Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  “Within a few minutes of that, I got a tip from someone at the police station about the two addresses in Oswald’s wallet. We went tearing over to the Elsbeth address, where he wasn’t living—I burst in on some wino and his girl shacked up together. Then we went to 1026 Beckley, where he actually lived. We were twenty minutes behind the FBI. There was that little old room, it couldn’t have been more than eight by ten. The only thing they left in it was a banana peel.

  “On Sunday morning, Jim Ewell had the assignment at the jail, but he got a flat tire on the way. I went over just to see what was going on and saw Ruby kill Oswald. It was pure luck that I saw it and he missed it all. He feels snakebit, I’m sure.”

  Today Jim Ewell is still a police reporter in Dallas, and Hugh Aynesworth—well, Aynesworth is still a reporter too, but he is also an odd sort of footnote to the assassination, the journalist who has spent more time on the story than any other. He is a walking compendium of names of FBI agents, New Orleans informers, assistant district attorneys, bus drivers and cabbies. He was the first reporter to print Oswald’s diary and he sat shivah with Jack Ruby’s family.

  Aynesworth became so emotionally involved in the Clay Shaw trial that one of his dreams influenced the outcome of the case. “Suddenly one night I awakened out of a nightmare,” he told James Kirkwood, author of American Grotesque. He had dreamed that District Attorney James Garrison produced a surprise witness who came in “and sat down and captivated the jury, winning the case hands down.” He was so shaken by the dream that he wrote a letter to Shaw’s lawyer, urging him to hire a private detective to investigate one of Garrison’s witnesses, a dapper man named Charles Spiesel who claimed he had heard Shaw discuss the possibility of assassinating Kennedy. The detective discovered that Spiesel had filed a sixteen-million-dollar lawsuit charging the New York police and a psychiatrist with hypnotizing him and preventing him from having normal sexual relations; the information was crucial in discrediting Spiesel’s testimony.

  In some way, of course, Aynesworth is probably as addled about the assassination as some of the genuinely crazy people who come to see him. Unlike them, though—and unlike most of the buffs—he continues to believe that John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. “I sort of feel like a damn fool,” he says. “There’s nobody on earth who’d rather prove a conspiracy than me. I’d love to write it—if there was any damn thing that made me believe it.” It’s an odd position: investigative reporters try to bring conspiracies to light; Aynesworth has spent much of his time knocking them down.

  “Let me tell you how the story about Oswald’s being an FBI informer got started,” he said. “There was a note in Oswald’s papers with the name James Hosty on it. Hosty was an FBI agent, and in the beginning we thought Oswald was some kind of a spy or paid informer. I worked the FBI stuff, and we’d run down everything you could imagine. I even got Hosty’s phone records. I called the phone company and I just asked, ‘How do you get phone records if you’ve moved?’ I never actually said I was Hosty—she just assumed I was, and she sent them. Anyway, we couldn’t put it together except for these interviews where Hosty had come to see Marina. And that’s where Lonnie Hudkins came along.

  “Lonnie Hudkins was on the Houston Post, and he’d been sent to Dallas to work on the story. He called me up all the time, he would bug me and give me all these tips that were nothing. I just didn’t want him bugging me anymore. So one day he called up and said, ‘You hear anything about this FBI link with Oswald?’ I’d just about had it. I said to him, ‘You got his payroll number, don’t you?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Lonnie. I reached over on my desk, and there was a Telex number on a telegram, S. 172 I think it was, and I told it to Lonnie. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s it. That’s the same one I’ve got.’ Lonnie could see the moon coming out at high noon.” The number eventually became part of the lore of the assassination.

  Aynesworth stayed on the News until 1966, did some work for Life, and was on the staff of Newsweek from 1967 to 1974. The story would die down for a while and then crop up again. “Something was always coming up,” he said. “Look magazine bought the Manchester book, so Life felt it had to have something to counteract it. They put an investigative team on it, and in 1966 they were digging around. They moved to New Orleans and worked with Garrison, did a lot of investigation for him. Jack Fincher, the San Francisco bureau chief, comes up with a little fag from New Orleans, a short-order cook who told him a story about Oswald and Ruby being seen in New Orleans as lovers, and then at the YMCA in Dallas. He wove a great tale. Fincher didn’t know enough to know whether it was good, so they told him in New York to run it by Dallas and see what Hugh thinks.

  “We got a motel room at the Executive Inn out by the airport, and we taped this story, and he really had it down. There was no way I could break him. I was beginning to wonder myself. He was going on and on, he’d seen them swimming, hugging and kissing, and he said they’d even tried to entice him. Finally, I looked at him and said, ‘Wasn’t that a terrible scar on Ruby’s leg, that shark bite? Which leg was it on, anyway?’ He said, ‘It was the right leg.’ He took a pause. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was the left leg. I remember now.’ I said, ‘You little son of a bitch, he didn’t have a scar on his leg.’ He started crying. I felt sorry for him—he’d been promised a good bit of money for his story.”

  Last year, after working a spell as a private investigator, Aynesworth joined the Times Herald and began working with Dudney. They make an interesting pair: Aynesworth is stocky and square, Dudney is lean and long-haired; Aynesworth is disorganized, Dudney is a compulsive file keeper; Aynesworth works the phone, Dudney writes. The Times Herald, under the by-line of its publisher Tom Johnson, broke the story last fall of the threatening letter Oswald wrote to the FBI prior to the assassination; Aynesworth and Dudney did much of the legwork and wrote the backup stories. Their biggest story, both agree, was a non-story that took them weeks to put together. An FBI clerk named William Walter, who was working in the New Orleans office in 1963, told them that five days before the assassination he saw a Teletype saying there would be an assassination attempt in Dallas and that no one had done anything about it.

  “When we first talked to him on the phone,” Dudney said, “we were both extremely excited. The guy was very convincing.”

  “We interviewed him twenty-some times,” said Aynesworth, “and we talked to everybody who ever knew him.”

  “We got red flags everywhere,” said Dudney.

  “We gave him a polygraph,” said Aynesworth, “and he didn’t pass it.”

  “We never could get the one bit of information that proved it or disproved it,” said Dudney.

  “When we were three weeks into it,” Aynesworth said, “CBS got onto it. Dan Rather called and asked me what I thought. I said, ‘I’m ninety percent sure he’s lying, but I’m not sure.’ They did some film with him, chartered a plane to get it out, and once again Dan and I were back and forth on the phone. I gave him the results of the polygraph—with Walter’s permission. Finally, CBS went with it—but in a very positive manner. So we came back with a detailed, massive study. Knocking these stories down is no good—but you have to do it. There’s a lack of willingness in this business to say that nothing is there. Especially after a few bucks have been spent.”

  There is a reason there are only a handful of reporters working the Kennedy assassination—and that is that a lot of smart reporters have kept as far away from it as is possible. This is a story that begs for hundreds of investigators, subpoena power, forensics experts, grants of immunity; it’s also a story that requires slogging through twenty-seven volumes of the Warren Commission report and dozens of books on the assassination. A lot of people are dead. Some of the ones who are alive have changed their stories. The whole thing is a mess. And while it’s not likely that Aynesworth and Dudney will get to the bottom of it—that would be a little like shooting a bear with a BB gun—it’s nice to know they are still down there in Dalla
s plugging away.

  “The other night I was at a party,” Bob Dudney said, “and we were talking about certain great events that shaped the lives of people my age. The emergence of the Beatles and the Vietnam war were obvious influences. And I said that I thought the assassination of Kennedy was a big influence—and as soon as I said it I corrected myself. Oswald’s death was more an influence than Kennedy’s. Had he lived, so much more would have come out. His death left us a legacy of suspicion and doubt that’s turned in on everybody. It’s unusual. Such a neurotic little man, who was really such a loser, you know, and he’s left a very profound influence. The country would have recovered from the death of John Kennedy, but it hasn’t recovered yet from the death of Lee Harvey Oswald and probably never will.”

  February, 1976

  The New Porn

  Every so often, I manage to get through a day without reading the New York Times. This is an extremely risky thing to do—you never know whether the day you skip the Times will turn out to be the one day when some fascinating article will appear and leave you to spend the rest of your life explaining to friends who bring it up that you missed it. Fortunately, this rarely happens. But on Friday, November 14, 1975, I managed to miss the New York Times, and I learned my lesson.

  That, as it happens, was the day the Times ran a page-one story by its food writer Craig Claiborne about a four-thousand-dollar meal he and his friend Pierre Franey ate at a Paris restaurant, and I think it is safe to say that no article the Times has printed in the last year has generated as much response. (The only recent exception that comes to mind is one that Charlotte Curtis wrote about cottage cheese.) In any case, a few days later, in desperation, I went back and read it. As you undoubtedly know, Claiborne had bid three hundred dollars in an auction for dinner for two at any restaurant in the world; because American Express was footing the bill, there was a stipulation that the restaurant be on the American Express card. Claiborne chose to dine at a chic spot on the Right Bank called Chez Denis, and there he and Franey managed to get through thirty-one courses and nine wines. Two things were immediately clear to me when I read the article: first, that the meal had been a real disappointment, though Craig only hinted at that with a few cutting remarks about the blandness of the sorrel soup and the nothingness of the sweetbread parfait; and second, that the Times had managed to give front-page play to a story that was essentially a gigantic publicity stunt for American Express. What good sports the people at American Express were about the entire episode! How jolly they were about paying the bill! “We were mildly astonished at first but now we’re cheerful about it,” a spokesman for the company said—and well he might have been. Four thousand dollars is a small price to pay for the amount of corporate good will the article generated—and that outraged me; I have dealt with the people at American Express about money on several occasions, and they have never been cheerful with me.

  Because my outrage was confined to such a narrow part of the event, I was quite surprised a few days later when I began to read some of the letters the Times received about the dinner. There were eventually some five hundred in all, four to one against Claiborne, and the general tenor of them related to the total vulgarity of spending four thousand dollars on a dinner when millions were starving. Knee-jerk liberalism is apparently alive and well after all. There were references to Nero and Marie Antoinette, and there were also a few media-wise letter writers who chose to object not to the article itself but to the Times’s decision to run it on the front page. The Times printed a short and rather plaintive reply from Claiborne, who said that he could not see how anyone could claim that the meal had “deprived one human being of one mouthful of food.”

  All of this raised some interesting questions. For openers, how much money did Claiborne have to spend to cross the line into wretched excess? Would five hundred dollars have done it? A thousand dollars? Had he spent two thousand dollars, would the Times have received only three hundred letters? Would the objections have been even more intense if he had spent the four thousand dollars but put the tab on his expense account? Then, too, there is the question of editorial play: how much difference would it have made if the Times had run the article inside the newspaper? These are obviously unanswerable, almost existential questions, and a bit frivolous to boot—but there is something more serious underlying this whole tempest.

  Claiborne was clearly puzzled by the reaction to his piece. He had managed to commit a modern atrocity—even if he did rip off American Express, for which he is to be commended—and there is a good reason why it never crossed his mind that he was doing so: except for the price tag, what he did was no more vulgar and tasteless than what he and hundreds of other journalists do every day. Newspapers and magazines are glutted with recipes for truffle soufflés and nit-picking restaurant reviews and paeans to the joys of arugula. Which of us will ever forget the thrilling night that Gael Greene blew five hundred dollars on dinner at the Palace, or that spine-tingling afternoon when Craig and Pierre jumped into the car and drove all the way from East Hampton to Southampton just in time to find the only butcher on eastern Long Island with a pig’s ear? Or was it pork fat for pâté? God knows what it was, but the point is that it should not have taken a four-thousand-dollar dinner at Chez Denis to remind the readers of the Times that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. All of this—let’s face it—is pretty vulgar stuff. It’s also fun to read. But when it’s accompanied by a four-thousand-dollar price tag, it reminds people of something they should have known all along: it’s not about food, it’s about money. Craig Claiborne writes about consuming—which should not be confused with consumerism, or Ralph Nader, or anything of the sort. And in his way, he is representative of one of the major trends in publishing today; he is a purveyor of what I tend to think of as the new porn.

  Before going further, I should define what I mean by porn in this context: it’s anything people are ashamed of getting a kick out of. If you want to sell porn to a mass audience, you have to begin by packaging it in a way that’s acceptable; you have to give people an excuse to buy it. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner was the first person in publishing to understand this; if he has done nothing else for American culture, he has given it two of the great lies of the twentieth century: “I buy it for the fiction” and “I buy it for the interview.” Of late, Hefner has been hoist with his own petard. He has spent twenty years making the world safe for split beaver, and now he is surprised that magazines that print it are taking circulation away from his own.

  The new porn has nothing to do with dirty pictures. It’s simply about money. The new porn is the editorial basis for the rash of city and local magazines that have popped up around the country in the past ten years. Some of these magazines are first-rate—I am particularly partial to Texas Monthly—but generally they are to the traditional shelter magazines what Playboy is to Hustler: they have taken food and home furnishings and plant care and surrounded them up with just enough political and sociological reporting to give their readers an excuse to buy them. People who would not be caught dead subscribing to House & Garden subscribe to New York magazine. But whatever the quality, the serious articles in New York have nothing whatever to do with what that magazine is about. That magazine is about buying plants, and buying chairs, and buying pastrami sandwiches, and buying wine, and buying ice cream. It is, in short, about buying. And let’s give credit where credit is due: with the possible exception of the Neiman-Marcus catalog, which is probably the granddaddy of this entire trend, no one does buying better than New York magazine.

  In fact, all the objections the Times readers made to Claiborne’s article can be applied to any one of the city and local magazines. How can you write about the perfect ice cream cone or the perfect diet cola or the perfect philodendron when millions of people have never seen a freezer, suffer from sugar deficiencies, and have no home to put potted plants in? How can you publish a magazine whose motto is essentially “Let them eat cheesecake”? Well, you can. And thousands of people wil
l buy it. But don’t make the mistake of giving the game away by going too far. Five extra pages on how to survive in a thirty-thousand-dollar living room, one extra price tag on a true nonessential, and your readers will write in to accuse you of terminal decadence. And when this happens, what will be truly shocking will not be the accusation—which will be dead on—but the fact that it took them so long to get the point.

  Terminal decadence.

  Exactly.

  March, 1976

  Russell Baker

  I have come to my devotion to the columns of Russell Baker later than most of the people I know, and I’m not sure whether this is because I am slow to catch on, or because Russell Baker is even better than he used to be. The answer, I suspect, is a little of both. In the last year, Baker has moved from Washington to New York, and the column he writes for the New York Times and its news service has shifted away from politics and toward urban life in general. I was about to go on to say something or other about that, but I realize that I have already begun to be unfair to Baker. Which is one of the problems of writing about him: as soon as you start to describe what he does, you do him an injustice. Urban life indeed. Baker did a column the other day that began with Franco dying and going straight to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles; it was brilliant, and there is no way to distill or describe it. You had to be there. And in any case, when I went to interview Baker and told him that column was a perfect description of urban life in New York, he assured me it was about urban life in Russia.

  Baker is, of course, usually referred to as a humor columnist and usually lumped together with Art Buchwald, and that, too, is unfair. He is to Buchwald what Saul Steinberg is to Peter Arno: he tends to humor that is abstract, almost flaky, off the wall, cerebral, a bit surrealistic. He almost never writes a column that is a long joke; because of this, and because he builds on mood and nuance, a neat paragraph summary of a typical Baker column doesn’t work at all. So I thought I would just go see him and let him talk, and the hell with anyone who wants a decent description of his writing. I should probably tell you that Baker is fifty, a tall, skinny man who looks a little like a hayseed. He is extremely low-key, terribly nice, and often seems on the verge of being embarrassed, particularly by praise of any sort.