After Visiting Friends

  #

  I slip into Chicago, take the El from O’Hare. When it stops at Cumberland Avenue, a chill wind swirls in. Past the Kennedy Expressway, across the parking lot of the grocery store where once I rode in circles, I see my old home. Through the light rain, I see the window of my childhood bedroom. The window of that morning. I tuck my head into my chest. People are boarding. What if my mother gets on? I have not told her I am slipping in.

  #

  Lois lives south of the Loop. Some sort of conversion. There’s a doorman. I slink around the corner, huddle against the rain in the doorway of a restaurant. I call her number, get her machine. I hang up.

  Nerves. If I gave in to them, I’d still be standing in the doorway. But I do what I do when I’m reporting: I get into character. Like that scene at the opening of Pulp Fiction when Jackson and Travolta are talking about Quarter Pounders, and they walk to the apartment and they’re still talking B.S., and then, just before they shoot up the apartment, Jackson says, “Let’s get into character”—that’s what I have to do. If I don’t step out of myself, I don’t step out of that doorway. I tell myself, This is not a story that involves me, this is me reporting a story about some other guy. I have to depersonalize it.

  I tell the doorman I’m here to see Lois Wille. He picks up a phone, says, “There’s a Michael Hainey here to see you. . . . Okay.” He hangs up and says, “They are on their way out and cannot see you.”

  I look past the doorman. Behind him is the door and the elevator. A man is coming out. I calculate in that moment whether I can run to the door before he can catch me. Instead, I go quietly and retreat to the doorway of the restaurant. I stare at the drizzle on my shoes, count the wages of a failed day. I wish I had had a few drinks before all this.

  Screw it. I call Lois. Again, the machine. This time I leave my name and number. A minute later, she calls. “What do you want?”

  “I think you knew my father.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You weren’t with him the night he died?”

  “If you want to find people who knew him, I’d suggest you go to the public library and find some old Sun-Times and get names of people from back then. Don’t call me again.”

  I stand in the doorway, convinced she knows.

  # # #

  I Google: CRAIG KLUGMAN SUN-TIMES. He’s now the editor of The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I cold-call him. He says, “Of course I remember you. How’s your brother, Chris?” I tell him fine. And then he asks me about my mother. I say I’m writing a book about my father and can he help me. He tells me he’s on deadline, but to e-mail him and we’ll make a date. He writes back and tells me to call him Thursday at lunch, next week. Then he adds a P.S.:

  Beware of romanticization of older men (and some women) who look at their youth and see nothing but good times. The colorful characters they often recall were, often or not, drunks.

  I’m still looking forward to talking to you. I just hope you’re not disappointed with my remembrances.

  —ck

  I decide to talk to Klugman in person. But I don’t tell him I’m coming.

  At dawn, the Chicago Skyway, east, into Indiana. A rising sun, hard in my eyes. I make the two-hour drive and find the Journal Gazette building in the center of town. As I pull up, the Gary Wright song “Dream Weaver” comes on the radio. That song always calms me down. Takes me back to 1976 and how I thought that whirlydoodoo sound was the trippiest thing ever.

  Klugman’s not surprised to see me. Or at least it doesn’t show. He is compact. A kind-faced man. He wears a red-and-white-striped shirt; rep tie; gray herringbone jacket. He shakes my hand and smiles. I tell him that I “just happened” to be in Chicago and figured I’d drive down and maybe we could have lunch. He suggests a place near his office.

  As we walk out, he asks once again, “How’s your mother?”

  I offer generalities, and then I ask, “How would you describe her? I mean, back when my father was alive?”

  “That’s easy: worldly, cynical, and quite beautiful.” He pauses. “I always thought she was dealt a bad hand.”

  He goes quiet and quickly brings his fist to his mouth and takes a blast from an inhaler.

  “Did she ever remarry?”

  “Yes.”

  He spits out a small breath.

  When we get to the table, he hangs his coat on the chairback. The waiter asks about drinks. Klugman orders a martini in a rocks glass. I order a glass of red.

  He gives me a look.

  “Do you know what your father drank?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Boilermakers. He was a shot-and-a-beer man. The first time I saw him drink it, I asked where he learned to drink that, and he said, ‘From my Polish father-in-law.’ We always loved that night in October when they turned the clocks back, because it gave us an extra hour to drink. The bars didn’t close until four but we’d keep going until five or six in the morning.”

  “Where did you drink?”

  “Usually it was Andy’s. Your dad liked it because it wasn’t filled with newspaper people, so he could forget about the business when he was there. As the assistant copy chief, your father’s job was, in short, to make sure no one was embarrassed. He had to protect the editors, the writers, the paper. Your father was my first boss and my best friend on the paper. He gave me advice. He protected me from the bosses. Ralph Ulrich was the kind of guy who’d walk past your desk, and if I might be talking to someone, he’d drop a note scribbled on newsroom paper in your in-basket: ‘No chitchat on deadline.’ ”

  He takes a drink of his martini.

  “It was rare for guys as young as Bob to run the desk. You know your dad was the night slot man, right? So, picture a big horseshoe-shaped desk, and around it sit six or eight guys. These are the copy editors; we’re the guys who read the stories before they get sent to the composing room.

  “Your dad sat inside the horseshoe. That’s why your dad is called the slot. Every story goes to him. He reads it, then passes it off to one of the guys around the desk—what we call ‘the rim’—who correct it for grammar and other errors. The night slot man makes sure the story is solid. Then he signs off and sends it to the composing room, on this rickety conveyor belt that carried the story to the third floor, where it was turned into metal copy. Slot Man was like doing air-traffic control.”

  “And you guys worked together how long?”

  “Four years. I started there in ’67, out of college. I was happy to not have to go home to Fargo.”

  “So what was the night shift like?”

  “Incredible. Think about it. We worked into the night, and by seven the editor in chief, the managing editor, the city editor—everyone has gone home. And you’re on your own with no boss. We had a few editions to get out: like the three-star, which was the home-delivery edition, closed at ten. Then the four-star, which was the street edition, at 1:30 a.m.” He pauses. “It was wild. But I was young. If my head wasn’t up my ass half the time, then my thumb was.”

  He laughs.

  “Your dad was probably the best headline writer of the time. He taught me everything I know about writing heads. How to make them grab you. I still remember one he wrote, for a young mother who OD’d in her apartment: Hippie Mom Found Dead In Pad. Your dad loved anything done in a new way. I remember a talk in Andy’s about radical ideas, and he said, ‘If you got ’em, keep ’em.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Don’t be tied to the past and how things are supposed to be.’ ”

  “What was the newsroom like back then?” I say.

  “You have to understand. Until 1968, newspapers rarely questioned politicians or cops. But by then you had Martin Luther King marching in Chicago. You have the ’68 convention. And we’re covering this stuff, and all of a sudden the ‘official version’ of City Hall isn’t jibing with our reporting. In the past, we’d look the other way. But then it became harder and harder to. The thing that blew wide open was the Fred Hampton ki
lling in ’69. That’s when we had to decide: Do we go with the ‘official version’ from the police—of which we had for so long been partners and trusted their word—or with what the facts were telling us? That changed it all in Chicago. I mean, Bob dies in ’70 and a couple of years later, there’s Watergate. Burglars. Co-conspirators. In the span of two, three years, the old order dies. Completely.”

  “Did you go to my father’s funeral?”

  “I was a pallbearer, but I don’t remember who else was. I had to buy a suit. I drove with Mark. Your cousin. He had this beautiful blue Benz and he had the radio on, playing rock music. I remember thinking that was not right.”

  I ask about the night my father died. He says, “You should beware of the past. Sometimes people looking back can’t see what messes they were.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “People don’t always remember what they think they do. One night, about four in the morning, I went to Andy’s to meet people from the paper. It was a bad scene. A real wake-up for me.”

  “Did my father drink too much?”

  “There was a time when I thought so, but he straightened up.”

  “What do you know about the night he died? His obit says he was with friends. Were you with him?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  #

  He leaves me at the restaurant. All this way. And nothing. I go back to my hotel room and flop on the bed and think, There has to be more.

  I pick up the phone. “Craig, I’ve come all this way. How about dinner?”

  He tells me to meet him at an Italian place in a strip mall. Enough time for me to have a drink by myself. Settle my nerves. He shows up with his wife. She tells me that she knew my father and mother, that she and Klugman met during the ’68 convention. She was a student volunteer and he was driving a bus for Eugene McCarthy supporters to and from the International Amphitheater, down near the stockyards.

  Dinner comes and I’m waiting for a moment. I switch tactics. I do the reporter’s trick where I tell him that I already know the true story. I tell him Dick told me that there was a cover-up. “My father was with someone,” I say. “Some friends.”

  Klugman and his wife look at each other. He says, “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “But see,” I say, “that just seems strange to me. Newspapermen are the nosiest guys in the world. And here, your best friend at the paper dies, and you have no curiosity to know the details of the story?”

  “I knew the details. He died on the street.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s all I know.”

  “The obits said he died on the 3900 block of North Pine Grove?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “So you never heard any different story about how he died?”

  “No.”

  “Let me ask you this: Would you not tell me the truth?”

  “I don’t think you have the right to know the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “If you had a son and thirty years from now he went to one of your friends and wanted to know details about your life, would you want your friend to tell him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so. Guys stick together.”

  “You don’t know anything?”

  “No.”

  We settle up in silence, walk to the parking lot, and say so long.

  # # #

  When I return to New York, I look up Jim Hoge. In 1970, he was the editor of the Sun-Times. He was thirty-four years old to my father’s thirty-five, but a world removed. East Coast–born. Schooled at Yale. He came to Chicago in the late ’50s and had stints as the paper’s financial writer and its Washington correspondent.

  He built the Sun-Times into a brash, bold paper. He started an ad campaign called “The Bright One”—a clear put-down of the Tribune, which was seen as the reactionary, dull one. The slogan could just as easily have been Hoge’s nickname. Gleaming teeth. Blond hair. Intense blue eyes. He saw that papers needed to speak to the under-thirty-five demographic. Where the Tribune was still on guard against the Commie threat, Hoge made the Sun-Times young, urban, and professional. He stocked it with columnists who knew the readership. Roger Ebert, John Schulian, Bob Greene, Roger Simon, Ron Powers, and Mike Royko. And then he balanced it with vets like Bill Mauldin, Sydney J. Harris, Novak and Evans.

  He took the paper back to the roots of great Chicago newspaper muckraking. Probably the best story he assigned was his Mirage idea. The paper bought a tavern, called it the Mirage, and then documented the endless bribes that city workers, from fire-department inspectors to building inspectors, demanded in order to approve the licenses. A Chicago story. A story about deceit. About men putting in The Fix.

  In Chicago in the 1970s, Hoge was a minor god. That he looked like Robert Redford didn’t hurt. The picture of him I always carry in my head was one that ran in the Sun-Times in 1983. He stands atop a desk in the newsroom. Jacket off, tie askew. Sleeves rolled up. Reporters and editors crowd around, faces raised to his. He is breaking the news that his bid to buy the paper from Marshall Field V has failed—that Field has sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch.

  Hoge went on to become the editor of Foreign Affairs. That’s where I leave a message. His secretary calls and says he’ll meet me for drinks at the Metropolitan Club. But that afternoon, she calls to say that he has to work late, I should come by the office.

  The offices of Foreign Affairs are on East Sixty-eighth Street. It’s all very Three Days of the Condor. Hoge meets me in a hallway cramped with cartons of papers. His hair is more gray than golden, but his eyes are still blue and the jaw still cut and jutting. He takes me to his office, a smallish place made even smaller by all the books piled around him on tables and the floor.

  “What can I help you with?”

  By now I have my strategy down: Start general and build, try to drop the question in as innocuously as possible.

  “I’m writing about my father and—well, you knew my dad and I’m wondering if you could tell me a bit of what the paper was like back then.”

  He leans back in his chair, a man ready to hold forth. His eyes look to the ceiling and stay there as he speaks, as if the ceiling is some sort of portal into the past, a screen, maybe, which I can’t see, and he’s simply channeling, narrating to me, what he sees as it passes by.

  He tells me about the lobster shift—6 p.m. to 2 a.m. He tells me how back then editors still needed to be able to read metal type upside down, since the type was set that way. He tells me how the Linotype machines below the newsroom vibrated so strongly that you could feel the floor rattle.

  “The night shift was a separate world,” he says. “One for night owls. The guys had dark senses of humor. When your father and I came up, there were still guys on the paper who had covered Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. They’d covered Dillinger. The year your dad died—it was a moment between two eras. Between The Front Page and the Information Age. These were guys who saw journalism not as a profession that you needed a college degree for. For them it was a job. And most of all, it was a kind of game. It was all about the scoop. About getting the story first. These guys taught us how to do second-story work.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know those stories in the paper about a guy who kills his wife or his girlfriend? And with those stories, there’s always a family photo of the dead woman, one that looks like it sat on her mother’s nightstand? There’s an art to getting those photos. You and another reporter go to the house of the dead woman, and when someone answers, you flash your press passes fast, all official-like, and tell them you’re detectives and you have a few questions. Then, while your partner asks her questions, you sneak upstairs to the second floor and steal photos. That’s second-story work.”

  He smiles.

  “Of course, you can’t do that anymore,” he says.

  “Definitely a different time,” I say. “And in t
alking to you and other guys from back then, it seems like there was a real code among newspapermen.”

  “It went like this: You could and would compete like hell during the day, but if something happened to you, I’d protect you. We watched out for each other. And at night, we’d all drink together. Because at night, everyone is on the same team.”

  “And my dad—tell me about him.”

  “You have to understand, not many men could do your father’s job. You had to be almost a machine. Every story in the paper goes through his team and him. He was the fulcrum. I think part of the cost of that was you had to bury your emotions. You couldn’t lose your cool. And when you got off work, you had to blow off steam. Instead of one drink, maybe you have four.”

  “Did he do that a lot?”

  “We all did.”

  He starts to pick his words and slows down. He stares even harder at the ceiling, like he’s unsure of the script that is unrolling.

  “You knew you could not push your old man. He could really verbally abuse someone. You had to watch out for the trigger.”

  I thank him for his honesty. Tell him that not many guys I’ve talked to have given me the full picture of his personality.

  Hoge nods.

  “One last thing,” I say. “I’m trying to figure out what happened that night he died. His buddies all say they can’t remember. If a buddy of mine died, I’m sure I’d know the details. Especially if I’m a newspaperman. I find it strange that none of you guys can remember what happened to a friend who worked with you.”