by Sally Quinn
Right at this moment, out came the servant with a tray and a bowl literally heaped with caviar. This was not any caviar. This was the shah’s personal stash of golden caviar, the most rare and precious caviar in the world. As it turned out, the shah hated caviar, so he doled it out to his closest advisers.
Caviar is my favorite food. Yet another moral crisis—should I go or should I stay? I stayed. The caviar was beyond delicious. And, yes, even worth the chase around the dining room table. Before he agreed to send me back to the hotel with his chauffeur, I had to threaten to rat him out to Ardeshir if he dared to touch me. I look back on that evening and think how stupid I was to stay. It could have had a disastrous ending. But, oh, that caviar . . .
The following day I had an interview with the shahbanou at her residence. She was beautiful, charming, sympathetic, and very upset. It turned out, as she told me discreetly, that she had been against the party and thought it was an unnecessary extravagance. She was also agonizing over the fact that this celebration was not being used to highlight Iranian culture. She clearly understood that the entire event was only going to exacerbate the already simmering tensions between the shah and the people. The whole thing had been cooked up by the shah’s sister Ashraf and her husband, a Machiavellian pair if ever there was one. I left the palace, beyond excited. I had had a great interview, despite the fact that I couldn’t use everything she told me or intimated to me. I learned a lot more later to substantiate what I had suspected.
It was true that the shah had done a lot to modernize his country and bring it into the twentieth century, giving women rights and promoting education and economic development. Nevertheless, he was a dictator who could be ruthless. He was so insulated by those around him that he didn’t pay enough attention to the religious unrest that was happening on his watch until it was too late.
The celebration in Shiraz was a disaster. It was particularly a public relations disaster and I definitely had a hand in that. I wrote nine stories about it, just writing what I had observed, but the pieces were received as one more damning than the other. The whole spectacle was an egregious display of wealth, power, and ego. The guests included Prince Philip and Princess Anne from the UK, King Hussein of Jordan, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace from Monaco, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, President Tito from Yugoslavia, and Imelda Marcos from the Philippines. U.S. president Richard Nixon had planned to attend but changed his mind and sent his vice president, Spiro Agnew (not quite in the same international luminary category).
It was clear when they got there that they were all wondering what the hell they were doing stuck in their tents in the hot sandy desert in Iran, driving for miles to attend excruciatingly tedious ceremonies and boring dinners, and, even worse, eating French food.
The moral implications were not lost on me at the time. I found it untenable that so much money had been wasted for such a self-serving event, while so many people were living in poverty. At the time, though, I was so wrapped up in the coverage, pointing out the event’s extravagance, that I didn’t need to editorialize about it. That wasn’t my job. I reported it the way I saw it and that was enough.
Later, when I told my brother, Bill, who eventually earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religion at the University of Chicago, an alumnus of its Divinity School, about the huge, three-day party and the meeting I had had with the dissidents, he was not surprised. He mentioned then that he felt our government didn’t pay enough attention to the religions of the countries in which we were represented. By the time the shah was finally overthrown in 1979 by the Islamic Revolution, the worst nightmares of my educated, middle-class Iranian dissident friends had come to pass. Bill said to me then that the government should have an office devoted to understanding religion because it played such a huge role in the lives of the billions of people globally.
In 2001, President George W. Bush had created an Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, whose mission, as a report from the Brookings Institution stated, was in part to encourage State Department employees and diplomats to see faith communities as potential allies around the world. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry set up a special office and appointed Shaun Casey, a scholar of Christian ethics, as U.S. representative for religion and global affairs.
It was my experience in Iran, and watching the subsequent overthrow of the shah and the ascendance of Ayatollah Khomeini, that first got me thinking in a serious way about the power of religion and the consequences the misuse of that power can have. I began to think about religion coverage and about issues of faith in a way I never had. I started to see that simply because I thought of myself as an atheist didn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to understand what motivated the vast majority of people in the world. There had to be something there; there had to be. That’s when I began paying attention to the role of religions globally, to belief systems, to faith. That’s when the seeds of what would become the website On Faith were really planted.
* * *
When I was first shown to my desk in the new Style section, I found that I was sitting next to Phil Casey, a grizzled, hardened, cynical reporter who had been covering the police beat for the Post for most of his career. Phil, who happened to be a beautiful writer, had been languishing in the Metro section for years. Ben had scrapped the old women’s section “For and About Women” (somewhat to Kay Graham’s dismay) for Style. The revolutionary idea was that it would be about people, politics, and culture. Ben brought in writers, men and women, from all over the paper and hired outside renegades as well.
Phil Casey was one of his experiments. Phil wore rumpled suits, his jacket off, shirts unbuttoned at the neck with the sleeves rolled up, and a loosened tie. He had a raspy voice from the chain-smoking. His desk was a heap of littered papers, filled ashtrays, matches, empty food containers and Coke cans, and press releases. Phil was the quintessential tough guy with a heart of gold. He viewed me with a mixture of amusement and suspicion, but he saw how nervous I was. I was assigned to cover parties. He gave me the best piece of advice I ever got as a journalist, which served me well throughout my career and not just in covering parties either. “Remember, kid,” he growled, “in every story there’s always a victim and always a perp.”
Since I had no journalistic training, I simply covered parties and other events in a conversational way, describing what I had seen and quoting what I had heard. I also began doing interviews of well-known figures. I quoted them accurately. They spoke for themselves. The pieces were not always flattering, although I did many more positive pieces than not. Naturally though, it was the “hatchet jobs” that got the attention, and soon I had developed a reputation for being a very tough reporter. I began getting quite a bit of publicity, not all of it good. I also began doing profiles of a lot of famous and powerful people. I wrote it the way I saw and heard it.
I did a profile of Norman Mailer after which he dubbed me “Poison Quinn.”
My friends began hiding at parties from those I had interviewed. One woman I barely knew came up to me at a party and said, “I met your mother the other night. She’s so different from you. She’s really nice.”
Part of my reputation may have come from reactions to some of my reporting on social activities and parties, including reporting on the White House. In my powder room at home I have a framed document of abbreviated notes dictated to H. R. Haldeman by President Nixon, dated March 5, 1973. It reads: “Never invite Sally Quinn, violated rules and attacked a guest at church.” Nixon had begun having Sunday services in the East Room at the White House, and I was covering one of them. The press was roped off from the “worshippers” and forbidden to talk to them. As people were filing out, I asked one of them a question. That was the end of any relationship I had with the Nixon White House. But the Nixon administration itself had only seventeen months to go.
I did many stories on Henry Kissinger, who once said that Maxine Cheshire—referring to the Post’s gossip columnist—“makes me want to commit murder. Sally Quin
n, on the other hand, makes me want to commit suicide.”
Ben was thrilled. Meanwhile, Ben had hired columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, who was writing vicious columns about everybody and everything. Nick was the most well-read writer at the Post and wasn’t happy unless the paper got several thousand cancellations after each piece. (They always came back.) Still, he didn’t get nearly the kind of opprobrium that I did.
This was a difficult and confusing time for me. I had become quite successful, but I was more feared than admired, more well known than well liked. I have to say that the negative pieces I did write were about people who condemned themselves with their own words and deeds.
Still, it was painful to realize that people had an entirely different view of me than I had of myself, and I began to doubt my own decency, my own worth. I thought I was a good person. A lot of people thought I was not. I had many close friends to whom I was very loyal, and vice versa, and a close family to whom I was devoted. Yet beyond my circle the perception of me was harsh.
I began to wonder if the fact that I was an atheist (though I never uttered that word) and the fact that I didn’t believe in God had somehow seeped out of my pores and people were sensing it.
I couldn’t help not believing. I didn’t choose to believe or not to believe. I felt I was being punished because I didn’t believe, and it was infuriating. The idea that you couldn’t be a person of values, ethics, and morals because of your lack of beliefs was outrageous. I thought that by writing the truth I was doing the right thing. It turned out that a lot of people didn’t think I was doing the right thing. I also recognized that von Hoffman, who was much tougher than I ever was, never had the same reputation that I did. Nick was a man and I was a woman. That was a simple fact of life in our culture then, as it is now.
Ben continued to be shocked by how I was perceived and treated long after he and I got together. The person he knew me to be, he would say, had no relation to my public persona. It wasn’t until long after Quinn had all his problems and Ben had died that that view of me began to change. Even today I haven’t totally been able to be seen as the person I know myself to be.
Chapter 13
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Back at the Washington Post in 1972, I was covering national campaigns. I was on my way down to Miami to cover the Republican Convention, and the Post travel office booked my ticket. Nobody flew first class—a Ben edict—so I was in coach. Imagine my shock when I arrived at my seat to find myself sitting next to Mr. Bradlee. He was surprised as well. It seems that the travel person had arbitrarily assigned us seats together. We were both a bit flustered—I because I had been worshipping him from afar since he’d hired me, and he because (as he later admitted) he had been lusting after me from afar as well.
I had always assumed he was way out of my league, not just because of the age difference but also because he had an envied perfect marriage—at least to those on the outside looking in—to one of the legendarily beautiful Pinchot sisters, Tony, with seven children between them. This golden couple had also been best friends with Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Ben thought I was out of his league not just because to him the age difference was daunting, but also because he knew I had a famously passionate relationship with Warren, whom he saw as a dashing, accomplished young journalist. I had started to make a name for myself as a reporter and interviewer and was part of the jeunesse dorée crowd of Washington. That’s how we saw each other anyway, as we would later learn.
The flight was turbulent, and I’m a terrible flier. We were engrossed in conversation, but when the plane lurched violently, I grabbed his thigh. When things settled down, I kept my hand there. It wasn’t deliberate. Really. I just never considered removing it. By the time we landed, two hours later, I was in love.
He asked me to have dinner with him. He was joining Susan and David Brinkley, the legendary NBC News anchor, and would I like to come along. Susan was an old friend, and I had dated David briefly, so naturally, I said I would love to. Ben dropped me at my hotel in a cab. Shortly after I got to my room, the phone rang. “Bad news,” he said. His roommate, Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor (editors didn’t even get their own rooms), had arranged for the two of them to take a group of reporters to Joe’s Stone Crab for dinner. He had to cancel the Brinkleys. Would I like to come along? Disappointed, I said yes. We ended up at a very long table with Ben at one end and me at the other. I tried not to look longingly at him. I tried to make small talk, but the evening seemed endless. We all went back to our respective hotels.
Two nights later, I had had my fill of the speeches and antics on the convention floor and left the center to go back to my room. I was standing on a corner hailing a cab when I heard a deep gruff voice calling out, “Taxi.” I looked over to find Ben. Clearly he had had the same idea. “Would you like to get a drink?” he asked. “Why not?” I responded. We got into a cab and headed to the Fontainebleau Hotel. We had no sooner gotten out of the car when we heard a familiar voice. It was Phil Geyelin, who called out, “Benji, Sal, come join us for a drink. We’re all going to the Flamingo Room.”
We looked at each other in mutual despair and without conferring, both of us regretted. “I’m going to turn in,” Ben said. “I think I’ll call it a night,” I echoed.
That would be the last time we were together for nearly a year.
* * *
Warren had moved to New York by this time and I had gotten a new apartment on California Street in Washington, both of us commuting back and forth between the two cities to see each other. At the same time, he was seeing other people quietly, as was I.
I began to write Ben anonymous love notes. They would come after some sizzling newsroom encounter between us. I would say things like I don’t know how much longer I can stand this. . . . I later teased him that if he’d had half a brain, he would have figured out who sent them, but he never did. Once, our mutual close friend, national editor Larry Stern, got caught between us during one of these exchanges. After Ben walked away, Larry looked at me, wiped his brow, and said, “Whew! I’ve never seen such sexual electricity between two people in my life.” I just lowered my eyes.
By now the Post was in the thick of reporting the Watergate story. We all knew that Ben and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were being watched. Bernstein was even approached on the street by a suspicious character trying to sell him marijuana. He wisely refused. Once when Bob and Carl had gotten an important story, they went to Ben’s house, and Ben, afraid that his house might be bugged, met them on his front lawn in his bathrobe to discuss it. The idea that Ben might have an affair was out of the question. It was simply too dangerous. On the other hand, I was so hopelessly in love that I was prepared to throw caution to the wind, and I had a feeling that if I proposed it, he might succumb.
Finally, in desperation, I went to my close friend Paul Richard, then the art critic of the Post, and a good friend of Ben’s as well. I told him the whole story and asked his advice. “You can’t do it,” he said. “There is too much at stake. You have to put your country first.”
That was the one thing Paul could have said that would convince me to back off. This was about what was best for the country. I made no moves and did nothing.
It was in May of 1973 that Gordon Manning, Ben’s dear friend and former colleague at Newsweek and then the vice president of CBS News, called me. It seemed that the women at CBS News had demanded a woman anchor. Would I be interested in being the first female anchor for CBS Morning News? I knew this would be a revolutionary step, for CBS and for me, but my heart sank. I didn’t want to leave the Post, I did not want to move to New York, I did not want to go on TV, and most of all I did not want to leave Ben. Nonetheless, I said yes—for one reason: I could not stand being around him anymore without being with him. It was simply too painful.
I asked to see him in his office. I told him about the offer, and I burst into tears. He was livid, furious with Gordon for trying to steal me away, but I could see the anguish in his face. I knew he didn’t want to lose me. What I didn’t know was whether it was because he thought I was a valuable asset or because he really cared about me. After all, he hadn’t made a single move and I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t figured out who was sending him those little notes.
He tried to talk me out of going. He offered me a raise. Of course he couldn’t begin to match the CBS offer, which for that time was an astronomical figure. I told him I was going up to New York to have lunch and an interview with Hughes Rudd, the co-anchor, and Gordon Manning. I would let him know how it went.
They offered me the job at the lunch. I accepted. Apparently Hughes had rejected every woman CBS executives had suggested for the job. I must say I was completely baffled, especially considering I had no TV experience. When I asked Hughes “Why me?,” he immediately responded, “’Cause you’re meaner than a junkyard dog.” At that moment we became fast friends.
I knew that the best thing for me was to leave the Post and move to New York to live with Warren. A new career would be good for me. I tried to convince myself I would be happy, but I was dying. I came back to Washington to give up my apartment. I asked Ben to take me for a farewell lunch. He suggested the Madison Hotel across the street from the Post. I rehearsed my speech for a week. I couldn’t go without letting him know how I felt.
I’ve never seen so much chicken salad. It was a tower of glutinous white mess. My stomach was churning so I couldn’t possibly have eaten a bite. Ben ordered it too. He never picked up his fork. We made polite conversation with lots of questions. When was I moving? Would Warren and I live together? When was the program to air? Finally, I pushed my plate back. I was trembling with apprehension.