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
