Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  On the night of April 17, 1991, there was a White House State Dinner for Violetta Chamorro, the first democratically elected presidenta of Nicaragua, following the abysmal failures of Fidel's ideological "children" -- the Marxist Sandinistas. I happened to be seated next to Disney's Michael Eisner. Despite the beauty of the evening, Eisner was in poor spirits and in worse luck, for he clearly would have preferred to sit next to starlet Teri Garr, who was just across the round table and at whom he kept glancing hopelessly. But, he was stuck between me and President Chamorro, who speaks little English, and who, moreover, was busy talking with President Bush.

  As Eisner either had to talk with me or sit there in silence all night, he commented that he had been invited to the White House several times, but had not come -- "Is this supposed to be some kind of honor?" he demanded. Finally, he revealed what he had done before becoming such a world famous figure that he would be invited to the White House despite himself. He mentioned that, in his earlier days, he had worked as an assistant to "Charlie" Bluhorn in the Dominican Republic.

  Slowly, I asked him ... wasn't there something about Gulf and Western doing a book ... ? On Fidel Castro was it?

  He brightened noticeably (Teri was busy by this time). "Oh, sure," he said, now almost smiling, "We offered Castro everything we could to get that book. It was a sweetener, we were going to get Castro to do sugar deals through European subsidiaries." He paused, then looked at me very seriously, as though he were genuinely, truly, conspiratorially revealing something great, even unforgettable. In fact, he kind of hunched over, as if God only knew what might happen if "the others" heard this. "We were even going to film Bad News Bears in Cuba," he whispered to me.

  Bad News Bears? I had never heard of Bad News Bears. Apparently everyone was supposed to have heard of the popular movie and television series. "Bad News Bears, Bad News Bears," he repeated several times, snappishly. Each time he would look at me with more barely concealed irritation. But I had learned about something far more important than Bad News Bears.

  Then, on September 16,1992, I went to New York for the kickoff party for the new national radio book show of my old Chicago friend, the popular WGN-Radio interviewing star, Milton Rosenberg, at the fashionable "Le Club." Serendipitously, one of the first people to whom I was introduced when I came in was Michael Korda, the polished editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. We chatted for a moment, and I mentioned that I had written the biography of Castro. He seemed to know and appreciate that and was surely pleasant and charming.

  Then, before I could ask him, he volunteered, shaking his head in disappointment, "Yes, we almost had one on Castro, too. I had printed an earlier book on the 'Venceremos Brigades,'" he said, referring to the brigades of young American leftists who flocked to Cuba during the 1960s. "Then Alice and Dick went to Havana and they even signed Fidel up. It didn't work. They say we paid him $1 million, but I don't think any money changed hands." Then he smiled, shook his head in mock confusion and added, "I'm not sure."

  In fact, all of Simon & Schuster's machinations had come very close to killing my book, if only because it "relieved" me of my financing. Moreover, I eventually learned from the highest-level Cuban intelligence defector, Major Florentino Aspillaga, that Castro's intelligence had actually intended to copy or steal my manuscript, just as I had always feared. So, in addition to everything else, I had hidden copies under friends' beds and (infinitely more effective) placed copies of everything in two vaults at the Riggs Bank across the street. Ultimately, I had kept my staff by earning more money through speeches (which, of course, severely reduced the amount of time that could be spent on the book) and, in the end, Simon & Schuster had signed off, almost gratefully, on their first advances to me.

  What finally happened in this whole "memorable" publishing story was that my book on Fidel was rescued by Little, Brown & Co. and my fine editor Fredrica Friedman. We named the book Guerrilla Prince, to dramatize Fidel's unique inspiration of most of the guerrilla movements of our times, as well as his Machiavellian temperament. Published in January 1991, the book received generally excellent reviews (front cover of The New Republic , the cover review of the prestigious Times Literary Supplement of London, two pages in The Economist , and so forth) and was optioned for a television series by Francis Ford Coppola. Tad's book was also well-received critically, and we remain good friends.

  By far my own greatest joy was that the book beautifully fulfilled one of my greatest hopes for it -- through individual "carriers," it was brought to the underground in Cuba, and the Cuban dissidents and others met to read it aloud to one another. The defectors would call me and tell me excitedly that now, for the first time, Cubans could know who he really was .

  As for the traveling-carnival-team effort of the Simon & Schuster editors, who apparently naively believed until the bitter end that the egoismo numero uno of the entire world could really reveal himself enough to write an autobiography ... to date, all that they have ever published by him is one of his accustomed tirades -- on the economics of the Cuban debt. Now there is one to wake you up!

  ***

  While sipping my morning coffee on September 15, 1992, I received still another surprise when the phone again rang unexpectedly. It was my good friend Col. Denny D'Alelio, a brilliant strategist just retired from the Pentagon, but his usually buoyant and confident voice seemed diffident and confused.

  "Gee Gee," he said, "Suzy and I were watching television last night, and there's a new show with you in it. She's a famous woman foreign correspondent, and her name is even Georgie Anne ..."

  More confused than suspicious, I obtained a video of the show. It was called Hearts Afire -- a brand new sitcom that had just been launched by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband Harry Thomason, the two fast-lane friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were that very autumn running for their "copresidency." When I saw the show two days later, I was even more incredulous.

  Here was this character, appearing on CBS at 8:30 every Monday night, played by seductive actress Markie Post and immediately billed as a pioneering woman foreign correspondent. She had long blonde hair with long bangs -- just the way I wore my hair when I was younger. She was born and raised in Chicago, worked for the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post , now lived in Washington, received calls from world leaders, is a specialist on the Middle East, always says that her favorite interview was Anwar Sadat, and, if all that were not enough, wrote the definitive book on Fidel Castro.

  At first I did not know whether to be flattered or enraged. Markie Post is a very pretty woman (that part was all right), but ahh, the differences! This "Georgie Anne Lahti" has a father who looks suspiciously like mine, but, unlike my sterling-character father, finds his future defined by the walls of the federal pen. She has lost her job, cannot pay her credit cards, and would have shocked even the free-and-easy male foreign correspondents of my experience with her breezy abandon and sheer indomitable animal energy between the bedsheets. Indeed, the Thomasons' "Georgie Anne" seems to have slept with just about every man she ever interviewed -- and what's worse, it is directly implied in the first script that she slept with Castro to obtain her interviews with him.

  But -- very well -- exactly what was I supposed to do? Hearts Afire was flickering away week after week, and all because someone totally unknown to me, far away in California, had arrogantly taken my life and reformed its essence into something so different from mine that it could only parody the original, or in effect, create another kind of image. I began to feel afraid of this amorphous and "unreal" threat. It was as though something that dangerously approximated, acted like, and was named for, me was hovering above my head and shoulders, deflecting the private reality that should be every person's alone. It was as though some witch doc-tress were toying with my soul, and perhaps one was.

  The underlying difficulty was that, if you are going to be the first woman to accomplish something, you'd better be straight; and my entire career has been based upon the principle of co
mplete honesty. Indeed, that is the reason that leaders of very different cultures -- princes of Saudi Arabia, Russian leaders, leftist guerrillas in various parts of the world -- always knew they could trust me. I made a whole lifetime of people knowing who I was, and now people would not know.

  You see, my life was my life. The Thomasons had not stayed up nights while American diplomats were being killed in Khartoum, or huddled in an underground bunker in 1984 on the Iraqi desert east of Basra being bombarded by Iranian troops, or heard suddenly that their best friends were killed in Teheran (Joe Alex Morris) or Tegucigalpa (Dial Torgerson). Only I had lived this life, only I had created and formed it, and only I had cared enough about those "others" all across the globe to try to translate to my world what was happening "out there." Moreover, we correspondents are not a group lacking in courage, and so trivializing our lives is insufferable.

  Complaints from my fine Chicago lawyer and friend Joel Weisman were answered only with derision by their lawyers. Typically, in one letter from Michael J. Plonsker of Lavely & Singer of Los Angeles, he accused me of making "libelous and defamatory statements" about them! Then he wrote that I should "cease and desist from making all such statements immediately. All she accomplishes is increasing the amount of damages that she will ultimately be held responsible for."

  During November, when I was becoming increasingly dispirited, I had dinner in Washington one night with the sophisticated TV critic Michael Medved, who even with all his experience in Hollywood, was nevertheless stunned by these events. At the end of our talk he leaned across the table and said to me of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, "But she wants to be you!" Medved then reminded me that Linda had publicly referred to her sitcoms as her "columns."

  Next, I sought out a brilliant young law professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Rodney Smolla. Rod was a national expert on cases such as mine, and had written several books and a legal treatise on these issues -- not a bad fellow at all to have on your side! And so, early in December 1993 , I took him to a very long lunch at the Cosmos Club, where in 1988 I had become the first woman member. He tried to explain to me the murky and confused, but endlessly fascinating, waters in which I, usually the most expert of swimmers, now found myself so uncomfortably struggling for air. Essentially, we talked about the new imagery.

  "There are five or six causes of action that are available to you," he began. "The first is defamation, or libel -- but to win with libel, you have to prove that you are the person depicted. Then, there is a far more complex legal position called 'false light invasion of privacy,' which is also sometimes known as the violation of your 'right of publicity."'

  The "false light invasion of privacy" claim, Rod went on--as I admittedly struggled to try to understand what in God's name all this meant -- involved placing the plaintiff in a "false light in the public eye." But above all, there was the new and increasingly famous law in California, the "Right to Publicity" law, which was supposed to protect you against a kind of (my term) "plagiarism of persona." Like so much in these new areas, it was treacherous because, although it protected you on one level, it also required the loser in any such case to pay the winner's lawyers' bills -- had I lost, they would have ruined me financially. It was already abundantly clear to me that their lawyers were big spenders.

  From the beginning, I began to believe that even my beloved freedom -- and thus my capacity to produce and create -- might increasingly be on trial. This situation was not at all mitigated by the fact that Linda and Harry were by then being lionized all over Washington, as they had created the Democratic Convention film of candidate Clinton's life and were in charge of the presidential inaugural. Worse, my lawyers had forbidden me to either speak or write about the case, because at that time I was seriously intending to sue them; so, I felt like a mute who has been ambiguously violated, while unable even to defend herself.

  The week before the inauguration, I decided to act, so of course I did what any normal, sensible woman, knowing she was totally and unequivocally in the right, determined to serve only law and justice and The Good and dedicated to the Protection of Future Generations, would do: I called my old friend of thirty years, the greatest journalistic talent of our generation, the young man who had sat in front of me during those early days at the Chicago Daily News , the patient and understanding, calm and abstemious, Mike Royko.

  It takes a great deal to make my tough and savvy old pal from the west side of Chicago incredulous or to shock him in any way. The word "unbelievable" is not in his dictionary (surely not after what he has seen all his life in Chicago politics). Yet, even Mike was shocked.

  Only five days before the inauguration of the new American president in January 1993, when Linda and Harry were vying around the clock for respectability in the Clintons' new home town, Mikes's first column on me and the creative Hollywood Thomasons came out in the Chicago Tribune and other papers across the nation. To spare the sensibilities of the tender-hearted reader, I shall quote only a few of the kinder portions here:

  Although I watch few TV sitcoms, I've looked in on one because the main female character reminds me of an old friend...

  The real-life Georgie Anne is a brilliant, respected expert in foreign affairs, who writes a column that appears in 120 newspapers, has authored important books and magazine articles.

  Along the way, she's put her life on the line more than once .... She has reason to be proud of her accomplishments. It wasn't easy. She broke into journalism when the few women on newspapers covered cooking, fashion or society. So along comes these TV people who need an outline for a TV character...

  Then, on to the Thomasons:

  I'll tell you who these sleazy TV producers are, since you'll probably become familiar with them during the next four years. They are a Hollywood couple ... part of Bill Clinton's innermost circle. They helped shape his and Hillary's public image and created the highly effective "Man from Hope" propaganda film shown at the Democratic Convention. They're close chums, and you'll hear more about them because they are the Clinton's show biz connection.

  In Washington, they are already big names, the kind of instant powers who will be fawned over and gawked at during the inauguration glitz. What informal roles will they play during the Clinton administration? As we know, it can become necessary for presidents to tell lies. Sometimes for alleged national security purposes, but more often to protect their hides. So if Clinton feels the need to tell a lie, but is not quite sure how to do it, he can consult the Thomasons. They've already established their credentials."

  At this, "the story" broke all over the country. Meanwhile, almost all of Linda's "responses" were centered around denying that she had ever heard of me or that she might ever have wanted to. When TV Guide wrote a complimentary piece about me and the show, for instance, she faxed them:

  I wouldn't know Georgie Anne Geyer if she threw herself on the hood of my car. I have never read her book. I have never read one word of her column .... I understand Miss Geyer says that if anyone really believes that these are just major coincidences, then she must be living in never-never land. I would say that is exactly her correct address.

  Frankly, after that bit about landing on the hood, for some days I tried to keep my wits about me and my eyes alert when crossing the street. But despite Linda's, shall we say "intemperate" words, I was feeling infinitely better; I was now, after all, fighting the case in my court, which was the press. And so I was snuggled up late at night at home in my favorite chair with my beloved Japanese bobtail cat Nikko, on January 22, 1993, the Friday right after the inauguration, which the Thomasons' imagery ad made into "Hollywood North." I switched on C-Span, and there, to my amazement, were Linda and Harry, speaking that noon at the National Press Club.

  Linda was all in black, with black dress, black cape, and even black hood tied tightly around her head, while Harry looked very rumpled and incongruously "down-home Arkansas" for a Hollywood multimillionaire. Their talk was rambling, and I was frankly sur
prised that they were not more disciplined or polished.

  But just as I was trying to analyze them, in the question period the president of the Press Club suddenly asked Linda, "What did you think of Mike Royko's column on Georgie Anne Geyer?" For a moment, Linda looked as though someone had thrown a water pitcher at her; then, she composed herself and sat there in the National Press Club and said the most astonishing thing. She said, "Georgie Anne Lahti is a wonderful journalist. . ." Then she corrected herself quickly, saying "I mean Georgie Anne Geyer."

  I soon discovered that I was not alone. A man called me from Nashville: he was a songwriter from the Thomasons' home town in Arkansas, and his name was Wood Newton. Who was the character in their other sitcom, Evening Shade , but one Wood Newton! (He started to sue them, but the court ruled against him, saying that he had written a letter approving the use of his name.) Later the Thomasons used the name of Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove of the paper's style section, and in Hearts Afire again, even had another character threaten to "break Lloyd Grove's legs." I called Grove, and he said he had called Harry, whom he knew, and that Harry told him, "Sometimes we just do that to people we know." Grove then explained to me that , "I think it's because I wrote that piece about how the Clintons gave their old used underwear to the Salvation Army and took it off their taxes." Grove's response, a good one, was to write a hilariously funny satiric takeoff on the Clintons -- in short, to satirize them .

  More than a year later they came out with still another sitcom, Women of the House , and this time, among other clumsy satires, they included making fun of the famous Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee's wife, Sally Quinn, all because Sally did not invite their main character to her New Year's Eve party! (Social resentment: such a sad thing!)

  In January 1994, I was invited to the White House for the first time with this administration for a columnists' luncheon on NATO expansion. This may seem unimportant, or it may seem a little self-important for a journalist to complain about not being invited, but in fact it was extremely odd. These briefings almost always include major correspondents and columnists, and being excluded carries a message. It was also a little odd because that day the president called me "Georgie," instead of Georgie Anne or Gee Gee. Nobody calls me "Georgie," but that was what by then they called Markie Post in the show. And when I walked into the White House that day, Vice President Al Gore, who has always been friendly to me, laughed devilishly when he saw me. "I saw the picture in the paper of you," he said, referring to one of the articles having to do with Hearts Afire. Then he laughed again, covered his mouth and said, "oh, I guess I shouldn't be saying that here."