William Randolph Hearst was among the 11 winners in 1937, receiving a Headliner Award for enterprise in journalism. We’re still waiting for him to come pick it up.
Press titan William Randolph Hearst.
In an industry dominated by men, it took Headliners nearly a decade to honor a woman. She was Helen Hiett, who demonstrated that shoe leather comes on dancing shoes, too.
To get a story for NBC in 1940 about how British troops were enduring a Nazi siege at Gibraltar, she infiltrated a group of friendly chorus girls bound for a gig to entertain the troops there.
Five days of strenuous rehearsals made her stage-ready. After the troupe landed, Axis air fleets unleashed attacks on the British citadel. She was the only journalist there and broadcast exclusive reports about waves of bombers attacking the iconic fortress.
Helen Hiett, a daring war correspondent and the first woman to win a Headliners award.
She would go on to report from the hotspots of the European war, once sneaking into Germany and reaching Berlin. She entered Italy and, two days ahead of allied troops, reached Milan, where the dead Mussolini was strung up by his heels.
Ever intrepid, she would die in 1961 at age 47 in a mountain-climbing accident in the Alps.
Lee Carson, a foremost World War II correspondent whose arrival in Atlantic City caused a stir.
In 1945, Lee Carson became the fourth woman honored with a Headliner Award, but attracted far more publicity than that year’s other 10 winners, which included the revered Red Smith, the facile sports columnist of the New York Herald Tribune.
Though Carson was a hard-charging World War II correspondent for the Hearst empire’s International News Service and considered one of the foremost reporters of the European theater, it was her electrifying beauty that propelled her star image. Competitors griped it also led to some of her exclusives.
She once charmed a pilot into smuggling her aboard a bomber on D-Day, where she witnessed the bombing of Cherbourg and became the only female war correspondent to come close to the Normandy Invasion. She joined Patton’s U.S. Third Army as it steamrolled from the Battle of the Bulge and deep into Nazi Germany.
And she was said to be, perhaps apocryphally, the first journalist to ride into a liberated Paris. Bob Reuben of Reuters shared her Jeep but joked that Carson ensured she was in the front seat the day they entered the city.
When she reached Atlantic City to accept her award, her arrival at the Hotel Claridge was covered by the Atlantic City Press. It identified her as “Lee Carson, comely war correspondent for INS.”