Cover-up

by John Feinstein

  “He was right when he told Susan Carol and me that no one who works in TV has a conscience, and that TV work is shallow and meaningless anyway.”

  “But quite lucrative,” Shupe said, standing up. “That’s why so many print guys have come to work for us.”

  “Not Kelleher,” Stevie said. “He turned you down.”

  Shupe laughed. “That’s because he’s a lot more arrogant than he is bright. Stevie, we really have no choice. I’m truly sorry about this.”

  “No, you’re not,” Stevie said. “You can go to hell.”

  He glanced at his father to see if he was at all upset with him for using that kind of language with an adult. Shupe looked at Bill Thomas too, as if waiting for him to admonish his son. Everyone was standing now.

  “You heard him,” Stevie’s father said. “You can start your trip by getting out of our house.”

  The two TV men looked at each other. They picked up their coats and walked out the door without another word.

  2: TV TIME-OUT

  STEVIE WATCHED Shupe and Vincent get into their waiting car and kept watching as the car slipped down the street and turned the corner, out of sight. His father stood next to him.

  “You want to talk?” he said.

  Stevie shrugged. “I need to call Susan Carol.”

  “Let’s talk about that for a minute.”

  “Why? What’s there to talk about?”

  Bill Thomas walked over to the couch and sat down. Stevie remained by the window, wondering what could possibly be on his mind. He had a knot in his stomach that he guessed was a combination of anger, humiliation, and frustration. Part of him wanted to cry—but he wasn’t going to do that in front of his father.

  “Listen, Stevie, there aren’t enough bad things I can say about those guys right now,” his dad said. “You were great on TV and you don’t deserve to be treated like this. You’re right, we should have listened more seriously to Bobby Kelleher when he told us not to trust these TV people. And I know that if you call Susan Carol and tell her what happened, she will quit right away because she’s your friend and she’s going to be loyal to you.”

  “And you think that’s a bad thing?”

  He was shaking his head. “No, I think it’s a very good thing. But think about this for a minute: if she quits, they don’t have to pay her for the rest of the year. You they have to pay because they made the decision to get rid of you. If she walks away, she loses the money. This is just a guess, but I imagine that a minister in Goldsboro, North Carolina, doesn’t make a fortune, and the money Susan Carol’s earning right now probably means a lot for her family.”

  He had a point. Stevie remembered that Susan Carol had mentioned to him that she might be able to transfer to a private school in Charlotte that had a big-time swimming program. Susan Carol was a ranked age-group swimmer. And it wouldn’t have been grades keeping her out of that school….

  “But, Dad, even if I tell her not to quit, she’ll probably do it anyway.”

  “And if she does, she does, but I think if you encourage her not to, tell her you want her to stay on so that at least one of you will still have a say on the show, she might stay.”

  Stevie almost smiled. “Tell her to win one for the Gipper?”

  “Something like that,” his dad said. “Or at least stay on TV for him.”

  Stevie sat down on the couch across from his father to try to make sense of everything. His head hurt from how fast things seemed to be happening. He heard the phone ring.

  “Probably your mother,” his dad said, standing up to walk into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he was back, carrying the phone. “It’s Susan Carol,” he said. “She’s crying.”

  Apparently the USTV boys had called her as soon as they got into their car, wanting to put their spin on things before she could talk to Stevie. He took the phone and stared at it for a moment, not sure what he was going to say. “Your call, Gipper,” his father said, and left him alone in the room.

  For a few seconds, Stevie couldn’t understand anything Susan Carol was saying. Between the rush of words and her Southern accent, most of what he heard was gibberish. He was picking up perhaps two words a sentence.

  “Hate them…. Never, ever…. The nerve…. Can’t be trusted…. Hate them.”

  The second time he heard “hate them,” he broke in because he guessed she was repeating herself. “Calm down,” he said.

  Her next few sentences he understood quite clearly: “CALM DOWN! DON’T YOU DARE TELL ME TO CALM DOWN, STEVEN RICHMAN THOMAS. I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, NOT FOR ONE SECOND!”

  He realized he was smiling. Her anger was one part amusing and about five parts touching. She seemed to be more upset about what had happened than he was. And her tirade was making him feel much better.

  “What did you tell them?” he said when she finally paused to take a breath.

  “I told them they better find themselves another girl, that there was only one person I would work with and some eye-candy guy named Jamie Whitsitt, of all things, was not that person.”

  “Who is Jamie Whitsitt?”

  He heard her sigh, the kind of sigh he usually heard when she seemed convinced he was too stupid to live.

  “Jamie Whitsitt is the lead singer of the Best Boys. He is gorgeous, but I couldn’t care less. I’m not working with him.”

  Remarkably, Stevie had heard of the Best Boys, if only because he had heard the girls in his class oohing and aahing about them at lunchtime. “Aren’t those guys a lot older than us?” he asked.

  “He’s eighteen. They don’t care. Shupe said we were a ‘perfect match.’ I told him I didn’t care, that the show was supposed to be about two kid reporters—reporters—not some damn rock star.”

  Stevie almost choked. He had never heard Susan Carol say anything stronger than “gosh darn” up until now.

  “So what did they say to all that?”

  “They said they were going to talk to my dad—who’s not home right now. They said they understood why I’d be upset about this and they thought loyalty was a great thing, but I’d breach my contract if I didn’t keep doing the show; and that not only would I not get paid, but they might take me to court.”

  “Whoa! They threatened to sue you? Unbelievable!”

  “Remind me to listen to Bobby and Tamara when they say something from now on, will you?”

  Tamara Mearns was Bobby Kelleher’s wife. He was a sports columnist for the Washington Herald, she for the Washington Post. The two of them had become Stevie and Susan Carol’s journalism mentors. Both had urged them strongly to resist the temptations of money and fame put on the table by USTV. They hadn’t listened.

  Stevie took a deep breath. “I want you to listen to me for a minute,” he said.

  “Okay. What?”

  “I don’t want you to quit.”

  “WHAT…?”

  “Hang on a minute. First, there is the money issue. They’re probably bluffing about suing you. But I still get paid in this thing and you don’t. Second, you’re good at this and there’s no reason for you to stop doing it on my account. I’ll be fine. It isn’t as if my career’s over—I’m fourteen. Third, when the year is over, you can either walk away from doing this kind of stuff or, if you want, there will be ten other TV jobs at other places you could have.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Did your dad tell you to say all this?”

  Why was it, he thought, that she always knew everything. He considered lying for a second, but decided the heck with it. Lying was for TV guys.

  “Yes, he did,” Stevie said finally. “But I thought about it before I actually said it, and I think he’s right. And if you think about it when you calm down a little, you’ll probably decide he’s right too.”

  “Stop telling me to calm down.”

  “Okay. But you’ll think about it?”

  She sighed again, this time not the “too stupid to live” sigh but one of sadness. �
�I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Good. Call me after you talk to your dad, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He was about to say goodbye when he heard her say, “Stevie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I really do love you, you know.”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that one. They were fourteen and had kissed once. Still, the answer that came out of his mouth felt right.

  “I love you too.”

  The phone calls went back and forth over the next two days: Stevie and Susan Carol talked. Their dads talked. Their moms talked. Around and around they went.

  The major question for Stevie and Susan Carol was what Susan Carol was going to tell USTV on Monday when they needed an answer—and when she was scheduled to fly to Indianapolis. The fathers talked about legal matters: Could USTV actually take Susan Carol to court for quitting? Could the Andersons counter-sue by saying the show wasn’t what they signed on for without Stevie? Don Anderson wondered if the Thomases could sue USTV on the grounds that the contract said Stevie was to be on-air for a year, not just get paid for a year. Bill Thomas’s legal opinion was that USTV had the right to take Stevie off the air as long as he got paid, but Susan Carol had the right to walk away—as long as she did not get paid. Bill Thomas called some of the other lawyers in his office to see what they thought and they seemed to agree.

  The mothers talked mostly about how awful it was that the children were seeing this side of the TV business—or any business—at such a young age. “I feel like I’ve failed you,” Carole Thomas said to Stevie after one phone conversation.

  The one phone call Stevie was truly dreading was the one he knew he had to make to Bobby Kelleher. He knew Kelleher would never say “I told you so,” but he was bound to think it—entitled to think it. Stevie still had a copy of the e-mail Kelleher had sent him in October:

  “I know why this is tempting,” he’d written. “I’ve done enough TV to know how intoxicating it can be. People recognize you, they think you’re more important. I call it being famous for being famous. And I know the money would probably help your family and Susan Carol’s out a lot. Which is why I can’t absolutely tell you to say no. But I have to warn you: these are not good people. I’ve dealt with them. They’ll say whatever they need to to get what they want from you—and make it sound good. You just turned fourteen. You don’t need to do this. Neither does Susan Carol. You’ll both be big stars in journalism someday. Be patient.”

  They hadn’t listened. The money was tempting. And the show and the fame had been fun—intoxicating, as Kelleher called it. But now Stevie was facing a serious hangover of embarrassment when USTV announced the change on Monday.

  He finally made the call on Sunday morning. He knew Bobby and Tamara were home in Washington before they flew to Indianapolis on Monday night. It pained him to think of all the people who would be in Indianapolis while he sat at home. And he had to admit that a small jealous part of him wanted Susan Carol to say no to USTV, no matter what he had said before.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone when he told Kelleher the story.

  “Stevie, I’m really sorry,” he said finally. “Even for a TV network, that’s remarkably low-rent behavior.”

  “They’re announcing it tomorrow,” Stevie said.

  “You want to let them make the announcement, or can I rip them in tomorrow’s paper before they put their silly spin on it?”

  Stevie hadn’t even thought of his firing as a story. Maybe a sub-paragraph in the story about Jamie Whitsitt coming on board.

  “A whole column?”

  “Oh yeah. There’s a column in this. Bad enough when they treat professionals this way—but teenagers? Unconscionable.”

  “Let me talk to my dad.”

  “That’s fine. One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you still want to go to the Super Bowl?”

  “How? The NFL isn’t going to give out a credential this late—especially to someone who just got fired by a network that pays it a billion dollars a year in rights fees.”

  “You are a very smart kid—and you’re a hundred percent right about that. But who’s playing in the Super Bowl?”

  “The Ravens and the Dreams.”

  “And where do the Ravens play?”

  “Baltimore…Wait a minute. You mean…?”

  “I mean that the Herald covers the Ravens on a regular basis. We had a beat writer and a columnist at every game. I have no doubt I can get my boss to add you to our credential list. He liked the stuff you did at the Open for us, and he would love to tweak USTV and the league.”

  “And the league can’t say no?”

  “They can tell us how many reporters we can send but not who we can send.”

  “I don’t know if my parents will go for it.”

  “I’ll talk to them if need be. But my guess is they’ll go for it. How mad did you say your dad was at USTV?”

  He was right. And Stevie’d already been cleared by his teachers to go. “You sure about this?”

  “Never been more sure. Pack your bags, Stevie. You’re going to Indy and you’re going as a real journalist.”

  Stevie wanted to scream “yippee!” but that wouldn’t be a real journalist thing to do. He settled for “thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Kelleher said. “Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

  3: PUNT RETURN

  BY MONDAY MORNING, everything was set.

  It took a phone call from Kelleher promising to keep an eye on Stevie and make sure he stayed out of trouble—“for once,” his father had said—to convince Bill and Carole Thomas that it was okay for Stevie to make the trip to Indianapolis. He already had plane reservations, and Kelleher said the newspaper had booked extra hotel rooms in case the Ravens and the Redskins—who had lost to the California Dreams in the NFC final—made it to the Super Bowl. As soon as Susan Carol heard that Stevie was making the trip, she agreed to stay on the job for at least one more week—partly because she wanted to go to the Super Bowl and, she said, because getting paid to work that week would make quitting a lot less painful financially if that was what she ultimately decided to do.

  “Plus, I can’t let you be wandering around out there by yourself,” she said. “I don’t care what Bobby promised your parents, you will get into trouble.”

  “As if being with you at the Final Four and the Open kept me out of trouble?” he responded.

  “Good point,” she said, laughing. They had come a long way since Friday night.

  The only thing Stevie hadn’t thought about was what would happen once the news of his firing got out—which it did on Monday morning in Kelleher’s column.

  “So now USTV is firing fourteen-year-old kids,” he began. It got worse for USTV after that. “Let’s pretend for a minute that Steve Thomas did terrible work, just wasn’t right for the job,” Kelleher wrote. “This would still be a cruel move, three months after the show went on-air. Given that he happened to be very good at the job, this is completely inexcusable on every level. Bottom line: Steve Thomas got fired because he’s not six feet tall and doesn’t sing in a boy band. When did USTV decide to become MTV?”

  Shupe was quoted in the story. “On a personal level, we liked Stevie very much,” he said. “He just wasn’t right for TV.”

  Kelleher’s response to that quote was direct: “Shupe’s right. Steve Thomas has far too much class and smarts to waste his life in front of a camera. He’ll be at the Super Bowl as a working journalist. He should be proud of that. It is his former employer that should be ashamed.”

  Stevie loved reading the column. What he didn’t love was that the phone started ringing at 6 a.m. with calls from TV and radio stations and from print reporters all wanting him to comment or go on their shows.

  And then he had to go to school. When he got off the school bus, there were no fewer than six TV camera crews waiting for him. The school principal, Mr. Bates, was th
ere too, telling the TV people they could not come onto the school grounds.

  “You walk with me from here to the front door and they can’t do anything but film you walking,” Mr. Bates said.

  Stevie wished he had consulted with his father or Kelleher, but he hadn’t anticipated being stalked at school. He made a snap decision.

  “Let me talk to them for a minute,” he said. “Maybe that will get it over with.”

  “It might,” Mr. Bates said. “Until you get to Indianapolis.”

  Stevie cringed. He didn’t like being the story, but he didn’t feel right ducking other reporters—whether they were TV or radio or print.

  Mr. Bates found a spot a few yards away from the bus drop-off point and told the crews Stevie would talk for no more than five minutes. Stevie could see all the local stations were there, along with Comcast Sports and CN-8. There were a couple of other people with tape recorders he didn’t recognize.

  A blond woman wearing a good deal of makeup asked Stevie the first question as soon as everyone had trained their cameras on him.

  “Steve, are you crushed by what USTV has done to you?”

  Stevie shook his head. “You know, I was stunned on Friday night,” he said. “And I’m hurt because I thought Susan Carol and I were good together. But I’m going to the Super Bowl to write for the Washington Herald, and I know I’ll enjoy myself.”

  “Was it fair what they did?” asked someone else, whom Stevie couldn’t see because of the lights now shining in his face.

  “I don’t think so,” Stevie said. “But I’m a little bit biased.”

  That got a laugh from everyone.

  “Any thoughts of suing?” someone else said.

  “Not as long as they pay me what they owe me,” Stevie said with a smile—bringing another laugh.

  Mr. Bates, who had been standing off to the side, decided that was enough. “Stevie’s got to get to class,” he said. “His science teacher does not consider doing interviews an excuse for being late.”

  That reminded Stevie: he never had finished that chapter about rocks.