York Press, January 21, 2001

The Truth as You See It

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching

For example, the Daily News, first published on June 26, 1919, was founded by Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, an heir to the family that published the Chicago Tribune. Within five years its large photographs, wild headlines, and popular columnists had given the Daily News a circulation of 750,000, making it the most widely read daily in the United States. In 1924, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal and the New York American, declared war on Patterson by starting his own tabloid, the Daily Mirror.

But these papers, however sensational, still published something that could be recognized as news. Nothing had prepared journalism for Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Graphic.

Macfadden proved that material success can be won by the hard-working, ambitious, and utterly humorless. He was an ignoramus with the courage of his convictions, believing that whatever interested him would interest everybody else, and for an amazingly long time, he was largely right.

He was a graphomaniac health nut: during his long career, he published some 150 books on diet and fitness. He was also fixated on sex, although to call his focus on the human body an obsession is to lend glamor to a grimly Celtic fanaticism.

Bernard Adolphus McFadden was born near Mill Spring, Missouri on August 16, 1868. No one knows when or why he changed his name: one memoirist wrote, “…there was a legend around the Macfadden magazines…that the name was a misprint of Bernard, but that upon seeing it misspelled by a printer he had decided to keep it.”

He arrived in New York in 1894 after a brief stint as a professional wrestler with Sandow, the Strong Man. Four years later, already a vegetarian and non-drinker, Macfadden launched his first magazine, Physical Culture, from the Flatiron Building. At first he wrote most of the magazine himself, including its serialized novels. He also posed for the magazine in various stages of undress as an exemplar of Healthy American Manhood. He lectured, denounced alcohol and tobacco, and advocated fasting, natural healing, and exercise.

In 1912, his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture argued that all major illnesses, including polio, cancer, and Bright’s disease, could be cured by simple diets, water therapy, and modest exercises. One diet called for grapes—nothing but grapes—which Macfadden insisted would eradicate any cancer in the system.

His four marriages produced eight children, six of whom were daughters—Berwyn, Braunda, Beverly, Brynece, Byrne, and Beulah. They were a handsome family, and he loved publishing photographs of his children as representative of ideal American youth, often wearing costumes that Graphic reporter Lester Cohen later described as looking “like…a number of silk handkerchiefs, hanging here or there.”

Then he made his fortune. True Story began publication in 1918. It was the first modern true-confessions magazine. It warned young women against “random flirtations and promiscuous sex.”

One of his writers once asked an editor, “Can a heroine of True Story have sexual intercourse?”

“Yes,” the editor replied, “if she doesn’t enjoy it.”

Perhaps the greatest argument for Macfadden’s sanity is that, when the magazine’s sales dipped in 1920, he did a complete turnabout, publishing stories that placed a heavy emphasis on women who sought sexual gratification outside the bounds of marriage (although Macfadden still drew a conventional moral lesson from his characters’ unhappy lives).

At a time when most magazines still used illustrators, Macfadden used posed photographs of actors or models to illustrate his stories. He always admitted the photographs were posed, usually in microscopic type on the contents page. The mere use of photographs blurred the line between fiction and fact: many of his readers believed the stories were true.

True Story became enormously popular. It spawned legions of imitators. Then he started True Detective Stories and other gritty pulp magazines. He made $30 million within five years. This was not enough: he had to publish a New York City daily. Thus, on April 15, 1924, the New York Graphic hit the streets for the first time.

Of course, Macfadden’s paper would publish Nothing but the Truth: it said so on the masthead. He knew what the public wanted: after all, he’d succeeded with True Story and his other magazines. And it would be a crusading newspaper, fighting for health and physical fitness and against medical ignorance, fighting against the use of pharmaceuticals and against what he called “Prurient Prudery,” to advance “a new human race, free of inhibitions and free of the contamination of smallpox vaccine.” Within days, the joke was that the Graphic was for fornication, against vaccination.

Macfadden, then in his late fifties, was slender, beaky, and about five feet, six inches tall. He looked vaguely exotic: many thought he had Native American blood. He spoke with a bizarre accent: one listener compared it to a combination of Old Scotch and Choctaw.

Macfadden had assembled some interesting professional talent. Money can do that. His managing editor, Emile Gauvreau, had been editor of the Hartford Courant at twenty-six; his memoirs, My Last Million Readers, is a fine, racy impression of Twenties tabloid journalism. Macfadden’s greatest catch was an unknown, Walter Winchell. It was Winchell’s first job on a daily newspaper. He was the nightclub editor, sports columnist, and dramatic critic. Within months, his gossip column made him famous; within two years, it landed him a job with Hearst. Better than Macfadden, perhaps, he knew what “they” wanted.

Between his own genius, the keyhole journalism of Walter Winchell, and contests (the Graphic appears to have been the first American daily to offer cash prizes in crossword puzzle competitions), Gauvreau built circulation from 30,000 to 300,000 within two years. Headlines like “Nude Models and Students in Mad Revel at Paris Ball” and “Boys Spill Beans on Nude Coeds in Reservoir Swim” helped a lot.

So did the Composograph, “a depiction, posed in the Art Department, of a sensational real-life scene that…could not be photographed.” To Macfadden, it was simply the logical extension of the sort of thing that his magazines had done for years. His competitors found it fraudulent and unethical.

The tabloid photographers would do almost anything for a great shot. Thus, on January 12, 1928, Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer on assignment to the Daily News, concealed a miniature camera in his pants to illegally smuggle it into Sing Sing so that he could snap murderess Ruth Snyder, bound and hooded in Old Sparky, just as the executioner flipped the switch.

They were nearly two years behind the Graphic, which had used a Composograph to cover the execution of cop-killing post office bandit Gerald Chapman, whose polished manner had won him the tabloid nicknames “Gentleman Gerald” and “The Count of Gramercy Park.” Gus Schoenbaechler, a Graphic staff, posed as Chapman; his editor hung him from a steam pipe for the shot; Schoenbaechler nearly strangled himself when he accidentally kicked away the chair; and the picture made the Graphic’s front page on Tuesday, April 6, 1926.

More importantly for the Graphic’s prurient readership, as long as the darkroom held out, the Graphic could simply fake front page photographs showing celebrities in intimate situations, as in the misadventures of Daddy Browning and his child-bride, Peaches.

Edward West Browning (1875-1934) rose from office boy to real estate multimillionaire by the age of forty. He first appeared in the tabloids when his wife left him for the family dentist in 1924. He complained, “How can any sensible woman fall in love with a dentist, particularly with the dentist who has done her own work?” Mrs. Browning’s response was to allege Browning’s weakness for little girls.

The divorce settlement left Browning with custody of his adopted daughter Dorothy. Within a year of the divorce, Browning, claiming she needed a sister, advertised in the Herald Tribune for a “pretty, refined girl, about fourteen years old…” He allegedly interviewed 12,000 applicants over two weeks, bouncing the girls on his knee as he caressed and pinched them. Unfortunately, the successful candidate was soon exposed as a twenty-one-year-old impostor.

A year later, Browning met Frances Heenan at a sorority dance. The fifty-one-year-old was entranced by the fifteen year-old blonde. He said, “You look like peaches and cream to me! I’m going to call you Peaches.” The tabloids had already named him “Daddy.”

At five feet, seven inches and 145 pounds, Peaches was a healthy girl. Damon Runyon wrote, “She is…one of those large, patient blondes…her legs are what the boys call piano legs. They say she is fifteen, but she is developed enough to pass anywhere for twenty.”

They were married on April 11, 1926; on October 2, 1926, less than six months later, she marched out of their hotel lugging $30,000 worth of jewels, furs, gowns, and gifts while screaming, “Money isn’t everything!”

Daddy and Peaches each held numerous press conferences, at which they washed, as one writer commented, not only their dirty linen but their scanties and socks as well. Before their five-day divorce trial, Peaches confusingly claimed that: that he had forced her to perform unnatural acts, that she had had nightly relations with him “except when ill,” and that she had never slept with Browning at all.

At trial, Peaches testified that Browning had forced her to look at pornography and eat breakfast with him in the nude. He loved to hide behind doors and screens and then jump out naked to surprise her, shouting “Woof! Woof!”

Macfadden found this material irresistible. A flood of Composographs followed, such as one showing Daddy (discreetly in his pajamas) advancing on a cowering, towel-draped Peaches, saying “Woof! Woof! Don’t be a goof!” in an overhead comic-strip balloon while Daddy’s pet African honking gander, “perched on the marital bed,” comments “Honk! Honk! It’s the bonk!”

Peaches was awarded $350 a week in temporary alimony, cut off when the divorce was finalized.

The death of film star Rudolph Valentino, the Great Lover of the silent screen, made the Composograph almost infamous. Near the height of his fame, Valentino was only 31 when he died suddenly of peritonitis on August 23, 1926. There was an orgy of frenzied mourning, encouraged by the studios and the tabloids, with hysterical mobs shattering windows to get into Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue where Valentino’s body lay in state.

Macfadden sent two photographers to Campbell’s before the body’s arrival. Presumably after a distribution of appropriate gratuities, one photographer posed in Valentino’s empty casket. The other snapped away. While developing the photograph, the darkroom boys superimposed the actor’s head on the photographer’s body. Thus the Graphic had a picture of Valentino in the box before Campbell’s had finished embalming him. The boys also created a picture of Valentino on the operating table (Graphic staffer Lester Cohen later wrote that he recognized two fellow reporters among the “surgeons” and “nurses” in the photograph) and yet another, based on a medium’s vision, showing Valentino standing with Enrico Caruso in heaven as scores of dead souls ascend the stairway to the Pearly Gates.

Macfadden responded to one critic of this sort of thing by snapping, “What’s the harm in telling the public the truth as you see it? I ask you, sir!”

Macfadden never tired of pushing his nuttier ideas into the paper against Gauvreau’s better instincts. In 1928, Gauvreau, worn out by fighting with his boss, left the Graphic for peace and tranquillity as managing editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror, and the paper lost momentum with his departure. Macfadden, now convinced he should be President of the United States, further dissipated his energies by building a chain of newspapers and magazines to further his ambitions. Nearly all lost money.

On July 7, 1932, Macfadden folded the Graphic. In eight years, he had reportedly lost between seven and eleven million dollars. He never actually ran for President: in 1940, he ran for U.S. Senator from Florida in the Democratic primary, one of those old-fashioned races with sixteen candidates, and managed to poll a little over ten percent of the vote. A year later, the bankers took over Macfadden Publications and he was out.

In 1955, Macfadden was diagnosed with jaundice. Refusing all medical help, he trusted to fasting. He died on October 12, 1955—probably of his own prescription.

New York Press, January 11, 2000