Champagne Cholly, Signed to Lucius Beebe
[Signed Presentation to Lucius Beebe] Brown, Eve. Champagne Cholly, The Life and Times of Maury Paul. First Edition. 1947 Book and dust jacket are both in very good minus condition—there is a taped repair to the hinge, and jacket shows a minor tear to the front cover, mild soiling, and minor chipping to the spine ends. Book is warmly inscribed on the half title page, “To Lucius Beebe: who covered much of the fame ‘beat’ and better than anyone, knows what this is all about. Eve Brown, April 1947.”
Lucius Beebe, to whom this copy is inscribed, appears throughout this intimate biography of Maury Paul, the Hearst columnist better known as Cholly Knickerbocker. A fellow columnist and friend, Beebe moved in the same rarefied world that Paul chronicled and helped define. Written by Paul’s longtime assistant and eventual successor, Eve Brown’s portrait is affectionate but far from uncritical. She writes knowingly about the extraordinary influence Paul wielded as New York’s premier gossip columnist, a man who could make reputations, destroy them, or simply reshape the facts to suit a better story. The book is filled with feuds, social maneuvering, and revealing glimpses of café society—an expression Paul himself coined. Read today, it offers a fascinating look at a vanished world where columnists rivaled politicians and movie stars in power and celebrity.
“Society overlooks family skeletons, but it never forgives anyone who allows them to creep out of the closet and become public property.”
--Maury Paul