“Don’t be scared,” he said. “Big Daddy will take care of you.” And it was true, he didn’t look scared in the least. When we got to Seventh Street—lots of folks staring at us now—Galvin took my elbow and steered me another block south. We stopped in front of a dilapidated yellowing hulk of a building at Seventh and T.
“This is it!” he said. “The home of the greatest rhythm-and-blues music in America. Once upon a time, this was ground zero. Not the Apollo in Harlem, but right here. The Howard Theatre.”
I looked at the wreckage of the building. It was hard to imagine it as a shrine to anything except America’s racial disorder. It had been trashed during the riots in 1968 that followed the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and left for dead, a ruined shell. All that remained of its glory was a vertical marquee, spelling out the theater’s name.
“It looks like shit,” I said.
“Maybe now. But it’s going to see glory again, thanks to the Sun. Because we’re going to rebuild it.”
It was just past noon. A big black Town Car was pulling up on Seventh Street, with a D.C. police escort, fore and aft. The door opened, and out stepped the unmistakable figure of our mayor, followed a moment later by Ted Amara. The mayor, I noticed, was putting an envelope in his jacket.
“Well, well, well,” said Marquand. “How’s my favorite newspaper publisher?” Galvin had his hand outstretched, but the mayor clasped him in a bear hug; he wasn’t one to do things halfway. Galvin was still keyed up; he was rocking on the balls of his feet, almost like a dance. He pointed toward the ruins of the Howard.
“Mr. Mayor, you may not realize it, but this is a holy place for me. When I was a teenager, I used to drive all day from Pittsburgh to see James Brown, the Temptations, folks like that.”
The mayor was squinting, trying to imagine it; even after the bear hug, he was dubious about Sandy Galvin’s adventures as a soul brother.
“Why’d you come all the way down here?” asked the mayor. “That’s a four-hour trip.”
“Because this was the place. The Howard was so small, and the acoustics were so good that, when the band began to play, the whole place would just shake with the energy. It wasn’t possible to be a white man or a black man in there—all the electrons just got jumbled together.”
Galvin took the mayor’s arm and led him toward the charred building. “Listen to this, Mr. Mayor. You want to know how crazy I was? Nearly every Saturday I would plead with the manager to let me go backstage and interview the singers for my high school paper. After they got to know me, they’d let me watch the show through the curtain and then go down to the dressing rooms. I interviewed the Manhattans that way, and the Contours, and Junior Walker.”
“Shotgu-un!” sang out the mayor obligingly. He was a Junior Walker fan, evidently. Marquand was the same age as Galvin and had listened to the same music, but he was a more practical man. He had not only graduated from college, but had gone on to law school.
“Listen to this,” said Galvin conspiratorially. “One Saturday night, I actually interviewed the bass man of the Temptations. His name was Melvin, I think”—the mayor nodded, that was indeed the bass man’s name—“and he said we could do the interview on the way back to his hotel, because he had to meet some people there. So I sat in his limo all the way to Fourteenth Street, asking ridiculous questions about whether his roots were in gospel music, and he’s just nodding and saying ‘um-hmm,’ and ‘that’s right’ in that deep bass voice until we got back to his hotel. He took me up to his room and there were these fine women standing around, and people getting high in the corner, and I pleaded with him to let me stay. But Melvin decided it was time to say good-bye.”
“You did all that?” asked the mayor. He was beginning to suspect that there was something unusual about Sandy Galvin.
“Yes, sir. I did. I have been up there on that mountaintop, where black folks and white folks held hands and sang together. And do you know what? I want to go back! I don’t care about O.J. and Farrakhan and any of the rest of it. I’m tired of living in a city of hate. Sick to death of it. So I have another proposal for you. We are going to do something great here, you and me. We are going to rebuild this holy place—a black man and a white man—so that our children can come together and listen to the music we loved. What do you think about that? Can we do that?”
“Well, now,” said the mayor, looking at Galvin and then at Ted Amara. “I’ve been on that mountaintop too, and it’s a mighty long way back. But nothing’s wrong with giving it a try.”
THEY HELD A CEREMONY at Seventh and T a week later to mark the beginning of reconstruction of the Howard. Galvin pledged $15 million toward rebuilding the theater. Aretha Franklin cut the ribbon and sang “Respect.” Tens of thousands of people sang along with her. There were a lot of R & B fans left in D.C., it turned out—police said it was one of the largest multiracial gatherings in the city in decades. The Sun bannered the story on the front page. Galvin played it like the Second Coming: Black and white together, we shall not be moved! Bacon had given up trying to impose his usual standards. It was slipping out of his control. We would all follow Melvin the bass man into the promised land.
A week after that, Galvin declared Racial Healing Day. He ran a front-page editorial about it, and organized a convocation in front of the Sun’s headquarters. The mayor pulled out all the stops for this one. Black folks came from every neighborhood in the city, from Anacostia to Shaw, and stood in orderly lines. I could only guess at how much money Ted Amara had put out on the streets, but it had done the trick. White people came in from the suburbs too, in roughly equal numbers. For once, people weren’t scared.
Galvin gave a speech about love and racial tolerance. He seemed to be looking much of the time at Candace, who was standing in the front row, beaming. When he was done, Galvin embraced Marquand, the members of the city council—anyone he could find. The mayor grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Now give your neighbors a hug!” and the audience joined in, black and white, hugging anyone they could find. Galvin’s cameras from The Anti-News broadcast the whole glorious, gooey mess to the country.
People began to talk after that. They couldn’t help it. One of America’s most prominent newspapers was gushing about racial healing; blacks and whites were hugging in the streets of a city that had been addicted to race baiting. This couldn’t be Washington. Most of all, people talked about the charismatic publisher and his newspaper with a heart. He seemed to have that most inexplicable and essential human gift—the ability to make people forget about their problems. For a city that had been suffering under a perpetual cloud of righteous misery, it was as if the sun was finally breaking through.
SEVENTEEN
GALVIN BEGAN MEETING REGULARLY WITH THE PRESIDENT that fall. They were drawn together partly by the Sun’s Racial Healing campaign, which intrigued the President and emboldened the publisher. But it was inevitable that those two would connect; they had emerged from the same majestic swamp of ambition and aspiration. They were roughly the same age and had achieved success through a similar mix of charm and intellect. Most of all, they shared the same mysterious life force—conveyed through the eyes, the handshake, the physical presence—that gave them power over others, if not always over themselves.
Any relationship in Washington begins with a core of mutual opportunism, and that was doubtless true in this case. But they also seemed to like each other. The first meeting took place at the White House, but soon Galvin began inviting the President to his house in Virginia to drink fine wine, smoke cigars and talk about their troubles (or the President’s troubles, at least; Galvin wasn’t supposed to have any). I think both of them intended for the meetings to be secret, and the President traveled without his usual press escort. But discretion was not a viable long-term option in Washington.
I discovered the meetings by accident. I had driven out to the Virginia house one day to pick up Galvin’s theater tickets for the Kennedy Center that night, which he had offered t
o give me. At the bottom of the driveway were two bulky Ford Crown Victorias, the model beloved by law enforcement agencies. When I asked the housekeeper who was visiting, she pointed to the living room, where a half-dozen Secret Service agents were busily inspecting the house in preparation for a presidential visit. They demanded to know who I was, in the imperious way of the Secret Service; it took a phone call to Galvin to straighten things out.
I had to promise not to tell anyone, and in fact, I told just one person—Candace. But of course she already knew. Galvin had told her days ago.
I would have liked to witness the first of their meetings, to see these two aging baby boomers size each other up—fix each other with the same nimble, searching gaze; approach with the same winsome smile; extend hands as they looked with the greatest sincerity and interest into the other’s eyes. Who would win the Charisma Bowl? I had my money on Galvin.
There are people who can establish intimacy easily, by talking about themselves and their dreams and encouraging the other person to do the same. Galvin and the President both had that quality, and from what I could pick up, their conversations had that flavor of instant intimacy. They discussed what they wanted out of life; they talked about what they would do next (for there is always a “next”); they tried out ideas. Each had been validated—Galvin by his wealth, the President by his political success—as a member of the meritocratic elite. It was a group of tormented overachievers, with the same paradoxical combination of selfconfidence and insecurity as the early capitalists who gave the world the Protestant ethic. That yearning for validation—let’s be modern and call it status anxiety—was the moving force of history, no matter what the historians might say.
According to Candace, two topics dominated their conversations—the President’s legal problems (naturally) and the perilous state of the world economy. Galvin regarded the President’s troubles as a symptom of the sickness that afflicted Washington. He counseled the President to stay in the arena. The public hated all the carping and criticism; they saw the President’s critics for the dwarves they were. Since this was precisely what the President wanted to hear, they found much to agree about. I was able to glean less about their discussions of the world economy. Galvin apparently spent a lot of time explaining to the President how global markets worked, and why they had been so volatile. It sounded like a seminar. If he offered the President specific advice, he didn’t share it with me or Candace.
The President asked Galvin’s views on the foreign policy worries of the day: whether to bomb Serbia; how to overthrow the ruler of Iraq; how to foster democracy in Cuba. They plotted covert action together. Politicians hadn’t discussed such topics with newspaper publishers since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Phil Graham. But with these two, everything was on the table. I liked to imagine the pair of them, drinking fine old brandy and smoking cigars on Galvin’s heated porch—surveying the far banks of the Potomac as they discussed where to target a cruise missile.
THESE CONVERSATIONS WOULD HAVE been of historical interest only—grist for someone’s memoir—if Galvin hadn’t chosen to ignore the normal rules once again. He decided after his first meeting with the President that he liked the man. And it followed that if he liked someone, he should do everything in his power to help that person. Galvin didn’t understand arguments for caution. Caution smacked of compromise and cowardice—and he wanted none of it.
So he ordered up a front-page editorial. This wasn’t a safe, gee-whiz bromide about the need for racial tolerance. It was a screamer, boxed in three columns at the top left corner of the front page, under the headline: GET OFF HIS BACK! The editorial, which Galvin wrote and signed himself, said it was time to stop tearing the President apart and get back to business. The editorial expressed what a lot of people were feeling at that time, if you believed the polls, and the President’s friends certainly liked it. But within the insular culture of Washington, it exploded like a stink bomb.
Galvin was making himself some real enemies now. The Speaker of the House called a news conference to denounce “unprecedented meddling” by a newspaper owner in the affairs of government. The New York Times ran an exposé about Galvin’s secret meetings with the President. They had a lot of detail—God knows where they got it—and they made it all sound like a conspiracy. Galvin loved the attention. He was on The Anti-News every morning, fulminating against what he called the capital’s culture of misery. He even did a live interview with the President from the White House, which was carried in prime time by one of the networks. I thought it was great television, worthy of Jerry Springer. A sort of “Super-Zack: The 220-pound Baby.” Galvin asked the President at one point whether he was a happy man—and rather than the usual pap, he got a real answer. No, the President was not happy. He wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore. It was the baby boomer’s lament: We had it all, and we blew it.
Galvin’s biggest problem was the newsroom. It wasn’t just Howard Bacon and his dweeb friends grumbling anymore. Throughout the building, people felt that the publisher had crossed the line in his advocacy of the President. Reporters and editors came to visit me, still thinking that I had some influence with the man. They were embarrassed. Their colleagues at other newspapers and magazines were chiding them—how could they continue to work for a paper like that?—and some of the experienced reporters were wondering if they should quit.
The publisher’s only defense was that the public agreed with him. Circulation was continuing to climb—it was up nearly eighty thousand daily from what it had been when he bought the paper. And the stock price had nearly doubled, to ninety dollars a share, making the employee shareholders considerably more prosperous. Perhaps it was hypocritical—the employees who were criticizing Galvin’s actions were also benefiting from them. But there’s something to be said for hypocrisy. The world would be a worse place, surely, if everyone always acted on their convictions. It’s a sign of maturity and mental health to be able to carry contradictory ideas in your mind, without discomfort.
CANDACE DID HER BEST to hide her relationship with Galvin from the newsroom. I knew about it, so I tended to assume that others did too. But I think most people were actually unaware. They knew Candace and the publisher had been lovers once, and they knew they were still friendly. But Candace continued to be seen in public with Mark Pavel, the peripatetic assistant secretary. And her assignations with Galvin were well disguised. As far as the world knew, she never stayed overnight with him. The foreign desk would call her little house in Georgetown in the middle of the night when a plane crashed in France or when the Serbs shelled Kosovo, and she always answered the phone. Perhaps she just had it switched, so that it rang at Galvin’s place. It was impossible, really, to be sure of anything about that relationship.
“Be careful, Candace,” I said to her one morning, after I had again seen them leaving the building together.
“I’m always careful,” she answered. “That’s one thing you have to understand about me, David. I never get caught.”
GALVIN SEEMED TO AGE slightly as the winter set in. It probably wasn’t visible to most people, but I could see that he was thinner, his hair was graying, his face was losing the creaseless look of perpetual youth. It was a surprise, I must say—Galvin was one of those people who seemed to exist out of time. He got sick in late November, for the first time I could remember. He was congested and red-nosed and baggy-eyed, and he seemed to move around the building in slow motion. He was cranky, too. Some people bear illness with grace and good humor—or have the sense to stay at home until they get better—but he was not one of them. I told him to take a vacation, but he was too wound up with his many projects to consider the possibility of leaving. This was his moment. He didn’t want to waste a second of it lying on a beach somewhere.
CURIOSITY ABOUT OUR MERCURIAL publisher had reached the point that I began getting calls from journalists who were writing profiles about him. Evidently they had been tipped by newsroom gossips that I was Galvin’s friend and facto
tum, and might know the sort of idiotic “color” that I myself had once tried to worm out of people for articles in Reveal. My subsequent rise in the world hadn’t made me any more generous, so most of the calls went unanswered. But I received one call from a reporter I genuinely admired, named Michelle Hagel, a woman who had made her way by writing exactly what she thought—the more people she offended in the process, the better. She had succeeded none the less and was now a regular contributor to The New Yorker, but I couldn’t really blame her for that—talent will out.
So I agreed to meet her for drinks, with the forewarning that I didn’t really think I’d be able to offer much help (a line I’d often heard from prospective sources back at Reveal, which nearly always preceded a hemorrhage of information). She was an attractive woman, it turned out. Not a stunner like Candace—she was a bit heavier, and frumpier—but still a handsome woman. And she was Jewish; that was nice. She might have been my sister.
“What’s Galvin really like, once you get past the charm?” she wanted to know. That’s what people always ask about someone interesting—as if what they see with their own eyes couldn’t possibly be the real story. I told her it was a silly question, and threw back a nugget from Oscar Wilde: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” It was fun to show off for such a clever woman, but she cut me off—insisting that I had misunderstood.
The point about Galvin, she said, was that his actions couldn’t possibly be explained by the known facts. His affairs made no sense: He was nominally in the commodities business, but most of his assets had vanished; he was friendly with the President, but had no clear political interest or agenda; he had bought a newspaper, but rumors were circulating in New York that he intended to sell it. He was a series of puzzles. Hagel asked whether I could help her sort it out.
The Sun King Page 17
