Word: lait
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...next week, when Winchell returns from vacation to turn out froth and fripperies of his own, which are more spiteful and more readable. Turn of the Screw. One of the most prolific writers in the business, an expert in the sentimental, tough-guy school of prose, horn-rimmed Jack Lait has inherited Mark Bellinger's crown as king of the hacks. He figures that he has pounded out 1,500 short stories, besides 17 books, eight plays and millions of words of news. "Fiction," he rasps, "is a cinch, automatic. I just set the screw in my head...
...illusions about his stories' immortality, although he thinks that Book No. 17, New York: Confidential! (Ziff-Davis; $2.75), may last a little longer than some of the others. It is a cynical, side-of-the-mouth guidebook that prices everything from pizzerias to call girls; Lait wrote it with his nightclub columnist and protégé, Lee Mortimer (the man Sinatra socked). Having sold 20,000 copies in its first fortnight, and sold to the movies for $50,000, it is off to a better start than Lait's The Big House (200,000 copies...
Tough School. Jack Lait is one of the hard-schooled, shrewd, and devoted $52,000-a-year men who make the Hearst-papers what they are. Born in lower Manhattan, Lait went to school in Chicago with the late Eleanor Medill Patterson. He broke in on the police beat for the late Chicago American, covered the rise of gangs, lived through the rough & tumble Front Page days...
...graduated to the editorship of King Features Syndicate in Manhattan when a friendly Chicago cop telephoned him a mysterious summons in 1934. Lait rushed to Chicago and got his most famous scoop, standing a few feet away when G-men shot down Badman John Dillinger...
...years later Lait succeeded Walter Howey, a Chicago contemporary, as editor of the Mirror. Against the toughest competition in the country-the tabloid Daily News-he has doubled the Mirror's circulation (to 1,054,000 daily, 2,206,000 Sunday). Lait's Mirror has one big advantage over all other Hearstpapers: it is the only one that does not have to run Hearst editorials (because the afternoon Journal-American does...