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Chapter 1

BEFORE I BECAME a newspaper columnist, which is the job I currently am holding down and will continue to hold as long as I don’t get fired, don’t say to hell with all of it and open a liquor store, and don’t die, I was a newspaperman. Newspaper columnists aren’t really newspapermen, or newspaperwomenpersons, as one might think.

Columnists don’t have anything to do with the editing of the paper, the way a paper looks, or how the news is displayed. Unless we start stinking it up for a long period of time, we also never get punished; no one ever makes us columnists go out in the cold at four in the morning to deliver the thing to the readers’ doorsteps.

I don’t think people who deliver the paper get enough credit, quite frankly. I don’t care how good the paper is, if the man or woman who is responsible for having it on your lawn—come rain, sleet, snow, or hangover—falters, what difference does it make if four gorillas and an orangutan produce the paper?

(Of course, four gorillas and an orangutan could put out a better newspaper than the ones some people try to shove down the readers’ throats. Most gorillas and orangutans I know at least aren’t pinko, left-wing communist bed-wetters, which a lot of newspaper people are.)

Newspaper columnists aren’t reporters, either. We can simply make things up if we want to. I, for instance, make stuff up all the time. I once made up an interview I had with God. God said, “Tell Jimmy Swaggart he’s fired.” If I actually had interviewed God, I’m convinced that’s one of the things He would have said, along with, “Boy, was the ayatollah surprised when we met him at the Pearly Gates with a bazooka.”

I even quoted my dog once. I wrote, “My dog drinks out of the toilet. One day, I said to my dog, ‘Why do you go to the toilet on my living room rug?’ And my dog said, ‘Well, you go in my water bowl.’ “

A reporter couldn’t have quoted my dog because my dog can’t talk. He can barely bark anymore after he ate a wasp’s nest one day. You get a couple hundred wasp stings on your vocal chords, and you’ll have trouble barking, too. Now, my dog barks in a whisper. He goes, “WHOOF.”

I knew a guy who had a dog who actually could talk, however. (Now you have to guess if I’m making this up or not. Being a columnist is great fun.)

He took his dog into a bar one day and said to the bartender, “For a free drink, my dog will talk to you.”

It had been a long day, so the bartender said, “What the hell. You got your free drink, now let me hear the dog talk.”

The guy says, “Okay, ask him who was the greatest home-run hitter of all time.”

The bartender asks the dog, “Okay, dog, who was the greatest home-run hitter of all time?” and the dog responds, “Roof.”

So that riles the bartender and he throws the guy and the dog out the door of the bar. The guy and the dog roll out onto the sidewalk and land in the street.

The dog gets up, licks a few asphalt burns, and says to his master, “I still say it was Roof. Hank Aaron had more at bats.”

Other things I made up and printed in my column:

* The Beatles caused the Vietnam War.

* Jerry Falwell runs rabbits.

* Bugs Bunny is gay.

* Nobody actually lives in North Dakota.

* Muamar Qaddafi and former major-league baseball pitcher Joaquim Andujar are the same person.

* Eating liver causes shortness of breath, zits, flatfeet, anxiety, and prolonged menstrual periods.

* Richard Nixon was born wearing a suit.

* In a fit of rage, Buffalo Bob once whittled Howdy Doody into a likeness of Pinocchio and bit off his nose.

* Elvis actually is dead. Of course, nobody really believed that. I had a letter from a woman in Topeka who said Elvis had appeared at her Tupperware party disguised as a plastic egg carton.

“We weren’t really sure it was Him,” she wrote, “until he recited the entire dialogue from his movie Viva Las Vegas. We all got nekkid and danced around him while he sang ‘Down in the Ghetto.’ It was a religious experience.”

Newspaper reporters, of course, occasionally do make things up, but not all the time. Only in emergencies. Which is why there was that story about the Exxon oil spill in Alaska. It was a slow news day, and an editor in Fairbanks said to his environmental reporter, “We don’t have a thing other than another Eskimo eaten by a walrus. Why don’t you make up a story about an Exxon oil tanker spilling a couple of billions of gallons of oil in Prince Rupert Sound?”

The reporter said, “Give me thirty minutes,” and came back with a story about a drunken tanker captain who put some dingbat at the wheel, who promptly runs into a reef and spills a bunch of oil, which kills a bunch of fish and birds.

The editor and reporter didn’t think the story would make it out of Alaska, but suddenly it went worldwide, and it took the entire news staff all night to fill up Prince Rupert Sound with No. 2 ink to make the story look as if it actually happened.

Watergate never really happened either; Woodward and Bernstein and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee made the whole thing up as a joke on Richard Nixon on his birthday.

Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee got soused one night at the Sans Souci, and Bradlee said, “Hey, you wanna get one on Nixon?”

Bradlee was Woodward and Bernstein’s boss. What were they going to say, “Forget it, Jason, let’s have another drink”?

Of course not. That’s another thing about reporters: If your editor makes a suggestion, you follow it as gospel.

“So,” Bernstein said (Woodward was too drunk to comment), “what did you have in mind?”

“Let’s make up a story about Nixon being involved in some sort of cover-up,” said Bradley, just before he screamed at the waitress, Nora Ephron, “Hey, bitch. Who do you have to know to get a drink around here, Linda Lovelace?”

Bernstein, who also needed another drink, said to waitress Ephron, “Right, what’s the holdup here?”

And waitress Ephron replied, “One day, you’ll be sorry you talked that way to me,” and dumped a Perrier she was taking to John Tower right on Bernstein’s crotch.

Just then, Jack Nicholson walked in with Rob Lowe. The plot thickens.

Anyway, so Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein concoct this story about a third-rate burglary at National Democratic Headquarters and, as happened in Alaska later, things got out of hand. Bernstein, at least, got punished. He wound up marrying Nora Ephron, who later divorced him, and then later still wrote all about their marriage and divorce, which wound up as a movie called Heartburn, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.

Even Nicholson couldn’t save that dog. The worst two movies in the past five years? I mean, besides all those movies like Friday the 13th ad nauseam, where nobody in the cast is over seventeen except Freddie. They are 1. The Accidental Tourist and 2. Heartburn. Amadeus is third, incidentally, followed closely by The Last Temptation of Christ.

And speaking of Rob Lowe, he just goes to show you how even the best reporters often miss a great story.

The Democrats held their 1988 national convention in Atlanta, where I live. The editors at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, where I work, got very excited about the convention coming to town and spent about half the Vietnam War debt covering it. (Notice, I didn’t use the normal cliché, “the French War debt.” That’s because I’ve never forgiven the French for not letting us fly over their airspace when we wanted to bomb Qaddafi/Andujar or for how they treated President Bush’s entourage when he went over to help them celebrate the bicentennial of Bastille Day. Imagine not giving all four thousand members of the entourage VIP treatment.)

I wasn’t all that excited about the convention coming to Atlanta myself. Bring a World Series to Atlanta, now you’ve got a story. Having a World Series in Atlanta would be sort of like holding the Winter Olympics in Miami. Both would be Man-Bites-Dog stories of the highest order.

The problem with spending all that money and effort covering the convention was that everybody knew what was going to happen before it happened. Let’s say the entire country already knew San Francisco was going to beat Denver in the Super Bowl. How many reporters would show up for the game?

Everybody knew Dukakis was going to get the nomination. Everybody knew Jesse Jackson would make speeches that sounded great unless you actually listened to what he was saying. And that is exactly what happened. But with hundreds of newspeople in town, nobody got the big story. The Rob Lowe story.

It’s too much fun not to do over again.

Rob Lowe is the actor. Actually, I think I should make that “actor.” The kid looks good, which I assume is how he got into the movies. As an actor, he couldn’t carry Bill Frawley’s derby hat.

For some reason I am yet to determine, Rob Lowe came to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Maybe he had a thing for Kitty Dukakis.

See what you can get away with if you’re a columnist?

I write, “Maybe he had a thing for Kitty Dukakis,” and you read it and tell somebody, “You know what Lewis Grizzard wrote in his latest book?”

And they say, “You mean the one called If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground, that costs $17.95 and everybody in the country should go out and buy immediately?”

And you say, “That’s the one. He wrote, ‘Maybe Rob Lowe had a thing for Kitty Dukakis’!”

Your friend tells the story a couple of more times, and one day you pick up USA Today and there’s a story saying, “ROB LOWE DENIES HAVING KINKY SEX WITH KITTY DUKAKIS IN DEMOCRATIC LOVE NEST.” Rumormongering is another fun thing about being a columnist.

But back to the convention. Rob Lowe shows up with a guy who was referred to as a “traveling companion.” They hit an Atlanta joint called Club Rio across the street from the convention site. There they meet these two girls, and Rob and his pal take them back to their hotel suite and set up a video camera. They invite the two girls to perform a little lesbian thing and they record the performance, quite a smashing one (a lot better than Amadeus) according to those who later saw the videotape.

What transpired afterward was the big news. One of the girls on the tape was only sixteen. A minor. Only six years out of the fifth grade. She later allegedly tried to blackmail Rob Lowe because if she goes to the cops, Rob gets hit with all sorts of nasty things such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, making child pornography, and having sex in the Bible Belt.

Then, the sixteen-year-old’s mom sees the tape, and she sues Rob Lowe. At this writing, nothing involving the incident has been settled, but do you see what I mean? How does Rob Lowe getting a sixteen-year-old and her buddy to get naked and do it to one another on a video camera in a hotel room compare with Lloyd Bentsen’s acceptance speech as far as reader interest goes? No comparison. Rob and the lesbian stuff wins hands down over Lloyd and his recommendations for the economy. But Lloyd was front-page news.

It took six months for the Rob Lowe story to break.

I realize at this point that I have strayed far off the original path I had intended for this, the opening chapter, but I wanted to throw in some stuff about celebrities and sex to get you this far.

My theory is that if somebody goes into a bookstore and starts browsing through a book, whether or not they buy it probably depends on how they enjoy the first few pages. You can’t stand around in a bookstore and read an entire book and then put it back on the shelf, thereby actually stealing the book, unless, of course, it is very short, which is why most writers make their books so long. Tolstoy, for instance, was so concerned about somebody doing that to War and Peace that he wrote one of the longest books in the history of books.

So I’m going for the sensational and the prurient early, figuring the browser might say, “Hey, this is pretty exciting stuff. I’d better buy this book so I don’t miss what else is in it.”

I’m not saying there isn’t going to be any more juicy information here. (I’ll make up some if I have to—remember, I’m a columnist.) But now let us go ahead with the book’s main thesis.

This is going to be about newspapers, because since I was eight I’ve been in love with them, and because people have the damnedest ideas about newspapers and a great deal of fascination with them, as well.

How could you be literate and not be fascinated with newspapers? Every day of most people’s lives, a newspaper sneaks in there at some point. They are delivered right to our homes, just like pizza, only pizza is more expensive. There’s another connection, too: Newspapers and pizza can both give you heartburn.

I love newspapers because they are a constant in my life. No matter what happened to me the night before, I know there will be a newspaper on my lawn the next morning. It’s my little friend.

I get up. I put on the coffee. I go outside and get my little friend. Then, I read it and drink my coffee.

Everybody has a different method of reading their newspaper, I suppose. Mine is another constant in my life. I always read the paper—any paper—the same way: I glance at the front page first. If no war has been declared, no tidal wave is expected to hit my neighborhood, and no announcement that cigarettes really don’t cause cancer, or other such astounding news, I then go directly to the sports section.

I read everything in the sports section that isn’t about hockey, soccer, and hunting. I’ve said for years, if the deer had guns, too, then, and only then, would hunting really be a sport.

I go back to the front page after I finish reading sports. I read very few news stories with foreign datelines because I basically don’t care about what’s going on in South Yemen. I should, but I don’t. I think I’m a fairly normal reader, and the fairly normal reader usually wants to read about what’s going on in his or her hometown. No matter how the jet airplane has shrunk the world, it’s still difficult for somebody in Meridian, Miss., or Minot, N.D., to care what’s doing four or five thousand miles away in some place covered with sand, unless they know somebody there.

I quote a colleague of mine who, during a discussion concerning what emphasis should be put on international stories, said, “I don’t give a damn what happened last night in Outer Mongolia. I just want to know who cut who down at Slick’s Lounge.”

People were always getting cut (southern for “knifed”) at Slick’s in Atlanta. And shot, too. Two guys got into an argument about who was the better wrestler, Vern Gange or Argentina Rocca, and one guy pulled a gun and shot at the other guy. He missed and hit an innocent bystander in the knee, instead.

I happened to know the emergency room doctor that treated the victim.

When he asked the patient what happened, the patient replied, “Man, I was just sittin’ there drinkin’ a Schlitz and some fool shot my ass in the knee.”

If something really interesting or odd happened in a foreign country, I will read that, however.

There was a story about a British Airways jet recently. The windshield in the cockpit blew out at 23,000 feet and it sucked the pilot out. Luckily, another crew member grabbed his feet and held on to him until the copilot could land a half-hour later.

That’s even better than a guy getting knifed in the stomach at Slick’s for saying Richard Petty couldn’t have carried Fireball Roberts’s lug wrench.

I usually get through most of the “A” section in a paper fairly quickly, stopping only to read good political gossip, and the latest on where the killer bees are now located and how long it will take them to get to my house.

Then, I read the editorial pages. I rarely read the unsigned editorials that come under the newspaper masthead. They are usually about something happening in South Yemen.

I enjoy the readers’ letters, however, especially the ones from members of the National Rifle Association who say if we outlaw the sales of AK-47’s, the favorite weapon of drug dealers and drive-by murderers, they may also eventually lose their hunting guns and that they are actually doing the deer a favor by shooting them. If we ever do take away the AK-47’s from drug dealers, I think we ought to give them to the deer.

I also enjoy editorial columns on the op-ed page. I’m always amazed how angry readers get at columnists. If Carl Rowan or William Safire or Richard Reeves writes an opinion, it’s his prerogative. I might say to myself, “Carl Rowan must have drunk some bad buttermilk when he wrote this,” or “What on earth was William Safire trying to say?” But I don’t ever get mad at them and call down to the paper and threaten to cancel my subscription. Disagreeing with a columnist is a lot of fun. A good columnist will stir debate and reaction.

After the editorial page, I read the feature section of the paper which has names like “Lifestyle” and “People” and “Arts and Leisure.” That section usually has the comics, the TV and movie listings, and a lot of stuff women enjoy reading, like Dear Abby and stories about how women will soon take over the entire world and tell all the men to get up and go cook their own breakfasts and “Don’t let me hear any pots or pans rattling.”

News for and about women is big in those sections. “News you can use” is a new catch phrase in the industry, which means running a lot of stories about why you should eat oat bran and how to make your house safe from radon gas.

I do the Jumble every morning. That’s where you unscramble four words in order to figure out the answer to a puzzle.

Okay, in ten seconds, what is this word: “Tigura”?

Time’s up. “Guitar.” It took me an hour one morning to get that. I only glance at the business section because I don’t understand much about business.

Reading my morning paper is, quite often, the highlight of my day. I’m always a little sad when I finish. To put off finishing the paper as long as I can, I even read stories about art exhibits. If I’m really desperate, I’ll even read Scheinwood on bridge. And I don’t know the first thing about bridge. I just don’t want it to be over.

I fell in love with newspapers when I was eight because they took me to every minor league and major league baseball game. They taught me about Duke Snider and Senor Al Lopez, the manager of the Chicago White Sox. I could sit in Moreland, Georgia, and read about Mantle’s three home runs for the Yankees. There were a lot of people in the rural South who didn’t think there really was a New York City. Nobody knew anybody who had actually been there. But I’d been there, in my sports page box score where the Tigers’ Yankee Killer, Frank Lary, had beaten the Yanks again before 40,000 in Yankee Stadium.

I’d also been to Wrigley Field in Chicago and Tiger Stadium in Detroit and Crosley Field in Cincinnati and Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

I can go on all day about this, so here are “25 More Reasons I Love Newspapers Besides All the Stuff I’ve Already Talked About”:

1. They ain’t heavy, except on Sunday.

2. The Far Side.

3. Mike Royko’s column out of Chicago.

4. You don’t have to look at the ads if you won’t want to. It’s hard to escape television commercials no matter how fast your remote control finger is.

5. Editorial cartoons.

6. They are brief about the weather: “Today: Cloudy with a high near 75.” Television weather lasts longer than some thunderstorms.

7. Baseball box scores that can tell you exactly what twenty-three guys did in a two-and-a-half-hour period in about three inches of agate type.

8. Peanuts.

9. B.C.

10. Adult movie ads. I once saw one called “Thar She Blows.”

11. Occasionally I have the pleasant surprise of finding humorous writing on the editorial page.

12. The personal ads. They keep me up on what’s kinky.

13. As I read my paper, I often fantasize about owning my own newspaper. Its slogan would be “Born to Raise Hell.”

14. They don’t play any loud rock music.

15. The fact there’s a crossword puzzle in every day in case I ever decide to take up doing the crossword puzzle.

16. If you read a newspaper every day, there will be very few topics you can’t talk about.

17. The Wizard of Id.

18. College football and basketball odds.

19. Those “People” columns where they tell you what’s doing with Prince Charles and Lady Di and Elizabeth Taylor.

20. You can serve your dog leftover steak bones on a newspaper.

21. You can be going through your grandmother’s attic and find a paper from 1939 and have a lot of fun reading it. You will want to say, “Watch out for Hitler.”

22. Newspapers make great starters for fireplace fires.

23. Automobile dealers can’t do their own commercials.

24. Newspapers are the only romance in my life that hasn’t eventually picked up and left me.

25. If you really think about it, newspapers are one of the last great bargains. Most daily newspapers cost a quarter. What else can you get for a quarter that tells you how various wars and famines are going, how much money you lost in the stock market or betting on a ball game, what new thing will kill you according to researchers, how many people got killed in the latest soccer riot, how many people are going to have AIDS by the year 2015, what Congress did, how bad the president is doing, what the weather is going to be like, not to mention informing you of the day and month and year it is?

What really gets me is, after all the service newspapers give people, most people don’t really like newspapers. Perhaps it’s the old messenger-who-brings-the-bad-news thing. A newspaper tells you the ozone layer is going to disappear in twenty years and you’re going to be fried alive, and you get mad at the newspaper.

Readers are always asking, “Why don’t you print more good news?” The answer is simple: There’s not any.

If there were any good news, we’d print it. Let’s say I was interviewing God again, and He said, “Tell everybody we’re going to throw out the Sixth Commandment on Judgment Day.”

You recall the Sixth Commandment. Moses tried to get God to forget it in the first place, but God didn’t know at the time that the Playboy Channel would come along on cable and make everybody want to commit adultery.

So now God realizes “Thou shalt not commit adultery” isn’t really an operative thought anymore, and He tells me He’s going to overlook it for everybody born since 1945, except for Jimmy Swaggart, of course. God would have forgiven him for simply committing adultery, but he couldn’t forgive him for selecting that sweat hog he found in a New Orleans motel room as his adultery-ette.

Anyway, if that story broke, it would indeed be good news and newspapers would carry it, front page, top story.

The New York Daily News would say:

“GOD ON SEX:

’LIVE IT UP’ “

The New York Post would say:

“I WANT YOUR BODY”

The New York Times would say, in a headline size much more dignified than that of the Daily News and Post:

“GOD GRANTS FORGIVENESS FOR

ADULTERY FOR THOSE BORN AFTER 1945.”

Followed by these subheads, in descending type size:

“SUPREME BEING INDICATES

SIXTH COMMANDMENT PASSÉ”

“PLAYBOY’S HEFNER

ELATED AT NEWS”

“POPE STARTLED,

CANCELS TRIP”

“THOUSANDS CELEBRATE

IN TIMES SQUARE”

“WADE BOGGS GOES 5-FOR-5

IN BOSOX ROMP OVER YANKS”

So this is to be a book about newspapers, written by a man who has been both a newspaperman and a newspaper columnist, and that makes me an expert on just about everything about newspapers except how to sell advertising, how to crank the delivery trucks, and why the accounting department always questions my expense accounts. This is also going to be a book about how and why I got into the newspaper business and where it has taken me. Not all of it will be pretty. I’ll have to deal with my days as sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance. This was the worst period of my life. I was dragged to court by one of my sportswriters, divorced by my second wife, once sat next to a man who had a rooster on his head on a Chicago Transit bus, and had to help push a friend’s car, which had a dead battery, eight blocks through the snow, quite a shock to my southern-born hatred of cold weather.

To work your tail off getting a paper out, and then be handed a first edition, which always felt warm to me somehow, like it had just been taken out of the oven, was a joy. It was instant reward. I would never have been happy in a business where it took more than forty-five minutes to see the results of my labor.

And after I got into the business, I met a thousand characters who loved newspapers as I did and didn’t really give a damn they were getting paid so poorly.

There were so many other rewards. Like knowing we got the news first and it was our job to tell everybody else. It’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s also good for the ego. I always felt a little superior to civilians.

I got my first newspaper job when I was ten. I didn’t get paid, but I did get to see my name above an article for the first time, and it was a thrill the likes of which I have not often known again.

That makes thirty-four years in the profession. I mentioned earlier that, one day, I might quit all this and open a liquor store, but I won’t.

In the immortal words of Frank Hyland, a friend and colleague, “Wouldn’t it be hell to have to go out and get a real job?”

It would.