Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  Their shows reflected these differences in temperament and background: The Sopranos, for all its baroque plot twists and turns, was essentially inward facing—a psychological drama about a man seeking to fill a void he didn’t really understand. In the tradition of great post-Freudian literature, it was about the gulf between the inner man and the outer world. The Wire, meanwhile, was almost pre-modern in its expansive view outward, its Balzacian ambition to catalog every corner of its world.

  For all that, the Davids shared one important quality: Both were men who grew up with a bedrock sense of certainty about what they were supposed to do, and in what form, only to find their ambitions better served by the most unlikely of mediums.

  • • •

  For Simon, the call was always to journalism. He was another child of the suburbs and another baby boomer—albeit one of the last, born in 1960, instead of one of the first, like Chase. He grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, in an upper-middle-class Jewish household with three newspaper subscriptions, stacks of books, and great value placed on intellectual dexterity, especially in battle. Political and philosophical argument was the family sport and the dinner table the playing field, with Simon’s father, Bernard, the public relations director and speechwriter for B’nai B’rith, acting as de facto referee.

  Simon, the youngest by many years of three children (his brother was fourteen years older, his sister ten years), was a quick study. “We learned very early what was a weak move: Fallacies of logic were weak. Ad hominem attacks were weak—though if it was funny, you might get one in. But generally, how well you did in carrying forth a credible argument was looked at with merit,” he said.

  He remembered 1968 as a particularly loud and contentious year at the Simon table, with the family split between supporting Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy for president. (“Nobody was for Nixon, I can tell you that.”) The first time Simon’s brother brought his future wife to meet the family, she left asking, “Do you guys hate each other?”

  The taste for a fight, and faith in argument as a creative process, would remain such an intrinsic part of Simon’s character that he would express genuine puzzlement when people interpreted his later battles as personal feuds. It was, he thought, simply the way serious, smart people interacted. “David could argue the world flat or round, and have you believing both,” said Rafael Alvarez, a colleague and friend at the Sun and a writer on The Wire.

  Liberalism, passionate rhetoric, and muckraking journalism all had good pedigree in nearby Baltimore, home of H. L. Mencken, William Manchester, and others. At the University of Maryland, Simon gravitated to the independent school newspaper, the daily Diamondback, to the exclusion of almost everything else. He wore a ponytail and ripped jeans, listened to the Clash, and wrote blisteringly funny columns like a two-parter about students assigned to write campus parking tickets. That one was titled “Eat Flaming Death.” By the time David Mills, a few years younger, arrived at the paper, Simon had a budding rock star reputation.

  “He always had something clever to say or had a great story to tell. He was always involved in some fucked-up adventure—driving figure eights on the quad or something,” Mills said. “And he had a fully grown writer’s voice at that age. He just produced these artfully profane rivers of language.”

  The romance and the intensity of the newsroom suited Simon perfectly, as did the spotlight it provided. But these were underpinned by a genuine, idealistic belief in journalism’s mission. From the time he ascended to the editorship of the Diamondback at age nineteen, he became locked in a battle for autonomy and resources with the paper’s adult business manager, Michael Fribush. Once, a blizzard, which normally would have canceled the next day’s paper, occurred on the same day as several extraordinary stories, including an airplane crash in the Potomac. Simon couldn’t bear the thought of all that news going unreported in the Diamondback. He ordered a print run of ten thousand copies, without advertising, just for the UMD dorms. When Fribush confronted him, furious, Simon told him impassively that he’d planned to ask for permission the next morning. If denied, he and the rest of the staff had agreed to take salary cuts to pay for the edition. It was a struggle he could recount, and get worked up over, nearly forty years later, in precise, not to say stultifying, detail, leaving the distinct impression that he would rather talk about it than television, The Wire, his family, or anything else that had happened since.

  When his term as editor ended, Simon began stringing for the Sun—or, more precisely, acting like a stringer for the Sun, since he hadn’t actually been hired. “I put my final issue of the paper to bed and called in a brief: three paragraphs about the vice president of the university resigning,” he said. “I told them, ‘I just finished editing the Diamondback and I’m ready to be your stringer.’ Totally arrogant. They said, ‘Well, thanks for the brief, but you have to come in and interview.’ Two days later, I called in another story. The guy’s like, ‘No, really, thanks for the piece. But we really need you to come in.’”

  Eventually, Simon was persuaded to put on a suit and submit to an interview. As stringer, he submitted so many stories that the newspaper union took notice. None was bigger than a major scoop involving a gifted UMD Terrapin basketball player named Herman Veal. Veal had been mysteriously held out of the ACC tournament for disciplinary reasons. Using sources on the university’s student judicial panel and employing a bit of guile with the administration, Simon confirmed that the player had been accused of sexual misbehavior by a female student. Veal, she said, had carried her upstairs at a party and thrown her roughly onto a bed, though he left when she protested. When Simon tracked the girl down, she told him that Lefty Driesell, the Terrapins’ legendary head coach, had been calling her dorm room, berating her for costing him Veal’s services in the tournament and threatening to ruin her reputation. One such call had even been witnessed by the head of the judicial panel. (Driesell denied any intimidation.) Simon’s story ran over three days in the Sun and was picked up by The Washington Post and nationwide.

  Simon assumed that Driesell would be fired. “We had him dead to rights,” he said. Instead, the university investigated for a year, slapped the coach on the wrist, and gave him a new contract, with a raise. “That was the last time I ever believed journalism fixes anything,” Simon said.

  • • •

  The Baltimore Sun, when Simon finally joined as a full-time reporter, was still a newspaper fetishist’s dream—a haven of hardworking, colorful reprobates, lechers, drunks, and misfits. And Baltimore provided more than enough opportunity for a reporter looking to follow Mencken’s favorite dictate to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

  Simon joined a group of young writers and editors that included Rafael Alvarez and William Zorzi, both of whom would eventually write for The Wire. Zorzi, who would also play a version of himself in the show’s fifth season, was a political reporter with a lugubrious, bone-dry wit. Alvarez was a twitchy, voluble hipster with a high-pitched shout of a laugh and a penchant for radical shifts of identity, such as what he mysteriously called “my Elvis phase.” They were pranksters in the office: if Zorzi was on the phone with, say, the governor of Maryland, there was a fair chance Simon could be found with a foot up on the desk, thrusting his crotch into the other man’s face. Well after Simon had left the paper, Zorzi would come back to his desk and find notes from his old colleague, informing him of the various bodily crevices in which he’d wiped Zorzi’s phone receiver.

  Simon worked hard and stayed out late. “We were young, devil-may-care, work-around-the-clock, party-till-you-drop, rock ’n’ roll reporters,” Alvarez said. In the newsroom, Simon was not shy about expressing his opinions, often in what would become for him a kind of secondary art form: the devastatingly eloquent, polemical memo. His editor, Rebecca Corbett, eventually had to demand that any further officewide missives be vetted by her first.

  “I felt like, I’m a newspape
r reporter. I could be making a lot more money doing something else, but the one thing I do get that most people don’t, is that I get to come into my office, put my feet up on the desk, and say what I think,” Simon said. When it came to edits, his opinions could be expressed with somewhat less civility: Alvarez recalled at least one instance of Simon kicking a trash can across the office, and Zorzi described seeing him in an editor’s office, “literally on the floor, kicking his feet.”

  Simon was assigned to the police beat, filing daily stories on murders, drug busts, and departmental politics. With the encouragement of Corbett and another editor, Steve Luxenberg, he was also experimenting with longer-form features, though he hadn’t become what Zorzi neologized as a “writeur”—a reporter with more flair in his prose than chops in his reporting.

  Simon was mindful of George Orwell’s diagnosis of why writers write. As he put it, “Because you want to show them you’re right and they’re wrong. That, ‘I’ve learned something about the world, I’m going to share it with you, and fuck you if you don’t agree.’

  “Anytime I hear a reporter say, ‘I want to make the world right,’ or, ‘I’m writing for the little guy; I’m about the truth,’ I think, ‘Okay, you’re full of shit,’” he said. “I want to hear from the guy who acknowledges the vanity of the byline. Any reporter I knew who was good, he wanted to come back to the newsroom the day after he filed and have everybody be reading his shit, saying, ‘Man, this is a fucking good story. I wish I’d thought of it.’”

  Yet Simon had a gift for putting his ego and his sense of justice to the same purpose. “One of David’s best skills is that he gets pissed off as a citizen and a journalist sort of simultaneously,” said Alvarez. “He’s righteous about the truth, and he’s good at leveraging people, through his journalistic skills, into getting the best version of the truth available. That makes you a great reporter.”

  Was he cocky about those skills?

  Alvarez lifted an eyebrow. “Look, a tiger knows he’s a tiger, right?”

  Simon found an immediate affinity for the world of working cops, which mirrored the newsroom in its rough jocularity, its camaraderie, and its sense of purpose, however cynical it might sometimes become. He also, like many journalists, not to mention children of middle-class privilege, was susceptible to a romantic notion of working-class men. Irishmen, always kind of Dionysian twins for Apollonian Jewish boys, fascinated him. He made a point to drink Jameson. Later, as a showrunner, he went out of his way to dress in a style best described as “Polish dockworker.” And while the romance of “common folk” would occasionally come to seem like his only blind spot and threaten to undermine his finest work, it also gave him enormous powers of empathy when it came to reporting on both the police and the people they pursued.

  On Christmas Eve 1986, Simon spent the overnight shift with a squad of murder detectives in the hopes that an enlightening, or at least amusing, story would come out of the juxtaposition of holiday and homicide. Toward the end of the shift, while toasting from a bottle of whiskey Simon had snuck into the office, one of the detectives said, “The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”

  Two years later, on New Year’s Day 1988, Simon officially began a leave of absence from the Sun and reported for work as a “police intern.” In hand he had a book contract from Houghton Mifflin and an agreement from Police Commissioner Edward Tilghman to allow him complete access to one of the city’s two homicide squads. (Several cops later speculated that the fact that Tilghman was dying of a brain tumor at the time contributed to his decision—either because it had driven him mad or he figured he wouldn’t be around to see the fallout, which indeed he wasn’t.)

  For the next calendar year, Simon spent nearly every day with the initially wary detectives of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s homicide squad. It was a deep embed. His marriage—the first of three—dissolving, Simon worked six or seven days a week, often pulling double shifts alongside the detectives and generally coming as close as was possible to joining their ranks. “Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better,” he wrote in an afterword to a fifteen-year anniversary edition of the book that grew out of his reporting: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. At night he would return to his new bachelor apartment, with its mattress on the floor, and pore over the stacks of notebooks he’d fill. In time, he came to have a more global view of the division’s goings-on than many of the detectives themselves and could answer such questions as who was working which case on a given day.

  The day before the Marty Ward memorial, Jay Landsman and Terry McLarney, both in their fifties, sat at a Caribbean-themed restaurant near the border of Baltimore, the city, and suburban Baltimore County. On the table was a platter of Old Bay–doused wings and the remnants of more than several beers, though neither man made any move toward the bathroom: cop bladders.

  These were the last men still on the job from the squad Simon immortalized in Homicide. McLarney had since climbed the BPD ranks to become major and head of the Homicide Unit. Landsman had moved out to the county, where he now worked burglaries, but his youngest son, Joe—one of four Landsman children in law enforcement—was a newly minted murder investigator under McLarney. To the degree that there is a David Simon “voice” evident throughout his work, it was in some ways an amalgam of these two men’s style of speech—baroque, vulgar, deadpan, in love with language for its highfalutin ballbusting potential.

  Landsman, like most of the cops, had disliked the idea of the book at first. “I didn’t want anybody looking over my shoulder all the time. You’re working murders in the ghetto. What, are you going to come out looking like a saint?” he said. Simon became the victim first of the cold shoulder and then of weeks of hazing—mostly the overuse of his American Express card at the bar after shifts and a series of ever more imaginative ways to question his sexuality.

  “But David is a likable guy,” McLarney said. “He was young, he was getting a divorce . . . It was like the Stockholm syndrome. We started to identify with him somehow. It became normal for a call to come in and for David to just jump in the car.”

  Would Simon have made a good cop?

  “If they started admitting pinko liberals, I guess,” said Landsman.

  “Nah,” said McLarney. “He’d never pass the drug test and polygraph.”

  At the end of the year, Simon sat down with his massive pile of notes, files, and recordings and churned out a manuscript. His editor, John Sterling, returned from lunch to find the stack of typed pages sitting on his desk; Simon had been so anxious to deliver the book that he’d driven from Baltimore to Manhattan, dropped it off, and headed home.

  • • •

  If David Simon had never gone into television, he would still have a claim to greatness as a long-form literary journalist based strictly on Homicide, as entertaining, compelling, and journalistically convincing an account of men at work as has been written. To have achieved all that while observing the highest standards of journalistic integrity made it all the more impressive. It’s little wonder Simon would later be so hard on journalists he accused of being fabulists; never mind issues of ethics and integrity, he must have thought, why would anybody need to make things up?

  For an aficionado of The Wire—or its predecessor, the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street—the book is a treasure trove of familiar details. There are scenes like a tender moment between a deeply inebriated McLarney and another detective in which the future head of homicide thanks the other, because “when it was time for you to fuck me, you were very gentle.”

  There’s lingo like “red ball” (a high-publicity, and thus high-priority, case), “dunker” (an easy-to-solve murder), and “stone whodunit” (the dunker’s polar
opposite). Simon is never better than when diving into such deep linguistic pools—the secret inside languages of the working world. It’s an impulse that reached its natural extremity in Generation Kill, Simon and Ed Burns’s HBO miniseries about the invasion of Iraq, the point of which seemed in part to be the ways in which the Orwellian jargon of the war machine’s bureaucracy both drove and obscured the war itself.

  And of course there’s “the board,” a kind of grimly ironic echo of the writers’ room whiteboard, which tells the story of which cases are solved (written in black) and which remain stubbornly in red.

  But the most important lesson of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets for Simon was a narrative one. At the dramatic and emotional core of the book is the murder of eleven-year-old Latonya Kim Wallace and one detective’s increasingly obsessive and futile search for her killer. “At the time I remember calling my editor and saying, ‘My God, what happens if they don’t solve this? My story may not have an ending.’ And John, being a better editor at that point than I was a reporter, said, ‘Then that’s your ending. Maybe that’s perfect.’ Which: Yeah, of course.”

  Or as Sterling put it, articulating what might have been a credo for the Third Golden Age’s narrative philosophy: “Life is like that: endings are rarely provided. There’s an awful lot that’s messy and unresolved.”