Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Morgenthau had recently started a one-man law firm, and his secretary, a sullen lady with the hint of a mustache and a slanted gait, greeted me with a series of mumbling grunts. “Sit down until he calls you,” she said, and I took the only chair, a narrow Hitchcock antique with a missing rung. There I waited, looking at the bare puce walls, the brown industrial carpet, the vacant spaces where a sofa and table with magazines should have been. His secretary—I had heard she had designs on him and liked to drive away female visitors—kept looking up and glaring at me. I felt as if I were awaiting arraignment. Absently, I tore my tissue into tiny pieces. Minutes went by, then an hour. My poncho was dry, but the jig was up—I was about to be found out.

  When Robert Morgenthau finally came out of his office, all six feet of him, reedy, skin of burnt sienna and a face like an elongated teardrop, he looked at me in surprise. “I thought you had stood me up,” he said, and then scowled at his secretary as if he knew she hadn’t told him I was there.

  He ushered me into his office, which was small, smaller by far than befit his stature. His desk was covered with a three-inch strew of papers that seemed to be in no particular order. I sat down across from him, and sure enough he began talking about government people I had never heard of. He mentioned the name Wright Patman.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Wright Patman,” he repeated.

  “Um, could you spell that?”

  “W-r-i-g-h-t P-a-t-m-a-n.”

  “What is it he does, could you remind me?”

  He stared at me. “You don’t know who Wright Patman is?”

  That was not the only member of the Banking Committee of the U.S. Congress whom I did not know. The consternation in Mr. Morgenthau’s voice went up in increments. I was not yet flustered, though, for I was lost in his strange soaring forehead. I had never seen anyone who looked remotely like him. This oddness made me feel more comfortable, especially when I began to detect the melancholy in his eyes, in the corners of his mouth. Behind his confident exterior, he was not a happy man.

  No wonder. He had just lost his wife of twenty-nine years to breast cancer, leaving two adult children and two school-age ones for him to raise alone. And now, having been thrown out by Nixon, he would surely see the cases he was developing against the president’s cronies be buried by his Republican replacement, Whitney North Seymour.

  I identified with him. I too faced the loss of a loved one, my mother, and in my own way I also had felt professional humiliation. When I won the Pulitzer, I was elated—until I came up against the resentment of my male colleagues, who were fiercely unhappy. Many had been driving all their lives toward the fantasy of that elusive prize and they decided that I, a naive hayseed, had stolen it out from under them. I rather agreed with them: How could I have possibly deserved this highest honor in journalism? It must have been an accident, an embarrassment. It took decades before I could feel proud of my role in the Diana series.

  “Do you know anyone in the Nixon campaign committee?” he asked with weary resignation.

  “Oh yes, I know about Maurice Stans, the secretary of commerce,” I replied.

  “The former secretary of commerce.”

  “Yes, the former secretary of commerce. And, like, I know he quit to head up Nixon’s finance committee for his 1972 reelection campaign. In fact, I would really appreciate it if you could enlighten me about him. I hear he ran slush funds for the campaign and that you investigated it.”

  “I’m not talking about that.”

  “I have information on how he laundered the money, but I just need to check it with you. I don’t want to print something that is wrong.” You may think I’m clueless, Mr. Morgenthau, but I am about to outsmart you.

  “No comment.”

  “I hear he helped Nixon hide a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “No, no,” Morgenthau said. “More like a million.”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “All right, but this is the last thing I’ll tell you on the subject.”

  Within an hour and a half I had my Watergate story, a good, detailed one too.

  I rose, smiled, and offered him my hand goodbye. For some reason, his eyes were averted, and he was glaring. My cheeks grew pink with embarrassment. I thought I had been so clever, but maybe I had been obvious. Maybe he had outsmarted me, telling me stuff he wanted to make public. Had I forgotten the lesson that pols use reporters? I turned, bumping into his secretary, who was standing behind me, and quickly left his office. How could I have ever presumed that a Mr. Morgenthau would think well of me? I knew he had friends in high places. Would he tell them that a dense, yammering goose had interviewed him?

  In fact, as I found out later, at the time of our interview, he thought I was either the dumbest or the smartest reporter he had ever met. Then, when he read my story, breaking the news that Maurice Stans was believed to have laundered campaign money through Mexico, he decided I was the smartest. He knew that I had used my naïveté to probe deeply, to squeeze more information from him than a lot of reporters could have.

  Moreover, he hadn’t wanted me to leave his office.

  He has always said that that was the day he fell in love with me. Or rather, with my white poncho, which he couldn’t get out of his mind.

  For the next year, he somehow found the nerve to ring me half a dozen times, only to be foiled by Roger, who, whenever he heard that deep, resonant voice, would claim I was out, though I was twenty feet away in our tiny bedroom, writing my first book. He thought that it was an important enough book—on deserters from the Vietnam War—to keep me in a kind of boot camp. He kept friends away and even discouraged visits from Penelope, my sister, who had just graduated from college and was proud at having found an apartment in my building. Penny, six years younger, and I had a fragile bond. We could be very close and then very distant, and Roger’s shunning of her, which she assumed was mine, was a mistake that caused a long rift in our relationship.

  It did not occur to me that Bob had any real interest in me as a reporter, but in late 1973, eight months after I had done the story on him, he called me at the office, on the phone I shared with other UPI reporters.

  “Hello, is this Lucinda Franks?” His voice detonated in my ear. “Apparently, The New York Times is about to be sued for not having enough women reporters,” he said, as though we had been in the middle of an ongoing conversation. But I hadn’t heard from him in a long time. Not a whit of small talk after months of silence. His words just came out in a rush: “So they asked me to provide them with some good candidates. I recommended you.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly. “Why me?”

  There was a silence, and then he said, “You were the only woman I could think of.”

  “Oh,” I replied, as my blood pressure rose. I felt insulted and complimented at the same time.

  “Well, that is very nice of you, Mr. Morgenthau,” I said as the images came fast: my mother giddy with joy at the news, my radical friends slit-eyed at my selling out, the anticipation of crafting complex stories two columns long instead of the three-hundred-word wire service wonders. And the chance to have the most exalted job in journalism.

  The next day, Arthur Gelb, the Times’s city editor, invited me to dinner at Sardi’s restaurant. I was excited. I had never been to Sardi’s, a landmark off Broadway, near the Times building, a gathering place for artistes de renom. I was the first to arrive. The restaurant’s deep red walls were covered with excellent caricatures of famous writers and actors, some of whom swished past in full flesh to tables situated so they could be seen. I checked the buttons of my blue shirtwaist dress, smoothed my hair, which was pulled back in a neat bun, and took two deep breaths. I became self-conscious, just standing there alone, so I began studying the history of the restaurant mounted in the vestibule. Suddenly Gelb was behind me: “The caricatures were drawn by a Russian émigré of the ’40s,” he said. “He did them in exchange for one meal a day.” The city editor was accompanied by two prominent Tim
es reporters who shook my hand vigorously. I did all but curtsy.

  The maître d’ welcomed Gelb as though he were royalty and led us to one of the front tables. Gelb nodded at various actors and then sat down and ordered red wine and steak (which I dislike) for everyone. The three instantly zeroed in on me. “So, why do you want to be on the Times?” asked Gelb. “Ah, well, like…” I took a sip of wine and swallowed it the wrong way. As I was choking, I thought, “Do I really want to be on the paper?” How much my rebel friends, who considered the Times a decaying tool of the establishment, would hate me!

  “What story have you liked in the Times recently?” the female reporter asked. “Uh, well, I liked all the stories,” I replied, having not read the Times in weeks. I wanted to bite back my words. I could do better than this, but I always felt rebellious when I was called upon to perform; it felt as if I were in second grade, facing the kids who would pretend to be my friends and then throw insects down my dress.

  The female reporter raised her chin. “How do you think we did covering the peace in Vietnam?” I had heard she had written glowing stories about Kissinger’s diplomacy. I chewed my food very slowly, concentrating hard on saying what they wanted me to say, but out of my mouth popped “What peace?” They looked first at me, then at each other. “I mean, there are still U.S. advisers in Saigon,” I said, “and we have bombed the hell out of Cambodia; I don’t see much print about that.”

  The next day Gelb reported to Morgenthau. “I think she must have been on drugs,” he said (I was not). “But thanks anyway for bringing her to my attention.”

  For some reason beyond me, Morgenthau wanted me to join that paper, and he pressed on, sending Gelb the story I had done on Maurice Stans. “I’d take another look, Arthur,” he argued. “She did the trickiest interview with me. She’s a highly equipped journalist.”

  So, in the spring of 1974, off I went for another interview. Trekking down West Forty-Third Street, I passed hangars sheltering giant rolls of newsprint, and then high above hung a calligraphic sign indicating that you were entering the territory of The New York Times. I entered an ink-scented lobby, and who should I meet but the legendary left-wing Times reporter Gloria Emerson, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her fingers in a nervous flurry about her coat. We both were veteran voices in the movement; once, we slept on the floor of William Sloane Coffin, the antiwar chaplain of Yale. Now, finally, she had just been fired for her insurrectionist writing.

  “If you want the job,” she whispered, “just tell Abe Rosenthal that the Times is the greatest paper in the world.”

  I walked into the prodigious office of Rosenthal, the Times’s managing editor, with its Chinese rugs and mahogany furniture. Abe, shrunk into an oversized chesterfield chair, waved me into a chair opposite him. He was a short, severe, disquieting man with a pockmarked face. I had heard how he strode up and down the newsroom, hands behind his back, inspiring reporters to type furiously as he walked by. Yet now he uttered an elegiac sermon about the paper, and I realized suddenly how insecure he was. He didn’t threaten me as Gelb and the reporters did. He looked like a kid, disappearing into the chair. I realized he needed to feel as though he were The New York Times.

  “Why do you want to work here?” he asked abruptly.

  “Because the Times is the greatest newspaper in the world,” I replied.

  “You really think so, do you?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s the paper of record, and I would give anything to work here.”

  “Come on,” he said, hoisting himself up, “I’ll show you where you’ll be sitting.”

  * * *

  It was early 1974, and overnight my life had changed. I was caught up in the intensity of being a high-powered reporter for the Times. Though the troops were gone, U.S. advisers were still in Vietnam, and the war there raged on. Patty Hearst was kidnapped and radicalized, and I still attended concerts, burned effigies at agitprop performances, and hung out with a few of my renegade friends in walk-ups down in the Village. When former revolutionaries like Jane Alpert and later Katherine Ann Power, wanted for bombing or driving getaway cars, finally surfaced and turned themselves in, they chose me to talk to about their lives underground. I painted compassionate pictures of these revolutionary lawbreakers, but I got such attention for the very fact they had only talked to me, I felt doubly guilty. My commitment to setting the world right was fading. I had acquired new friends, ambitious men and women whose talent and lively minds I respected. Mary Breasted had become my closest buddy; she had an irreverent sense of humor and was always teasing Arthur Gelb about the former reporter Lacey Fosburgh. Lacey frequently visited the newsroom and would saunter up to the city desk and sit in his lap.

  I had left my motor scooter in London, so I bicycled to work through the traffic, winning the amused respect of my fellow reporters. I was losing my self-consciousness, getting a sense of humor. Nick Gage and a few other men in the predominantly male newsroom were constantly kidding Mary and me—mostly about sex. “Lucinda, it’s time for us to go to the Ramada Inn,” Nick would call out so our esteemed editor would hear it. There had been a time that I would have taken offense at this loud pretense that we were having an affair. But now I simply retorted, “Okay, let’s go. I’ll bring the Mazola oil.” Nick could be serious, however, and he taught me how to be proud and vocal about my accomplishments. This was particularly helpful since I was working on my book and dreaded the reviews should I ever finish it. “You have to realize you’re smarter than your lousy reviewer,” said Nick in his persuasive Greek-accented voice. “You believe in yourself and just forge on until finally, after you write your third book, you’ve worn them down. They’ll love it.”

  I had my own big metal desk, in one of twenty-three rows lined up in the Times newsroom like a typing pool, and an old-fashioned black phone. Working in the most influential newspaper in the nation, I quickly became accustomed to overtures from the lofty hoping to get their names in the paper. Robert Redford called me three times after I did an interview with him about his filming of Three Days of the Condor. Mayor Koch asked me to lunch twice, just to chat.

  After about a month, I called Bob Morgenthau to thank him, and he followed up my call with several of his own. He was clearly glad to be my news source: I gave him political gossip, and he sniffed out stories for me. Bob glided stealthily through the political backwaters and unlike the other notables seldom wanted me to publish his name. He was not above using me to further his interests—leaking the unethical practices of one of his opponents, for instance—but mostly it seemed he just wanted to help me.

  One day, when I had been working at the Times for barely two months, he phoned to say, “Look at the Franklin National Bank. Get what you can on the bank president. Jet-setter by the name of Michele Sindona: he’s deeply corrupt; he’s into helping the Nixon administration and the Sicilian Mafia and even the Vatican.”

  Morgenthau gave me one potential source: a bank vice president who he told me would drop clues and confirm or deny, but only after I had gathered as much incriminating information as I could. My experience with financial reporting had not exactly been vast, limited as it was to a color story on three-card monte games in Times Square. So Bob volunteered to brief me on money laundering, foreign bank transfers, and letters of credit, all along suggesting strategies for culling information.

  I dug up an accounts manager inside Franklin who was outraged by working amid the corruption. Then, armed with some fishy bank accounts, I got myself up like a moll; I wound my hair into a bun, painted on a heavy layer of makeup, and strode past Sindona’s secretaries, my heels clicking as though I were someone as important as one of his mistresses. I ended up getting a ten-minute interview that did nothing to further the story but gave me invaluable color on what the flamboyant crook was like. When I came out with my exposé, there were desperate squawks and denials from the Franklin Bank. Nevertheless, the reputation of the financial institution was going downhill, and within a few months it finall
y closed its heavy doors. I was roundly congratulated by the brass for my bank series, and Bob was especially pleased; I suppose it was further proof that I wasn’t the dumbest reporter he’d ever met.

  Arthur Gelb, the former culture editor, was unique in the annals of city editors. Arthur, who had seemed so tough and intimidating at Sardi’s, was actually soft-spoken, refined, and always full of creative ideas. He would come loping down the aisle with one of his “starbursts,” ideas, looking for a favorite reporter, like me, and then give the person as much time as needed to report and write it. A chunk of the staff thus worked from home, worked when they felt like it, and then finally pulled several all-nighters to come up with the blockbusters that Arthur wanted. The metropolitan section—which made up about half the newspaper—was king, full of Nick Gage’s investigative stories on the Mafia, Molly Ivins’s deadly funny profiles, and Mickey Carroll’s incisive political exposés. Arthur and his boss, Abe Rosenthal, made the Times the kind of crackling, vibrant newspaper that people grabbed fresh off the presses; it was a heyday of the institution.

  One day, on my own, I decided to investigate the food dyes that permeated our food supply. I found a lab worker at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who secretly gave me the results of a test on female rats that revealed cancer-causing effects of Red Dye No. 2. I did follow-up stories, and there was such an outcry that the dye was banned by the FDA and replaced with Red Dye No. 40. After the ban, I wrote more stories: Red Dye No. 40 was also carcinogenic, being based, like No. 2, on coal tar derivatives. My stories provoked a national red dye scare and a decline in the sale of bright red products like maraschino cherries.

  Meanwhile, after my mother’s illustrious Boston doctors from the Lahey Clinic refused to operate on her “terminal” colon cancer, I took her medical records to New York, to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the world’s premier cancer center. I had scouted around until I’d finally found a surgeon, Horace Whiteley, who scoffed at the Boston doctors and said he could go in and remove the tumor. He did and gave her the gift of two more years of life. Every six weeks, I would sneak out of work to pick her up at the train station and stay with her at the hospital while she had her chemotherapy. I would go to Wellesley on weekends to be with her and to help my father care for her.