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Show tfOAfiWAY AND MAIN STREET This Guy Khrustalev Must Have a Lot of Crust Making Fun of Poor Old Joe Stalin That Way 1"" " By BILLY ROSE Peaf J1" be so bold. I'd like to call your attention to a matter which Zmt iDatter' even thUgh U'3 been 6ettinS 8 lot of laughs l! c0 Namely, the recent efforts of your propaganda boys to win 1; a influence people in this part of the world. T Z instance, last winter's about how your engi- rsffe with ( whether you Act-minded peo-' peo-' rto thrive on ,,,, says be s Ma ; w we want to t"' i:k rt.1 Pi Li M exploded nothing but giggles. Time magazine reprinted the item as a gag, my chorus girls threatened to picket the Russian consulate, and the syndicate which handles my stuff picked up a few more papers ALL OF WHICH should have taught your word-wasters a lesson, but it didn't. A few days ago, someone mailed me the February issue of your magazine. Novy Mir (New World), and lo and surprise! In it was an article by one P. Khrustalev which, by way of documenting docu-menting the degeneracy of American Amer-ican culture, described me as "a gangster with three chins" who "murdered a man and grabbed his capital." took this, I assure you, as a plaudit rather than a potshot. On your way up, as I get it, you knocked off a couple of banks yourself, and since have undoubtedly undoubt-edly knocked off an opponent or three. Khrustalev, it was evident, meant to be complimentary when he word-painted me in the image of Soviet Citizen No. 1. All kidding aside, though, don't you think it's about time you sent for your typewriter assassins and pointed out that their releases are getting more howls than hosannas? And while you're at it, you might point out that Joe Goebbel's theory the bigger the lie the more apt it is to be believed only works with people who desperately want to believe be-lieve the lie. One thing more: I fraternally suggest you keep an eye on this Khrustalev fellow who said I had three chins. Such a man, in a reckless reck-less moment, might describe his premier as having two heads. Sincerely, Billy Rose said one of them. "Let them think they invented gunpowder." Some issues later, the same periodical ran another captious cartoon in which several Politburocrats were debating the question, "Shall we invent television now or wait until they perfect color?" As another, and admittedly picayune, pica-yune, example of what I'm getting at, let me tell you about my own experiences with your editors and copywriters. Every now and occasionally, as some idle-eye in your press division divi-sion has apparently noticed, I take a playful poke at your regime re-gime in my column an event which certainly doesn't figure to precipitate a crisis of state. But instead of filing it in the waste-basket waste-basket and going about their business, your name-callers have twice made the mistake of answering an-swering back and both times with the finesse of a lumberjack trying to tat. The first time, a year ago, both Pravda and Izvestia reported I was a "white slaver" and that my humpty-dumpty little cabaret was "the biggest bordello In the world." And as if that weren't enough, they went on to say that my partners in this enterprise were John Edgar Hoover and Bernard M. Baruch. Well, as might have been expected, ex-pected, this bombastic bombshell Z f when Billy Bo. jSt - . ole in the there were the recent hum-,Z hum-,Z which claimed that every S (ram the wheel to the fly Saucer had been Invented by a Kow. I can't doubt that I,., an important idea has been .ied between the Carpathians He Urals, but when your prop-Li, prop-Li, machine gives the rest of lm:i credit for nothing but the r,jy hop and the bubonic plague, , lot of (oiks who might otherwise ' h friendly begin to titter and . ,ven your legitimate claims get isst in the chuckle. OH MASS REACTIONS were jdtiy summed up a few months uo when The New Yorker car-,-dned a group of your agents in : cna discussing policy. "The main - ,g is to handle them with tact," |