Who’s on First? (In Elaine’s Bathroom)

Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson, a handsome New Yorker, is less than six degrees of pages or separation from the New York Post’s infamous Page Six. Actually, Johnson is Page Six and has been for quite some time. He has seen or heard it all and then some—and then inked it in for the rest of us to wake up to: the zing-a ling a-ling wohza-powza of many a New York/Hollywood “scandal.” Who can resist ripping through a paper with headlines like “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar”? And we’re just getting warmed up.

WE ASKED RICHARD Johnson for a few of his favorite Elaine’s memories. Here goes:

The best story ever was the one I wrote on Page Six about the night that Gianni Uzielli’s girlfriend was caught in flagrante with Mets star Keith Hernandez.

The two had disappeared after many drinks, and Uzielli finally left the table to look for them. He found her performing fellatio on Hernandez. Then came an operatic scene as the cuckolded Uzielli screamed at the woman, who sobbed.

As a reporter, the big issue for me the next day was determining whether it had happened in the ladies room, as I had been told, or in the men’s room, as Hernandez maintained. This issue being, who followed whom? Who instigated this act of betrayal?

I’ll also never forget the night George Plimpton and I debated the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission report. Plimpton believed in the single gunman and the magic bullet. I was and remain convinced Lee Harvey Oswald was set up by co-conspirators.

Then there was the night Bo Dietl and I got into a discussion of Donald Manes’s suicide in 1986. Dietl said, “What a coward. What kind of man leaves his family like that?”

I remarked that he didn’t take the easy way out with pills or carbon monoxide.

He stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. That isn’t easy.

Good times.