Headless headline still raises the bar

IT didn’t take long before Headless Body in Topless Bar adorned not only T-shirts, but mugs, ties and placemats — and even spawned a film.

JOURNALISTS don’t talk about Charles Dingle any more. They barely ever did.

He pops up in the news every few years and will do so again in December when lodging yet another application for bail. He lives at the Wende Correctional Fac­ility in upstate New York alongside Mark David Chapman, who made headlines in 1980 by shooting dead John Lennon.

Dingle made the headline in 1983 — “Headless Body in Topless Bar” — with an appalling crime that has long been overshadowed by the New York Post front page that reported it.

Last week The West Aust­ralian’s Nick Butterly made headlines himself when a security guard at Parliament House in Canberra denied him entry because of his ­“offensive” T-shirt; it bore the image of that headline from Friday, April 15, 1983.

The story behind the headline had begun 24 hours earlier when Charles Dingle, drunk and sniffing cocaine, became angry with Herbert Cummings, the owner of Herbie’s Bar in Queens, New York. Dingle shot him dead and took four women hostage, one of whom he raped.

While robbing another, he saw her business card. She was a ­mortician. He instructed her to remove the bullet — it was evidence ­linking Dingle’s gun to the crime — from Cummings. With only a steak knife from the kitchen she couldn’t, so Dingle had her remove Cummings’s head, which he placed in a cardboard box. He released two hostages and took the others off in a stolen cab. At the corner of Broadway and 168th Street he fell asleep and the victims escaped and alerted police.

It is an incomprehensibly grim story — and you can debate the merits of the headline that accompanied it — but I challenge anyone to tell it in fewer than five words.

In any case, the New York Post decision has been vindicated by those words being quickly subsumed by popular culture — in which they clearly resonate today.

It didn’t take long before Headless Body in Topless Bar adorned not only T-shirts, but mugs, ties and placemats — and even spawned a film of the same name starring Raymond J. Barry.

I was working on the New York Post on the 10th anniversary of that famous front page and — proving the adage that success has many fathers — a debate broke out about whose words they were.

But the issue was settled that night. It had long been argued that Drew MacKenzie, brother of legendary London Sun editor ­Kelvin, wrote that headline. But MacKenzie conceded he had changed just one letter, removing the indefinite article (as written on a piece of copy paper the original words were “Headless body in a topless bar”) to make it fit.

They had been written by ­Vinnie Musetto, a short, bearded, bespectacled and mostly quiet professorial type whose remaining strands of hair flowed at length over his black shirt collar.

Musetto had been given the bare facts of the crime that, a ­reporter had been told, took place in a topless bar. But others urged caution. No staffers had been to Herbie’s and none knew the dress code for certain. “It’s gotta be a topless bar!” Musetto is ­reported to have said, standing on his desk. “This is the greatest ­f..king headline of my career!”

A reporter — a woman — was sent to Herbie’s to find out. Musetto was on edge. His brilliant splash head might yet be undermined by the facts. “Tell her if it’s not a topless bar to take her top off and make it one,” he suggested. Herbie’s was closed, but the woman was able to spot a sign inside that read “Topless dancing”.

Musetto and his headline were the toast of New York talkback shows and were feted by Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, to whom Musetto described the New York Post as “the best newspaper in America”. Opinionated tabloids make friends and enemies in equal number and the Post’s critics jumped instantly on a noisy bandwagon that quickly lost its way to the circus.

“Headless body in topless bar” is a brilliant distillation of the facts of a dark crime. Literary critic and academic Peter Shaw described it as having a “trochaic rhythm . . . the line implied the appropriate ancient truth about sex, violence, and death.”

As the Post’s most famous ­reporter, former Sydney Daily ­Mirror cadet Steve Dunleavy, said at the time: “What should we have said? Decapitated cere­bellum in tavern of ill repute?”