“Thing,” or “What I Was Thinking,” that other papers presumably thought would attract younger readers because they sounded edgier. The paper was secure in its identity and fortunately it had even advanced to the point of covering music written after the “Blue Danube Waltz.”
I had put in ten years at the New York Daily before taking over the column, starting as a secretary—not an assistant, the term used more often these days—right after college. Since I showed outstanding capability in juggling the phones and discreetly giving everyone the proper messages so that their colleagues didn’t find out that headhunters were returning their calls, or worse, places like AA, I was asked to stay on after my six-month probation, sparing me the humiliation of circling ads in the Times and calling people in human resources, a name that made me think of organ banks.
I was promoted to editorial assistant, and finally cub reporter, which meant that I earned the right to go downtown to cover a press conference by the Consumer Product Safety Commission on lawn-mower safety (never mind that as an apartment dweller I had never even seen one) and up to Connecticut to report on a factory that made walking sticks. I had my shorthand to thank—or blame—plus my trusty tape recorder and my reputation for staying with a story until every source was questioned practically to death. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m tenacious about ferreting out the truth, or that I’m so insecure that I overresearch. Let’s just say that I took the old journalism adage to heart—“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
The column was actually something of a gift following a tense investigation of a shelter for women who were victims of domestic violence. I spent two nights in one and wrote a story exposing the failures of the system, including a lack of policing that led to boyfriends finding their way in and spending the night. Apparently the current columnist had opened the paper one morning to find an obit of a colleague who died at age fifty of a massive heart attack and immediately submitted his resignation so that he could spend more time with his family. But ultimately the decisive factor that led to my becoming a columnist with all the power that comes with it might well have been the fact that the stars were in proper alignment.
In any case, it was a prized, if competitive, job. It was a bit daunting, at first, to find myself up against some ace metro reporters, including Slaid, who had a far wider net of contacts than I did and far more experience. Being male didn’t hurt him either, plus he was slick at taking advantage of the buddy network built up through jobs at various papers and magazines, so that disgruntled insiders seemed to gravitate to him. Then once he sat down with them, he was one of the guys and always on their side, at least until he was in front of the computer screen and the story came out.
And how was I viewed? Think perky former cheerleader. In fact, I was told on my thirtieth birthday that I had the cherubic face and fawning grin of an eighteen-year-old Goldie Hawn. Not a bad thing, but needless to say, with only one year now on the job, I had a lot of catching up to do to earn credibility and authenticity.
But back to Slaid. Be assured that I would never denigrate a colleague needlessly. He was known to be trustworthy to a fault, at least judging from the fact that months back he had spent a few weeks locked up in prison for refusing to turn over his notes after he interviewed a mafia don following the murder of a member of a rival family. It led to a juicy column and his refusal to cooperate with a police investigation on the grounds that New York’s shield laws protected journalists from turning over their notes and revealing their sources.
I don’t believe for a minute that Slaid withheld his notes—as some of my more mean-spirited colleagues have flippantly suggested—because he knew he could count on his buddies from the six o’clock news to make a show of hanging out supportively at the prison 24/7, guaranteeing that his popularity would soar, not to mention bringing him hearty fare like pasta alfredo and osso bucco from Little Italy so that he would be spared the ordeal of subsisting on prison food. That wasn’t such a really big deal. After all, he didn’t get to drink the Pinot Grigio or the Barolo. They were confiscated; I know that for a fact.
But watching him on TV, I realized that he oneupped me in another, more fundamental way. As he was interviewed coming out of prison (and the hype! You’d think he’d served twenty years and a wrongful conviction was overturned), he stops and turns to stare directly into the camera’s eye, speaking softly, in a controlled, almost wounded kind of way—like an Italian film star in a noirish setting. No one could miss the fact that his deep-set eyes and shadow of a beard, combined with the upturned collar on his worn sport jacket, gave him that soulful bedroom look that I know he was going for. And what did he say? Would you believe he quoted James Madison? “‘Popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.’”
Bravura performance. The erudition coupled with the intensity of his look. Little me, on the other hand, would try and fail at impersonating the lost, waifish air of a Daryl Hannah type. Instead, I’d look vulnerable and helpless. Instead of alerting viewers to the fact that my incarceration was part of a distressing new pattern of attack on the freedom of the press, I would merely look distraught as though I was weathering the flu. I’d undoubtedly say something rambling and incoherent because I hadn’t slept well due to the hard beds and thin mattresses, the claustrophobic sizes of the cells and the overcrowded conditions. My hair would be twirled up in a ponytail so that it didn’t droop like seaweed because of the absence of Aveda Sap Moss shampoo or Kiehl’s Silk Groom (do they let you take those things to jail?)—my lifelines to vibrant hair. And without Nars Orgasm blush and Chanel lip gloss, I’d look merely washed out, not sultry columnist wronged by the system.
So instead of reporting it, Slaid Warren was the news for a good week after that, and as I learned, spending time in the big house, especially for holding such high moral values, can really up your Internet-chatter quotient, not to mention boosting future book advances. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that Slaid had arranged it, maybe even sleeping with the judge (who was divorced and not half-bad-looking, even in her muumuu-size black robe) to set the whole thing up.
But these days, praise the Lord, Slaid was out, a free man—free to take himself to movie premiers and hang out at all-night celebrity-backed restaurant openings that were destined to be covered in the next day’s papers where he was photographed snuggling one fetching model or another and generally cavorting with the A-list.
And while we had very different types of social lives and went our separate ways, we both seemed to have similar instincts when it came to sniffing out a good story, leading to columns that were often breaking the same news.
The problem was we were more than just rivals in our columns; we had become rivals in our lives, elevating one-upmanship to a spectator sport for readers, not to mention the sword sharpening that went on privately between us, on the phone.
What do I mean?
When I wrote about the mayor using workers under city contract to renovate playgrounds to work in his Fifth Avenue town house, Slaid had a similar column as I guessed he would. So I was lucky enough to know someone who worked for the construction company. I topped him by offering obscure details about the particular style of moldings that the mayor was installing (egg and dart) and added another juicy detail—he had them working overtime so they could finish the job in time for his annual Christmas bash. (Catered by a company headed by a friend of a friend. I held off describing the canapés that he ordered, baja ceviche, crab rangoon and caviar d’aubergine, among others, and the cranberry Stoli martinis, juicy details to foodies, but really a bit beside the point.) That phone call was a memorable one too.
“Egg and dart?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What the hell is egg and dart?”
“Ask one of your interior-design
