Dominick Dunne and a few locals at Gibsons, a well-known steakhouse in Chicago. (As a true contrarian, I ordered salmon.) Dunne complained that whenever he met Eddie Greenspan in the men’s washroom at the courthouse, Greenspan didn’t bother to say anything to Dunne or shake his hand. The two men had had a prior public spat that spilled onto the pages of Vanity Fair magazine.
I enjoyed listening to Dunne’s endearing stories about his celebrity crowd, although his meal was cut short when he nearly choked on a piece of steak. He was saved by our server, Mohammed, who spent about fifteen minutes alone with Dunne and then paid for a cab to return him to his hotel. It was a touching display of kindness by a server who had earlier been scolded by Dunne for not recalling the precise way that his steak should be cooked.[4]
I was interested to learn from Dunne that Nancy Kissinger was livid with Conrad Black for entangling her husband in his trial. Henry Kissinger was one of the cast of luminaries whom Black had enlisted for the Hollinger board. Nancy worried that poor Henry’s reputation might now be sullied. At the very least he would merit a mention in Black’s biography of Richard Nixon.
Senses and Sensibilities
While I profess to have no particular interest in profanity, it has its proper place and time. One of those approved places is the courtroom. Witnesses are sworn to tell the truth (in America a promise suffices) as they recount the vulgar details of overheated and angry exchanges that they participated in. On countless occasions, I have been in a Canadian courtroom where a judge prevails upon a hedging witness to repeat the precise slurs that were spoken. “We have all heard it before,” the judge adds with a benign smile.
Not, evidently, in Chicago. The truth in a Chicago courtroom is an edited version of events. In a critical moment of the trial, Gus Newman began to cross-examine Thomas Henson about a negotiating session at the Chicago Sun-Times building conducted with David Radler over the CNHI deal. Henson portrayed Radler as a rude and abusive man who was prepared to feign anger if it assisted in closing a deal. Prior to storming indignantly out of the meeting, Radler had stood inches from Henson, the witness recalled, and raised his voice: “You’re wasting my fill-in-the-blank time, and you wasted your fill-in-the-blank time.” Ouch, that really hurts.
Are the jurors at the Conrad Black trial so delicate that we dare not risk offending them? I wonder if the same standard is applied to the criminal defendant who has hurled obscenities at his arresting officer. Put the middle finger of each hand firmly in the air if you accept that the officer’s statement in court would be recited in the following fashion: “He said, ‘You cops are nothing but fill-in-the-blank pigs and you can all go to fill-in-the-blank.’”
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