The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [81]
None of this frugality is evident in Howard's private office, which is a loud version of an Oriental temple in redandblack lacquer and gilt, with a chandelier in the form of a Chinese lamp trailing red tassels. The walls are decorated with scrolls addressed to the publisher by admiring Celestials. They are long, vertical strips of parchment covered with large calligraphy, and Howard, who reads no Chinese but knows an English version of each of the texts by rote, likes to translate them for visitors. “The Chinese send them instead of autographed photographs,” he says. “That one there, for instance, is from my old friend Tong Shoyi, who was slated to be President of China if Wu Peifu had beaten the Kuomintang, but the Kuomintang beat Wu Peifu, and Tong Shoyi was killed by hatchet men in Shanghai. He was a great friend of Herbert Hoover's. The scroll says, 'To make love to a young woman is like feeding honey to a baby on the point of a knife.' “ In his house in the East Sixties, which looks something like a branch public library, he also has a Chinese room, and Mrs. Howard has a threehundredyearold Ningpo lacquer bed that was imported in a hundred and twentythree pieces, with directions in Chinese for putting it together. “The only Japanese stuff in my house,” Howard says, “is a dressingtable set of pigeon'sblood cloisonne that Mrs. Matsuoka gave Mrs. Howard.” Until recently, Mr. Matsuoka was the Japanese Foreign Minister.
The surface of the huge desk at which Howard works in his office, and which looks long enough for him to sleep on, is so brightly polished that it mirrors his face, and a caller sitting across from him may have the sensation of being talked at simultaneously by two identical faces, one perched on Howard's neck and the other spread out on the desk. There is always a small bowl of dark magenta carnations on the desk, and Howard usually has a carnation of the same shade in his lapel, day or night. When he dines out, he has been known to wear patentleather Russian boots, an evening cape, a red tie, a checked waistcoat, and a dinner jacket. His business suits are shortwaisted and doublebreasted, and have long, pointed lapels like the ears of an alert donkey. Although the suits in themselves are notable, people usually remember them only as accessories to his haberdashery. Beholders recall chiefly the winered shirts with large plaids of shrill green; the shirts of turquoiseandgold squares; the orange, mauve, and pistachio shirts; the shirts of jade, rust red, and tangerine, lovingly picked out with electric blue, and, invariably, the matching bow ties and pocket handkerchiefs cut from the shirting. A fascinated colored washroom attendant who once observed him in the clubhouse at Saratoga stared for a minute and then said with awe, “All that man need is a gold horseshoe front and back and he have the prettiest racing colors in America.”
Whenever Howard gets an idea he considers good, he walks into an office adjoining his own and tries it out on William W. Hawkins, chairman of the board of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, who has been his closest ally inside the organization since both were youngsters working for the Scripps wire service, the United Press, thirty years ago. Hawkins is a broadbodied, placid, redfaced man who gazes at you benignly through goldrimmed spectacles. There is nothing exotic about his office. It is traditionally Americanexecutive in motif, and is adorned with a large portrait of Will Rogers by Leon Gordon. Howard owns 13.2 per cent and Hawkins 6.6 per cent of the stock of the E. W. Scripps Company, which holds over fifty per cent of the voting stock of each of the more than fifty separately incorporated ScrippsHoward enterprises. According to its financial statement for 1939, the E.