Finding Magic

by Sally Quinn

  “I asked you to take me to lunch for a reason,” I began. “I want to tell you why I’m leaving.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “I’m leaving because I’m in love with you and I can’t stand being near you any longer without being with you.” I blurted this out before I had a chance to reconsider. My words seemed to float in the air before they landed on him. He looked stunned and said nothing. We looked into each other’s eyes. I could feel mine welling up. I waited.

  Finally he spoke. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. I’ve been in love with you for the past year. But I thought you were in love with Warren. That’s why I didn’t try to stop you.”

  The waiter took our untouched plates away.

  Ben had to leave for story conference. “Can we meet tonight?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Seven thirty at your apartment?”

  I nodded again. We walked back to the paper in silence.

  I was numb with disbelief. I should have been exhilarated, but I could feel nothing. I didn’t even focus on the consequences of what we were about to do. I spent the afternoon cleaning out my desk. Around five he came looking for me in the Style section, a worried expression on his face.

  “Bob and Carl have come up with a big story,” he said. “I may be late. How about eight o’clock?”

  For some reason I went into sparring mode.

  “How about never?” I said saucily, fully expecting him to laugh.

  “I’ll be there at seven thirty,” he replied and turned and walked off.

  He was.

  We made love that night. Ben was everything I could have ever wanted and more. What I felt for Ben was so transcendent, so sacred, so divine. I had never experienced anything like it. It was magic in the sense that it was otherworldly, life enhancing, life transforming. I had lost myself in another being, another soul. Perhaps a better way to describe it was that I found myself in another being, another soul. Or even more, I merged with another being, another soul. We were one and always were ever after from that moment until the moment he died. For the first time I understood the truly profound meaning of love.

  Chapter 14

  Modern views on life and relationship overlook the mysterious and in so doing dismiss both soul and spirit. . . . Yet fate and destiny, essential parts of every person’s experience, are largely beyond the limits of our knowing and predicting. How do you live out a human relationship under such conditions? You honor the mysterious in the whole of life.

  —Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own

  Ben asked me to marry him (sort of) several days after we had “gotten together” that first night. We were both besotted. We were sitting on an ottoman together at a farewell party for me. I’m surprised that no one seemed to notice we were in a swoon, barely able to keep our hands off each other.

  He didn’t get down on his knees. He simply said, “I want to marry you.” I was unable to get my breath to respond. I just nodded. We never paused to think exactly how that was going to happen. He was, of course, still married, though he and his wife had virtually no relationship at that point.

  Then reality set in and I got caught up in a whirlwind of activity. Watergate was still going on. Ben was consumed. I was back and forth from New York for meetings and moving out of my apartment in D.C. and into Warren’s in New York. I still cared deeply for Warren, but the fact that we were both seeing other people eroded what we had had together. To this day, though, we’re the best of friends.

  Once I gave up my Washington apartment, Ben and I had no place to meet. We couldn’t tell anyone, so we had to behave as though everything was normal. We were frustrated and delirious with happiness at the same time. One weekend we were able to sneak away to his log cabin in West Virginia, where we took a picnic and a bottle of wine down to the river. We made love on the rocks, sunning ourselves in an indolent daze. It was a new kind of magic for me.

  * * *

  My co-anchor at CBS Morning News, Hughes Rudd, and I were sent around the country on a grand promotion tour before the show debuted. Everything was happening so fast I didn’t think to ask about rehearsals or any kind of preparation, and I never got any. We were going to be dynamite, everybody said. Hughes and I believed them. We gave speeches together about what kind of show we were going to do. We were boffo, and the audiences responded enthusiastically. The idea of actually doing a live one-hour TV show every morning was a distant blur. What kept nagging at me was that I didn’t want to do this in the first place. I didn’t want to leave the Post and I certainly didn’t want to leave Ben.

  One of the stops on our CBS tour was in Cleveland. After we had done our TV appearances and Hughes had left, Ben met me and we rented a car and just drove down the highway until we found a huge motel with a restaurant and took a room. We went down to dinner and luxuriated in the fact that nobody recognized us, even though both Ben and I had been in the news for a while. We slow danced, arms wrapped around each other, and even made out on the dance floor. The risky forbiddenness of it all was delicious. Clandestine.

  Sometime during the whirlwind of activity, someone from the CBS promotion department called me. Everyone there was ecstatic. Clay Felker, the powerful and charismatic editor of New York magazine, wanted to do a cover story on me. Clay was a friend. He had tried to hire me away from Ben and I had declined the offer. He had assigned one of my friends, a former colleague at the Post, to do the story. We did the interview, which I felt had gone well, and the cover shoot was scheduled. When I arrived at the studio in New York, the photographer was standing in front of an imposing king-size bed. On it was a man’s pajama top. The idea was that I should put on the top and get under the covers, and he would shoot me slithering seductively out of bed. The caption would read something like “Good Morning, New York” or “Wake up with Sally Quinn.” I was horrified and scared. I knew I wasn’t going to pose that way. It was sleazy, smarmy, and disgusting, and I felt totally exploited. Still, I didn’t know what to do. CBS was so excited about the cover story and everyone was counting on it to give the show a great kickoff. What if I refused and Felker killed the story? Finally I summoned up the courage to tell them no. There were a lot of frantic phone calls back and forth to Felker. After much negotiation, it was agreed that I would sit on a pile of steamer trunks and suitcases wearing a pantsuit as if I were the new girl coming to town. That seemed fairly harmless if a little hokey, but I was so relieved that I didn’t have to get into the pajama top that I acquiesced.

  The magazine appeared on the stands in July with the cover headline reading “Good Morning, I’m Sally Quinn. CBS Brought Me Here to Make Trouble for Barbara Walters.” Barbara was a friend and had been incredibly kind to me when I took the job. The piece was a total hatchet job, more fiction than fact. From my reading of the story, I came across as a slut and a bitch. The line that sent me over the edge was, “She once said ‘I thought I could get any penis I wanted.’” In my entire life I would be incapable of saying something like that. I thought I would die.

  Nobody at CBS knew what to say. Everyone was appalled, including Bill Paley, the head of the company. When I walked into the office, everyone turned their backs on me. I flew down to Washington to see Ben. He sat with me and held my hand and read the piece out loud to me, trying to calm me down. He kept telling me how it wasn’t that bad. I was so grateful to him. I had fully expected him to say, “You are not the woman I thought you were,” and break up with me. He didn’t. He stuck by me. He told me I was strong and that I could handle this. We could handle it together. Warren was wonderful, too, but Warren knew me and knew who I was. He also knew the reporter, and he knew Clay. He understood what Clay was doing. He simply wanted a sensational piece and he got it. It seemed that was all anyone was talking about. Little did they know that Ben and I were together. If they had, it would have been an even bigger scandal.

  The show debuted August 6, 1973. It was a complete disaster. I had the flu and was nearly delir
ious. For some reason I wanted to look serious and had curled my hair in a tight little sprayed do, instead of the long blond look I had had forever. I wore a yellow—my least flattering color—military-style jacket and rimless granny glasses. I guess I was thinking I should look serious. It didn’t matter since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing because we had not rehearsed the show and I had been up since one A.M. “writing” the intros to whatever script they might have had for me. Also, I didn’t know which camera to look into since nobody had bothered to tell me the one with the red light was the one that was on.

  I got killed in the reviews, not just because I was so terrible but because, after the New York magazine piece, everyone hated me.

  * * *

  Once I had my disastrous debut on the CBS Morning News things became more difficult for Ben and me. He would fly up to New York, meet me at a hotel, we would go for lunch/dinner, then he would fly back to Washington in time for story conference and in time for me to get to bed in order to report to work early. Most days, Hughes and I would have lunch at a Mexican restaurant, get drunk on margaritas, and I would collapse into bed at 5:30 P.M. in order to get up at 1:30 A.M. This was no life. I didn’t get to write anymore. I was exhausted all the time and hungover as well. I loathed TV and hated the job but had to keep going.

  One day, in early September, Ben and I had a very late lunch on the terrace of Tavern on the Green in New York. It was an unseasonably cold but sunny day and we were the only ones eating outside except for two little old ladies at the other end of the terrace. Because we had privacy we were holding hands and kissing the entire way through the lunch. Ben left and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Warren’s to sleep.

  Ben was in his office when one of the editors overseeing Watergate coverage came in and closed the door. “So,” he said to Ben with a conspiratorial grin on his face, “you and Quinn, huh?” Ben was shocked. “How do you know?” he asked. “My mother was having lunch with a friend on the terrace of Tavern on the Green today . . .”

  We both realized then that we had to come out of the closet. Ben had already decided to leave home and a marriage that had been foundering for several years and had moved into the Georgetown Inn. He told his wife that he was in love with someone else but didn’t say who. She told some of her friends. My phone started ringing off the hook. Who could it be? Both Washington and New York were wild with curiosity. I even made a few well-placed calls myself, debating the identity of the new inamorata.

  We finally told everyone. Warren was the hardest for me because I really loved him. I quickly rented a furnished apartment in a residential hotel on Central Park West and told Warren that night. He was in shock. I moved out and into the hotel where my apartment was immediately broken into and most of my clothes were stolen. This was not a good time.

  Ben told a few people at the Post, and it went international immediately. Hughes was in shock as well. He was exactly Ben’s age, twenty years my senior, and had been like a father figure to me. CBS was also in shock and none too pleased. The last thing they needed on their hands was a new anchor (the first woman in history) with already bad publicity, who also happened to be bombing on TV, and now was running off with a married man.

  I lasted on the Morning News until December 7, ironically Pearl Harbor Day, when, by mutual agreement, we parted ways and I left the anchor job, leaving the morning news behind, and returned to Washington. I stayed on as a CBS “reporter” for a few months, back in the bureau in Washington. I lived with Ben in a new apartment in the Watergate—yes, the Watergate. It was a large one-bedroom with a beautiful view of the Potomac River and convenient to the Post, but the irony was lost on no one.

  I detested that CBS job in Washington too, and once again, by mutual agreement, I left. I had no job now.

  More important, I still had not forgiven Clay Felker. He had caused me more pain than almost anyone I could think of. I just couldn’t live it down, at least in my own mind and imagination. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?,” as a once-maligned public figure asked years ago.

  I was obsessed with the magazine story and how badly off the mark it was, not to mention its effect on my life. So I decided to put a hex on Clay, which I did. I told Ben about it. He had heard the stories about my mother’s hexes and was dismissive of them. But he laughed and said, “Do what you have to do, baby.” Some time afterward, Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in a hostile takeover, and Felker was out. I learned this at a dinner party I was having at my Dupont Circle house. Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post, was there. Kay was a close friend of Clay’s and had offered to help him buy the magazine but couldn’t get the other owners to agree. Clay called in the middle of dinner to tell her the bad news. She came back to the table visibly shaken. I was in disbelief. Was I responsible? Clay never recovered professionally. Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately caused his death.

  I was eaten up with guilt and remorse. Had I really done this? Of course I knew intellectually that I had had nothing to do with Clay’s misfortunes, but still, my embedded religion and my Southern upbringing made me believe otherwise. I have to say that Ben was a little rattled by what had happened to Clay, even though he thought it was ludicrous. However, he was especially nice to me for a little while after that. I told my brother about this one too. He was adamant that I never do it again. What you put out, he said, will come back at you threefold.

  I vowed never to do it again. It was too powerful an emotion. It seemed like sorcery, like black magic. It didn’t feel right. I was scared and confused. It would only get worse.

  * * *

  After several job interviews and an ill-fated and brief hiring by the New York Times, Ben persuaded the Post’s managing editor to rehire me as long as Ben recused himself from anything to do with me at the paper. I went back to work at the paper in March of 1974.

  It was never the same for me at the Post. Suddenly everyone treated me differently. I was the boss’s girlfriend.

  Then, much to my disappointment, Ben was balking at getting married, even though he had earlier said he wanted to marry me. Marriage now seemed to be off the table.

  That year was one of the most intense of my life. On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon told the country in a televised address of his intention to resign the next day. Several days later Ben announced to me that he was going up to his log cabin in West Virginia to write a book on JFK. Without me. He had signed a contract to do a book on the notes he had taken when Jack Kennedy was president and Ben and Tony were spending so much time with him and Jackie in the White House. He had told Jack he was writing the book and Jack understood. The only ground rules, Jack had insisted, were that Ben wait ten years until after he had left the White House. Ben agreed. Kennedy was killed in 1963 and Watergate was over, so now was the time.

  Ben was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally after the Watergate years. He needed to get away, he said. He needed to work out in the woods, to empty his mind. He needed solitude. He needed time to process what had just happened. He needed to think about us. He needed to be alone.

  I was heartbroken. There was no working phone in the cabin. He said he wouldn’t come back until he had finished the book. It could take a month; it could take six weeks. I would be alone in August in Washington in our apartment in the Watergate with no contact with him at all. I understood that he needed to get away. I got it that he wanted to do the book, to focus only on it. What I didn’t understand was why he would want to be away from me all that time. I would have thought my presence would be calming to him, would be soothing, reassuring. I would have thought he would want to sleep with his arms around me at night. I tried to talk to him about it. He was resolute. He got up the next day, packed a few pairs of jeans and some T-shirts, took his research, and off he went.

  Naturally I presumed the worst. He would get up there and decide he didn’t love me and that he could do just fine without me. He would realize he didn’t miss me and that would be that. It w
as the summer from hell. I was more in love with him now than ever. Could it be that he was not in love with me anymore?

  He came back after Labor Day. He was wearing jeans and was clean-shaven. He had stopped off at a barber’s to have his hair cut and a shave before he came home. He had grown a beard, which he said was white and scraggly looking, and he didn’t want me to see it. His hair was whiter than ever. He seemed a different person. In a way I had the same feeling I had had when Daddy came back from Korea, his hair having turned totally white. I was exhilarated but scared. I wasn’t sure who this person I loved so much had become.

  We spent many days talking. He had finished the book that became Conversations with Kennedy. It would be published the following year and quickly became a perennial bestseller. Ben had spent a lot of time in the woods, chopping down dead trees and clearing brush. He swam off the rocks, our sacred rocks, every day. He had a beer on the porch at night, had a bite to eat, and went to bed early. He was completely refreshed. He had absorbed what had happened in the past two years and had come to terms with the enormity of the Post’s role in the Watergate affair.

  What Ben had had was a spiritual experience. His time in the woods was and always had been for him, a form of meditation, a form of prayer. He called it mind emptying. He had had a silent retreat, a very long silent retreat. He became a much more thoughtful, deeper, more peaceful person after that. On some level, he must have understood that he had done what he was meant to do. After that he was never as ambitious as he had been before.

  I had had exactly the opposite of a spiritual experience. I had been crazed while he was gone. I didn’t let him know that. But I was impatient and anxious for him to get on with what else he had been thinking about. Yes, yes, I wanted to say, but what about us?

  We got to that eventually. He had deliberately left it for last. He loved me very much, he said. He was in love with me. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. But he still didn’t want to get married. He had been a failure at his two marriages, and he didn’t want to be a three-time loser. We had such a perfect relationship, he said. Why ruin it by getting married? He definitely did not want any more children. He already had three (and four stepchildren). I had told him, and I meant it then, that I didn’t want children either. We were so happy, he insisted. My mother and I had begun to plan our wedding but that had to be scrapped, or at least postponed, I thought, when I was in my most optimistic mood.