Chapter 32

Selling the Story

 

Ford Curtis didn't cross Nick’s mind until they were well settled down and half drunk in the little front sitting room of Angela’s hotel digs.

First things first, Nick ordered ice and a bottle while he waited for Angela to take her much-advertised bath.

As he stood, drink in hand, at the open Parisian-style window/door overlooking Assembly Square, mulling over the sparse details he’d so far dragged out of Angela about her capture, he marveled at the hominess of this room. With its desk and easy chairs in front, separated from the bedroom and bath by a teakwood bookcase divider, it was like a tiny little house. The divider shelves were filled with her amazingly eclectic assortment of musty, battered books, old pictures and odd colorful trinkets and bits of fabric. Most of the stuff looked like it had been collected from the nearby markets, or the stalls and tiny storefront shops that lined the streets around.

Black and white photographs of war were tacked to the creamy walls.

Gosh, Nick thought, I don’t have much more than a portable typewriter.

So how was he going to pitch this thing to Harry? It all seemed strangely political. A good-looking woman spends 10 days with the Cong. Well, mostly with them, and short spurts with the fellows who captured her. They clearly were regular North Viet Army. They’d moved her around. They don’t torture her, they don’t rape her, they encourage her to talk to captured Americans, and they let her come out with pictures! Doesn’t make much sense. No one’s going to even believe this story, unless the pictures really hold up.

Unbelievably, they had made it to her room without anyone seeing them. The taxi took them to a delivery door of the hotel and they scooted up a back stairs. At that point they didn’t want anyone quizzing her until they’d had a chance to sort out her stories, and figure how to break them and to whom she should sell. Her peasant garb made a great disguise. She’d insisted on that conical hat right up to the very end, she’d even worn it into the bathroom. It seems she knew her hair looked like seaweed and could hardly wait to wash it. Nick said he sure was glad to know that all those shampoo commercials advertising shiny, manageable hair for ladies weren’t just a bunch of bull.

“They’re true,” Angela explained to him with a grin. “Plain old soap really does make your hair dull and straw-like. Especially the dinky pieces of lye-type shit I occasionally got from the Cong.”

When he asked if she was going to make a big point of that in the piece she was planning to sell to either Look or Life, she glared at him. Nick burst out laughing. “You’ve been a prisoner of the Viet Cong for 10 days, and your main goddamn concern is your hair.”

She finally emerged from the bathroom with the hair still wet and wrapped in a Carmen Miranda-type turban. She was wearing a thick, hotel-issue white terry cloth robe and white athletic socks.

“How are the feet?” Nick asked.

“Not bad. The blisters are starting to heal and turn to calluses. The soak in hot, hot water felt sooo good, you can’t believe.”

“OK, let’s roll.”

He handed her a glass with a little ice and a lot of Scotch, and a notebook and pen. “I got to get ahold of Harry soon. You got to give me a lead or a digest line, a few details so I’m prepped to tell him what to expect.”

“Shit, Nick,” Angela said with a frown, ignoring the offered notebook. “I don’t quite know how to break this down. I have POW interviews to offer. As to what happened to me, there’s no drama. No real story. I walked, then walked some more, then got up and walked again. My feet were like mushy cantaloupes. My biggest fear some days was that I might have to have my feet amputated. What’s heroic or dramatic about being too embarrassed to take a pee and end up wetting your pants? Or having a deathly fear of sunstroke? Yeah, sure, your heart’s in your mouth. Who wouldn’t be scared? But pretty soon it’s your life. These guys who are marching you around are just guys. Some occasionally offer you a cigarette, some are pretty hard-nosed, a few menacing. But they’re disciplined. They’re well-indoctrinated with the party line. They’re fighting for their cause, so they’re not going to foul up and harm me when I’m high profile. Word had obviously moved up the line pretty fast that they had a two-headed prize: a journalist and a woman.”

“The drama is in your getting out alive. You know that as well as I do,” Nick replied. “An eyewitness to the Cong. That’s the story. That and the grilling they kept giving you every time they could move you on to another English speaker.”

“Yeah, you betcha. I’m their propaganda tool,” Angela said, this time her frown turning to a grimace. She picked up her empty glass and stared at it for a moment, then put it back down on the little teak table between them. She reached behind her to retrieve the Scotch from the bookshelf, unscrewed its cap, and took a long swig from the bottle. She then picked up the empty glass with her other hand, placed it on the bookshelf, and firmly set the bottle down on the teak table.

Nick laughed. “Now we’re getting down to business. Hey, whoa, what about Curtis? Maybe I should try to get a message to him while I’m out. The poor son-of-a-bitch is on his way to Hue to look for you.”

She took the news with a lot less emotion than she'd shown for her seaweed hair.

“Jesus, Angela, what's wrong with you? The poor bastard is out there risking his job and his life looking for you and you're as cool as though I told you he went out for a pack of chewing gum.”

“Ford's not risking his job. There's plenty to file on from Hue.”

“What does he file if he gets dead?”

“Quit being melodramatic. You said he was supposed to go to Khe Sanh, so what's the difference?”

“The difference is, I guess, the guy's willing to make a fool out of himself over you.”

“Nick, leave me alone about Ford.” She reached for the Scotch bottle and took another swing.

“The poor sap's in love with you.”

“I’m afraid there's no room in Ford's life for more than one war correspondent.”

At that point, Nick gave up on Ford and tackled the subject of another winner on Angela’s Hit Parade of Men – Harry the Arse.

“Him, you need,” Nick said, standing up to go, hoping to leave no room for argument. “I’ll buzz up to the post office and see if I can get a phone line through.”

He got Harry – at home. After the foreign editor had cleared the sleep out of his ears, he was overjoyed. Really. This was one hell of a story. And it belonged to them alone. Angela had some fantastic pictures, or at least she thought she would, once she had a chance to develop them.

Harry suggested the best way for Angela to get maximum exposure was to let Life or Look magazine take their choice of the shots along with first rights to her eyewitness account. “Daily life,” he said, “you know, the stuff about how to wash and take a shit is fine. Obviously done delicate, can’t get too graphic. You sure gotta hint, a course, ‘bout fear of rape. Delicate again, you know the drill.” Harry was perfectly willing to take second choice of the photographs, since there would be plenty to choose from. Newspaper photos are so grainy anyway, it didn't make that much difference. But Harry planned to break the spot story of Angela's capture and safe return under Nick's byline. Harry even offered to call an acquaintance at Life to negotiate the sale.

The big problem was figuring out how to get the pictures through. Harry was worried that if they transmitted the shots through AP, which was the usual route, AP photo guys at transfer points along the line would see them.

“Embargoed exclusively for us,” said Harry, “we aren't running any great risk that some other paper would actually use one, but we sure would be announcing the story to the world.”

Harry and Nick had finally decided the safest route was for Nick to put the undeveloped film in a net bag tagged for delivery to a friend of Harry’s in New York and put it on a commercial flight or one of the government-contract runs that Braniff and a couple of other airlines made regularly transporting GIs back and forth from the States and Okinawa. It would cost them a day that way, but since Angela was the only source of information for the story, they figured there was no way to lose it.

“The broad's golden,” Harry said. “She's on her way now.” He said he’d set up the deal with Life just as soon as dawn came up in New York. “All you kids gotta do is get your butts to a couple a typewriters,” Harry yelled, then hung up.

When Nick reported back, Angela was dressed and the red hair was restored to its buxom life. Her portable with a blank sheet of paper rolled in was open on the teak table beside the Scotch bottle.

“Looks like the Scotch has been getting a better workout than the typewriter,” Nick quipped, as Angela leaned on the sill of her open balcony door staring out at National Assembly Square.

“Yeah, well tell me what Harry said,” Angela said, barely turning toward Nick.

“I’m going to write the news story,” he replied.

“What’s that all about?” Angela demanded, turning to stare at him.

“Simple. Someone else breaking it spot means the wires and everyone else will pick up the story of your capture. That’ll be great advance publicity for the magazine's weekly spread with your first-person account.”

“Well, maybe . . .”

“No maybe about it. Harry knows what he’s doing. Just sit down and get to work. Besides, you’ve got tons of stories – the American POW interviews, you name it. The magazine can take its pick there, too. You’ll have plenty left over for later Sunday features for Harry, and still some to sell to a monthly mag.”

Angela, in a defiant gesture, silently crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the sill.

“OK, babe, sit down,” Nick ordered.

Startled, she picked up her portable, carried it over to her desk and sat. She turned the typewriter so that it faced Nick, who’d moved over to stand near her. She then looked up at him with the most forlorn look he had ever seen.

“God,” she said. “My life depends on this. What if I can’t do it?”

“Just put your fingers on the keys and tell us what happened,” he said quietly.

She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, laid it down and began to type, not looking at the keyboard, never taking her eyes off of Nick’s face.

“I was petrified when they first stopped the bus and came aboard. It seemed like they headed straight for me," she wrote. "I suppose I wasn’t all that easy to miss, squeezed in the way I was among the farmers and their wares and chickens.”

“Way to go,” Nick said, as he sat down to finish his Scotch.

But when he finally pulled the last page of Angela’s story out of her typewriter, he frowned.

“Looks good, but I dunno about this,” he said, jabbing his finger at the page. “This line might give you trouble.”

“Well, hell,” she responded. “It’s the truth. Whether it was a setup or not, I can’t help it if the few American POWs I saw were getting humane treatment.”

 

****

Nick didn’t give Curtis a thought for days. He and Angela were buried in work. Everyone they knew and plenty they didn’t were all interviewing her. The weekly newsmagazines, all the networks, the BBC, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, even Japanese TV. Angela was queen of the mountain for days.

Then one afternoon as they were bouncing along in a pedicab, returning from an interview at the Embassy, she said: “You know, I think maybe I’m ready to take on Curtis.”

“Take on Ford Curtis! Lady, are you crazy?” Nick screeched. “If he's got a brain, he'd shoot you on sight. You leave him lurching around like a fool, don't even bother to make a call to let him know you're alive, haven't inquired once of anyone whether he's dead or alive in Khe Sanh or Hue. What are you going to take on, his ashes?”

“I heard yesterday he's in Khe Sanh, and was inquiring after me from someone who had just arrived. He was said to be extremely impressed when he heard about my POW interviews.”

“Angela, no man's going to love you for your POW interviews. Whatever happened to apple pie?”

“I haven't a clue, love. The guy who told me also said he was coming back in the next few days.”

~~~~~~