You see the pattern. Not until this enterprising fellow reached New York City on the morning of the twenty-fourth of August, to discover a world made delirious with the news that Irene Foster and Sam Mallory had just been rescued intact from some spit of an island smack in the middle of the Pacific, did his luck finally turn. So electric was the atmosphere in the newsroom of the New York Sentinel that the photographer was able to waltz straight past reception and make his proposal to some harried green-shaded copy editor, who happened to be on the last five minutes of a drop-dead deadline. To demonstrate his annoyance he hauled our Peeping Tom straight to the office of the managing editor, threw him in, and yelled, This fellow says he got a snap of Foster and Mallory fucking on some beach in Hawai’i! The managing editor and the five or six reporters crowding his office turned and stared, and it would be fair to say that the hackling of journalistic instinct in that room was thicker than the smoke of the seven or eight cigarettes they were presently smoking. No shit? said the editor, and the photographer said, Got it right here, sir. If it ain’t the real deal, you can kiss my mother. (Except he didn’t say kiss.)

There followed some agonized conferring about ethics, and the publisher himself was called in from some lunch at Delmonico’s, reeking of martinis and cigars and beefsteak. But the conclusion was foregone. Yesterday, Sam and Irene were martyrs, whose memory must remain unsullied, as was decent and necessary to American morale. Today, they were mortals, and the whole world wanted to know what they’d got up to on Howland Island for three weeks, and now the New York Sentinel had the answer, right there in incontestable photographic negative. You could call it muckraking, you could call it scurrilous, but you had to call it news. And once you stopped quibbling about principle, the only thing left to quibble about was price. (Ten thousand dollars for exclusive rights, as it turned out, which set a record for the time.)

Of course, once the formalities were complete, you had to wait a few days, until the public was bored and restless and eager for something new, but hadn’t yet turned its attention elsewhere. So it wasn’t until the first of September that the photographs—five were chosen from the roll—duly appeared on page three of the early edition, because you couldn’t print a thing like that on the front page, over the fold where anybody could see it, and within hours the newsrooms and editorial offices of the world found themselves struggling with what you might call a dilemma.