AMERICA OF TO-DAY

NZ Truth, Issue 1211, 14 February 1929, Page 6

AMERICA OF TO-DAY

Inflated Village

Invasion of All Privacy By Reporters CUSTOMS OJTNEW YORK American press methods have practically eliminated all privacy, even m domestic life, according to an Australian writer who has just returned from the United States. -

C4TT is impossible to obtain privacy 1 m America," says this lady writer. "The wonder to me is that they allow you to sleep m secluded rooms instead of m big v dormltories with plate glass fronts. "As far as one's intimate affairs are concerned, it is amazing how they rush into print with the most trivial as well as the most intimate happenings. Family rows and impending births are especial targets for the social par., and evidently such stuff mus,t go because all America seems interested m brawls m families. "Family quarrels, unless they have public consequences, are nobody's business but the family's, and I am astonished that m a city which must have an enormous amount of public news to occupy its attention, so much space should be "-■'..■ given m the newspapers to obscure and not very interesting family brawls or chit-chat about people whose affairs are of. no real importance. "Of so much importance is the affair of brawling with the family that just before 1 left I attended a church and heard a sermon by a famous preacher, called, 'How to get along with relatives.' "Sometimes the differences of young man-ied couples and their brawls with their mothers-in-law are chronicled, and the names slightly altered or distorted. "Such* stuff has been done m Australia, but I thought it was only because we were too young to know any better. New York, after all, is only an inflated village. "In the New Journalism, there is no such thing as private life, and reporters consider themselves entitled to enter a man's house and make a story out of. the most intimate details of his career.

"The novelties are now, almost avowedly, making novels out of their friends, oblivious of the fact that m « doing: so they are confessing their ar- ; tistic bankruptcy. What becomes of the creative imagination when authors habitually take transcripts ' from , their friends' affairs? , , "I had dirty shoes for ten days m New York because I could not bring myself to have them shined m" public m full view of everybody passing. I discovered there was no alternative, but to put them in' the locker of the : hotel bedroom next morning. "Hair washing and hairdressing is \ aljnost as public m New York as it is m Colombo, where : they do it m the street almost under the feet of the passers-by. I had mine washed m a room, along with seven or eight people, • ' ■. ■ - - "• and with a plate glass window front, where the ipublic could gaze m on the secrets of all of us. "Privacy was not*-,.. """I [ T~" ~ even thought of, and, judging by the physical revelations, it , should have been the first thought. In Australia, fop. less than two-thirds of the price I had to pay m New York, I could have had my hair washed m a private cubicle by an attendant who would have given me her undivided attention. She and I would have had a pleasant talk, and the job would have been done m half the time that it took m Fifth Avenue. "Any Aussie hairdresser who con-" ducted his establishment on the system adopted by the Fifth Avenue hairdresser to whom I am referring, would swiftly become a bankrupt. . We dp not care to see a horde of . women sitting about a room with sopping hair m their fading locks and sagging cheeks. Our toilet is private business, and we' prefer that it should be done m private." :