Henry didn’t have much of a filter when communicating with other people, and he was slightly deaf so there could be little subtlety in any conversation with him because you both ended up yelling. But as eccentric as he was in person, his journalism was another story. A feature writer, he also wrote essays and criticism on whatever struck his fancy. He won a Pulitzer for criticism in 2000, and he put in thirty-nine years at the Post before leaving under a strange cloud of media attention when he got into a fistfight with a young reporter.
This was in 2009, and Henry, in his late sixties and by then an assignment editor, was within weeks of retiring. The fight with a Style section reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia, with whom he’d had a growing conflict over several days, culminated in Henry’s critique of a piece that he deemed “the second worst story I have seen in Style in forty-three years.” It involved a “charticle” (a hybrid genre of journalism that marries a chart or graphics with an article and is often the object of disdain by old-school journalists because it is viewed as a threat to the traditional narrative) about the history of inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information.
“Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable,” Henry told Politico. “The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up.” (If this story isn’t emblematic of the tensions between old and new media, I don’t know what is.)
In 2013 Henry wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the Washington Post. He described the earlier days, before the Internet and media conglomeration and all those evil things that aging journalists like to pull out of their complaint boxes, but he also acknowledged that people, almost from the beginning of his tenure at the Post in 1970, had been asking him, “Didn’t the Post used to be better?”
Publishing this rebuke in the Post’s chief rival must have been satisfying, though the loving nostalgia was what was powerful. “The Post that questioners remembered had yet to grow into its greatness,” Henry wrote, “but its happy few gave it style, a sexy, ironic edge. It was liberal and Ivy League, Kennedy and Bogart. The hip female reporters strode around the newsroom and swore a lot—an F-bomb had to be dropped at every dinner party, it seemed. I had the feeling that any young man who showed up in Levi’s, loafers and a Harris tweed sportcoat would be hired instantly.”
Throwing a punch was not a professional move, but I certainly understand the impulse, and I like to think that if I had been born a man, I might be the type to throw more than a few. But it was Henry’s talent that interested me a lot more than his temper. Being around writers of this caliber made me hungrier to write something worth reading. I wanted to produce journalism myself, but I also longed to develop the fiction writing I had worked on at Berkeley. The problem was that, at age twenty-two, I didn’t have much to write about. I carried around a small notebook and jotted down ideas and impressions, hoping that one of them would incubate.
One rainy afternoon, a short, stocky reporter with a permanent snarl and possibly a Napoleon complex—I’ll call him “Bonaparte”—was late to an interview across town. Until recently, Bonaparte had been the rock critic, but at his own request, he had switched to general assignment reporting. He declared that he had run “out of adjectives.” I was particularly intimidated by Bonaparte’s gruff manner. Everyone referred to him by surname, without the honorific, just “Bonaparte.” He and Harriet Fier were chums, and their theatrical swaggering and sparring often commanded the collective attention of the Style newsroom.
He approached the copy aide station that day and pulled out his wallet. The three of us manning the phones were lost in our own thoughts.
“Hey, do any of you have change for a twenty?” Bonaparte barked. “These D.C. cabdrivers never have change.”
Bonaparte was the type who regularly seemed to compare D.C. to New York—always unfavorably.
The other girls shook their heads but I dutifully reached for my purse, scrambling for my wallet. I pulled out a messy wad of one-dollar bills and started unfolding them, smoothing, organizing, and counting them into a neat stack. Bonaparte shook his head, tapped his foot, and sported his signature sneer. I came up short, at eighteen bucks. I looked at him, silently apologetic.
He snatched the bills from my hands, threw the twenty in my lap, as though I were a panhandler, and said with a sniff, “Poor girls always have singles.”
Before I could answer—not that I had a real comeback—he turned and strode off. The other girls giggled nervously. My eyes clouded up, and I mumbled something before running off to the ladies’ room. It was the first of many times I cried at the Post, but that time was the most pathetic.
As humiliating as the Bonaparte exchange had been, within hours I realized he’d given me an enormous gift. Skating around the rink that night, doing my warm-up crossovers, I brooded over Bonaparte’s comment. Poor girls always have singles. At first it rang in my ears like a recrimination, but the longer and faster I skated, the more mesmerizing it became, transforming itself from an accusation into an incantation, almost a kind of prayer.
As I walked home in the dark, exhausted from my workout, Poor girls always have singles was still playing in my head, becoming a musical riff. Bonaparte meant singles as in single dollar bills but really poor girls had single rooms, single beds, singleton status. I stayed up most of the night. By the next morning, I’d sketched out the rough outline of a plot about a philosophy student working her way through school by waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant.
One night, when a new shipment of fortune cookies turns up empty, Rachel O’Reilly, daughter of a Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father, cannibalizes Yiddish aphorisms and the wisdom of the great philosophers to improvise.
Her fortunes prove to be wildly popular (“Trust in God but tie up your camel,” “It is better to eat vegetables and fear no creditors than to eat duck and to hide from them,” “Hell shared with a sage is better than paradise with a fool,” “Love your neighbor, even if he plays the trombone,” and “The fortune you seek is inside another fortune”). It wasn’t a stretch from my odd jobs during college writing greeting-card text and singing-telegram lyrics. Before I knew it, I had half a dozen chapters written. I titled it Poor Girls Always Have Singles.
During that first winter, when I wasn’t working, I spent most of my time either writing my novel or skating at the rink. As the months wore on, I was slowly becoming more comfortable in my own skin and less awed by those around me. I made some friends, mostly other copy aides, and we’d get a drink or burger after work, though we eyed each other through the competitive lens of Ben Bradlee’s “creative tension.” We all wanted to be journalists, but given our lowly station there were just two traditional ways to score bylines and move up.
The first was rewriting the news wires about breaking entertainment news for what’s now called “The Reliable Source,” but back in the day was called, unimaginatively, “Personalities.” It was the bottom-feeder of writing assignments, but you got a tagline at the end of the column. The second avenue to promotion was party reporting, and as the months went on I got the hang of it and began to get the better assignments.
I quickly discovered that very little that went on in Washington was actually fun for fun’s sake, and parties were no exception. Politicians, lobbyists, and consultants all flocked to these events, conducting business, pressing cards into each other’s hands, plotting power moves between the bar and the bathroom. I understood their motives, but there were other people who seemed to be hangers-on who had no clear function or goal but showed up decked out and pumped up.
President Roosevelt at a 1942 press conference noted that a lot of social types were hanging around Washington and yet contributing nothing. “I suppose if we made it very uncomfortable for the—what shall I call them? Parasites? in Washington,” he said, “the parasites would leave.” But forty years later, the parasites were still there, and they all had to do s
omething in the evenings. Balls, benefits, fund-raisers—you name it—anything with pigs in a blanket, a mic, and a crowd, and politicians and parasites would show up in cocktail attire.
The Style section was determined to cover it all. If one of Washington’s A-listers, such as the president, First Lady, a Supreme Court justice, or, even better, a Hollywood celebrity, was scheduled to make an appearance, a real reporter would be assigned to cover the event. But if the party was a strictly B-listers affair, one of us copy aides would be sent. When we had one of these assignments, we waited until the day shift ended, and then we’d go to the bathroom, put on big-girl clothes and the strand of pearls that our parents had given us for graduation. We’d grab a reporter’s notebook and take a cab to the hotel or banquet hall where the event was happening. If the assignment editor had given us advance warning, we would have gone to the newsroom library and read any clips on the prior year’s coverage of the annual event, and if the paper had been given a guest list, the editor would go over it with us so we knew which people to get quotes from.
Covering parties is much harder than it sounds and significantly less fun. First of all, you’re the only one at the table who can’t drink. That is, unless you think getting loaded is going to help you when you get back to the newsroom and have an hour or ninety minutes max to bang out an eight-hundred-word piece that hundreds of thousands of Post readers are going to see the next morning. Everyone at the Post was aware that the publisher, Katharine Graham, might read your story in her paper. Just the idea that she might spot an error I made was enough to make a temporary teetotaler out of me.
Another challenge is that if you’re twenty-two and short and look lost or disgruntled (which I’ve been told on occasion is my resting face), “important” people aren’t likely to talk to you. Or even register that you exist. You are completely and utterly invisible. Then, when the important people find out you’re from the Washington Post, they want to talk to you, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily going to say anything interesting. And taking a break to visit the ladies’ room is a risk because actual news only seems to happen when you are in there.
This famously happened to my friend and colleague Liz Kastor in 1985, when she was covering a formal banquet for the Post and had the misfortune of going to the bathroom when Washington Redskins fullback John Riggins drunkenly said to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “Come on, Sandy baby, loosen up. You’re too tight.”
That line was delivered just before he passed out on the floor under the table.
The absence of breaking news doesn’t mean that party reporting is without value. Covering parties gave me an education I wouldn’t have found anywhere else. Important Washington business—networking and fund-raising—was conducted at these parties and at private ones closed to the press.
In addition to learning how political Washington works, the young party reporter also gets on-the-job journalistic training. Nothing makes you think faster or more creatively on your feet than having a rapidly approaching deadline, a tired and grumpy editor expecting copy, and a news hole reserved for your yet-to-be-written story. I developed a love-hate relationship with the process. I loved it because it forced me to construct a narrative quickly, accurately, and engagingly, even if its main characters were dull senators with canned responses and photo-op blown hair. I hated it because it meant talking to strangers, ones usually much older than I and always full of themselves.
The Washington Post press pass dangling on a thin chain around my neck—and constantly entangled with my pearls—helped to legitimize me, but still, I had to come up with a compelling question. In those first few months, I sometimes fell short and the list of interviewees who responded to me with contempt is long. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and master of disdain, was among the top—if not the—most unforgiving of those I tried to wangle a quote out of, his cold eyes boring into me after I stumbled through an inane question.
I learned you couldn’t predict who would be generous with their time and their wit, but no one was as gracious as Moses. That first spring, in May 1983, after having covered a dozen or so smaller parties, I was sent to cover the Folger Shakespeare Library’s annual benefit. The guest of honor was Charlton Heston. All I knew was that he’d parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
I was assigned to the party two days before the event, a luxurious amount of time in the pre-Internet age to read up on the Folger and Heston. Additionally, I wasn’t on the schedule to work the day shift because the Folger affair was a late-afternoon event. That meant I could sleep in and be well rested. I was intent on writing a great story. The only problem was I woke up speechless. Literally. I had a bad case of laryngitis, prompted by my newly acquired allergies, which the allergist had described as inevitable.
“Washington is a swamp,” he noted in a way I could tell was part of his regular spiel. “No one gets out alive.” He handed me a prescription. (Many years later I discovered that this often repeated cliché that the city was built on actual swampland was untrue, but as a metaphor it captured the essence of political Washington.)
No way was I calling in sick. This was the best assignment I’d gotten to date. I stayed in bed all morning drinking tea and slurping Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. When it came time to get ready, I dressed up and waved down a cab, notebook in hand, voice still nowhere to be found.
Heston couldn’t attend the matinee performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, and he got there just as the 150 guests swarmed into the Folger garden, munching on Renaissance meat pies and chicken morsels. In my story I described him as standing, “casually chatting, sun-tanned and towering majestically above a few reporters.” Somehow, after a few minutes, it was just Moses and me. The other reporters had gotten what they wanted, and now Heston was looking at me expectantly. I scribbled on my notepad that I had laryngitis.
Heston smiled and said, “Oh, that’s a shame.” He motioned to a waiter who was carrying a tray of wineglasses. “Sir, this young lady is under the weather. Do you think you could scare up a hot toddy for her?”
He then explained exactly how to make the drink as I stood nearby, stunned. Within minutes I was seated at one of the Folger’s intimate café tables for two, sipping my hot toddy with the man who had led the Israelites out of Egypt. He suggested that I write down my questions for him on my pad while he watched: What Shakespeare roles have you played? Is Macbeth your favorite role? Do you have a connection to the Folger . . .
I took down his answers, excited and filled with gratitude, basking in the curious stares of the other reporters and the female guests who were obviously wondering what my secret was. He rose from the table, still smiling his biblical smile, and said, “And now I have a question for you. Did the hot toddy do the trick?”
I nodded and then managed to utter a throaty “yes” and “Thank you, sir.”
He bowed and returned to the rest of the guests. I continued on the party circuit and met all sorts of Washington types, from presidents to princesses, but no one ever came close to showing that sort of kindness or class.
I wrote about everything from how to get your rugs cleaned (I didn’t have any, but it seemed like a useful piece of information) to the perils of sleepwalking (I’m a lifelong sleepwalker). Being a young reporter is a humbling experience, mainly because you quickly learn how much you don’t know. Luckily, I had good editors who saved me from my huge gaps of knowledge and lack of worldliness, which on one particular afternoon made itself painfully known to the entire Style section.
I was on the desk and took a call from the White House press office. I hung up and yelled over to one of the assignment editors that Nancy Reagan was having Jane Wyman over that afternoon for tea. Wyman was a popular film actress in the 1940s and 1950s, but recently around Washington she was known as President Reagan’s first wife. Suddenly, reporters were jumping up from their seats and fighting over who would get the story. Editors were close to screaming “
Stop the presses,” while they excitedly figured out how to rip up the front of the Style section layout to make room. “Above the fold, for sure!”
But then Ellen, my brother’s Style editor friend who had been my connection to the Post, looked at me and shook her head. “Robin,” she said, turning to Robin Groom, the salt-of-the-earth Style social events editor. “Could you call your White House contact and confirm this?”
Then, with laserlike intensity, she turned back to me, “Are you sure they said Jane Wyman? The actress? Ronald Reagan’s first wife?”
“Uh, I think so . . . I mean . . .” I have to admit that I didn’t know Reagan had a first wife. I knew of Nancy, and that was it. And as for Hollywood actresses, I was lucky if I could tell an Audrey from a Katharine Hepburn.
Robin hung up the phone and smiled. “Barbara, Barbara, Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “What are we going to do with you? It’s Jane Wyatt, the actress who played the mother on ‘Father Knows Best,’ not Jane Wyman, movie star and ex-wife of the president. That’s who is having tea with the First Lady right now.”
This was followed by a group eye roll and from-the-gut groan as I shrank down in my seat, shamed into silence for the rest of the week.
I did learn the first lesson of journalism: Double-check all names. The second lesson: Triple-check.
This wasn’t the last time I had to learn the hard way what it feels like to make a mistake that could end up being in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I had a knack for rewriting the wires, which we did a lot for the Personalities column, and I began to get assigned to this frequently. One day I noticed something interesting from the wire service and refashioned it into copy suitable for the Post, then hit “send,” moving it through to the editor. It was a particularly busy news day and though the copy desk was first rate, it didn’t catch every error. After the paper’s first edition was published, one of the copy editors came over and informed me I had written “Marvin” instead of “Melvin” in an item about the famously litigious defense lawyer Melvin Belli. When the editor explained who Belli was, I was terrified. If you haven’t heard of him, Wikipedia notes that he was known as the “King of Torts” and “Melvin Bellicose.”
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