William d'Alton Mann

One of the city’s more colorful figures, William d’Alton Mann (1839-1920) was a veteran of the Civil War, the inventor of a railway sleeping car, and the publisher of a number of newspapers and magazines including the scandal-filled weekly, Town Topics. Born to a humble family in Sandusky, Ohio (to which he refers in a conversation with Jack, Euri, and Cora), Mann was a self-made man who distinguished himself at Gettysburg (see him as a young man in uniform, above) and went on to make a fortune through his inventions. In 1891, he took over Town Topics, a weekly magazine in New York, and remade it as the city’s premier gossip rag, reporting on the indiscretions of high-society figures.

Mann himself wrote the magazine’s opening feature, a column called Saunterings in which he savagely mocked the failings, such as drunkenness and adultery, of the well-heeled. Mann wouldn’t identify the figures in question so as to protect himself from libel but he would soon after name them in a friendlier item, a code known to his readers. Mann also used the column to blackmail members of high society, threatening to publish unsavory stories that his henchmen and spies had gathered unless they bought expensive ads in Town Topics. Mann’s blackmail operation was foiled, however, by the moral fortitude of Emily Post.

When I first read abut Mann in an old New Yorker article magazine article, he seemed like the perfect Underworld Times gossip columnist. I also gave his real life associate Joseph M. Deuel the job of presiding over night court. Mann had illegally paid Deuel, a city juvenile court judge, to read Saunterings items before they were published to check for anything that might put him in legal danger. I imagined that the two would continue to work together in the afterlife.