The ongoing Jeff Bezos/National Enquirer tussle is far from the first alleged blackmail scandal to involve a magazine.
In fairly modern memory, the trashy scandal magazine Confidential (1952 to 1958) faced its share, and then some, of blackmail and bribery accusations. In Confidential's case, the motive seems not to have been money per se, but scurrilous scoops — agreeing, for example, to withhold juicy tidbits about Celebrity A in return for juicier ones about Celebrity B. (For a lively account of Confidential’s short and sordid life, check out “Shocking True Story,” by Henry E. Scott.)
But the greatest of all such scandals involved the now forgotten magazine Town Topics and its colorful owner, Colonel William D’Alton Mann. Among the players in this turn-of-the-century farce: an assortment of the nation’s richest men, a U.S. president or two, and, our hero, a crusading magazine editor.
Con Mann
Colonel Mann was a complex character, to say the least. He’d trained as a civil engineer, served honorably on the Union side in the Civil War (hence the “Colonel”), patented a number of important inventions, made and lost a fortune in cottonseed oil, owned a couple of newspapers, and even been elected to the U.S. Congress from Alabama, although for some reason he never served. Contemporary newspaper photographs show him as a whiskery old codger but give little hint that he was, in fact, less grandfather than Godfather.
H.L. Mencken, who had some dealings with the Colonel, wrote in his memoir “My Life as Author and Editor” that, “I saw him off and on, and was greatly attracted by his grand air and shameless roguery, for swindlers of all sorts have always interested me.”
Town Topics, founded in 1879, was a New York weekly that covered the Manhattan scene for a sophisticated audience, making it a forerunner of a kind to today’s New Yorker and New York Magazine. While it offered a wide range of content, including well-regarded fiction and theater reviews, after Mann acquired the title in 1891, nearly half its pages were devoted to society gossip and scandal, according to magazine historian Frank Luther Mott.
“I have stuff locked in my safe that would turn New York upside down if published,” Mann reportedly bragged to one interviewer.
Mann’s shameless shenanigans, well known in New York society and journalism circles, came to national attention in 1904, courtesy of Collier’s Weekly. Apparently Robert Collier, son of the magazine’s owner, had been offended by a Town Topics item accusing Alice Roosevelt, the irrepressible daughter of President Teddy, of “wearing costly lingerie,” “indulging in fancy dances for the edification of men,” and “indulging freely in stimulants.”
Collier and his crusading editor Norman Hapgood collaborated on a one-paragraph takedown that called Town Topics “the most degraded paper of any prominence in the United States” and “a sewer-like sheet." They concluded by noting that its editor’s “standing among the people is somewhat worse than that of an ordinary forger, horse-thief, or second-story man.” They also implied that he had lower journalistic standards than William Randolph Hearst, apparently an even harsher criticism at the time.
Hapgood stayed on the attack into 1905, charging, among other things, that Town Topics made most of its money not through magazine sales but, “payments in other forms, induced by the dread of the paper’s innuendos. Sometimes men lend to Colonel Mann money which they know he will never repay. The town is full of his worthless notes.”
Hapgood also called attention to a more obscure Mann publication, Fads and Fancies of Representative Americans, an annual collection of adoring puff pieces about the rich and famous. Printed in a very limited edition, it was priced at the stunning sum of $1,500 (about $46,000 in today’s dollars).
The author Lucius Beebe, who devotes an entire chapter to Mann in his 1966 book “The Big Spenders,” described Fads and Fancies as a publication that, “even in an age that gladly paid top prices for flattery, must stand as a landmark of combined naïveté and opulence…. Printed in red and gold as well as conventional black letterpress on heavy vellum-type stock twenty-six by sixteen inches, each signed, numbered, and registered copy was bound in full green and gold morocco [leather] with end papers of heavy watered silk and top and sides of eighteen-karat gold leaf.”
Besides charging its subjects to be glorified in its pages, Fads and Fancies seems to have served another purpose: as a cover for Mann’s extortion enterprise. Society types who bought a copy, or several, could be assured that their scandals wouldn’t be aired in Town Topics. According to Hapgood, some buyers paid even more (as much as $10,000 in one poor rich woman’s case) depending on what Town Topics had on them. Ex-President Grover Cleveland was also on the subscription list, although what he paid for his copy (or why) appears to have gone unrecorded.
Eventually Mann had had enough of Hapgood’s taunts. To defend his good name, bad as it was, he filed a pair of $100,000 lawsuits against Collier’s, one on his own behalf and another on his magazine’s. He also managed to have the New York D.A. arrest Hapgood on a charge of criminal libel. The famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson came to bail Hapgood out.
Hapgood and his defense team were reportedly fearful at first that the case against him would be dismissed before going to trial, depriving them of the opportunity to expose Colonel Mann’s blackmails in open court. But they got their wish, and the case went to trial in early 1906. Among the spectators in the courtroom was Mark Twain, another author known to appreciate a good scoundrel.
Hapgood’s lawyers grilled Mann and his associates on the business practices behind Town Topics, as well as calling to the stand several of their blackmail targets. One presumably wealthy man testified that after he refused to buy a copy of Fads and Fancies, Mann’s sales agent told him, “You know the editor of Town Topics wields a trenchant pen, and he may not treat you so well in the future.”
Mann about town
Mann often did his own dirty work, according to George H. Douglas in his 1991 book, “The Smart Magazines.” Douglas writes, “It is said that he frequently took lunch at some favored society watering hole such as Delmonico’s where proofs of the next issue of his magazine would be delivered to him from the printers, ink not yet dry. When he saw in attendance some gay young blade or elderly rogue whose indiscretions had been set up in type he might call the culprit over for a drink and gently show him the copy that was ready to roll. If he found that his companion was horrified by the revelations or wanted them expunged forthwith, the kindly old Colonel obliged without questions asked…. It was just that some time later the Colonel might ask the same individual for a little loan, say of five thousand dollars — a loan that almost inevitably would never be repaid.”
Among Mann’s countless blackmail victims, none may have been richer or more prominent than the financier J.P. Morgan, who “lent” Mann $2,500 (about $71,000 in 2019 dollars). Jean Strouse, in her biography “Morgan: American Financier,” speculates that J.P. might have been trying to prevent further veiled references to his married mistress in Town Topics. After he’d come through with the cash, Strouse writes, “Town Topics continued in the late nineties to mention the financier in its business columns, usually with praise”
But, compared with some of his fellow fat cats, Morgan got a bargain. William C. Whitney was hit up for $10,000 ($280,000 in today’s dollars), William K. Vanderbilt for $25,000 ($705,000 today), and James R. Keene, a famous Wall Street operator, for $90,000 ($2.5 million today). All told, Mann admitted to “borrowing” some $200,000 ($5.6 million today).
It also emerged in court that Town Topics maintained an “immune list” of 40 to 50 society figures, business barons, and politicians who had apparently coughed up their dues and whose escapades were off limits for publication. Membership on the immune list wasn’t permanent, however, and seems to have required the occasional booster bribe in order to be maintained.
In late January 1906, Hapgood was found not guilty of libel. The jury had deliberated for all of nine minutes. Even the prosecutor, in summing up the case against him, had referred to Town Topics as a “vile sheet.” Mann’s lawsuits seem to have fizzled out, as well.
Forgotten Mann
Hapgood went on to other crusades and other magazines, including, ironically, a stint in the employ of William Randolph Hearst. Collier’s, its reputation burnished by the Mann affair, continued for another half century, before ending its run in 1957.
As to Colonel Mann, he was tried for perjury for his testimony in the Hapgood trial but acquitted. And while his blackmail operation may have been hampered by all the publicity, he continued to publish Town Topics until his death in 1920, at age 81. In the decades since, both he and his magazine have been all but forgotten, though he was the subject of a well-received 1965 biography, "The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons," by the late New Yorker writer Andy Logan.
Mann’s obituaries were mostly respectful, citing blackmail as just one of his many accomplishments. Some grudging admirers even held him up as a Robin Hood to the ruthless robber barons of his day — agreeing with the author and editor Elbert Hubbard, who once wrote that, “If any blame should be sent Mann’s way it should be because he let ‘em off so easy.”