• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The publisher freely volunteers advice to political candidates, plans complete careers for young women he has known three minutes, and for a year tormented a Russian portrait painter he knew with instructions for the improvement of a left eye in one of the painter's works. The maddened painter finally turned on him and shouted, “Yah, and I know who designs your shirts! The Congoleum Corporation of America!” As a matter of fact, Howard has them made for him by WalterMcCrory, on West Fortysixth Street. Howard's willingness to run things sometimes rises to the international plane. Matsuoka, whose wife sent Mrs. Howard the cloisonne, was chief of the Japanese delegation to Geneva at the time Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. Howard was also in Geneva then. “Matsuoka never could sell me on the idea of taking Japan out of the League of Nations,” Howard says, “but he tried like hell.” Another Japanese project of which Howard disapproves is the appointment of Wang Chingwei as puppet President of China. “I am personally acquainted with Wang Chingwei,” he says, “but I do not think he would make a good president.”

Howard prefers as friends men whom he considers leaders in their field. This includes not only businessmen like Barton, Bernard M. Baruch, and Bernard F. Gimbel but Howard Chandler Christy and Leon Gordon, the artists; Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster; Rex Beach, Rupert Hughes, John Erskine, and Hendrik Willem van Loon, the writers; and Kent Cooper, general manager of the Associated Press. Of the entire group, Baruch is the only one who might be called a representative of finance capital. Howard grew up in Indiana with a pious, Midwestern fear of Wall Street. In general he finds the Eastern or pseudoEnglish type of rich man a bit stiff and prefers the company of transplanted Midwesterners like himself. Many of his friends are members of the Dutch Treat Club, a sort of Kiwanis of the arts. Howard likes the Rotarian congeniality of the club and doubtless approves of the house rule that every man pays for his own lunch. He has a feminine reluctance to part with money for anything except clothes. Sometimes he tries to make this characteristic amusing, saying blithely, “I'm Scotch,” as one of his employees pays the fare for the taxi in which they have been riding or picks up a check for drinks. On other occasions, in restaurants, he determines the tip by dividing the amount of the check by ten and leaves the exact tithe, down to the penny. “The soandso gave us the worst service I ever saw in my life,” he is likely to say afterward.

The event in his life to which Howard most frequently refers in ordinary conversation is the time he had an audience, in 1933, with Hirohito, Emperor of Japan. This privilege, as the United Press was careful to explain in sending out Howard's account of the meeting, had never before been enjoyed by an American newspaperman. Howard was unfortunately unable to quote the Emperor in his newspapers, because court etiquette forbade it. However, his account of the colloquy, which ran on the front pages of all ScrippsHoward papers, left no doubt that the publisher had favorably impressed the Emperor. Howard often dates events by the momentous day. “That was two and a half years before my interview with the Emperor of Japan,” he will say to a woman he meets at a dinner party, while discussing almost anything, and one associate unkindly says that Howard thinks of the Christian era as something that began 1933 years before the historic encounter.

According to Howard's own story of the interview, Matsuoka, who, after maneuvering the Japanese out of the League of Nations at Geneva, barnstormed the United States in a dignified fashion, explaining Japan's position, suggested that the publisher come to Tokio sometime and meet the Mikado. One gathers that, having business there a few months later, he dropped in on Matsuoka casually and the statesman practically dragged him through the palace gates, insisting that Hirohito would be offended if he didn't