Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  It was Mary’s political profiles that gave Newby Noyes the confidence to send her to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. After languishing as a book reviewer for thirteen years, with her heart in politics the entire time, opportunities suddenly unfurled before McGrory.

  Soon after the hearings, Mary was moved to the national desk, an almost unheard-of step at the Star for a reporter who had not first served a shift at the city desk. “Some old hands took a dim view of having a woman on the national staff, particularly one with such wispy credentials and provocative views,” Mary reflected. “But ancient cub as I was, I was launched at last.”

  By August 1954, James “Scotty” Reston, the powerhouse Washington bureau chief and columnist for the New York Times, had begun aggressively courting Mary to jump to his paper. Reston had earned a reputation as the quintessential Washington insider, a reporter who was a leader of the very establishment he covered. Reston approached Mary suggesting that he didn’t really have a slot open but was interested in fitting her into his talented team.

  But the negotiations with Reston took a dramatic turn for the worse, spawning a piece of journalistic lore in Washington in the process. He told Mary that he would love to have her working at the Times, but she would also need to “handle the switchboard in the morning.” A near Pulitzer winner, Mary was being asked to answer the phones in addition to her other duties. “It was such a gross insult there was nowhere to begin,” Mary said, “because it showed a mind-set that there was no getting around. I was so embarrassed for him that I didn’t really tell anyone at the time.”

  Anthony Lewis, who worked under Reston in the Washington bureau around the same time, saw Mary as a cultural challenge for Reston and the Times. “The paper was very antsy about reporters having a point of view,” he said. Arthur Gelb concurred: “In those days, the Times was very restrictive in terms of giving writers license, and I don’t know if Mary would have been happy at a paper like the Times.”

  The United Press also offered Mary a position as a columnist but made clear that she would first have to serve a stint as a wire service reporter. “What’s the point of that?” she said. “That’s like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s quite remarkable that he can do it, but what does it prove?”

  The Star’s increasingly successful crosstown rival, the Washington Post, also took a run at Mary around 1958. Phil and Katharine Graham invited Mary to dinner, which Mary described as one of “those fabled, dazzling affairs where I sat next to notables whom I had no other chance of meeting, especially if I had written rude things about them.” When Phil Graham put together a lucrative bid for Mary’s services, she wrote to Newby Noyes, who was vacationing at his family home in Sorrento, Maine. Newby’s reply was prompt: “Don’t you move a goddamn inch.” He gave her a raise and showered her with acclaim. Mary stayed put.

  With her newfound success, Mary was able to also begin exploring the world, and she began what became an annual vacation pilgrimage to Italy. On her trips, she would sit on the Spanish Steps, try on dresses at Fontana’s, and eat lasagna verde on the Piazza del Popolo. She luxuriated. She sipped Campari and sodas at the bar of the Plaza Hotel, where she stayed and where she became something of an icon: Maria Gloria, la giornalista americana. The staff effusively encouraged her halting efforts to speak Italian. Mary sometimes traveled with friends to Italy but often went by herself. “It didn’t matter where in Italy, she was ready to accept any of it, and love all of it,” remembered her friend Gerry Kirby.

  Mary’s friends back in Roslindale recognized that she was becoming cosmopolitan in ways that seemed difficult to fathom. Visiting her apartment in Washington felt like an introduction into a foreign land, a whirlwind of politics, cocktail parties, and world events. But there was also a lingering sense among her friends and family in Boston that maybe Mary should put aside the foolishness of the newspaper business, come home, get married, and have children. Indeed, when she had a chance to watch Mary work anxiously on deadline during a visit to Washington, her mother commented, “You should have taken the job with the phone company.”

  In 1955, Mary visited the picturesque town of Positano, Italy, with its colorful houses rising sharply up from the coast like a disheveled wedding cake. A local festival was scheduled to begin the next day, and Mary watched frantic preparations on the beach as volunteers built and decorated a bandstand. There were sack races, and local boys tried to scale a greased flagpole. Around noon, some of the revelers climbed under the bandstand to sleep before an afternoon parade.

  As Mary stood on the terrace watching the fireworks that completed the day, an Italian man, Vito Rispoli, caught her eye. “I didn’t like him,” recalled Mary, “or so I thought.” The next day, Mary traveled by boat to the island of Capri. While Capri was lovely, a discouraged Mary thought it was so romantic that it should be declared off-limits to all but honeymooners. After dinner back at the hotel, Mary again bumped into Vito, and she was charmed. They talked about Positano and the chaotic state of Italian politics. Vito made her laugh.

  Vito appeared at the hotel the next evening as well. When an Englishwoman knocked a table over and onto Mary’s foot, Vito leapt up. He joked that the foot might have to be cut off as he ordered the waitstaff to bring ice and bandages. Mary turned scarlet as a crowd of cooks, bellboys, and fellow guests gathered around, but she was beguiled by Vito’s lavish attention.

  After an evening out with a fellow traveler, Vito and Mary ended up in Positano’s deserted piazza. He put his head in her lap as they talked of travel and philosophy; he called her pet names.

  The next day, Mary went off for some solo sightseeing, but her mind was on her Italian squire. That night she wore her best brown-and-blue dress. Mary and Vito walked through the steep streets and then sat on the pier, looking out at the Mediterranean. He asked her questions about relationships and sex. She blushed. The two went back to Vito’s room, and he tried every form of persuasion to get her to spend the night. She was torn but retreated to her hotel. Mary, despite having had a number of boyfriends, was in her thirties and still single, at a time when most young women were married in their twenties.

  Mary extended her stay. After a day at the beach, she and Vito went up to the piazza in the afternoon to watch the Sunday crowds heading for the cinema. He offered running commentary on the passersby. Mary again went to Vito’s room. The sound of an accordion in the distance added to her longing.

  Vito asked Mary to explain why she was so reluctant to make love. She was unable to provide an explanation that seemed rational by his standards. Mary walked back to her room, thinking she would never see Vito again.

  But he appeared at the hotel for dinner again that night. Mary thought it gallant. It was not long before the two were again engrossed in conversation on the stone steps by the town’s lion statues. “He was so amusing and perceptive, in that setting especially, so much a man,” Mary wrote.

  After several brandies, Vito tried one more time. He argued that cigarettes were to be smoked, food to be eaten, women to be loved. He said Mary was like the sea itself: slow to warm but likely to hold its warmth for a long time. He said she was a strange woman. “And considering how I felt about him, I had to agree,” Mary confided to her journal. “This has been an argument with him and others for many years.” Mary could not bring herself to sleep with him. In all likelihood, she was still a virgin. She confessed that she was not always sure why: “I trust God knows the answer, for I do not.” With considerable remorse, Mary passionately kissed Vito goodbye.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arrived

  In August 1956, Newby Noyes dispatched his new political reporter to cover the presidential campaign pitting the enormously popular President Eisenhower against the Democratic standard-bearer, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. Mary was initially assigned to cover Stevenson’s running mate, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

  “There’s just one question we want
answered in our stories about campaigns,” Newby told Mary as he sent her out on the trail: “How is he doing?” Joining a small corps of largely young and untested reporters that included Tom Winship of the Boston Globe and Blair Clark of CBS News, Mary immersed herself in an odyssey of small towns, second-rate hotels, and county fairs. It was exhausting, exhilarating, and slightly ridiculous in the way that only campaigns can be. The reporters on the Kefauver campaign were tight-knit, spending their days banging out stories on planes and buses and their nights drinking and dissecting the day’s events.

  Kefauver was the kind of politician that reporters loved: a loquacious, progressive southerner who drank too much and had an eye for the ladies. The senator was candid over drinks on the campaign plane, confident that his comments were off the record when he wanted them to be. He was also a relentless campaigner. “Unlike Mr. Stevenson, who persists in regarding the campaign speech as an art form,” Mary penned, “Senator Kefauver obviously still believes that the road to the White House is paved with pressed palms.”

  For a former corporate lawyer and Yale Law School grad, Kefauver had an earthy style. He mangled the names of local candidates and told corny jokes, all of which Mary found more endearing than off-putting. At a rally in Worthington, Minnesota, a local party bigwig presented Kefauver with a prizewinning live turkey, which promptly defecated on the stage as the vice presidential candidate held it aloft.

  The 1956 campaign marked the birth of Mary’s “bearers”—the affectionate term given to the legion of male reporters she politely dragooned into carrying her typewriter and luggage. There has never been any journalist before or since who had so many eventual Pulitzer Prize winners serve as their bellhop. Mary explained, “This was back in the Dark Ages when there were at the most two women on a trip, and we were treated like white goddesses on safari. Yes, dear sisters, we may have been oppressed, but we were spoiled too.” Mary was proud that she never carried anything heavier than her notebook on the road. Mary’s cousin Brian McGrory joked that when Mary’s colleagues weren’t carrying her bags on the campaign trail, the candidates were.

  Mary once observed, “To be a woman reporter in the man’s world of Washington in the 1940s and 1950s was to be patronized or excluded or both,” but she also used her sex to her advantage when possible.

  She was often given nicer hotel rooms than the men were or offered a ride in the candidate’s car rather than on the bus. Mary acknowledged that many feminists might have viewed her approach as treasonous, yet as a pioneer in her field, she was never uncomfortable making the most of what she called the “enjoyable side of inequality.” Instead of seeing herself as an oppressed minority, Mary viewed herself as an elite.

  Former CBS anchor Dan Rather described the environment. “She was traveling, by and large, with proverbial whiskey-breathed, nicotine-stained, stubble-bearded, experienced reporters. Not a gentle world, and not genteel.” Rather noted that on the press bus there was an unspoken but clearly established hierarchy, with the old pros sitting on the outside right behind the driver. “The fact is that Mary pretty much sat where she damned well pleased, with the exception of a few old bulls.”

  Reflecting her Girls’ Latin training, Mary spoke with the perfect diction of Katharine Hepburn and often addressed her bearers in almost regal tones: “Dear boy, would you be so kind to give me a hand with this?” “The best part of being a newspaperwoman is newspapermen,” she observed. “I cannot speak too well of them. They are always communicative and sometimes witty; approached non-competitively they are capable of chivalry.” The Washington Post’s David Broder noted that Mary “demanded—not asked, but demanded—all of the courtesies that the 19th century gentleman would have been expected to provide for a woman.”

  Not everyone approved of Mary’s neo-Victorian style. Reporter Jack Germond took umbrage with her demands and noted with pride that he never carried Mary’s bags. “It seemed to me that she got more and more imperious,” he said, “but she was an awfully complicated person.”

  One of Mary’s favorite bearers and drinking buddies, whom she first met on the Kefauver campaign, was Blair Clark of CBS News. Tall and handsome, Clark grew up in East Hampton, New York, as part of a well-to-do family that had made its fortune as founders of the Coats and Clark Thread Company. Clark had attended all the right schools, going to prep school at St. Mark’s before attending Harvard as a classmate of John Kennedy.

  Clark had also served a stint at the CBS Paris bureau in the early 1950s, where he became friends and drinking buddies with Crosby Noyes, the middle of the three Noyes brothers at the Star and a foreign correspondent at the time.

  Some of the Western Union cables from Mary and Clark back to Crosby Noyes in Washington illustrate how much Mary enjoyed life on the trail.

  Mary and Clark first wired Noyes from the Hotel Fort Des Moines, in Iowa (which bragged that it had just undertaken “the largest mass installation of TV sets in Iowa”), with fake outrage that Noyes had failed to inform them that they shared the same birthday. “Sir, it has come to our attention,” they teased, “that you may have committed a breach of human kindness so gratuitous, gross, and graceless that if facts bear it out, neither of us wishes to have anything to do with you ever, ever again.” Noting that Noyes had helped celebrate Clark’s birthday in Brussels just two years earlier, and claiming that the demoralized Clark had been reduced to spending his birthday crying quietly in his hotel room, the two demanded that Noyes explain without delay.

  Noyes responded as the Kefauver party was checking in to the Hotel Eugene, in Oregon: “Accepting the fact that in our profession we have little control over the people with whom we are forced to associate, a special word of cautionary advice is clearly called for under the present circumstances. Mr. Blair Clark of the Columbia Broadcasting System has an international reputation for conduct so spectacularly outrageous that few respectable members of society care to invite him to birthday parties. Much as we deplore the discussion of personalities, we feel it our solemn duty to advise you that his version of the events of August twenty-second last amounts to the purest fabrication, concocted no doubt for some sinister motive of his own.”

  After visiting Sidney, Montana, the Kefauver entourage switched to a smaller DC-3 aircraft so that they could land in Kalispell, where Kefauver was scheduled to give a speech at the Flathead County High School. Midflight, the sleek silver prop plane encountered violent thunderstorms. As lightning flashed outside, the plane dipped and yawed wildly. A loose mimeograph machine tumbled down the aisle. Mary, who was not a fan of small planes, sat next to reporter Al Spivak, clutching his arm in terror. Kefauver, the would-be vice president, sprawled in a Scotch-induced slumber and wearing a silk eyeshade, seemed oblivious.

  As the campaign moved on to Rock Springs, Wyoming, things veered further into the absurd. The DC-3 was able to land at the airport, but the airport didn’t have any stairs tall enough to reach its door. With no other alternative, Kefauver and the reporters deployed the plane’s emergency shoot and slid down. Mary might have had men carry her typewriter, but she was game for adventure. The reporters soon dubbed themselves the Kalispell Choral Society and the Wyoming Sliding Chute Federation and worked up a late-night drinking song: “Slide, Estes, Slide.”

  It was with great sadness that Mary learned that she was being dispatched to cover Adlai Stevenson. It was a more important assignment, but Mary knew that it would not be nearly as fun as barnstorming across the West with Kefauver and his group of half-mad reporters. The group held a rollicking going-away party, and Mary cried when she left.

  The next day, a hungover Mary arrived at the Denver airport for her connecting flight to take her on to the Stevenson campaign. She called the Western Union office to see if the Star’s editors had wired updated instructions. There were twelve collect telegrams waiting for her. As Mary had the telegrams read to her over the phone, she broke into an irrepressible grin. They were all mock missi
ves from reporters on the Kefauver campaign. A telegram from “Vice President Nixon” congratulated Mary on leaving the low-flying Kefauver plane. A faux message from union chief George Meany took Mary to task for her labor policies, suggesting that she “either hire personal bearer or pay union scale.” The final wire, from Blair Clark, noted that the campaign plane had turned off its motor for three minutes over Kalispell in tribute.

  As Mary got off the telephone, she turned and bumped into a friend, young Senator Jack Kennedy, who was passing through the airport on his way to make a campaign appearance on behalf of the Stevenson ticket.

  Mary had first laid eyes on JFK, “thin as a match and still yellow from malaria,” when he returned to a hero’s welcome in Boston after World War II, at a 1946 celebration at the Parker House Hotel. Kennedy’s exploits as a highly decorated captain of a torpedo boat in the Pacific were widely known in the city, thanks to the substantial favorable publicity purchased in the local newspapers by his father, Joe Kennedy. JFK made a largely forgettable speech about Ireland, but Mary always remembered the radiance of his smile.

  A few short months later, Kennedy declared a bid for Congress from the same spot. Many of the local political pros were initially disdainful, dismissing JFK as a spoiled dilettante and dubbing him “Harvard Irish.” Although Mary thought Kennedy was unpolished, she recognized his raw political skills and his rare ability to convince people that he was somehow a more perfect version of themselves.