One Summer: America, 1927

Story , the flagship of this side of his operations, soon had monthly sales of 2.2 million. All the stories in True Story were candid and juicy, with ‘a yeasty undercurrent of sexual excitation’, in the words of one satisfied observer. It was Macfadden’s proud boast that not a word in True Story was fabricated. This claim caused Macfadden a certain amount of financial discomfort when a piece in 1927 called ‘The Revealing Kiss’, set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, turned out, by unfortunate chance, to contain the names of eight respectable citizens of that fair city. They sued, and Macfadden was forced to admit that True Story ’s stories were not in fact true at all and never had been.
    When tabloids became the rage, Macfadden launched the Graphic . Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, it produced a series of articles by him from beyond the grave. The Graphic became famous for a form of illustration of its own invention called the ‘composograph’, in which the faces of newsworthy figures were superimposed on the bodies of models who had been posed on sets to create arresting tableaux. The most celebrated of these visual creations came during annulment proceedings, earlier in 1927, between Edward W. ‘Daddy’ Browning and his young and dazzlingly erratic bride, affectionately known to all as Peaches, when the Graphic ran a photo showing (without any real attempt at plausibility) Peaches standing naked in the witness box. The Graphic sold an extra 250,000 copies that day. The New Yorker called the Graphic a ‘grotesque fungus’, but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, its circulation was nearing 600,000.
    For conventional newspapers, these were serious and worrying numbers. Most responded by becoming conspicuously more like tabloids themselves, in spirit if not presentation. Even the New York Times ,though still devotedly solemn and grey, found room for plenty of juicy stories throughout the decade and covered them with prose that was often nearly as feverish. So now when a murder like that of Albert Snyder came along, the result across all newspapers was something like a frenzy.
    It hardly mattered that the perpetrators were spectacularly inept – so much so that the writer and journalist Damon Runyon dubbed it the Dumbbell Murder Case – and that they were not particularly attractive or imaginative. It was enough that the case involved lust, infidelity, a heartless woman and a sash weight. These were the things that sold newspapers. The Snyder–Gray case received more column inches of coverage than any other crime of the era, and would not be exceeded for column inches until the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1935. In terms of its effect on popular culture, even the Lindbergh kidnapping couldn’t touch it.
    Trials in 1920s America were often amazingly speedy. Gray and Snyder were arraigned, indicted by a grand jury and in the dock barely a month after their arrest. A carnival atmosphere descended on the Queens County Court House, a building of classical grandeur in Long Island City. A hundred and thirty newspapers from across the nation and as far afield as Norway sent reporters. Western Union installed the biggest switchboard it had ever built – bigger than any used for a presidential convention or World Series. Outside the courthouse, lunch wagons set up along the kerb and souvenir sellers sold tiepins in the shape of sash weights for 10 cents each. Throngs of people turned up daily hoping to get seats inside. Those who failed seemed content to stand outside and stare at the building, knowing that important matters that they could not see or hear were being decided within. People of wealth and fashion turned up too, among them the Marquess of Queensberry and the unidentified wife of a US Supreme Court justice. Those fortunate enough to get seats inside were allowed to come forward at the conclusion of proceedings each day and inspect the veneratedexhibits in the case – the sash weight, picture wire and bottle of chloroform that featured in the evil deed. The News and Mirror ran as many as eight articles a day on the trial. If any especially riveting disclosures emerged during the day –