by Fannie Flagg
“I see. Well, I wonder where we go from here.”
“Tell me, what happened, what were the circumstances? How did you manage to keep it quiet for this long?”
“I was barely fifteen, and he was twenty-three. I was so stupid. I didn’t know anything about sex. I was one of eight children and I guess I was flattered by the attention he gave me. Probably I was starved for affection. He was my uncle. He told me he loved me and that I was special, and the next thing I knew … It only happened once, but about a month later, I started to get sick and I had no idea what was the matter with me. The doctor came and told my father I was pregnant. I know it’s hard to believe now, but we were a pretty religious family and we never talked about things like that.” Her voice trailed off. “What makes this so strange is he always denied it, he said it had not been him, that I was lying. And they believed him and sent me to live with my mother’s sister. I had the baby, and the next day she was gone, and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t wondered about her, wondered if she was all right. If she was happy. But I signed a paper, I gave up my rights. You don’t know how hard it has been not to try and find her, but I couldn’t do that to her, expose her. And now this.”
She looked into the distance. “If he hurts my daughter, I don’t know how I will ever be able to forgive him.”
Dena was suddenly upset again. “Forgive him? I don’t think you understand. This is serious. Your whole life could blow up. All the great work you and Charles have done. You should be furious!”
“Oh, believe me,” Peggy said, “I am furious and I am scared to death, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”
Dena announced, in a voice laced with vodka and false courage, “Well, I can do something about it, by God. I’ll quit, that’s all. I’ll tell them if they pursue this, I’ll quit. I’ll probably get fired anyway if they find out I told you. So I’ll just walk in there Monday morning and quit.”
“No, you can’t do that, Dena. You said it would come out sooner or later anyway.”
“Well, not by me. And if it does, deny it. Say he’s lying. People will believe you and Charles over this dirtbag.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Think about it. This is going to ruin your lives. People put you two up on a pedestal. They are not going to care who you are trying to protect. All they are going to care about is that you had a baby when you weren’t married and hid it. You think people are going to forgive you? You can’t let your life be ruined over one mistake that happened over twenty years ago.”
Dena touched her arm. “Listen to me, Peggy: cancel the damn interview. Say you’re sick, say your mother is dying, say you’re dying … anything, just don’t do it. Hire a hit man, I don’t care, but do something. It’s nobody’s business anyway. They’re not playing fair. Why should you? Peggy, don’t be an idiot, you don’t have to be honest with these people. Jesus Christ himself would lie over something like this!”
“I have to talk to Charles. I don’t know what to do.”
“I’m telling you what to do. Lie.”
“But it’s the truth.”
“Then say you were raped.”
“But I wasn’t, I mean … I started to let him kiss me. I think it might have been my fault and I didn’t say no until he—”
“What do you mean it was your fault? You were only fifteen years old. How old was this guy again?”
“Twenty-three.”
Dena’s eyes lit up. “That’s it, Peggy, threaten him; a twenty-three-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl. You were a minor. That son of a bitch could go to jail for statutory rape.”
“Rape?”
“Yes!”
“No. I couldn’t do that.”
Dena glanced over at the couple who had been shown to the next table and realized that the restaurant was beginning to seat early dinner customers. “Look, I think we better get out of here. Go home and talk to Charles.”
“Dena … I don’t know how to thank you for warning me. I’m not sure what we can do at this point but pray about it.”
“Well, you can pray if you want to, but in the meantime, I’d threaten to have him arrested.”
“Dena”—now Peggy Hamilton took her arm—“no matter what happens, promise me you won’t quit over this. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience, too.”
Dena nodded. “All right, I promise.”
She squeezed Dena’s hand. “Thank you.”
Dena waited a few minutes so no one would see them leave together. When she got up and walked through the restaurant, she found that her knees were weak and realized she was not as brave as she thought she was.
The Power Play
New York City
1973
For the next few days at work Dena waited like an inmate sitting on death row. Would Ira call? As the time for the interview grew closer she began to get terrified, and had trouble breathing. This morning she was just about to take a Valium when the buzzer almost made her jump out of her skin.
She answered. “Yes?”
Wallace barked, “Come in here!”
As she walked down the hall her heart was pounding. This last mile could be the end of her career. She knocked lightly.
“Come in.”
Wallace got up and went over and closed the door. “Sit down.”
He scowled at her across the desk.
“I know this ain’t gonna break your heart, but we are going to have to pull the goddamn question about the goddamn Hamilton kid.”
“Why?”
“Julian Amsley won’t let us go with it. He’s afraid of a lawsuit.”
“Why?”
Wallace slammed his fist down and yelled, “Because the goddamned corncob Capello dug up is now claiming he lied about it and it never happened. And he had the goddamned nerve to deny the goddamned story, so we have to scrap it.”
Wallace continued, “Can you believe the bastard is denying it? That son of a bitch reneged on a deal. But that’s what you’re dealing with now, liars, cheats, bums, no-good bums. People don’t have any goddamned ethics anymore.”
Dena had no idea how the Hamiltons had managed to talk him into denying it, but she quickly pulled herself together and put on an act that would have made her college drama teacher proud. She looked at him with the same face she would have shown if Ira Wallace had said he had decided to become a priest.
“Are you telling me, Ira, that after all you put me through on this piece, that now I can’t use it? I can’t believe it … I just cannot believe it!” She stood up and started to pace the office. “Well, I don’t care if Julian Amsley is the president of the network, I’m going to ask the question anyhow. It’s news, for God’s sake. He can’t interfere with the news!”
Wallace panicked. “Do you want to get us all fired?”
“I don’t care, it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Well, I care. It’s the principle of keeping my goddamned job.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do, Ira? I had planned the whole interview around it. Now I’m left with some softball piece that I have to rewrite in less than twenty-four hours.”
Wallace tried to calm her. “I know, I know, but what can I do? Tell me, what do you need? How can I help?”
“So Capello is the best! He didn’t even check out his source and now look what I’m left with.”
“OK, OK, it was stupid.” Wallace raised his hands in surrender. “Shoot me.”
Dena was enjoying herself now. “Well, I can’t possibly be ready by tomorrow. You’ll have to cancel the interview.”
“No, no, we can’t do that. It’s already scheduled.”
“Look, Ira, I’m the one who’s going to look bad, not you. I ought to let you and Capello sit your butts on camera not prepared and see how you like it.”
“All right, all right, you’ve made your point. How can I make it up to you? You want my firstborn, take him, he’s yours. Just don’t go nuts on me, all right? What do y
ou want? Tell me.”
The next thing Dena said surprised her, but once said, she knew she meant it. “I want you to fire Capello’s ass.”
“Yeah, I should.… But look, I’ll have three assistants at your disposal, I’ll send in dinner, breakfast, I’ll even pay overtime. What else can I do?”
“I told you. I want you to fire Capello.”
“I can’t do that. I just hired him.”
“I want him fired.”
“You want him fired. Get serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Look, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t fire him. He has a contract. We’re talking money here.”
“Ira, don’t tell me you didn’t put a loophole in that contract. You always do.”
It suddenly dawned on Ira. “Hey, wait a minute, you can’t tell me who to fire. Who do you think you are? You ain’t got the job yet.”
She leaned on his desk. “Let me put it this way. If he’s not out of here in the next hour, I’m going to be too upset to do the interview, and the Hamiltons won’t do it without me. Like I told you before, they like me, they trust me. And you’ll be left with twenty minutes of dead air.”
“Oh, come on, now, you’re kidding. Aren’t you? You don’t want to do this to Capello. The poor guy made one lousy mistake. Have a heart. The poor slob feels bad enough. You should have heard him. He hated letting you down like that. He was almost in tears. You should have seen him.”
Wallace could see that she was unmoved. Dena had a determined look he had not seen before. They sat staring at each other. After a while, Wallace said, “All right, all right, but this is frigging blackmail. I’m telling you, you are making a mistake. Capello can do you a lot of good.”
“One more thing.” Dena stood up. “I want to be here when you do it.”
Now Wallace could not believe what he was hearing. He looked at her with a hurt expression and slowly shook his head. “What’s happened to you? You used to be such a nice, sweet kid.”
She did not answer.
Forty-five minutes later Capello had come back from lunch and Dena was sitting across from Sidney Capello when Wallace fired him.
Capello immediately turned on Dena. “You bitch, I’ll get you for this. You just wait, you—”
Wallace came around the desk and more or less pushed him toward the door. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know how tough you are, Sidney; now get the hell out of here.” He shoved him out the door and slammed it behind him.
Wallace went back to his desk. “Satisfied?”
Dena smiled. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
As she walked down the hall she felt a surge of something that made her feel strong. For the first time in her life she felt that heady rush of power and she suddenly understood why men fought for it. It felt good, and at that moment she was glad that she was not like Peggy Hamilton. She did not have to forgive Capello.
As Wallace leaned back in his chair and relit his cigar, he was also feeling a surge. Only it was admiration, for himself, for having pegged Dena Nordstrom. Damn, she was tough. She never flinched for a second while he was firing Sidney. She had not backed down an inch from him, either. He may have made some mistakes about people in the past, but he had always suspected that behind that innocent face was someone he could use to push all those sanctimonious types over at the other network—the types that looked down on him—right out of the business. Especially their lordly newscaster, Kingsley, who Wallace would love to knock off his pedestal. Howard Kingsley had once refused to work with him, costing him a big job at Howard’s network, and he had not forgotten it. He reached over and buzzed Sidney Capello’s new office. Capello picked up.
“It’s me, Ira.”
Capello started to curse him and to issue threats and Ira said, “Hey, hey, hold on … hold on. I know what I said but listen to me.” He yelled. “Listen, for Christ sakes! You ain’t gonna sue anybody. I called to tell you not to take this thing seriously. I just needed to clear up a little temperament problem so don’t get excited. We can work your contract out, no big deal. So you just won’t come into the office. What’s so terrible? You stay home, you send your stuff in, you get paid. She don’t know the difference. You’re happy, I’m happy, she’s happy. I know I promised to get you in the door here, but what can I do? She hates your guts. Look, you’ll get paid and at the end of the year maybe a nice bonus, OK? It’ll be better in the long run. Trust me.”
Capello was bitterly disappointed. This was his chance, maybe his one chance to get into big-time television and he knew it. Wallace was the only one who would ever have hired him and now, thanks to that blond bimbo, he was right back where he started. Still nothing more than a paid informant working out of some seedy hotel room. There went the office, his producer title, everything, all because of some bitch who thought she was better than everybody else. Goddamn her.
As he packed up the office he had had for only a few days, he pacified himself somewhat by reading the plaque he kept on his desk. REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD. He smiled.
Life is a long time.
My Hero
New York City
1973
Two weeks after the Hamilton piece ran, Dena and almost everyone else of any prominence in television, except Ira Wallace, attended the Heart Fund dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Heart Fund man of the year was Howard Kingsley, the grand old man of news broadcasting and one of the last really great newsmen in the country. He was introduced as the man whose face and voice had become the one the country depended on in any crisis for the past thirty years, to calm us down, to reassure us that all was well, or to share our sorrow. That was certainly true for Dena; his face and voice were as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life.
Kingsley was now sixty-four years old and still a handsome man, distinguished for his thoughtfulness and balance, and beautifully spoken. His acceptance speech was gracious. He thanked his wife of forty years for sticking with him through thick and thin (“mostly thick”) and said that without her he most likely would have wound up selling insurance in Des Moines, Iowa. That she and his daughter, Anne, had always been “his safe harbor on the rocky and stormy sea of broadcasting.” After his short speech he received a five-minute standing ovation, and as professional and sophisticated as Dena thought she was, she was thrilled to be in the same room with him. As dinner went on she tried to figure out what he had that was so different from most of the TV people she had met. Then it came to her: integrity, that’s what it was. It wasn’t really anything he did or said but you just had the feeling that he was a decent and honorable man who could always be trusted to tell you the truth. He wasn’t really different than most men, but in the television news business, integrity was slowly becoming a rarity, more and more like a light in the dark. Dena looked over at his wife and daughter and felt that old feeling whenever she saw a father and a daughter, a sadness tinged with envy. All she had ever seen of her father was a photograph. She was even envious of Ira Wallace’s little girl. He might be one of the most despicable human beings she had ever met but at least he did adore his daughter.
After the dinner, as they were walking out, J.C. said, “By the way, we have an invitation to the reception for Kingsley upstairs.”
“What reception?”
“It’s a small, private reception that Jeanette Rockefeller is having for a few friends.” J.C. was a fund-raiser and knew a great many people. She did not want to go.
“Why not?”
“I won’t know any of them. I’m not a friend of his; he might think I’m too pushy or something.”
“Oh, come on, don’t be silly. Jeanette is a friend of mine. Come on.”
“You go and I’ll wait for you.”
But J.C. would not take no for an answer and five minutes later she found herself upstairs in a suite, at a party with the heads of all three networks, including Julian Amsley, the man who ran hers. She was horrified when he looked over and saw he
r. Oh, God, she thought, now he’s going to think I’m some gate-crasher, but he nodded pleasantly at her. After about thirty minutes of trying to hide in a corner, Dena watched Jeanette Rockefeller approach and start to pull everyone over to meet the guest of honor. Now Dena stood in line with J.C. and wanted to drop right through the floor. She watched as Howard Kingsley came closer, shaking each person’s hand and saying a few words, and at last when Dena was introduced, she had an almost uncontrollable desire to curtsy. But she managed to look calm and say, “Congratulations, sir, I enjoyed your speech.” Howard looked at her with a slight little smile, and with a nod of his head said, “Thank you very much, young lady.” As she started to move away he said, “Oh, by the way, Miss Nordstrom, I caught the Hamilton piece. Good work. Let’s have lunch sometime.”
Dena managed an “Oh, thank you,” just as the hostess steered forward another guest.
Had she heard right? Had he actually said, “Good work, let’s have lunch,” or was she hallucinating? Maybe she misunderstood; he had really said, “Bad work, hated it a bunch.” J.C. was still behind her and Dena grabbed him by the arm. “Did you hear him say, ‘Let’s have lunch’?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I was standing right there.”
“Oh, my God … what do you think he wants?”
J.C. laughed. “What do you think he wants? He wants to tell you, you are the most talented and brilliant woman in New York.”
“Don’t be silly. Did he really say, ‘Good work’?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think that means?”
“It means he thought you did good work.”
“And he really said it?”
“Yes, Dena. Am I going to have to carry a tape recorder around to gather all these little kudos from now on?”