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, a.k.a. gossip columnist extraordinaire Cholly Knickerbocker, who wrote for the Hearst newspapers. Beebe was a fellow columnist and friend. It was Maury Paul who first coined the term café society, but it was Beebe who sold Hollywood the rights to use the term in a film title. Eve Brown, the author of this book, was Paul’s longtime assistant and successor after he died. Did she admire him? Mostly, yes, but she was aware of his faults, and she writes knowingly about the tremendous power he wielded as New York City’s premier gossip columnist. In the stories about his various feuds (including a hilarious one with Elsie de Wolfe) and his personal involvement in the tabloid stories of the day, there remain lessons to be learned. Friends of the column were treated infinitely better than enemies, actual truth be damned. Between the lines, there is gay subtext. The author refers to Paul’s beloved right-hand-man as “Adonis.” Moreover, it seems as if Paul’s much-ballyhooed dislike of Palm Beach was because he was once run out of that town on a morals charge.
“Society overlooks family skeletons, but it never forgives anyone who allows them to creep out of the closet and become public property.”
--Maury Paul