NONFICTION - Dec. 26, 1993

SCRIPPS: The Divided Dynasty by Jack Casserly (Donald I. Fine: $23.95; 236 pp.). The high point of this book comes early, when Ed Scripps, on his first assignment for his mother’s Seattle Star newspaper, interviews Jean Harlow. The lady answers her hotel-room door wearing nothing but silver high heels, subsequently completing the ensemble with the addition of a cigarette. “Scripps: The Divided Dynasty” doesn’t go downhill from there so much as dissipate, for Jack Casserly hasn’t got much of a story to tell--mostly because this book is reported with Ed Scripps and his wife Betty (in whose names the book is jointly copyrighted) sitting on his shoulder. Edward W. Scripps, the 84-year-old chairman of the Scripps League newspapers, wants to gain journalistic respect in this volume on several counts: for successfully developing the chain of small-town newspapers his parents cherished following their repudiation by dynasty founder E. W. Scripps; for making more money than his relatives at the much larger, more honored Scripps-Howard company; for adhering to a moral business code. The trouble is, it’s an uninspired and untrustworthy story, being incomplete, sugar-coated and defensive. Casserly, who has co-authored biographies with Barry Goldwater and William R. Hearst, Jr., is probably the right journalist to set down the self-image of a conservative, old-fashioned newspaper owner, but he makes little attempt to get below the surface. In some ways, though, that’s appropriate, for it mirrors a curious Scripps League tradition. When readers criticized the league’s flagship paper, Utah’s Provo-Orem Daily Herald, for expending too much ink on the fate of killer Gary Gilmore, it simply cut back on its coverage.