Editor Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford) presides over a trashy but financially successful tabloid newspaper in New York City. With his hotshot crime reporter, Steve McCleary (John Derek), and feature writer, Julie Allison (Donna Reed), Chapman attends a Lonely Hearts Club publicity stunt sponsored by the paper, where he's shocked to run into Charlotte (Rosemary DeCamp), the wife he abandoned two decades before. Their argument takes a violent turn that might ruin everything Chapman has.