Lloyd Shearer, who wrote the popular "Personality Parade" column in Parade magazine for three decades under the nom de plume Walter Scott, died on May 24th aged 84.
Spoken of in awed tones by Pulitzer prize-winners and Washington politicos, he originated the question-and-answer column that is considered a Sunday morning must-read by millions. He wrote it every week for 33 years, stopping in 1991 after falling ill to Parkinson's disease. The column tried to satisfy a nation's curiosity about its public figures, titillating and informing on such matters as whether Elvis Presley wore a guide (no) or why Jackie Kennedy Onassis preferred pants to skirts (bowlegs).
It also delved into weightier matters, such as why Executive Order 9066 was called the "Shame of the Nation" (it ordered the internment of Japanese Americans and nationals during the Second World War without proof of their disloyalty) and whether Stokely Carmichael was ever a Communist.
Lloyd Shearer's column was probably the one most widely read in US. Parade, the colour supplement found inside 350 Sunday newspapers, has the largest distribution of magazines in the US, reaching 75 million readers every week. "Walter Scott's Personality Parade" has a prime position on the inside cover. Now written by Edward Klein, a former New York Times Magazine editor, it is still the magazine's most popular feature.
Lloyd Shearer wrote about celebrities such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis before they became household names. In 1973 he wrote that Ronald Reagan would be president, and he was first with the news on the romances of Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis.
Walter Anderson, Parade's editor for 20 years before becoming its publisher, said Lloyd Shearer deserved all the credit for the column's success: "He had an innate talent for understanding what people are interested in... and a genius for popular culture. Besides having creativity, intelligence and incredible curiosity, he worked hard, seven days a week, 365 days a year."
The son of Austrian immigrants, he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in New York city, where his father worked as a typesetter. He began writing in high school and majored in English at the University of North Carolina, from where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1936.
His first reporting job, at the Durham Sun in North Carolina, was interrupted by conscription into the US army just before the outbreak of the second World War. He became part of the original staff of Yank, the second World War military magazine that made pin-ups famous.
Near the end of the war he transferred to Los Angeles to cover the Pacific theatre for Armed Forces Radio. He later became an in-army correspondent for the New York Times and gained some notoriety as the star of a popular book, "See Here Private Hargrove". After the war he wrote regularly for the New York Times Magazine and Reader's Digest.
In 1957 he wrote a series of personality profiles for Parade that elicited a flood of queries from readers - was Katharine Hepburn living out of wedlock with Spencer Tracy, did General MacArthur really hate General Eisenhower, did author Sinclair Lewis drink too much?
He suggested to Jess Gorkin, then editor of Parade, that the magazine start a column "devoted to separating fact from fiction, truth from rumour", as he wrote in the foreword to a 1995 compilation of columns, "The Best of Walter Scott's Personality Parade".
The purpose was to "tell, if legally tellable, what the readers wanted to know and apparently could not find out elsewhere".
The column was launched in March, 1958. Each week it offered about a dozen items, illustrated with "mug shots" of everyone from Winston Churchill to Dinah Shore.
Lloyd Shearer is survived by his wife, Marva; sons Derek and Cody; and daughter Brook.
Lloyd Shearer: born 1916, died, May 2001