by John Darnton
He then revealed a second piece of information: “If I’m not mistaken—but you know the timing on this—I think part of Tootie’s technique in setting up housekeeping with Barney was that she got pregnant. And I think my father thought that they’d gone off and seen a judge or something, but why they would have given that impression and not done it, I don’t know.” A few moments later, he said he had heard that Mom “snagged” Barney by getting pregnant. I knew, on this point, that he was reflecting Pollie’s take on things.
We talked for a while and then I mentioned a name that reminded Bill of my mother’s other suitor. “That’s it!” he cried excitedly. “You’ve got it. That’s who it was.”
The name was Cedric Worth, my father’s friend from the New York Evening Post, the man who had passed along the quotation “Anyone who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.”
At this point, I was tempted to throw up my hands. Lindesay Parrott. Ursula Parrott. Mac and Dorothy MacKaye. Pollie. Milly. Tootie. Barney. And now Cedric Worth. Everyone, it seemed, was sleeping with everyone else, or trying to. Jumping in and out of bed had certainly made for some lighthearted shenanigans and no small amount of intrigue. But underneath that sophisticated revelry, I thought, it had been a serious and cruel business. It broke up friendships and ruptured marriages. The ethos was captured by a sardonic remark that Barney once tossed off to my mother, which she didn’t tell me until I was grown up: “It’s not wedding bells, but cheap hotels, that’s breaking up that ole gang o’ mine.”
The story has a footnote. Their lives had not stopped interweaving. I learned that Lindesay Parrott—he who had lost Pollie to Barney in the 1930s—had come back into Pollie’s life sixty years later. He moved into her apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and she nursed him there until his death. That was why, when Bob first telephoned her, she had insisted that he meet her in a restaurant, not in her home. Bitter to the end, Lindesay Parrott had said, according to Dorothy MacKaye, “No son of Barney Darnton is coming to my place.”
I looked at Bob’s notes, scribbled during the train ride back to New York after his interviews with Dorothy and Pollie. He ruminated on the paths their lives had taken, large outcomes that hinged on random happenings and what at the time seemed like small moments—a request to a friend to look after a fiancée, a misunderstood signal over drinks at the Minetta Tavern, a kitchen door opened at the wrong second, revealing a husband kissing someone else. In retrospective old age, these moments loomed large and were seen for what they were—pivotal.
“While history happens at the level of great events,” Bob wrote, “these micro-events get washed out. Yet for the individuals, the latter are history: the past as looked at across a distance of 50, 60, 70 years. Who’s to say that their past, however individual and anecdotal, is any less history than the Big Story line we know in conventional narratives?”
CHAPTER 17
The dashing foreign correspondents of the 1930s were gone when I started at the Times in September 1966. I remember my first day vividly. The night before, I had been too nervous to sleep. By morning, I felt worse. Gulping down my coffee, I followed it with a tranquillizer—for the first time in my life I needed a pill to calm down. The reason seemed obvious once I entered the busy lobby of the headquarters on West Forty-third Street. Across from a bust of Adolph Ochs, the publisher who had made the Times great, was the bronze tablet to the memory of Byron Darnton and Robert Post, two correspondents “who braved every peril with unsurpassed and unsparing devotion and who by their writings helped to forge this democracy into the greatest war machine of all time.” I was entering my father’s cathedral.
In the elevator, I remembered visiting my mother in this building; back then the elevators had operators who would tip their hat to her. I got out at the third floor, where the newsroom was. A receptionist at an imposing wooden desk called a copyboy to meet me. I was ushered through a pair of swinging doors and along a passageway behind a frosted-glass partition. I could hear phones ringing and the buzzing of many conversations on the other side. Then I got my first glimpse of the city room—a cavernous space extending the length of an entire block, with windows at either end. To one side were the senior editors, seated at clusters of desks shoved next to one another. Copy editors lined the rim of crescent-shaped desks, some actually wearing green eyeshades. To the other side, reaching all the way to Forty-fourth Street, was the reporters’ area, row upon row of metal desks with large typewriters that could be flipped upright or collapsed out of sight. Even in midmorning, there was a certain bubbling activity, the promise of exciting things to come. A dozen or so men were talking on the phone or typing. One stood up and slipped on his jacket, his side pocket bulging with a notebook, presumably to go out on an assignment.
My job, it turned out, wasn’t in the newsroom itself, but in a room beyond. I was to work for the Times News Service, next to the communications department. As stories and cables piled in from foreign and national bureaus, I was to grab copies and run them off on a mimeograph machine and then distribute them to Times’ clients on an upper floor. After half an hour, the machine turned my hands purple—they looked as if I had thrust them into a pot of dye. I had been there about a week when an enthusiastic political reporter named Clayton Knowles heard my name and asked if I was related to Barney Darnton. I said yes. He grabbed me by the wrist and took me over to meet the deputy metro editor, Arthur Gelb. Gelb, a tall man, whose arms seemed in perpetual motion, greeted me warmly. He said he had joined the paper some years after my father’s death but had certainly heard a great deal about him. “He was a legend,” he concluded, looking down at my hands as if I had contracted a disease.
Over the months to come I studied how the newsroom functioned. I learned to read the reporters’ status by the placement of their desks—the top ones, Homer Bigart and Peter Kihss, were up front, and the pecking order extended all the way to the rear. I learned who was good and who was not, who was respected and who drank too much. I came to know when a big story was breaking, not so much from people dashing around shouting—that was a Hollywood stereotype—as from an indefinable perception that the well-oiled machine was shifting to a faster gear. The city room was an impersonal place. When an editor on the metro desk wanted a reporter for an assignment, he’d grab a microphone and boom out the name and the reporter would lope up an aisle under the searching eyes of his colleagues, some of whom hoped he would bungle it.
I was at first acutely conscious of my father and wondered if people were comparing me to him. Every now and then I would run into people who had known him. They invariably said something positive and innocuous—how “nice” he was or some such thing—and I felt pleased but also embarrassed. I was curious to know more but reluctant to press them for details. I didn’t want to appear anything other than cool and in control, professional—which was the way I imagined he must have been. As a consequence I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in his shadow, even if it wasn’t apparent to everyone else. I would sometimes look at the older reporters standing around gossiping or telling jokes, and I’d imagine him there, at the center of the action.
Over time my nervousness wore off, in part because the jobs were so menial that there was little chance to slip up. I worked hard, mostly at nights, and I gradually was promoted from copyboy to news clerk and then news assistant. At first I answered calls on the foreign desk. Then I wrote captions on the picture desk. After that I moved to the metro desk, where I kept track of assignments and copy and handled news tips. And finally I compiled the daily news summary, which ran on the front page of the second section. I was watchful for signs that management was favoring me as some sort of legacy, but this did not appear to be the case. Other copyboys and -girls—girls were just starting to be hired—seemed to be following the same trajectory.
By this time I had decided I wanted badly to be a reporter. I examined the stories written by my role models and tried to imitate their style. I assimilated the values of the paper and lear
ned the institutional lore, much of it passed on from older reporters in anecdotal form. The stories they told encapsulated lessons—about accuracy, objectivity, street smarts. There was the tale of the reporter whose career was shot when he secretly slipped away from Chile the night before the coup against Salvador Allende. There was the reporter fired for inserting the name of a phony award in a routine commencement story. And there was the hero who covered segregation agitators in Mississippi and learned to look inconspicuous by taking notes inside his jacket pocket.
I realized that I had been hearing similar stories all my life from my mother, who remained starry-eyed about the paper despite her travails there—except that her stories, I now learned, stretched credulity. One tale she recounted with relish was meant to illustrate the paper’s incorruptibility. Years ago, when the legendary Carr Van Anda began his job as managing editor, he had typed out his resignation and kept it in his desk drawer. As she told it, Adolph Ochs himself came down one day to see him, bearing a wedding announcement of a family member that he wanted to see in the paper. “Certainly,” replied Van Anda. “And while you’re here, here’s something for you,” he added, reaching into the drawer and handing over his notice. Ochs read it, then sheepishly took back the announcement. I myself told that story dozens of time, until I knew enough about the Times to realize there was no way it could have happened. The wedding of a publisher’s relative was newsworthy, and besides, no editor, not even a legendary one, would have been likely to buck his publisher over so trivial a matter.
The chasm between news assistant and reporter was wide, and to make the leap, the beginner was expected to write feature stories on the side. Coming up with a subject august enough for the Times was difficult. One day I heard about a man harboring an incredible menagerie of animals in a makeshift pet store on Fulton Street. He was being forced out by the city to clear the way for the new World Trade Center. Pythons, monkeys, Amazonian fish—all of them had to relocate. At last I had found a human-interest story. I interviewed the animal lover, a rotund bearded man named Henry Trefflich, not once, but twice. I arranged for a photographer. I stayed up almost until dawn writing and rewriting the story, trying to make each word perfect. I went to work, handed the story in to an assistant metro editor, who assured me it looked good, and went home that evening exhausted but triumphant. The next morning, I ran out to get the paper. I couldn’t locate the story. I flipped through the pages several times and then saw the fruit of my labor—shrunken to a six-line caption under a photo of Trefflich holding a chimp.
In the summer the Times allowed news assistants to fill in for reporters on vacation. This meant receiving assignments from the desk—and the likelihood that the stories would be printed. I was assigned to cover a Fifth Avenue parade of veterans. I was nervous, wondering whether I could write fast enough on deadline. What would happen if I choked? Would there be a big blank spot in the paper? I checked the clip files in the morgue to see how past parades had been covered, went to Fifth Avenue, crammed a notebook full of quotes and descriptions, and went back to the office to cobble together a story. Sweating, I typed out my lead, which I cribbed from one I had found in the morgue: “The tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet resounded along upper Fifth Avenue yesterday as …” The next day, I found in my mailbox a dupe of the story, marked with the initials of Abe Rosenthal, then city editor. He had scribbled a note that consisted of a single word followed by an exclamation point: “Cliché!”
Somehow, over time, I learned enough and assembled enough clips and impressed enough people to be promoted, one of a small handful to rise from within the ranks. In August 1968, after a two-week vacation, I entered the building as a reporter. I was assigned to a desk in the very last row and drew journeyman assignments. Soon after that, I found myself at the police shack. Close up, it lost some of its glamour.
That was the fall and winter of the bitter Ocean Hill–Brownsville school strike, which pitted the largely white, largely Jewish teachers’ union against African-American parents and activists in a struggle for “community control.” I trudged around the streets, interviewing people on the picket lines or in their apartments, trying to figure out what was going on. Mostly I did legwork for the big-name education reporters. In those days, on returning from assignments, we lined up in front of the night city editor, Sheldon Binn, a brilliant, no-nonsense newspaperman. One by one, we would move up, eventually taking the seat next to Binn, who would fire off two or three questions to get the essence of the story, dispense space (“a buck” meant a full column), and assign a “slug”—the one-word name that would track the story on its circuitous journey through production and into print. Each time I approached Binn, half of me wanted to be told that I had fallen on a big story—big enough for page one—while the other half felt paralyzed at the thought.
It took a long time for my capabilities to catch up to my ambition. But I eventually settled into the rhythm of reporting and writing and yelling “copy” the moment I finished each page. I derived a thrill from the knowledge that by the time I was working on the third page, my second page was being copyedited and my first was being set in hot lead by a linotype operator in the composing room upstairs. In midafternoon, trucks delivering newsprint backed into the loading bays on Forty-third Street, sending fourteen-hundred-pound rolls crashing into place. It sent a jolt through the newsroom, like the rumbling of a hungry beast. Phones rang, reporters barked questions, typewriters clacked, and the loudspeaker would boom out directives—“We need copy!” or “Keep it tight!” The frenzy mounted through the early evening. Then magically, at 7:10 p.m., like a baseball game that ends with a walk-off, it all stopped. Reporters leaned back and relaxed. Copy editors finished up the one or two stragglers. People would approach the city desk and ask for a “good night”—permission to leave. And soon the presses in the subbasement would start up, sending a tremble through the building. The beast was digesting.
One of my early assignments was covering Connecticut. In those days the state was the bailiwick of a single reporter. I was provided with a car and a one-room office in downtown New Haven; the office had frosted glass on the door, like a private eye’s. I covered everything that happened: summer riots in Hartford, dreary debates in the legislature about the state income tax, student sit-ins, racism in the Waterbury Police Department, the admission of women to Yale. And of course I wrote countless features about life in suburban Fairfield County. Nina and I moved to Westport. It felt odd to be living there after such a long absence and to be viewing it through the eye of a chronicler.
These were the tumultuous times of the late sixties. My political views were left of center—I had carried my antipathy toward Richard Nixon into his presidency—and I felt an affinity for the counterculture. I was friends with some of the provocative agitators, like Jerry Rubin, who tried to persuade me to abandon objective journalism, which he insisted was impossible, and go to work for a more compatible publication, such as The East Village Other. I resisted the argument. I had been inculcated with the belief that the highest form of journalism was the honest type practiced by quality newspapers. Objectivity, at least as a goal, was the key. I thought if I laid the facts out fairly, and other reporters did the same, and readers were open-minded, chances were that people would end up reaching the same conclusions I held.
While I was in Connecticut, a big story broke. The Black Panther Bobby Seale was indicted for murder—a young Panther, interrogated as a possible informer at the local chapter, had been killed after a visit by Seale—and so the stage was set for a high-profile trial. On May Day in 1970, thousands of antiwar and antigovernment activists poured into New Haven for a massive demonstration. The police fired ample quantities of tear gas at protesters on the town green, but the event did not ignite a leftist uprising as the FBI had warned. Eventually, Seale’s trial ended in a hung jury and the case against him was dropped.
For one particular story, I went to JFK to meet a party of Black Panthers who were coming from th
e West Coast. Their plane was late, and as I bided my time, I stared up at the giant board of destinations: Istanbul, Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Cairo, Jerusalem, Hong Kong. The names seemed infused with poetry. I felt a restlessness almost as palpable as a bodily ache. I had to see these places and experience them. Was this, I wondered, what my father had felt?
My stories from Connecticut were enough to secure me a promotion as “chief suburban correspondent,” a new position. In theory, I was to roam the outer urban areas, uncovering trend stories of sociological import. I was a flop, and after some months of desultory work, I was consigned to night rewrite as a punishment. Night rewrite is to a newspaper what the emergency room is to a hospital—a place of intense boredom, punctuated by periods of unmitigated panic. I disliked it, but eventually I got accustomed to fielding multiple phone calls from legmen, writing “quick and dirty” sidebars, and piecing together big stories quickly. The blank spaces in the paper never appeared. I was cured of my anxieties over writing on deadline.
After two years, I was taken off night rewrite and sent to the pressroom at City Hall. If the police shack was the toxic pulse of the city, Room 9 was its reptilian brain stem. The door was covered with brass plaques of all the city newspapers that had died. Inside, the walls were covered with dust, ancient press releases were stacked on the windowsills, and the desks were jammed so closely together that even whispers could be heard by rivals. The air was rife with intrigue and, at Christmas, the closets magically filled with cartons of scotch from well-wishers doing business with the city.
I arrived there at the mid-tide watermark of the John Lindsay administration and stayed two years into the Abe Beame administration. These were important and changing years for the city. Federal money was still coming in, the old-time bosses still had some power, a reform movement was under way, crime was up and city services down, and everyone worried about racial riots. The corridors of power were peopled by Damon Runyon characters in government clothing.