In August 1918, Damon Runyon wired his friend Gene Fowler about an opening at William Randolph Hearst’s New York American. Unlike most early 20th-century reporters, Fowler had attended journalism school, at the University of Colorado. When assigned to write an essay for class on a theme first articulated by John Bogart, city editor of the original New York Sun – “Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news” – Fowler wrote an article entitled “Hydrant Leaks on Dog.”

In 1913, Fowler helped produce the final issue of the Denver Republican, where his career had begun. Two days after that edition went to press, he regained consciousness at a Rocky Mountain News city room typewriter. He had been hired while drunk at the Republican’s wake. (When an editor criticized his verbosity, Fowler began his next story: “Dead. That’s what she was when he found her.”)

Then he jumped to the Denver Post, an unabashed pirate ship run by cynical blackmailers, Harry Tammen and Frederick G. Bonfils, who had reportedly won the paper in a rigged card game (many believed its reporters were required to provide their own burglar tools).

To Fowler’s mind, such experience required the American to pay him $100 a week. To Hearst’s mind, any reporter demanding that kind of money was either demented or very good and in either event might be an amusing addition to his newsroom. Hearst hired him, thereafter calling him “that young man from Denver.” Fowler reported to the office, which he found “Warehousey and fetid…The windows were opaque with grime, and an elevator that was as impotent as a veteran of the Mexican War rose with groggy lament up a shaft that would have disgraced a coal mine.”

The city editor, Victor Watson, loved creating news. He ordered Fowler to arrange the first monkey gland transplant in America after Dr. Serge Voronoff claimed the operation could rejuvenate the human sex drive (as Fowler biographer H. Allen Smith wrote, “millions of limp and flaccid men began to take hope…”).

Fowler found an elderly Latin scholar who admitted to carnal thoughts “once a year, or not more than twice;” a surgeon who would do the job for $500 cash; and a monkey in a Penn Station pet shop. After the operation, Fowler recalled, the patient “was removed from the table and put in a bed above which there hung a picture of Catherine the Great reviewing her troops.” Watson gave the story an eight-column headline. The doctor was suspended by the county medical association. The patient was rid of carnal thoughts.

Such thoughts were no problem for Fowler. Celibate as a rooster, the self-described battered polygamist was “too proud to pretend chastity when there was no chastity in his soul.” When asked why he never went dancing, Fowler replied, “I don’t believe in preliminaries.”

In 1921, three balloonists disappeared over northern Canada, stumbling a month later into Moose Factory on James Bay. Fowler was waiting for them, having commissioned a special train loaded with fine Canadian whiskeys and some food, and got their story. But the real epic was his expense account, a greater work of imaginative fiction than any of his novels. He listed parkas, mittens, sleeping bags, snowshoes, a dogsled, and a rental team of Alaskan malamutes to haul it all across the tundra, payments to the owner of a rented lead dog dead in the line of duty, and a headstone. When the auditor rejected it as out of balance, Fowler added: Flowers for bereft bitch, $1.50.

In 1927, the chief summoned Fowler to his Riverside Drive apartment, where Hearst offered to make him managing editor of the American, which Fowler accepted only after obtaining $500 a week and no interference. That lasted until Fowler tangled with Louella Parsons, a Hearst favorite, by editing her column. She stormed into his office, claiming her contract forbade Fowler from changing even a comma.

“I do it because you are totally and incurably illiterate,” Fowler said.

Hearst sent Fowler on a European vacation, all expenses paid. Having spent most of it in a Roman house of joy on Hearst’s tab, Fowler on his return was “promoted” to an executive post where he remained, occasionally performing special assignments for the American, until his contract expired in 1928.

His last job in New York was editing the Morning Telegraph, a breezy daily focusing on sports, racing, and the theater, published from an old car barn at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street and later merged into the Daily Racing Form. His tenure was marked by heroic extravagance – he hired Ring Lardner for $50,000 a year to write four columns a week.

After publishing two novels and “The Great Mouthpiece,” a best-selling biography of flamboyant criminal lawyer William Fallon, he answered Hollywood’s call. His professional skills served him well in doctoring books, screen treatments, and dud scenarios into workable scripts. By 1939, he was paid $5,000 a week.

Until he died in 1961, he still called himself a reporter.