Daily News | ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’: 40 years later, the story behind an iconic newspaper headline
This month marks the 40th anniversary of a watershed moment in journalism: the publication of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline on the front page of the New York Post.
Headlines sell newspapers — at least, they sell the print newspapers offered via those relics known as newsstands. In 1983, almost all of the 965,000 daily newspapers that rolled out of the Post’s building in Lower Manhattan were sold on newsstands. On April 15, 1983, the newsroom had to sell Mayor Ed Koch’s plan to hire 1,000 more police officers and the arrival of tax day. Yawn.Vincent A. Musetto, one of the Post’s managing editors, gets the credit for “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” In a madcap newsroom run largely by owner Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street-hardened crew of Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis, Musetto was a real-deal, prototypical New Yorker: brash, zany, unafraid to drop-kick a trash can during a debate.
From that day, I wanted to work for Vinnie. Two years later, as a pun-loving 25-year-old copy editor at a South Jersey paper, I tried out as a Post sub-editor, designing pages and writing headlines. On the first day of my tryout, the editors sent me a goofy filler story about male dogs being electrocuted by a poorly grounded lamppost. The headline I submitted: “Piss of death.
The New York Times also covered the story, stuffing it on Page 2 of the Metropolitan section under the headline,
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