THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Press’s Win-at-All-Cost Tradition Lives On

Tuesday night, several survivors of the newspaper business’ old days provided a glimpse of the way trials and Hollywood celebrity life were covered in the long-ago years before television.

The old-timers were the stars of a program called “News Through the Decades,” sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. It was held at a great old L.A. hangout, Les Freres Taix on Sunset Boulevard near Alvarado Street, just northwest of Downtown.

I’d gone there after a day at the O.J. Simpson trial, which, to critics, has come to exemplify today’s celebrity journalism media run amok, marching to tabloid television’s tune.

Except when the Simpson scene gets especially tawdry, as when Kato Kaelin was elevated to brief stardom, I have not shared this gloomy view.

Responsibility has never been a media strongpoint. When my career began, as the old days were ending, veteran co-workers taught me how to talk my way into crime scenes and to steal photographs from the homes of grieving widows and crime suspects. So when I was assigned to the Simpson circus, I saw it as another chapter of uninhibited journalism, no better or worse than what happened in the past.

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The reporters featured on the panel started in an era that began after World War II, and lasted through the ‘50s. Most of their generation had come back from the war to jobs at L.A.’s six dailies: the Herald Express, the Examiner, the Times, the Mirror, the old Daily News and the Hollywood Citizen-News. It was a low-pay business, but highly rewarding in terms of entertainment and excitement for young people who scorned the discipline and gray flannel suits of law offices and corporations.

A heroine of the time was Aggie Underwood, city editor of the Herald Express. She died several years ago, but she was at Les Freres Taix in spirit, and on a videotape made during her retirement by the journalism department of Cal State Northridge.

Underwood was a handsome woman, with a firm jaw and strong, clear eyes that could see through a reporter’s lame excuses. You never lied to her, recalled Times columnist Jack Smith, who worked for Underwood for three years.

On the videotape, she told about covering one of the most luridly reported trials of the 1940s, when Charlie Chaplin was accused of fathering the child of a young actress.

Newspaper photographers, with their bulky, flashbulb-equipped Speed Graphics, were often allowed in the courtrooms by friendly judges.

At the request of her boss, Underwood asked Chaplin if he would move his feet under the defendant’s table, mimicking a famous dance he did in a movie. Since Underwood was friendly with Chaplin, he agreed, and the photog shot his feet. Nobody could figure out why the photographer was aiming his camera under the table until they saw a display of Chaplin’s dancing feet on the Herald’s front page.

Every big trial sent the papers into win-at-any-cost competition. One of the most fiercely covered was the trial of a prominent physician, Dr. Bernard Finch and his beautiful girlfriend, Carol Tregoff, for the murder of Finch’s wife.

Lou Mack, then an Examiner photographer, was under pressure from his tyrannical city editor, Jim Richardson, known as “the last of the terrible men,” to get a picture of Finch and Tregoff having lunch together. The lovers shared a meal during noontime breaks of the trial.

Lawyer Grant Cooper had taken steps to give the couple privacy but Mack found their luncheon room and noticed a slight opening in the door that gave him a partial view of Finch and Tregoff. He fired away with his Speed Graphic and the forbidden picture was on Page 1 of the Examiner the next morning.

Judge Lance A. Ito would have barred Mack from the courthouse, but the photographer was a hero in the bars where reporters and photographers hung out.

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The first sign that the era would not last came in 1949, ironically just as it was beginning.

Three-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell into a deep narrow well in a field on what is now part of the San Marino High School campus. A young television reporter, Stan Chambers of KTLA Channel 5, was on the air live for 27 1/2 hours through the weekend. It was, Chambers said, the first time viewers had been caught up in a long, live television drama. “They were part of it,” he said. They grieved when they learned she had died.

Over at the Examiner, Richardson dispatched a young reporter, Erwin Baker, to the scene. Sheriff’s deputies barred Baker from the field. Chambers and the Channel 5 crew were the only ones allowed. Watch it on television, Baker was told.

He reported back to Richardson, who exploded. Abandoning his post at the Examiner city desk, Richardson hurried out to San Marino and demanded access to the well. But “the last of the terrible men,” who had made mayors and governors quiver with fear, was turned away.

Television was on its way. Eventually, the Times was the only one of the six competing daily metropolitan papers left. But, as the Simpson story has shown, L.A.’s tradition of win-at-all-cost journalism continues to flourish, kept alive by an endless supply of celebrities and a public hunger for every bit of dirt about them.