Kuhn, Irene Corbally (1898–1995)

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Kuhn, Irene Corbally (1898–1995)

American journalist who gained her reputation in the 1920s and 1930s as a foreign correspondent and feature writer. Born Irene Corbally on January 15, 1898, in New York City; died at the Brian Crest-Deaconess Nursing Home in Concord, Massachusetts, on December 30, 1995; daughter of Patrick J. Corbally and Josephine (Connor) Corbally; attended Packard Business School, Marymount College (Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson), and Extension Division, Columbia University; married Bert L. Kuhn, on June 11, 1922 (died 1926); children: Rene Leilani (b. 1923).

Started out as reporter on the Syracuse Herald (1920); wrote for the New York Daily News (1920), Chicago Tribune (European edition, Paris, 1921–22), Evening Star (Shanghai, 1922–26); served as a foreign correspondent for Hearst Wire Service and International News Service, Honolulu and Shanghai (1923–26); worked as broadcaster, station KRC Shanghai (1924); wrote for the New York Daily Mirror (1926), New York Daily News (1927–28, 1930), Honolulu Star-Bulletin (1929–30); was a scriptwriter for 20th Century-Fox (1931–32), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1932–33), Paramount (1939); worked as feature writer, New York World-Telegram (1933–35); was an executive and commentator, National Broadcasting Company (1940–49); was a columnist for King Features Syndicate (1953–69); was a columnist, Columbia Features, Inc. (1970); contributed reminiscences to Gourmet magazine (1970s–80s).

Selected writings:

Assigned to Adventure (Grosset and Dunlap, 1938); (with Raymond J. DeJaeger) The Enemy Within (Doubleday, 1952).

The story of Irene Corbally Kuhn transports one back to the whirlwind days of cutthroat journalism so ably portrayed in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play The Front Page. It was a world of glamorous aviators and sensational murder trials, of international playboys and Asian warlords, where journalists mixed copy-desk camaraderie and hard drinking with fierce competition. In this world, Irene Kuhn thrived. In her career, she gathered a number of "firsts" after her name, some quite unusual: the first woman ever to broadcast in the Orient; probably the first female announcer in radio; the first woman vice-president of the Overseas Press Club; the first individual to broadcast from a U.S. Navy vessel; the first person to broadcast from liberated Shanghai; the first woman reporter sent to Manila; and the first woman to write for the Stars and Stripes.

Irene Corbally Kuhn was born on January 15, 1898, in New York City, the daughter of Patrick J. and Josephine Connor Corbally . She grew up in Greenwich Village in a large brown-stone house which her family shared with relatives. Writes her fellow journalist Ishbel Ross , Greenwich Village then "really was a village, with backyard gardens, trees in the streets, band concerts in the parks and May parties in Central Park on Saturdays, reached by chartered trolley cars with ribbons flying from their poles. The horse cars used to jog and jingle through West Houston Street, where [Kuhn] was born, a stone's throw from her maternal grandfather's cooperage shop, established by him around Civil War time."

Irene received her early education in Roman Catholic schools. Her first journalistic experience was a column, "I'll Tell the World," in a neighborhood paper, the Greenwich Village Home News. Here, she acquired a taste for newspaper life that never left her. At age 16, before she had finished high school, she enrolled at New York's Packard Business School. Secretarial training, she believed, would provide her with writing skills while introducing her to that mysterious entity called "life." After seven months of studying stenography, she secured her first job at a salary of nine dollars per week.

After a series of minor positions, Kuhn became secretary to William J. Geis, professor of biological chemistry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Geis not only convinced her of the need for a formal education, he obtained a fellowship for her at Mary-mount College in Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson, a school directed by French nuns for girls of wealthy families. Enrolling in the fall of 1918, Kuhn dropped out after a term, finding the school too elitist and upperclass. Returning to New York City, she took courses at the Extension Division of Columbia University.

By then she dreamed of working for a New York City newspaper. An acquaintance in the profession, Crosby Grant, recommended that she first obtain "cub" experience in an upstate city. Moreover, Grant was able to secure Kuhn her first reporting job. In 1920, she was hired by the Syracuse Herald at a salary of $18 a week. So green, she said, that "she didn't know copy paper from cleansing tissue," she began as a contributor to its "Inquiring Reporter" column. Thriving on the competition, she later wrote of "the old-school training":

hard, unyielding discipline, little praise, much work, long hours, short pay. If you like the business you gloried in it and survived to prosper—at least, to have a swell time and do work that was a credit to yourself and your paper. If you didn't like the work and couldn't take the training you were fired before you had a chance to quit.

After six months in Syracuse, Kuhn was hired by the newly founded New York Daily News. City editor Philipp Payne taught her that the reactions of the "gum-chewers" were virtually the same as the upper classes "except that the former are more honest." Commenting about the News, she wrote:

Here was the movie scenarist's dream of a newspaper, with everything moving at top speed, telephones jangling from every desk, voices shouting, boys scrambling for copy, everybody in the way, people slamming at typewriters, not enough chairs or desks to go around, reporters sitting in each other's laps. But not for long. For everybody, everything, was on the move in the fastest tempo I've ever seen.

I would not give up one heartache, or trade any part of the agony, for a chance to live my life again in security and peace. To live close to reality is really to live.
—Irene Corbally Kuhn

In 1921, laid off during a typical seasonal retrenchment, Kuhn went to Paris. For a brief time, she was hired to write advertising copy for an American manufacturer of perfumes and patent medicine, but the job was amorphous, her employer unreliable. She was soon fired. Armed with letters of recommendation from Payne to various American papers in Paris, she was hired by Floyd Gibbons, the flamboyant correspondent of the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. Her starting salary was equivalent to 90 American dollars a month. Rosemary Carr , the fashion editor, was just leaving the paper to marry poet Stephen Vincent Benét; Kuhn volunteered to fill the slot. Soon, she was covering fashionable Deauville in clothes borrowed from couturiers for modeling purposes. A general all-around reporter as well, Kuhn wrote on such topics as the marriage of a "tin plate" fortune heir to the daughter of a Russian grand duchess, an evening of music and Dada art at the Galerie Montaigne, and life among U.S. troops stationed in Germany. She chased a prominent draft dodger, Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, all over Switzerland to get his story.

In 1922, Kuhn resigned from the Tribune to accompany Peggy Hull , a prominent war correspondent, to Shanghai. Arriving in the middle of the New Year holidays, Kuhn had about $50 in gold, of which $36 was spent on three days lodging. Just as the shutters were being taken down from the shop windows and businesses began to open, she met Herbert Webb, editor of the China Press, who hired her as feature editor for the Evening Star. Both the Star and Press were owned by a shady opium dealer who later found legitimacy as a civic leader and real estate operator. On her first day at work, she met a news editor, Bert L. Kuhn, who had written for the Chicago Tribune, had been city editor of the

Manila Bulletin, and was currently news editor of the China Press. Married in June, the couple lived in relative luxury. The household staff consisted of a Number One Boy, cook, cook's assistant, coolie, gardener, laundress, and personal rickshaw boy.

Soon after their marriage, the Kuhns obtained a year's leave of absence from their papers and sailed for Hawaii. Irene, now pregnant, wanted to have her baby on American soil. In Honolulu, both did newspaper work, Irene for Hearst's International News Service (INS) and Bert for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Three days before the baby (Rene Leilani Kuhn ) was born, Irene scooped the Associated and United presses in covering a great tidal wave that crested at Haleiwa, 30 miles from Honolulu. The wave flooded many villages, damaged plantations, and tore out a section of the railroad. Writing her story on February 3, just as she was about to deliver her child, she then rushed to the maternity ward. Wrote Kuhn of her bonus from INS: "On March 2 the cheque arrived. It was for fifty dollars, and it paid for the baby."

Six months later, Bert's restlessness took the family back to Shanghai. When radio came to China in 1924, Kuhn was its first female voice. Facilities were primitive. They operated out of Shanghai's China Press offices. Wrote Kuhn:

We draped heavy cambric sheets across walls and ceiling of a cubicle opposite the editorial room. We set up a wall telephone which had to be "cranked," and which was connected directly to the transmitting station a few miles away. [Roy] Delay [the station manager] installed a microphone and a wheezy portable gramophone with a dozen or so records.

In an article for the China Press, Kuhn predicted that "the introduction of a small instrument which can bridge this gap of the human voice may change the entire fortune of China." She interviewed a variety of people over the airwaves, including Chiang Kai-shek, the future Mme. Chiang Kai-shek (Song Meiling ), and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger , who was in China to advance her cause.

On May 30, 1925, riots broke out in Shanghai after Sikh police shot into a mob of some 3,000 Chinese students storming a police station; they were protesting the convictions of Chinese strikers who had left their work in Japanese-owned cotton mills. "That volley of rifle-fire, dropping six students in sudden death," wrote Kuhn, "created such anti-foreign feeling as had not been known since the bloody days of the Boxer rising in Peking many years before." The next day, she said, the city was like an armed camp. Kuhn helped organize the Women's Volunteer Motor Canteen Service, which took food and drink to the international force of volunteers and marines doing outpost duty around the settlement.

The Kuhns felt themselves in danger. The household staff quit. Their nurse vanished one night, returning badly beaten. Taking four-hour shifts, one would work while the other stayed at home, watching the baby, cooking from cans set over electric grills, and guarding the house with a gun. To compound their troubles, new owners had taken over the China Press and were attempting to break their contracts. In the late fall of 1925, Irene sailed for America with her baby. During a stopover in Vancouver, just an hour before sailing time, she learned that her husband had died. The medical report simply mentioned "unknown causes." Bert had worked secretly for U.S. Naval Intelligence, and Irene could not help but link this activity to his death.

Irene Kuhn freelanced for six months in Chicago, then in July 1926 was hired by Phil Payne, who had moved to the New York Daily Mirror, a new Hearst tabloid. Now something of a celebrity, at least among reporters, Kuhn covered the Hall-[Eleanor] Mills and Snyder-Gray murder cases, interviewing murderer Ruth Snyder in the process. Kuhn was assigned to the flight of Charles A. Lindbergh and the trial of Leonard Cline, a talented journalist who shot a friend while drunk and later committed suicide. A year later, she went back to the New York Daily News, where she remained for two years.

In the fall of 1929, Kuhn took a leave of absence. She and six-year-old Rene returned to Honolulu, spending a year there while Irene wrote a beach column and reported police news for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. In March 1930, she returned once again to the News, where she was the only woman involved in rewriting on a New York paper. She also covered a major Washington social rivalry, the Frances ("Peaches") Heenan and Edward ("Daddy") Browning divorce, and various other scandals.

In 1931, Kuhn moved to Hollywood to write scenarios for the new "talking pictures." Attracted by the large salaries, she first worked for 20th Century-Fox, where she was "weaving plots which high-powered script writers embellished with dialogue and business," she said, "but getting nary a 'screen credit' with which to further my career elsewhere." In 1932, she began a year at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and in 1939 did a brief stint for Paramount. Her experiences, she remarked, ran true to form; she made a "grand entrance," then "suffered immediate and complete obliteration except on the payroll."

While vacationing in New York in 1933, Kuhn accepted an invitation from Roy W. Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, to become a feature writer for the New York World-Telegram. She stayed with the paper for two years. Out of her varied experiences came her autobiography, Assigned to Adventure (1938), the first such work ever written by a newspaperwoman. The book offered a rare view of American journalism during the inter-war period, and included some deftly drawn portraits of press personalities.

Heenan, Frances (b. 1911)

Subject of a 1926 scandal. Name variations: Peaches Browning. Born Frances Heenan in 1911; married Edward West Browning (a real estate magnate), on April 10, 1926 (divorced 1927).

Frances "Peaches" Heenan was attending the Textile High School in New York City when she met Edward West Browning, a real estate tycoon who had earned the nickname Daddy because he was generous with his money, especially with projects connected to poor children. Soon, Browning was squiring the young girl around town in his Rolls-Royce and arranging for a chorus-line job for her in Earl Carroll's Vanities. Ensuing publicity caught the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who learned that Heenan had been allowed free rein for several years previous. In April 1926, when the Society began legal action in Children's Court against Heenan's mother for neglect, Browning married the young girl. She was 15; he was 51. Heenan's mother moved into Browning's 15-room mansion in Cold Spring, New York, and lived with them.

The marriage was front-page fodder for its duration: seven months. That October, Peaches sued for divorce, making particularly lurid accusations against him. She also accused him of being penurious, refusing to buy her the car, clothes, and jewelry she requested. The judge eventually dismissed her allegations in March 1927, claiming that "the defendant and her mother have falsified, exaggerated, and magnified to such an extent as to render their testimony entirely unbelievable." Browning then won a separation from her.

In 1940, Kuhn joined the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), where she served as an executive and commentator until 1949. As director of program promotion, she visited Mexico in 1942 and broadcast from Rio de Janeiro. She also had her own radio column, "Irene Kuhn's Feature Page." In September 1945, Kuhn was the first person to broadcast from liberated Shanghai and a month later the first woman to broadcast from liberated Manila. At one point, she was broadcasting from a U.S. Navy vessel, the Rocky Mount, flagship of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid of the Seventh Fleet, anchored in the Whangpoo River in China. In 1945, she was an accredited NBC correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater of war, flying a total of 24,277 miles in planes of the Air Transport Command.

All this time, Kuhn was becoming more of a conservative activist. During the presidential campaigns of 1940 and 1944, she was associate director of publicity for the Republican National Committee. In 1952, in editing the memoir of a Roman Catholic priest who had served in China, she referred to "Communist control of China according to the Soviet viewpoint in their world conspiracy." She accused American policymakers of regarding the Chinese Communists as agrarian reformers and said that General George C. Marshall, who sought to negotiate a truce between the Communists and the Nationalists in 1946, "never really understood the true nature of communism." In an article written for the American Mercury in 1955, entitled "Geneva's Smile of Death," she blamed America's "defeat" in the Korean War on the United Nations and found the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit riddled with Western appeasement.

From 1953 to 1969, Kuhn wrote a column, "It's My Opinion," for King Features Syndicate. Beginning in 1970, she was a columnist for Columbia Features, Inc. She contributed to a number of magazines, including Reader's Digest, Town and Country, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Sign, American Legion, Co-ed, Gourmet, Paradise of the Pacific, Vista, and Signature. She also was travel editor for American Labor Magazine and wrote various travel and museum guides. On December 30, 1995, Irene Kuhn died, aged 97, at a nursing home in Concord, Massachusetts.