I took the letter opener that had thoughtfully been provided for me, and began to carve my initials into the soft wood of the desk. The stain was so rich and deep that it took some effort, but eventually it was visible: DC. My secretary came in while I was finishing the C. She was a nice woman in her mid-thirties; a working mother, two children at home. “Need anything from the cafeteria?” she asked, ignoring my act of vandalism. Her attitude seemed to be that the boss was always right, even a bizarre boss like me. I could have lit a fire in the trash can and she wouldn’t have said a word.
I decided after a few days that I had to decorate the office; mere desecration wasn’t enough. I got a poster from a movie store of The Little Mermaid, which in my view is one of the two or three greatest movies ever made—definitely ahead of Citizen Kane, but probably behind Gone With the Wind. That was cheering, to be able to look up whenever I liked at Ariel’s sweet smile and cascading red hair, which never seemed to get wet, even though she lived underwater. Other secret fans of The Little Mermaid presented themselves—they were men, mostly; the women around here disapproved of well-coiffed mermaids who fell in love with princes.
And I held a morning staff meeting. It had become obvious the first week that holding a morning meeting was the essential—and perhaps the only—requirement for being a good manager. So I gathered my half-dozen various editors at eleven o’clock each day and asked them to suggest ideas that might actually make the next morning’s paper worth reading. In the beginning, they answered by reading lists—what movies were opening the next weekend, what celebrities were being thrust at us by the publicists, what awards, banquets and other nuggets of social news were in the queue. No wonder the Sun was so dreadful, if this was how they did things. Reveal, even at its most ridiculous, had been more interesting than this.
The first few days, I just said no. No, no, no, no—until they began to bring me better ideas. I astounded my staff when I approved a story proposal on the five best and worst places to go parking with your date. (Best all-around spot: Potomac Overlook off the George Washington Parkway in Virginia; worst all-around spot: Westmoreland Park in Montgomery County—the cops shine their lights in the car and make you get out, even if you’re naked.)
It was fun being a wiseass and saying whatever came into my head, and having the various subeditors laugh at my jokes. But after several weeks, I began to wonder if I had really found the right niche for someone with my sort of interests. Sandy Galvin’s razzmatazz about circulation wars and billion-dollar bets was all fine, and I hoped it motivated everyone to produce a less boring newspaper, but it was irrelevant to me. I didn’t care about money, and I certainly didn’t care about being a news bureaucrat. That wasn’t why I had signed on with Galvin.
My purposes were complex; make no mistake about that. But at the core, intellectually, was a desire to make people uncomfortable. Galvin had me exactly right. I was a born troublemaker, but it wasn’t simple mischief that motivated me. Much as I might pretend otherwise, my antics were not simply those of a court jester. What motivated me was a need—as powerful as another person’s need to paint or sing or seduce twenty-three-year-old interns.
My need was to tell the truth, especially when it made people squirm. I’d done it with my father, for as long as he was alive—needling him, pouncing on his mistakes, even publishing a homemade newspaper called The Dirt on Dad. In college, I had written a series of articles attacking the dean of the medical school for his consulting relationship with one of the drug companies. (He responded, reasonably enough, that he was helping them make better drugs, but so what?) Before I got fired from my first job at a newspaper in North Carolina, I had written an exposé of the owner of a local furniture store, a sometime Baptist preacher who ensnared customers with a trick he called “rent-to-buy.”
There’s an old saw about how journalists should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Well, I don’t know about the latter part—the afflicted should probably look elsewhere, but I definitely understood the first part. I simply could not resist the opportunity to fire off a spitball at my betters—especially in a target-rich environment like Washington, D.C., where pious nonsense is practically mandatory.
Religious fanatics are always telling us that we were put on this planet for a purpose. I doubt it, other than to be fertilizer for other less-complex life forms, but let’s assume for the moment that it is so. In that case, I knew very well that my larger purpose was not to be Sandy Galvin’s bag carrier, much less to be his assistant managing editor in charge of the Lifestyle section. Those were just means to an end, and the end was—forgive the sentimentality—to tell the truth. To be a permanent truth-telling affliction; to say the terrible, true things that most people never dared to speak. That was my vocation, and now, thanks to the man who was at once my patron and rival, it was within my reach.
I WROTE GALVIN A memo. That is what News Bureaucrats did; we wrote memos to other NBs outlining our plans, so that we could ask them at meetings, “Did you get my memo?” and they could answer, “Yes, and I’ve sent one to you, outlining my thoughts on yours.” My memo to Galvin read as follows:
Dear Publisher Sir:
I would like to write a column for your newspaper. I have given it some thought and I would like this to be a weekly column, appearing in the Lifestyle section, which I will continue to edit in my haphazard but invigorating fashion. I have a name for my column. I want to call it “The Savant.” The name has a certain insouciance, does it not? And it was copyrighted several years ago, by me, in anticipation of the day when it would finally appear. This column will be about whatever I like. My only promise is that it will make people squirm. You told the staff recently that you want the Sun to be surprising and fun. Well, here’s your first chance to deliver.
Your news slave,
David Cantor
Galvin received my memo two days later through the interoffice mail, which seemed to be even slower than the U.S. Postal Service. He called me immediately. “What if I say no?” he asked.
“Then, good publisher sir, I will quit. I will follow the sensible advice you gave recently to employees—that those who cannot accommodate themselves to the big picture should take a walk. Which I will do.”
“You can’t leave,” he said. But of course I could. That was the advantage of having no discernable real-world ambition. It made such threats credible. I had him, and he knew it. He promised I could start as soon as I liked—and he even increased my salary, which was already at the ridiculous level of $112,000, to the even more ridiculous level of $135,000. There was a lesson in that—obvious, but worth remembering. When they know they can’t own you, they’re willing to pay considerably more in rent. I told him the first column would appear in several weeks, when I had found something worth being really snide about.
GALVIN CONTINUED TO DISPATCH workmen to the new lobby. They hung more banners and pennants, and big posters of Mark Trail and Dogbert and other characters from the Sun’s comic pages. The place looked increasingly like a set for a Chinese opera. But none of us realized, until Galvin installed the cameras, that it actually was the set for a new television show.
He had made a deal with one of the cable giants to distribute a daily news feed, which he planned to call The Anti-News. He had always loved the way the Today show opened its set onto the streets of New York—drawing the life and energy of the city into its broadcasts. Now he wanted to do the same thing with the nation’s capital. Washington was a carnival—especially now, in the era of permanent scandal. Why pretend any longer? Galvin wanted to have jugglers and fortune-tellers wandering the lobby, rubbing shoulders with the deputy secretary of state and the chairman of the Federal Reserve and whoever else was visiting the paper that day. He wanted to ban the stuffy boardroom lunches that had been a feature of the Sun for generations and replace them with freeform discussion in the open-air café—with reporters, editors and the Aunt Minnies who had wandered in off the street all joining in questioning the
newsmakers of the day. It was all part of his strange but well-considered strategy. He wanted to create instruments that would subvert the old newspaper that must die and help create the new one that could survive.
The cameras went up in the lobby with dizzying speed, and Galvin soon decreed that it was time to launch The Anti-News. No scripts, no rehearsals, precious little planning. His concept for The Anti-News was Cops meets Dan Rather. It was all going to be raw, live, unrehearsed. People were going to run onto the set screaming when they had a scoop, just the way they did in the newsroom. The reporters were going to wear their actual rumpled Dockers and sweat-stained shirts, and we were going to watch them do their jobs—squeeze sources, ferret out wrongdoing, rejoice in life’s small daily triumphs of good over evil.
The whole point, Galvin said, was that we were going to let people see how the news business really worked. People hated the journalists they usually saw on television—asking obnoxious questions, pouting at press conferences, puffing themselves up to look more important than the people they were interviewing. But real reporters weren’t like that, atleast not all the time, and Galvin was convinced that if people saw the real thing, they would like it.
To anchor the show, Galvin chose a beautiful business reporter in her twenties who had caught his eye in the cafeteria. Her name was Angelica, and everyone in the building instantly assumed that Galvin must be banging her, but it wasn’t that. She had spark; she didn’t want to be a worthy bore, she wanted to be noticed. Her colleagues, especially the women, frowned at her short skirts and tight blouses and hair that always looked as if she had just tumbled out of bed. They thought she was unserious, but they had it backward. What could possibly be more serious than raw sexual energy?
The first morning, Galvin sat with Angelica in the booth and acted as cohost. I think he wanted to establish the mood himself, because he didn’t trust anyone else (other than the beautiful, wide-eyed Angelica) to get it right. He was wearing a cashmere blazer and an open-neck Armani shirt—all in all, a pretty cool newspaper publisher. He was the show, in a sense. He had already decided that he would make his own personality part of the pitch—sort of a hip version of Frank Perdue, the tough man who makes a tender chicken, or that razor guy who liked the shaver so much, he bought the company.
“Folks, what does a newspaper do?” he asked in the opening segment. “I just bought this one, and over the next weeks and months, you and I are going to find out.” It was disarming. You had the sense, watching him, that he was inviting viewers to observe something real happening, in real time. Ordinary people would be able to watch him grapple with a great journalistic institution and the oversize egos who passed through its doors—and see how he did. He was publisher, pot washer and pitchman. He even did some of the ads himself—holding up the logo for Koons Ford and saying he could vouch for them because he’d bought his own car there. I knew it was a lie—he’d leased a big Lexus from somewhere else—but it was still good television, at once supermodern and old-fashioned kitsch.
Galvin joined in the interviews too—over the inevitable protest of his editor, Howard Bacon, who thought it was inappropriate for the publisher to blur the lines of pitchman and journalist (showing how little Bacon understood, since that blurring was the whole point, as far as Galvin was concerned). The first interview of the morning was with the President’s lawyer, who also happened to be a social friend of Galvin’s. Instead of the usual cat-and-mouse about the President’s legal problems, Galvin opened by telling the lawyer that he looked tired, which was certainly true, and asking if he was getting enough sleep. “What do you want out of life?” Galvin asked him at one point, and it produced a few moments of sublime television, in which the lawyer—who probably hadn’t been asked that question in years—tried to answer honestly.
I had meant to watch only a few minutes, but I frankly couldn’t stop. Galvin and Angelica were mesmerizing. Another of the guests was a rock star who was visiting town for a concert. Instead of the usual crap about the tour and his latest album, Angelica demanded that he sing her favorite song—right there, a cappella—and she was such a babe that he agreed, whereupon she stood up and started boogying on the set—I thought for a minute she was going to take her clothes off. It had that feeling. It was live, real, out of control. Galvin walked off the set at the end, shaking his head, amazed at himself. He was rolling now, and the real pleasure of it for him, I now suspect, was that even he didn’t know for sure where he was heading.
THIRTEEN
SUMMER SEEMED TO LAST FOREVER THAT YEAR. THE DAYS were long and dry, and the only painful result was that the city was overrun with bees—the tough little ones with yellow stripes on their backs. And they were angry, presumably because they didn’t have enough to eat. I paid a personal price on my way to work one morning. I was walking innocently enough, carrying my breakfast in one hand—a can of Coca-Cola—and shooing away the bees. I stopped to take a drink and felt something crunchy and fuzzy go down with that delicious elixir of Coca-Cola and—gak!—it was a bee. He stung the inside of my lip, which swelled up to blubber-lip size by the time I got to work.
Howard Bacon came by my office that morning, soon after I arrived. He had just left Galvin’s meeting of the vice presidents, and he was visibly upset. He was a light-skinned man, with the fine blond hair that newborn babies have, and blond eyebrows that were barely visible on his forehead. And when he was angry, as now, his cheeks turned a bright, blotchy pink. I had my own throbbing facial problem at that moment, and I didn’t really want to talk, but Bacon was insistent.
“Your friend Galvin is driving me crazy,” he said. “I don’t understand most of his ideas, and the rest are just flat-out wrong.” He looked at me curiously. “What’s wrong with your lip?”
“Bee ’ting,” I said. My lower lip was so swollen I wasn’t speaking very well. Bacon went on, oblivious.
“Galvin kept asking this morning where the good news was. How am I supposed to answer that? Is it my fault the President’s in trouble, or the stock market is in a slump, or a plane crashed in Canada? What does he want—for us to make up good news?”
“Pwobabwy not. You can’t wule that out, but I doubt he wants us to fabwicate the news. Not yet, anyway.”
“Seriously, Cantor, you know him. What is he doing? Does he want me to quit? Okay, fine. He can ask for my resignation, and I’ll be gone the next day. I have better things to do than stick around here and ruin my reputation.”
I shook my head. “He just wants the newspapew to be mo’ intewesting. He tink it turn off weader. He want more wivewy ’towie.”
“Animal stories,” Bacon muttered. “Last week we had three animal stories on the front page. The runaway zebra at the zoo. The horse in Manassas that can count to ten. And that one about all the dead fish—that wasn’t an animal story, really, but Jesus Christ! I didn’t get into the business to do this. What does he want from me?”
He was ranting. People from the Lifestyle section were looking through the glass partition to see what all the ruckus was about. I could imagine all the electronic messages that were zapping through computer terminals around the newsroom. “Bacon is losing it. He’s in Cantor’s office, screaming, right now!”
“Take a wacation,” I said. “Shumpwace wainy, wiffout so many bee.” I meant it. He looked so stressed out, I was afraid he was going to pop, right there in my office.
“You know the latest? He wants to run editorials on the front page—so readers can see that the paper has a heart. He just told us in the staff meeting. ‘The newspaper with a heart’! What horseshit! He wants to turn the Sun into a fucking tabloid.”
The swelling was going down. I could feel my lip again and, with effort, I could avoid sounding like Elmer Fudd. “Tabloids are gaining readers,” I said, “and we’re losing. That’s what Galvin sees. It’s not personal. He’s a businessman. He just looks at numbers.”
Bacon wasn’t listening. “The staff isn’t going to put up with it! They’re in revolt
already. They don’t want to work for a paper that runs TV ads touting its weather map. That isn’t what they got into the business for.”
“Weather is important,” I said. I was getting tired of his rant. He was my boss, but my lip still hurt and I wanted him out of my office. “People care about the weather.”
“Of course they care about the weather. I know that. I was the one who spent the money to get a decent weather map in the first place. But that’s all fluff. This is a great newspaper. It has fourteen bureaus around the world. It has distinguished columnists and critics. People should love us for that. Not for all this shit that Galvin is pumping in. ‘The newspaper with a heart.’ Jesus fucking Christ!”
A crowd was gathering outside. I told Bacon he should probably talk more quietly, or leave. He rose to go.
“Does he listen to you?” he asked.
“No, not really. Not about important things. He knows what he wants. He doesn’t care what most people think.”
“Does he listen to anybody?”
“Yes. I think he would listen to one person, and that’s Candace Ridgway. They went out in college—you probably know the story. But she won’t talk to him.”
“Why not?” asked Bacon.
“I’m not sure. It’s a strange relationship. He’s the boss, and she’s uncomfortable about that, but it’s more complicated. I think she’s afraid to get too close.”
“Well, maybe she should start talking to him. Now. Somebody needs to communicate with him, or this place is going to explode.”
I told him I’d see what I could do, but if he really wanted to pass a message to Candace, he should just tell her himself. She worked for him, after all, and I was an unreliable messenger boy.
CANDACE RIDGWAY WAS TALKING on the telephone when I wandered by. Her office was cozier than mine. She always had fresh flowers that arrived on her desk from somewhere—I had once assumed they were sent by the aging wonder boy, Mr. Assistant Secretary, but lately I had begun to suspect otherwise. Propped on her couch was a stuffed animal—a lumpy teddy bear with half its ear missing, which Candace had kept with her ever since she was a girl. She’d boasted once that she had taken it into war zones, to presidential summits and now here it was, sitting in silent reproach as she played nanny to the foreign staff.
The Sun King Page 12