by Tom Wolfe
You see Lola at the booth inside the DMZ. “You like veedeos?”
“What kinda videos?” asks Jimmy Lowe.
“Unusual veedeos,” says Lola with a full-blown, star-quality leer.
And now they’re all sliding out of the booth and heading for the parking lot.
Suddenly, as Irv sat there slumped way down in an antique bergère in Snackerman’s vast library, his heart began racing—even as it had raced that night when he knew the three young thugs were leaving the bar and heading for the High Mojave and the immediate proximity of his mortal hide.
Now you see a medium-long shot of the High Mojave in the parking lot. From inside the RV’s living room, you see the door handle revolve, and then the door opens and in come the raucous traffic sounds and deep electric-bass strums of Bragg Boulevard, and in comes Lola, and you’re staring straight down her dress at her prodigious breasts, and behind her come Jimmy Lowe and Ziggefoos and Flory … with their T-shirts, their muscles, their tight jeans, their skinned heads …
When Lola slips the videocassette into the VCR, Mary Cary’s voice takes over: “Lola had promised James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory some ‘unusual videos,’ and that was what she proceeded to show them. All that she had left out was just how unusual they would turn out to be.”
You see the three rednecks sitting on the couch and staring at the TV, whose own screen has that scrolling blur you get when you try to film television images. Irv had cut out all of Lola’s striptease act, and now you’re aware that Randy Valentine’s murderers are watching the very tape on which they themselves disclose how they committed the heinous crime, and Mary Cary says: “Sitting on that couch, in that High Mojave, they watched everything … that you have just seen.”
The hidden cameras focus on each of the three, and each one is blinking furiously. Jimmy Lowe’s mouth is hanging open; Ziggefoos smacks him on the side of his leg and says, “I ‘on know, Jimmy, I’on lack’is bleep.”
And Jimmy Lowe turns on Lola and says, “Look here, bleep it, Lola, I wanna know what the bleep’s going on, and I wanna know rat now.”
And Lola keeps saying, “Eenteractive teevee, eenteractive teevee.”
And Jimmy Lowe says, “You kin innerack with my sweet bleep, Lola. I ax you a simple question.”
And Lola says, “You don’ believe me? Eenteractive teevee. Eenteractive teevee, Jeemy! I’m gon’ show you, Jeemy, right now! There! You have a special vees’tor!”
And all at once the three young thugs are blinking, dumbstruck and agog over quite something else:
“Hello, Jimmy. I’m Mary Cary Brokenborough.”
I’m Merry
Kerry
Broken
Berruh.
You see the three youths’ shock and incredulity at the sudden appearance in their midst, in the living room of the RV out back of a fifthrate topless bar on Bragg Boulevard, of the best-known female face in the United States. You see them with their mouths open and their eyes blinking and those damning blinks in the unspoken but universally known language of Newsmagazine Sting TV say: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
Then you see the three of them, led by Ziggefoos, trying to turn the ambush into a joke. They start urging Mary Cary to “Gitcher tail up, gal” and join them inside the DMZ for some “vodka twilats.” Ziggefoos is the cool, cocksure, self-possessed one throughout this exchange, and so Irv had used the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory while Ziggefoos spoke. You hear Ziggefoos’s impudent, mocking words, but you see Jimmy Lowe’s and Flory’s blinking eyes saying, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” The rest was easy—if you knew this business the way he, Irv, did. He simply eliminated Ziggefoos’s Neanderthal rant, his self-pitying brute’s disquisition on manhood and “the unit,” and the rest of his utterly irrelevant bleat. Instead, we see Mary Cary, at the top of her form, grilling him relentlessly.
Ziggefoos says, “Whatchoo know abaout it?”
And Mary Cary says, “I know what I’ve just heard you say—you and Jimmy and Flory—in your own words.” Then, to Jimmy Lowe: “If it wasn’t for the reason you said, why did you attack Randy Valentine?”
Blinking furiously, looking furiously guilty, Jimmy Lowe says, “All’s I did-”
Ziggefoos cuts him off. “Jes shut up, Jimmy!”
Then Irv had shifted to the camera on Jimmy Lowe’s face. A damning, guilty silence, that face! With much blinking! Guilty! The brute looks as guilty on that screen as if he’s just made a full and open confession. Artistry!—
He had allowed Ziggefoos to say, “Didn’ none a us have nothing to do with Randy Valentine. Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him.”
But then he had cut to the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory—and not merely to capture their frightened, bugged-out, blinking faces, which said, without a word, “We do, too, know what happened to Randy Valentine! We kaled’at quair!”
At that point, thanks to the simple magic of multiple cameras, it was easy for Irv to jump all the way from Ziggefoos saying, “Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him,” to a beaten Jimmy Lowe saying, “Wale, you got it all wrong,” and giving the television set a weak, guiltsapped, dismissive wave and getting up and turning his back.
“’At’s rat,” says Flory, also getting up and retreating, “you got it all wrong.”
“But they’re your own words,” says Mary Cary, “from your own mouths.”
“Yeah, but y’all rigged’is all up,” says Jimmy Lowe, now in a full and stricken retreat to the door.
Now Ziggefoos joins Jimmy and Flory, and he looks like a whipped dog, too. It was as if the entire ambush had taken all of ninety seconds. Overwhelmed by the evidence and the sternness of the Goddess of Television, the three thugs had mounted one brief show of loutish bravado, then buckled cravenly, the logorrheic Ziggefoos included, put their tails between their legs and slunk off like the worthless mutts they were. And so what if after the ambush, Irv had learned that in fact Jimmy Lowe and Flory had been decorated for their actions outside the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu on Bloody Sunday? What did that have to do with their actions as homophobic goons and murderers inside a gin mill one bloody night on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville, North Carolina?
And now, on the screen, back in New York, is the victor, Mary Cary Brokenborough, at her futuristic desk at network command central. She begins her peroration, which she had retaped—and Irv had written—earher this very day:
“Already, various legal jurisdictions, federal, state, local, and military, have informed Day & Night that in broadcasting what you have just seen, we have violated laws concerning the wire interception of private conversations.” She pauses, and those fabulous blue eyes blaze. “Perhaps we have … Perhaps we have … Although we have been assured otherwise by our own legal counsel from the very beginning. Yet whatever the legal technicalities of the matter may be, we know very well—and we think that most of the citizens of our country know very well—that we have obeyed a far higher and more important law … and the most vital of American traditions, the tradition that values, above all else, Fairness … and Justice … regardless of what legislators and prosecutors, who come and go, might care to say …”
Prosecutors!
He, Irv, had written the entire thing for his Big Blond mouthpiece, but suddenly—prosecutors!
The implications of the word hit him, and a horrible wave of fear went rolling through his central nervous system, and his heart began drumming away at an alarming rate.
What have I done? Jail! They’ll send me to jail—with relish! They won’t touch her. Oh no, not her, not Merry Kerry Broken Berruh! They’ll treat me like the accountant, like the accountant who goes to jail when the Big Celebrity cheats on her income taxes! They’ll subpoena all the videotapes! They’ll see what I did! Bugged the DMZ—violated the laws of at least four jurisdictions—five years on each count—the rest of my woulda-been working life! The porno video I concocted with Lola Thong—that cheap little
hooker thrusting the gorged red lips of her labia majora right into the camera—entrapment!—they’ll pin it on me! Every insidious editing trick I played with the tapes—they’ll see it all and reveal it all! We’re going to make you, Irv, an example of everything Americans instinctively hate about the arrogance of the media and the reptilian perfidy of entrapment TV! Yes, you, Irv Durtscher—you coldblooded, slippery, slimy little snake, you—all fangs and no balls!
Now Irv’s heart had gone into not only tachycardia but a terrifying series of palpitations, and he slumped way down in the bergèreI’m having a heart attack! I’m—
—A beeper went off. Irv looked over. It was Dr. Siebert, Mary Cary’s husband, sitting over there on the far side by Senator McInnes’s wife. He pulled a little cell phone out of his jacket pocket. You could hear him speaking sotto voce.
Then he got up and strode rapidly over to where Snackerman and Mary Cary were sitting. Mary Cary’s image was still up on the screen. She was completing her stirring peroration—Irv’s peroration—about residual fascism in America. Nevertheless, Hugh Siebert said to Snackerman:
“Excuse me. I’m sorry.” And then he leaned right across Snackerman and said to his wife, “I’m sorry, honey. There’s been an accident on the FDR Drive. An eleven-year-old girl—corneal-scleral laceration with effusion of the vitreous humor.”
Then he bolted from the room. This big, square-jawed, graythatched, pompous piece of lumber—he literally ran out of the room and toward the elevator. Everybody, Snackerman, Rusty Mumford, Martin Adder, every last one of them, wives, Jennifer Love-Robin—all, that is, except for Mary Cary—they all craned their noggins away from the Sony TV screen and stopped listening to his, Irv’s, stirring prose pouring from the mouth of Her Smugness—and stared at the galloping surgeon. A medical emergency! A brave doctor! Fearless savior!
Irritably, Snackerman turned toward Mary Cary and said, “What’d he say?”
Mary Cary never for a moment took her eyes off herself on the screen as she replied, “An eleven-year-old girl’s had her eye sliced practically in two, and the insides are gushing out.”
That did it. Irv sat bolt upright. His heart was still hammering away, but no longer with fear. Now—clean, old-fashioned hate, in normal sinus rhythm. That son of a bitch! Him and his Dr. Daring stage whisper! Corneal-scleral laceration—meeeeeyah! Probably beeped himself and then faked the call! A pathetic failure at the dinner table who couldn’t even pick up, much less carry, his end of the conversation—and so now he has to try to steal the scene by playing Emergency Medical Hero during the very climax of his own wife’s triumph—as orchestrated by me, Irv Durtscher! Why, that ice-sculptured son—of—a—bitch!
“ … what we know it to be, in our hearts: a wake-up call for America.”
It was over. The last of Irv’s words had passed through the lips of the blond and Tiffany-blue goddess on the huge screen.
Now they were on their feet, Snackerman and all his assembled hotshots. They had all turned toward Mary Cary, and they were grinning and applauding. Mary Cary herself stood up, a modest, almost misty little smile on her famous face, as if the whole subject was too serious for her to break into the big donkey-toothed bray of triumph she’d obviously like to cut loose with.
Snackerman grabbed her around the shoulders and grinned down at her and hugged her, and the whole mob started applauding all over again. Even Cale Bigger, who knew exactly how these shows were put together, was over there in the Mary Cary/Snackerman huddle, giving them both his best lifetime-lackey’s shit-eating grin. Irv found himself standing alone. He was damned if he was going to walk the subservient eight feet it would take for him to join in the après-triumph pile-on.
Presently Cale walked away from the chattering, laughing, exulting hive and came over to Irv and stuck out his hand and said, “Great job, Irv! Great job!” Then he smiled and cast his eyes down and shook his big florid head and then looked up at Irv and said, “Jesus Christ. That girl’s got some balls, hunh?”
THE NEW YORHER AFFAIR
Foreword: Murderous Gutter Journalism
May I offer you, here at the end, something on the order of those two gold foil—wrapped, silver dollar—sized, chocolate-covered peppermint coins the franchise hotels put on your pillow when they turn down your bed at night?
Just for the flavor of it, come with me back to the 1960s, to a time when the newspaper wars still raged in New York City; to 1963, when the struggling New York Herald Tribune completely transfused its Sunday supplement and changed its name from Today’s Living to New York. In due course New York had a new editor, a young man named Clay Felker, who had come to the Trib from Esquire magazine. As editor of New York, Clay had one full-time assistant editor, Walt Stovall, and two part-time staff writers: Jimmy Breslin, whose main task was turning out a column for the Trib five days a week, a column based entirely on reporting (and probably the greatest column in New York newspaper history), and me. Five days a week I worked at the beck and call of the city desk as a general assignment reporter. In our so-called spare time, Jimmy and I were supposed to turn out a story apiece each week for this new Sunday supplement, New York. I’d heard of skeleton staffs before, but this one was bones.
Nevertheless, one day Clay, Walt, Jimmy, and I were crowded into the little bullpen of a cubicle that served as New York’s office, when Clay said, “Look … we’re coming out once a week, right? And The New Yorker comes out once a week. And we start out the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of ink. Is there any reason why we can’t be as good as The New Yorker? Or better. They’re so damned dull.”
At that moment, I must say it seemed like nothing but talk. Dull or not, The New Yorker was one of the two or three most eminent weekly magazines in the country, certainly in terms of prestige. But Clay meant business, and thanks to his Esquire days he managed to persuade some great outside contributors to join Jimmy and me in our brave ride on Rosinante, writers the likes of Peter Maas, Richard Condon, Robert Benton, and David Newman, along with the Trib’s own outstanding critics, Walter Kerr, Judith Crist, and Walter Terry. Sure enough, by mid-1964 our little Sunday supplement, New York, had started making the town take notice. You know the current expression, “the buzz”? Well, by late 1964 the Buzz buzzed not for The New Yorker but for us, so much so that The New Yorker began paying us the left-handed compliment of making fun of us, first in items in their Talk of the Town column and then in a full-blown parody that went after Jimmy and me specifically.
It so happened that 1965 was The New Yorker’s fortieth anniversary. The magazine was, in fact, so eminent that the usual, predictable tributes to its illustrious traditions and its thises and its thats began effusing in print, like gas inflating a balloon, when the simple truth was that Clay was right. The New Yorker had become dull, dull, dull—dull and self-important—under William Shawn, who had succeeded the magazine’s founder, Harold Ross, as editor. So … what better time to pop the balloon?
Our idea was to take a page from The New Yorker’s early days, back when Ross was running the show and the sheet was alive, and do a parody in the form of a profile of Shawn. One of The New Yorker’s greatest coups, under Ross, had been a parody of Time magazine in 1936 in the form of a profile by Wolcott Gibbs of Time’s founder and editor, Henry Luce. The town, or the part of the town that buzzes, had dined out on that one for a year. Not only was Gibbs’s parody of Time’s famous breathless style gorgeous stuff (“Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind” … “Where it will all end, knows God!”), but the personal details got under Luce’s skin … At Yale he had adopted the mucker pose of going around unshaven and not wearing garters but was actually a puritanical “conformist” … he talked jerkily, stuttered, and avoided people’s eyes … wore baggy clothes … seethed secretly over all the visiting Asians who looked him up in New York because he had been born in China, where his parents had been missionaries … Ross sent Luce an advance copy of Gibbs’s story, and Luce got so angry he con
fronted Ross in Ross’s apartment and, the way the story was always told, threatened to throw him out the window.
So a parody profile of Shawn it would be. The very form, “the profile,” the very term itself, was a New Yorker invention. And in this case there was a news peg that went beyond the fact that this was The New Yorker’s fortieth: there had never been a profile of Shawn anywhere. Despite the fact that he was one of the most prominent figures in American journalism, he never showed his face to outside journalists. “Intensely private” was apparently putting it mildly. There was only one known photograph of the man, the official New Yorker portrait, which he had commissioned, paid for, and controlled.
The first thing I did was ring up Shawn at his office to ask him for an interview. By and by he came to the telephone and, in his quiet voice, said:
“Here at The New Yorker, if we tell someone we want to do a profile and that person doesn’t want to cooperate, we don’t do the profile. We would expect you to extend us the same courtesy.”
“But, Mr. Shawn,” I said, “we’re a newspaper, and we consider you and your magazine’s fortieth anniversary news.”
That argument got me exactly nowhere. Obviously I would have to get my material from present and former New Yorker employees and others who knew Shawn and the magazine. That very night, or soon after, I was having dinner with a group of people down in Greenwich Village, and at the table was a young woman named Renata Adler. It was she, not I—I had no idea who she was—who brought up the fact that she was a staff writer for The New Yorker. I will admit I encouraged her to dilate upon the subject, however. I can’t remember anything particularly riveting or revealing that she divulged, but she never forgot the conversation, as it would turn out. Anyway, it must have been shortly after my telephone call to Shawn, because soon the word was out at The New Yorker that nobody was to talk to anybody from the Herald Tribune.
