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,
