The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.
—Coco Chanel
I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in creative writing and a vague notion about wanting to pursue a career that involved writing. But before surrendering to adulthood, I spent a mostly magical summer in Italy and Greece, first attending a college buddy’s wedding in the Italian Alps and then roaming around the Greek Isles with another friend. As Labor Day approached and my funds dwindled, I booked a ticket from Athens to D.C., landing in the nation’s capital with not much more than a duffel bag of dirty clothes and a travel journal.
I decided to head to Washington because that is where my siblings were and I didn’t have a better idea. First my sister and then my brother—both government lawyers—provided me food and shelter and helped me put together some semblance of a résumé for my job search. This wasn’t easy, given my spotty work history: babysitter, camp counselor, greeting card author (a college roommate’s father owned a greeting card company and had employed me to write sappy verses to accompany cloying animal photos), and singing-telegrams entrepreneur (another college buddy had talked me into going into business with her).
A friend of my brother’s who was an editor in the Washington Post Style section passed along my résumé to the woman at the Post in charge of hiring fresh-faced college grads (read: easy prey) willing to work menial newsroom jobs. “You’ll have to take it from here,” Ellen, my brother’s friend, had said when she told me she had gotten my résumé to the right people, adding that if I got the job I shouldn’t tell anyone she had recommended me until I had proven myself.
I was hired as a part-time “copy aide”—the phrase had recently come into use as a concession to the women’s movement but even I knew it was just a verbal sleight of hand for “copyboy.” Whatever the title, I was thrilled to have a real job though I was still too young to appreciate the sheer serendipity that my first foray into the professional world was going exactly according to my hastily devised plan. My main duty was to answer phones and fetch whatever anybody on the Style section staff needed—anything from clip files from the newsroom’s library, which I was disappointed to learn was called the morgue only in the movies, to deliveries from bike messengers left at the front desk.
The best part of the job was the phone answering. The copy aides were the reporters’ lifelines to the outside world, with missed calls from elusive sources, needy children, and annoyed spouses rolling over to our phones. I liked taking messages because it gave me a sense of how the reporters actually worked. After a while, I began to figure out which ones were merely waiting for some PR flack to call, and which ones were working the phones themselves and developing their own sources. As lowly as the position was, the pace was frenetic with phones going off all the time, reporters constantly barking out requests, and the unsettling feeling I was supposed to be in two places at one time, especially when a deadline loomed.
The one thing I didn’t like in those early weeks was the way the head copy editor, whose job it was to lay out each page of the section, would yell, at the top of his lungs, for whichever one of us who was up next to grab the dummy, a long, thin sheet of paper, and run with it through the newsroom and down two floors via the creepy stairwell to the composing room where typesetters were waiting to lay out the next page.
He would holler, “Dummy to go!” and if you were next, you had to jump up like you’d just heard a bullet shot out of a gun. I didn’t object to the running, and I liked getting away from the chaos at the copy desk, but it was demeaning that we had to respond to someone yelling commands at us, like we were dogs being told to fetch. Also, it made us all nervous that we might hear someone scream out “Dummy to go!” at any moment, and we might not be ready to go.
Other than that, I didn’t mind the grunt work. I basked in the reflected star power around me. The Washington Post newsroom in 1982 felt like a grand social science experiment being conducted on hundreds of idiosyncratic journalists with IQs north of 130. I was assigned to the highly regarded Style section, a new, modern iteration of the women’s pages, birthed in 1969 by the newspaper’s famous editor, Ben Bradlee, who came up with the idea of a section for an edgy, in-your-face kind of writing that would push the boundaries of where soft newswriting could go, stylistically, tonally, and topically.
Style would become an incubator for some of the most innovative and voicey and daring feature writing of its time, including that by Nicholas von Hoffman, Myra MacPherson, Tom Shales, and Henry Allen. And there was Sally Quinn, who famously penned biting profiles of assorted Washingtonian types—social climbers, players, takers, movers and shakers. Even more famously, perhaps, Sally married Bradlee (more on that later). But I didn’t have much of a sense of this recent history, arriving with just the most cursory understanding that the newspaper and its charismatic editor were household names because of Watergate, and because of the movie chronicling that era, All the President’s Men, which had come out just six years before I stepped foot in the newsroom.
Though the Style section had little to do with the paper’s Watergate coverage beyond proximity, it shared a sense of collective self-importance and an aura of excitement that felt like a current of electricity was always running through it. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists milled about, asking if so-and-so government official had returned their call, or if I knew where the empty notepads were (I did eventually), and I was making every effort to answer them without letting on that I was as overwhelmed as I was. I could barely breathe those first few weeks and spent much of my time avoiding eye contact and trying not to stumble over my words. Even though I certainly did not have a glamorous job there, I had landed myself in a glamorous spot.
We copyboys were young and female—Charlotte, Ann, Kathryn, Elaine, Diane, and me—and that was enough of a draw for many of the middle-aged male reporters who, battling writer’s block, would often get up from their computers and come over to shoot the breeze. Usually three of us were on duty at a time, and we sat just outside the glass wall of the managing and deputy editors’ offices, in a perfect row like shiny new sedans on a car lot.
The assignment editors sat in the next row, parallel to us, and they talked among themselves or to the writers they were currently editing. But we were able to hear what they were saying and just sitting in such close proximity to great editors editing great writers was worth as much as a year or two at the best MFA program or journalism school in the country. They would sometimes look up and realize we were there, hanging on their every word. Occasionally they would dole out a little mercy, offering advice to us about our (mostly imagined) writing careers.
“Let me give you a little piece of wisdom,” Harriet Fier, one of the assignment editors, said one morning, apropos of nothing, yawning and stretching. “Don’t get too fat and happy in any job.”
I looked at her blankly, and she sighed at my lack of understanding.
“Always move on to the next challenge,” she continued. I nodded, though I still didn’t completely understand what she was telling me.
Harriet’s last name was pronounced “fear” and she was a bit scary, in the sense that she was more confident than any woman I had ever encountered, and also louder. She wore black leather boots and tight sweaters and exuded an unapologetic sensuality. She had come to the Post from Rolling Stone, where she’d been a managing editor who had worked her way up from switchboard operator. I like to think we copy aides reminded Harriet of her salad days, but I can’t imagine she was ever as tentative as I was, and it’s doubtful she saw any glimmer of herself in me. She was gutsy, brassy, of the original lean-in generation decades before anybody was using that phrase.
The Post was filled with characters like her, and the more I figured this out, the more hooked I was on the place. The smell, the noise, the hustle—all of it worked on me like an aphrodisiac. I loved it in its entirety though each section had its own vibe, rhythm, and philosophy. As soon as you moved from the “hard news” newsroom (Metro, National, Foreign, Business, Investigative, and Obits) to “soft news” (Style, Sunday Magazine, Food, Home, and Weekend), the climate changed. The hard news sections were quieter—there was much less banter and clowning around. Reporters talked in hushed tones on the phone and I always imagined shadowy figures on the other end of the line, sources deep within the bowels of the Pentagon or the FBI. Their desks were messier with stacks of files and documents, and the national reporters tended to have fewer personal artifacts like family photos or cartoons tacked up in their cubicles.
The “soft news” sections were segregated from the rest of the paper. The cubicles of the soft news reporters were set apart from those of the hard news reporters by a mere forty yards, but the hallway that separated them was like a demilitarized zone, and when you moved from one to the other, you felt like you had crossed a border into another country. People would look up from their word processors, warily eyeing you, openly eavesdropping if you started a conversation with someone nearby.
I learned quickly that reporters had no use for social graces or nuanced manners. Men loosened their ties—the few who bothered to wear them in the first place—women kicked off their heels, and everyone spoke loudly and over each other. The exception was Judith Martin. She was the woman behind the popular etiquette column “Miss Manners,” and it’s possible that she took her job too seriously, floating around the newsroom in a royal haze, wearing white gloves up to her elbows. It was a cacophony of acerbic, inappropriate humor, deadline tension, free-floating anxiety, and not infrequent glimpses of genius.
Here, in Style, each person’s workspace was a miniature art installation of personality: bulletin boards with labor union bumper stickers, “You can’t eat prestige”; tattered strips of outrageous headlines—headless body in topless bar (now a cliché but then a tabloid news story about a hostage forced to decapitate a strip club owner)—and, when seasonal affective disorder became a thing, “Happy Light” boxes popped up on desks, casting their negative-ion therapy rays. Reporters often wore headphones, listening to music on their Walkmans, which had just become a thing a few years earlier. Others shouted at each other across the rows of heads, sometimes in jest, occasionally in anger, always on deadline.
The copy editors were the grown-ups of the newsroom, and they sat by themselves, in a bay of terminals off to the side. Their shift started around 4:00 p.m. and lasted long into the night, often past 1:00 a.m. Each day, they saved the newspaper from embarrassment and legal action and saved the writers from themselves, from errors of both judgment and fact, not to mention grammar. They grumbled about the collective lack of attention to the newspaper’s in-house style guide for grammar and language, but secretly they were pleased because it was a constant validation of their existence.
I marveled at how bold and pushy the reporters acted, but eventually it became clear that much of their bravado was covering up a lot of garden-variety insecurities. It wasn’t unusual for a reporter to get up in the middle of a contentious editing session and stomp off to have a cigarette or, even worse, disappear across the street to pout in the Post Pub, nursing a bruised ego with a beer. In high school they’d been the ones who had taken refuge in the school newspaper, or, if they were late bloomers, hadn’t found their passion and tribe until they’d arrived at college, where they had stumbled into a campus newsroom and never left. They spent the next four years socializing exclusively with other student journalists, the closest facsimile to a band of brothers that civilians can join. And they continued this camaraderie when they found their way to the Post newsroom, albeit a bit tempered by what Ben Bradlee famously called “creative tension,” the friendly, competitive pitting of newsroom staffers against each other for bylines and “gets.” The newsroom crackled with a collective ambition that demanded you subscribe to or risk being left behind.
I hadn’t been one of those J-school types. While my peers at the Post had hung out in campus newsrooms writing stories about their university’s administration wrongdoing and learning about the inverted pyramid, I was scribbling bad poetry under eucalyptus trees on the Berkeley campus or in crowded, smoky coffee shops. Besides the core curricular requirements, I took creative writing workshops where I worked on plays, short stories, and novellas and talked about narrative arc and craft and voice. Not only had I never been involved in campus media, I had never even considered a career in journalism until I arrived in Washington. I wasn’t yet sure where I ultimately wanted to go, but I knew I wanted it to involve words and stories, and people who cared about both.
Style was a great section for me to start my career in because it was a place where women had risen to the top ranks. I was surrounded by confident, competent newspaperwomen who didn’t look to men for approval or permission: Harriet Fier; Mary Hadar, the Style section managing editor; and her deputy editor, Ellen Edwards. Also, working for a company headed by Katharine Graham—a legendary figure who had taken over leading the paper after her brilliant but mentally unstable husband killed himself—mitigated my overall sense that journalism was largely the realm of powerful white men. Nearly two decades later, in a collection of pieces about Washington that Mrs. Graham edited, she would observe: “Washington is a tough town for women—and especially for wives. This is in large part because, since its inception, Washington has been and remains a man’s town. For most of the decades of my Washington life, it was men who were in charge.”
It never occurred to me that it was unusual that a woman was at the helm of a ship as hulking as the Washington Post. The few sightings I’d had of Mrs. Graham in the newsroom my first year left me with the impression that she was untouchably regal, even unearthly in her sense of confidence and command. I knew only the briefest of outlines of how she had gotten there. I didn’t know about the decisions she made, the risks she took, and—what would be for me, when I did finally school myself in her personal history, the most resonant—the fears she thwarted or at least managed. I had no idea that in her own way she felt as much an outsider as I did in my lowly position. Despite her place at the center of power, Mrs. Graham also felt oddly on the sidelines and wanted so much to be in the game.
Though in my salad days, I also wanted to be in the game, and my perch on the periphery of the Style section was as good as any to figure out where I might begin to build a career.
I worked about twenty hours a week those first few months, hoping they would give me more hours while I struggled to save enough money to get my own place. I was living in my brother’s brownstone at Fifteenth and Q Streets NW, a neighborhood on the edge of Dupont Circle that was slowly becoming the gentrified, trendy mecca it is for young professionals today. My brother, David, was then a happy bachelor, and he good-naturedly put up with housing me temporarily. The deal was that once I saved enough for first and last months’ rent I would find my own place. He helped me navigate Washington and the beginning of adulthood. Right after I arrived he took me out on the front stoop and pointed in the direction of the Post.
“When you walk out the door, you can go that way. Don’t go that way,” he said, wagging a finger in the opposite direction. “The methadone center is two blocks over. Unless you’re secretly an addict, you don’t want to go there. And if you work late, after dark, you have to take a cab home. No exceptions, ever.”
David was secretly proud of my job, I could tell, but he had a weird way of showing it. His favorite gag was to creep up on me just before sunrise, when I was still deeply asleep, and yell in my ear, “DUMMY TO GO!” I would leap out of my bed and run toward what I believed in my stupor was the direction of the copy desk. He did this day after day for a month, and I fell for it every time.
Copy aides were allowed to pitch stories, and if their idea was approved, they could go ahead and pursue it, as long as they did it on their own time. If a story actually made it into the paper, the aide was paid a freelancer’s fee, usually a couple hundred bucks.
The Food section was particularly open to freelancers, and even though my idea of a meal was a tuna sandwich or a can of smoked oysters on crackers, I volunteered to write whatever they needed. Soon enough they gave me my first assignment, a medley of pumpkin recipes, and I turned David’s kitchen into my own test lab. That’s making it sound too sophisticated because my performance was more I Love Lucy than Julie & Julia. I also thought David and I might both throw up from eating too many pumpkin muffins, pies, and bread, but that concern disappeared the morning I picked up the paper off the front stoop and, spotting my very first byline in bold black typeface, ran into the house shrieking with delight.
After a few months, just as my brother’s patience was beginning to wear thin, the Post gave me a full-time position. I was still a copy aide, but now I was working a forty-hour workweek. That pay, along with what I made freelancing, meant I’d be earning just enough money to support myself. I was still writing for Food and Home (hard-hitting stories like how a Redskin offensive lineman decorated his bachelor pad and when to refinish your hardwood floors), but I also began to get assignments covering parties, mostly political fund-raisers.
I moved to a studio apartment in Foggy Bottom, close to the White House and the State Department and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was also walking distance to work. The building was art deco-ish and, if you squinted, it had a shabby elegance except for the occasional cockroach in the kitchen. My apartment was small but serviceable and sunny, being on the sixth floor facing east. It had parquet floors I would hate now but loved then and a Murphy table that unfolded from the wall in the unlikely event that I cooked dinner for anyone.
I was now truly on my own, gainfully employed, and my life was taking shape. My routine was to work the day shift, 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and as winter approached and the temperature dropped, I was able to fit ice-skating into my regular schedule on the nights I didn’t get assigned to cover a party. I had figure-skated since I was a kid, though I was never good enough to compete. But now that I had established myself in Washington, I started to explore the city’s outdoor rinks and a few nearby indoor ones, too. There was an adequate outdoor rink on my way home, and I would bring my skates with me in the morning and stop there for an hour or two before heading home for a late dinner.
One day I was walking through the Style section with my skates slung over my shoulder, and Henry Allen, a Vietnam vet with a gruff voice that bordered on a growl, yelled out, “Hey, Blades.” Not realizing he was talking to me, I kept walking. “Hey, BLADES!” he yelled louder. And then, in a cheesy Mexican accent, he hollered, “Senorita Blahh Daze.”
After that, whenever Henry saw me, skates or no skates, he would bellow from across the newsroom either “Blades!” or “Senorita Blahh Daze!” He would chuckle to himself every time as if the clever nickname had just then come to him. It was a friendly hazing, the first sign that I might someday get keys to the club of Post insiders. I turned bright red and fumbled and sometimes walked into the nearest desk, but secretly I was thrilled by the acknowledgment.
Henry didn’t have much of a filter when communicating with other people, and he was slightly deaf so there could be little subtlety in any conversation with him because you both ended up yelling. But as eccentric as he was in person, his journalism was another story. A feature writer, he also wrote essays and criticism on whatever struck his fancy. He won a Pulitzer for criticism in 2000, and he put in thirty-nine years at the Post before leaving under a strange cloud of media attention when he got into a fistfight with a young reporter.
This was in 2009, and Henry, in his late sixties and by then an assignment editor, was within weeks of retiring. The fight with a Style section reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia, with whom he’d had a growing conflict over several days, culminated in Henry’s critique of a piece that he deemed “the second worst story I have seen in Style in forty-three years.” It involved a “charticle” (a hybrid genre of journalism that marries a chart or graphics with an article and is often the object of disdain by old-school journalists because it is viewed as a threat to the traditional narrative) about the history of inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information.
“Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable,” Henry told Politico. “The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up.” (If this story isn’t emblematic of the tensions between old and new media, I don’t know what is.)
In 2013 Henry wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the Washington Post. He described the earlier days, before the Internet and media conglomeration and all those evil things that aging journalists like to pull out of their complaint boxes, but he also acknowledged that people, almost from the beginning of his tenure at the Post in 1970, had been asking him, “Didn’t the Post used to be better?”
Publishing this rebuke in the Post’s chief rival must have been satisfying, though the loving nostalgia was what was powerful. “The Post that questioners remembered had yet to grow into its greatness,” Henry wrote, “but its happy few gave it style, a sexy, ironic edge. It was liberal and Ivy League, Kennedy and Bogart. The hip female reporters strode around the newsroom and swore a lot—an F-bomb had to be dropped at every dinner party, it seemed. I had the feeling that any young man who showed up in Levi’s, loafers and a Harris tweed sportcoat would be hired instantly.”
Throwing a punch was not a professional move, but I certainly understand the impulse, and I like to think that if I had been born a man, I might be the type to throw more than a few. But it was Henry’s talent that interested me a lot more than his temper. Being around writers of this caliber made me hungrier to write something worth reading. I wanted to produce journalism myself, but I also longed to develop the fiction writing I had worked on at Berkeley. The problem was that, at age twenty-two, I didn’t have much to write about. I carried around a small notebook and jotted down ideas and impressions, hoping that one of them would incubate.
One rainy afternoon, a short, stocky reporter with a permanent snarl and possibly a Napoleon complex—I’ll call him “Bonaparte”—was late to an interview across town. Until recently, Bonaparte had been the rock critic, but at his own request, he had switched to general assignment reporting. He declared that he had run “out of adjectives.” I was particularly intimidated by Bonaparte’s gruff manner. Everyone referred to him by surname, without the honorific, just “Bonaparte.” He and Harriet Fier were chums, and their theatrical swaggering and sparring often commanded the collective attention of the Style newsroom.
He approached the copy aide station that day and pulled out his wallet. The three of us manning the phones were lost in our own thoughts.
“Hey, do any of you have change for a twenty?” Bonaparte barked. “These D.C. cabdrivers never have change.”
Bonaparte was the type who regularly seemed to compare D.C. to New York—always unfavorably.
The other girls shook their heads but I dutifully reached for my purse, scrambling for my wallet. I pulled out a messy wad of one-dollar bills and started unfolding them, smoothing, organizing, and counting them into a neat stack. Bonaparte shook his head, tapped his foot, and sported his signature sneer. I came up short, at eighteen bucks. I looked at him, silently apologetic.
He snatched the bills from my hands, threw the twenty in my lap, as though I were a panhandler, and said with a sniff, “Poor girls always have singles.”
Before I could answer—not that I had a real comeback—he turned and strode off. The other girls giggled nervously. My eyes clouded up, and I mumbled something before running off to the ladies’ room. It was the first of many times I cried at the Post, but that time was the most pathetic.
As humiliating as the Bonaparte exchange had been, within hours I realized he’d given me an enormous gift. Skating around the rink that night, doing my warm-up crossovers, I brooded over Bonaparte’s comment. Poor girls always have singles. At first it rang in my ears like a recrimination, but the longer and faster I skated, the more mesmerizing it became, transforming itself from an accusation into an incantation, almost a kind of prayer.
As I walked home in the dark, exhausted from my workout, Poor girls always have singles was still playing in my head, becoming a musical riff. Bonaparte meant singles as in single dollar bills but really poor girls had single rooms, single beds, singleton status. I stayed up most of the night. By the next morning, I’d sketched out the rough outline of a plot about a philosophy student working her way through school by waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant.
One night, when a new shipment of fortune cookies turns up empty, Rachel O’Reilly, daughter of a Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father, cannibalizes Yiddish aphorisms and the wisdom of the great philosophers to improvise.
Her fortunes prove to be wildly popular (“Trust in God but tie up your camel,” “It is better to eat vegetables and fear no creditors than to eat duck and to hide from them,” “Hell shared with a sage is better than paradise with a fool,” “Love your neighbor, even if he plays the trombone,” and “The fortune you seek is inside another fortune”). It wasn’t a stretch from my odd jobs during college writing greeting-card text and singing-telegram lyrics. Before I knew it, I had half a dozen chapters written. I titled it Poor Girls Always Have Singles.
During that first winter, when I wasn’t working, I spent most of my time either writing my novel or skating at the rink. As the months wore on, I was slowly becoming more comfortable in my own skin and less awed by those around me. I made some friends, mostly other copy aides, and we’d get a drink or burger after work, though we eyed each other through the competitive lens of Ben Bradlee’s “creative tension.” We all wanted to be journalists, but given our lowly station there were just two traditional ways to score bylines and move up.
The first was rewriting the news wires about breaking entertainment news for what’s now called “The Reliable Source,” but back in the day was called, unimaginatively, “Personalities.” It was the bottom-feeder of writing assignments, but you got a tagline at the end of the column. The second avenue to promotion was party reporting, and as the months went on I got the hang of it and began to get the better assignments.
I quickly discovered that very little that went on in Washington was actually fun for fun’s sake, and parties were no exception. Politicians, lobbyists, and consultants all flocked to these events, conducting business, pressing cards into each other’s hands, plotting power moves between the bar and the bathroom. I understood their motives, but there were other people who seemed to be hangers-on who had no clear function or goal but showed up decked out and pumped up.
President Roosevelt at a 1942 press conference noted that a lot of social types were hanging around Washington and yet contributing nothing. “I suppose if we made it very uncomfortable for the—what shall I call them? Parasites? in Washington,” he said, “the parasites would leave.” But forty years later, the parasites were still there, and they all had to do something in the evenings. Balls, benefits, fund-raisers—you name it—anything with pigs in a blanket, a mic, and a crowd, and politicians and parasites would show up in cocktail attire.
The Style section was determined to cover it all. If one of Washington’s A-listers, such as the president, First Lady, a Supreme Court justice, or, even better, a Hollywood celebrity, was scheduled to make an appearance, a real reporter would be assigned to cover the event. But if the party was a strictly B-listers affair, one of us copy aides would be sent. When we had one of these assignments, we waited until the day shift ended, and then we’d go to the bathroom, put on big-girl clothes and the strand of pearls that our parents had given us for graduation. We’d grab a reporter’s notebook and take a cab to the hotel or banquet hall where the event was happening. If the assignment editor had given us advance warning, we would have gone to the newsroom library and read any clips on the prior year’s coverage of the annual event, and if the paper had been given a guest list, the editor would go over it with us so we knew which people to get quotes from.
Covering parties is much harder than it sounds and significantly less fun. First of all, you’re the only one at the table who can’t drink. That is, unless you think getting loaded is going to help you when you get back to the newsroom and have an hour or ninety minutes max to bang out an eight-hundred-word piece that hundreds of thousands of Post readers are going to see the next morning. Everyone at the Post was aware that the publisher, Katharine Graham, might read your story in her paper. Just the idea that she might spot an error I made was enough to make a temporary teetotaler out of me.
Another challenge is that if you’re twenty-two and short and look lost or disgruntled (which I’ve been told on occasion is my resting face), “important” people aren’t likely to talk to you. Or even register that you exist. You are completely and utterly invisible. Then, when the important people find out you’re from the Washington Post, they want to talk to you, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily going to say anything interesting. And taking a break to visit the ladies’ room is a risk because actual news only seems to happen when you are in there.
This famously happened to my friend and colleague Liz Kastor in 1985, when she was covering a formal banquet for the Post and had the misfortune of going to the bathroom when Washington Redskins fullback John Riggins drunkenly said to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “Come on, Sandy baby, loosen up. You’re too tight.”
That line was delivered just before he passed out on the floor under the table.
The absence of breaking news doesn’t mean that party reporting is without value. Covering parties gave me an education I wouldn’t have found anywhere else. Important Washington business—networking and fund-raising—was conducted at these parties and at private ones closed to the press.
In addition to learning how political Washington works, the young party reporter also gets on-the-job journalistic training. Nothing makes you think faster or more creatively on your feet than having a rapidly approaching deadline, a tired and grumpy editor expecting copy, and a news hole reserved for your yet-to-be-written story. I developed a love-hate relationship with the process. I loved it because it forced me to construct a narrative quickly, accurately, and engagingly, even if its main characters were dull senators with canned responses and photo-op blown hair. I hated it because it meant talking to strangers, ones usually much older than I and always full of themselves.
The Washington Post press pass dangling on a thin chain around my neck—and constantly entangled with my pearls—helped to legitimize me, but still, I had to come up with a compelling question. In those first few months, I sometimes fell short and the list of interviewees who responded to me with contempt is long. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and master of disdain, was among the top—if not the—most unforgiving of those I tried to wangle a quote out of, his cold eyes boring into me after I stumbled through an inane question.
I learned you couldn’t predict who would be generous with their time and their wit, but no one was as gracious as Moses. That first spring, in May 1983, after having covered a dozen or so smaller parties, I was sent to cover the Folger Shakespeare Library’s annual benefit. The guest of honor was Charlton Heston. All I knew was that he’d parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
I was assigned to the party two days before the event, a luxurious amount of time in the pre-Internet age to read up on the Folger and Heston. Additionally, I wasn’t on the schedule to work the day shift because the Folger affair was a late-afternoon event. That meant I could sleep in and be well rested. I was intent on writing a great story. The only problem was I woke up speechless. Literally. I had a bad case of laryngitis, prompted by my newly acquired allergies, which the allergist had described as inevitable.
“Washington is a swamp,” he noted in a way I could tell was part of his regular spiel. “No one gets out alive.” He handed me a prescription. (Many years later I discovered that this often repeated cliché that the city was built on actual swampland was untrue, but as a metaphor it captured the essence of political Washington.)
No way was I calling in sick. This was the best assignment I’d gotten to date. I stayed in bed all morning drinking tea and slurping Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. When it came time to get ready, I dressed up and waved down a cab, notebook in hand, voice still nowhere to be found.
Heston couldn’t attend the matinee performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, and he got there just as the 150 guests swarmed into the Folger garden, munching on Renaissance meat pies and chicken morsels. In my story I described him as standing, “casually chatting, sun-tanned and towering majestically above a few reporters.” Somehow, after a few minutes, it was just Moses and me. The other reporters had gotten what they wanted, and now Heston was looking at me expectantly. I scribbled on my notepad that I had laryngitis.
Heston smiled and said, “Oh, that’s a shame.” He motioned to a waiter who was carrying a tray of wineglasses. “Sir, this young lady is under the weather. Do you think you could scare up a hot toddy for her?”
He then explained exactly how to make the drink as I stood nearby, stunned. Within minutes I was seated at one of the Folger’s intimate café tables for two, sipping my hot toddy with the man who had led the Israelites out of Egypt. He suggested that I write down my questions for him on my pad while he watched: What Shakespeare roles have you played? Is Macbeth your favorite role? Do you have a connection to the Folger . . .
I took down his answers, excited and filled with gratitude, basking in the curious stares of the other reporters and the female guests who were obviously wondering what my secret was. He rose from the table, still smiling his biblical smile, and said, “And now I have a question for you. Did the hot toddy do the trick?”
I nodded and then managed to utter a throaty “yes” and “Thank you, sir.”
He bowed and returned to the rest of the guests. I continued on the party circuit and met all sorts of Washington types, from presidents to princesses, but no one ever came close to showing that sort of kindness or class.
I wrote about everything from how to get your rugs cleaned (I didn’t have any, but it seemed like a useful piece of information) to the perils of sleepwalking (I’m a lifelong sleepwalker). Being a young reporter is a humbling experience, mainly because you quickly learn how much you don’t know. Luckily, I had good editors who saved me from my huge gaps of knowledge and lack of worldliness, which on one particular afternoon made itself painfully known to the entire Style section.
I was on the desk and took a call from the White House press office. I hung up and yelled over to one of the assignment editors that Nancy Reagan was having Jane Wyman over that afternoon for tea. Wyman was a popular film actress in the 1940s and 1950s, but recently around Washington she was known as President Reagan’s first wife. Suddenly, reporters were jumping up from their seats and fighting over who would get the story. Editors were close to screaming “Stop the presses,” while they excitedly figured out how to rip up the front of the Style section layout to make room. “Above the fold, for sure!”
But then Ellen, my brother’s Style editor friend who had been my connection to the Post, looked at me and shook her head. “Robin,” she said, turning to Robin Groom, the salt-of-the-earth Style social events editor. “Could you call your White House contact and confirm this?”
Then, with laserlike intensity, she turned back to me, “Are you sure they said Jane Wyman? The actress? Ronald Reagan’s first wife?”
“Uh, I think so . . . I mean . . .” I have to admit that I didn’t know Reagan had a first wife. I knew of Nancy, and that was it. And as for Hollywood actresses, I was lucky if I could tell an Audrey from a Katharine Hepburn.
Robin hung up the phone and smiled. “Barbara, Barbara, Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “What are we going to do with you? It’s Jane Wyatt, the actress who played the mother on ‘Father Knows Best,’ not Jane Wyman, movie star and ex-wife of the president. That’s who is having tea with the First Lady right now.”
This was followed by a group eye roll and from-the-gut groan as I shrank down in my seat, shamed into silence for the rest of the week.
I did learn the first lesson of journalism: Double-check all names. The second lesson: Triple-check.
This wasn’t the last time I had to learn the hard way what it feels like to make a mistake that could end up being in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I had a knack for rewriting the wires, which we did a lot for the Personalities column, and I began to get assigned to this frequently. One day I noticed something interesting from the wire service and refashioned it into copy suitable for the Post, then hit “send,” moving it through to the editor. It was a particularly busy news day and though the copy desk was first rate, it didn’t catch every error. After the paper’s first edition was published, one of the copy editors came over and informed me I had written “Marvin” instead of “Melvin” in an item about the famously litigious defense lawyer Melvin Belli. When the editor explained who Belli was, I was terrified. If you haven’t heard of him, Wikipedia notes that he was known as the “King of Torts” and “Melvin Bellicose.”
“Would he sue me?” I asked.
The editor laughed and fixed it for the next edition. “He’s got bigger fish to fry than you. But next time don’t take your eye off the ball,” she responded, walking off jauntily.
And then, perhaps my most horrifying mistake came when I was the wingwoman to Donnie Radcliffe, an old-fashioned social reporter who had covered the White House for many years. Donnie was the sweetest, most gentle person I met in that newsroom. And she was also one of the hardest workers. Careful, nervous, meticulous, she was a wonderful mentor and guide through official Washington. She was the go-to person for the Style section whenever the White House hosted a state dinner.
Covering state dinners sounds glamorous, and in a way it was, but it was mostly just nerve-racking. At one point, while Donnie was downstairs filing an early version of the story, she stationed me at the entrance where the guests arrived to note anyone of significance. A White House staffer was on hand to help the reporters identify people as they came in. When I saw a woman who looked to be in her sixties come down the line accompanied by a young man in military garb, I asked the White House press woman for the names of the couple.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll check.”
I wrote down the names, but they didn’t mean anything to me. Donnie came up and relieved me of my post, asking me to go file any quotes and updates I’d gotten. We had to file several versions of this story for the paper’s many editions throughout the evening.
When we got back to the office later that night to file the final version of the story, Donnie read the first edition, which had been out for hours. When she got to the sentence about the woman, she let out a squawk. The woman was the widow of a former congressman and a well-known socialite and expert on manners, Donnie explained in a panic.
“He wasn’t her date!” Donnie cried in distress. “He’s half her age, if that!”
She ran over to the copy desk and had the copy chief correct it for the next edition. When she returned, Donnie told me that the White House provides a military escort for all unaccompanied female guests at state dinners. That’s who the young man was.
Horrified, I couldn’t sleep, certain that the next morning I would be summoned to the eighth floor where Mrs. Graham would excoriate me for my carelessness and then fire me for embarrassing her, the newspaper, and her friend.
The reality was much less dramatic. I dragged myself in and learned that the woman had already called the Style section and told them she hadn’t laughed so hard in years. She loved imagining herself as the topic of scandalous conversation over cornflakes from Georgetown to Capitol Hill.
Journalism lesson number three: Never assume.
And then there are the mistakes not of fact but of judgment. I was sent out one night to cover the Washington premiere of one of the Indiana Jones movies, which was doubling as a benefit for Save the Children. Harrison Ford was to be there, and my marching orders were to return with a quote from the great man himself. I definitely knew who he was and was particularly pleased with the prospect of meeting him, but when I got to the event, I was herded into the press pool and we were cordoned off behind ropes as though the movie star were the president of the United States. (He later played one in Air Force One.)
“Can’t we talk to Mr. Ford, just for a minute?” one of the other reporters asked.
“I’m afraid not,” replied one of the young Hollywood types assigned to body-block us, the unruly, unwashed press.
“But that’s why we’re here,” another protested. “To get a quote from him. We wouldn’t have come if you’d told us we wouldn’t have access.”
The Hollywood type shrugged and tossed her highlighted hair over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she said, sounding not very.
This led to a heated discussion between the reporters and the handlers. I could tell there was no winning this so I slunk away to review my options. My editor had been pretty clear about not coming back empty-handed. I finally decided to go for it, raised the rope, and did a limbo maneuver. The next thing I knew I was right beside Harrison, who was sipping his drink and talking to a Save the Children executive. I waited patiently and then opened my mouth. But nothing came out. It wasn’t laryngitis this time. It was stage fright. He was just as good-looking in person as he was on the big screen, handsome in that weathered, rugged, attractively aging male way.
He was also short on patience for young, wet-behind-the-ears, starstruck reporters. Finally I mumbled something he obviously considered lame—I can’t remember what—and he answered me in a tone that made me want to dig a hole in the floor. The only thing I can remember he actually said was: “I think your first question precludes your second one.” Right then, one of his handlers spotted me and rushed over, grabbed me by the upper arm, and hauled me away, yelling at me about breaking protocol. Then another one appeared and soon it felt like a whole posse reprimanding me. Embarrassed, I escaped back to the newsroom.
One of Ben Bradlee’s favorite quotes was “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” That is true, but it’s also true that it’s not a good idea to use that ink to settle personal scores (journalism lesson number four). In the story I wrote I referred to Ford’s handlers as “pit bulls in evening gowns.” The editors loved it and thought it was a hilarious characterization. After all, don’t journalists love every opportunity they have to put down a flack?
The paper never got any pushback from anyone about it, but this was before the days of Twitter. Before social media made it easy to widely disseminate your opinion, it took a lot for someone to write a letter to the editor or make an angry call to Mrs. Graham. But looking back, I regret that line. It just doesn’t sit right with me. My redemption is that I use it as a teaching tool to remind my students that it’s better to be fair than to be clever.
Lesson number five—First do no harm—applies to journalism as well as medicine.