Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  “Brendan Kaiser cares, too.”

  Kaiser was the owner of the station. And he’d been the catalyst for my memo. His daughter had gotten a soccer scholarship to Cornell. And his wife was the new part owner of a pro team in the women’s basketball league.

  “It all started with that Title IX crap,” Stratton said now, shaking his head in frustration. “First, we had to start giving scholarships to women for soccer and lacrosse and all that nonsense. Then women started demanding to play sports the men played. Basketball, baseball—hell, there’s even women trying out for football teams now. Sports news today is filled with all this politics and protests and diversity stuff instead of box scores and football stats like it should be.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Steve,” I told him

  Then there was Wendy Jeffers, our weather person. Wendy was mad at me because I’d made her stop doing her weather reports outside while standing in the middle of a snowstorm or a downpour or high winds. Instead, I told her to give the weather to our viewers from the studio, like the rest of the Channel 10 news team.

  “Being outside lends authenticity to my reports,” she said now.

  “You really think you need to be holding an umbrella to tell people that it’s raining?”

  “It helps for them to actually see the rain.”

  “They could just look out their window,” I pointed out.

  “C’mon, Clare, every other weather reporter in this town does the weather while standing outside in the weather.”

  “If every other weather reporter in town decided to jump off the George Washington Bridge, would you do that?”

  Okay, it was a childish response. But weather forecasters who stood outside in pouring rain or snow—to tell the viewers that it was pouring rain or snowing—were one of my pet peeves about TV news. It wasn’t journalism, it was cheap theater. And I wanted to change that. Even if Wendy didn’t.

  I finally decided to offer her a compromise. She could report from outside if a snowstorm went over six inches, the winds were over fifty mph or the rain was falling at more than an inch an hour.

  “That way we can still watch you getting drenched or covered in snow or blown away in hurricane-force winds,” I said. “But otherwise you do the weather safe and dry and warm from inside the studio.”

  “I can live with that,” Wendy said.

  Ah, Carlson, you clever devil.

  Problem?

  I’ve always got a solution.

  “Anyone else have a complaint?” I asked everyone in the meeting room.

  “I do,” said Maggie Lang, my assignment editor and top deputy at Channel 10. Maggie was super intense and dedicated to her job.

  “Go ahead, Maggie. Take your best shot. What’s your problem?”

  “My problem is we still don’t know what news we’re going to put on the air tonight.”

  She was right. So we spent the next forty-five minutes going over all the big stories of the day. A looming taxi driver strike. Questions about voting irregularities in the last City Council election. Lots of crime, including a woman who had miraculously survived after being stabbed more than a dozen times by her ex-boyfriend on the Upper East Side. A protest over a homeless shelter the city wanted to build on the same block as a school. Plenty of news to fill up the Channel 10 news broadcast later.

  “What do you think?” I said to Maggie after we’d gone through it all.

  “We could still use a big story.”

  “We could always use a big story.”

  “No, I mean something unique for us—an exclusive.”

  “I might have a story like that very soon.”

  “What is it?” one of the other editors at the meeting asked.

  “I can’t tell you yet, but I’m working on it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “LAURIE BATEMAN’S LIFE with Charles Hollister is a big lie,” Janet had said to me in my office. “Now she wants to tell the truth about all those lies she’s been hiding behind. Just like you did.”

  Yep, I sure had told the truth about myself. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It took me long enough to do it though. Almost twenty years.

  But I’d finally gone on the air and revealed the whole story, including all the secrets I’d been hiding about the biggest news story of my career.

  The disappearance of eleven-year-old Lucy Devlin on her way to school in New York City a long time ago.

  I won a Pulitzer Prize as a young newspaper reporter covering the Lucy Devlin story. But there was a lot I didn’t reveal then: how I’d been sleeping with Lucy’s adoptive father at the time of her disappearance; how she’d really been taken by a self-styled vigilante trying to protect Lucy from her abusive adoptive mother; and, most important of all, how I was Lucy’s biological mother who had given her up for adoption at birth.

  Fifteen years after Lucy Devlin’s legendary disappearance, I’d finally tracked her down—alive, all grown-up and with a daughter of her own—and eventually decided to go on air with the real story about me and Lucy Devlin.

  Even though I knew by doing so, I could destroy my credibility as a journalist and possibly even end my career.

  But sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts about what’s right and not worry about the consequences.

  In this instance, my instincts turned out to be dead-on accurate.

  Oh, it probably wouldn’t have been that way ten or fifteen years ago. Maybe even five years ago. A journalist who screwed up—who played loose with the facts—never could recover from that. Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass—the past is filled with media scandals that ruined careers.

  But it’s different now in this instant gratification age of social media where things go viral quickly and public opinion is formed instantly about a controversial topic.

  In my case, I was forgiven for my judgment lapses and hailed for my courage in coming forward and talking about my secret search to find my daughter no matter what I had to do and no matter what rules I had to break.

  Everyone wanted a piece of me after that.

  I was interviewed on the Today Show. I went on 60 Minutes. I got big play on all the cable news channels. There were articles about me and my long, emotional search for my daughter in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and other papers. I got an offer to write a book about it all, a potential movie deal was in the works, and I even received a handful of marriage proposals from men who said they would help me ease my pain over everything that I had endured with Lucy.

  So I didn’t ruin my career at all by coming clean with everything I did. Instead, I became a media superstar all over again. Even bigger than I had been the first time for winning a Pulitzer for a story that wasn’t totally true. Go figure.

  I have a picture of my daughter on my desk that I look at a lot during my workday. Her name is Linda Nesbitt now, but I still call her Lucy. She’ll always be Lucy to me. She lives in Virginia with her nine-year-old daughter, Audrey, and her husband, Gregory Nesbitt. There’s a picture of my granddaughter, Audrey, on my desk, too.

  I see them as often as I can. We’ve been talking about spending Christmas together, if I can get away from work to go down there. It would be our first Christmas together as a family. It’s nice to have their pictures here with me in my office all the time now. It’s nice to be a part of a family.

  Of course, we’re not your normal everyday family. Not after everything it took to get us to this point. It makes me think of the old gag line: “Hey, they’re just as normal as the next family. As long as the next family is the Manson family!”

  Well, we’re not the Manson family. Far from it. More like the Addams family. Strange, different, and a bit odd—but still lovable.

  I thought about all that now—and also about Laurie Bateman.

  Laurie Bateman was a celebrity superstar. A lot bigger than me. And she’d be an even bigger celebrity superstar once she went public with all the dirty laundry about her
marriage to Charles Hollister and told her story of whatever she’d gone through while being married to one of the world’s richest men.

  No question about it, this interview would put Laurie Bateman in the public spotlight even more than ever before. She would ride this interview to even bigger fame and fortune. And me, well, I’d go along on that ride with her.

  It’s a funny thing about fame though. Sure, it was Andy Warhol who made the classic “everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes” statement. But I always preferred a quote from Marilyn Monroe: “Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.” And then there was Alanis Morissette who once said: “Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it.”

  Nope, fame isn’t always as great a thing as it’s made out to be.

  I’d found that out the hard way.

  Maybe Laurie Bateman had, too.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE LAURIE BATEMAN story was a pretty damn interesting one, even before all the divorce stuff.

  I sat in my office, going through background material I’d pulled together about Laurie Bateman—and Charles Hollister—to get ready to interview her.

  She was only six months old when she first arrived in America along with her mother, who had fled Vietnam in the last days of the war as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces captured Saigon.

  Laurie’s father had died while she was a baby. It wasn’t exactly clear how he died, but I remembered seeing pictures and film from then of Vietnamese people hanging on to U.S. helicopters in a desperate effort to flee before the Communists arrived in Saigon. I could only imagine the nightmare that must have been for Laurie Bateman’s family.

  Her name wasn’t Laurie Bateman then. It was Pham Van Kieu. The name Kieu means “pretty” in Vietnamese lore. So it seemed like the perfect choice for her. Her family name of Pham was one of the most common surnames in Vietnam—sort of like Jones or Smith here. In another time and another place, she might have grown up and gone on living her life as Pham Van Kieu.

  But her mother changed her first name to Laurie after they arrived in Southern California, trying to help the little girl fit in as they learned to adapt to life in their new country. Not long after that, the mother met and married a man named Marvin Bateman, a prominent and highly successful Hollywood producer.

  It seemed like an unusual pairing to me at first—Bateman and the refugee woman from South Vietnam. But then I saw pictures of the mother. She was beautiful, like her daughter would grow up to be. Well, that certainly explained how she captured Marvin Bateman’s attention. And, once they were married, Bateman formally adopted Laurie as his daughter.

  So Pham Van Kieu became Laurie Bateman.

  Laurie’s mother quickly became a Hollywood stage mom, sending her daughter out as early as three years old on modeling and acting auditions. Little Laurie wound up starring in a series of TV commercials as a little girl—helping to sell everything from cars, to appliances, to clothing lines. She was cute, adorable, and precocious. No doubt Marvin Bateman’s connections in Hollywood helped open a lot of doors for her. But, one way or another, Laurie was a child superstar.

  Then, as she blossomed into a real beauty as a teenager, she switched to modeling and became one of the biggest names in the modeling world.

  There were magazine covers, more TV appearances, and lucrative celebrity endorsement deals for the teenaged Laurie. There was even a brand of jeans named after her. She was the same kind of modeling celebrity that people like Brooke Shields were back then, but maybe even bigger.

  I looked at pictures of a young Laurie Bateman, modeling for newspapers, magazines, and billboards—as well as TV commercials—and I was stunned by her breathtaking beauty. Sleek figure, dark black hair, high cheekbones, and classic model face—she looked perfect. No wonder American consumers fell in love with Laurie Bateman and all the products she endorsed.

  Thus, it was no surprise that she became a Hollywood star after that, with appearances in numerous TV shows and movies beginning when she was in her twenties. She wasn’t a great actress—she never won an Oscar or Golden Globe or any other major award—but she worked a lot. Many of the roles she was in were forgettable, but she wasn’t. Everyone knew who Laurie Bateman was.

  And that popularity and name recognition from the public exploded into super-celebrity stardom once she married Charles Hollister.

  Hollister—like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Rupert Murdoch—had been a modern-day legend for the billions of dollars he was worth and the power and influence he wielded both in the U.S. and internationally.

  There were oil wells; pharmaceutical firms; media holdings in TV, movies, and publishing; and vast holdings in tech industries. He had been on the scene for a long time. Ever since he got rich back in the ’70s by developing a new kind of chip that revolutionized the computer industry and was the pioneer for all that went into our computer-dominated world today of smartphones, iPads, Echo, and all the rest.

  But it was his marriage to Laurie Bateman—thirty years younger than he—that had truly cemented his place on TMZ, Page Six, and all the other entertainment/gossip websites that Americans seem addicted to these days.

  The age difference between the two of them drew a lot of attention and disapproval from the public—as well as plenty of jokes. “They had a great honeymoon except Charles can’t remember much—he napped through most of it.” There were all sorts of memes and GIFs posted online depicting him as a doddering old man and her as a scheming gold digger. And a Las Vegas bookie even offered a betting line on how long the marriage would last—the popular over/under number was six months.

  And yet, despite all the ridicule and skepticism and overall negativity about the validity of the relationship, Laurie Bateman and Charles Hollister seemed to be happy together in the marriage. Even though their lives played out on the pages of every newspaper and website and on every gossip show—like watching episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the Real Housewives. There were pictures of them attending art and theater openings in New York City; summering on his boat at Nantucket or the Riviera; and skiing in the winter at Aspen or in Switzerland.

  In every recorded moment of their public life, they were smiling and affectionate and apparently deeply in love in this April-December marriage of theirs.

  Except now … well, I knew that wasn’t true.

  According to my friend Janet—who I had no reason not to believe either as a friend or a lawyer—there had been serious problems going on behind the scenes for quite some time. Serious enough to have led now to a divorce.

  It was hard to believe that it had all turned out so ugly.

  But it was a great story.

  And, even better than that, it was going to be my story.

  Everything was falling into place for me here on Laurie Bateman—this was going to be an easy exclusive for me to pull off.

  Really, really easy.

  Maybe too easy.

  CHAPTER 5

  MY BOSS AT Channel 10 was Jack Faron, the executive producer. There are all kinds of bosses. Good bosses. Bad bosses. Lazy bosses. But the best kind of boss is the kind you can go to with a problem. A boss who will work with you calmly and rationally—until you come up with a solution for the problem. When you’ve got that kind of boss, it sure makes your job a lot easier. Unfortunately, Jack Faron was not that boss.

  Faron hated problems. He only wanted to hear good news from me. Bad news or problems made him mad—at me. It was definitely a “shoot the messenger” situation when I went to his office with anything he didn’t want to hear. We’d had a long conversation about this recently. He accused me of being too negative. Too cynical. He said I needed to bring a more positive, upbeat approach to my job.

  So I went to his office now to tell him the good news about my upcoming interview with Laurie Bateman.

  “That’s terrific,” Faron said.<
br />
  “I thought you’d like it.”

  “This Laurie Bateman interview story will get us a lot of attention.”

  “True.”

  “And we should draw big ratings for it.”

  “Also true.”

  I didn’t say anything else.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  “No problem.”

  “You look like you have a problem.”

  “Me? No way.”

  “Good to hear.”

  He opened up a bag with his lunch in it. Faron had put on a few pounds—well, more than a few—over the past year and he’d been eating at his desk recently instead of going out for fancy lunches. He unwrapped something from the bag. It was a container of cottage cheese and a variety of fruits. He made a face.

  “How’s the diet going?” I asked him.

  “Okay.”

  “How many pounds have you lost so far?”

  “You can’t judge a diet by weighing yourself every day to see if you’ve lost a pound or two. The key to a good diet is the long haul.”

  “You haven’t lost any weight, have you?”

  “Actually,” he admitted, “I’ve gained five pounds.”

  “Jesus! How did that happen?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You been cheating on the diet?”

  “Well …”

  “C’mon, Jack.”

  “Okay, I’ve been so damn hungry from starving myself all day that I go home at night and kind of lose control. Last night, I wound up at both a McDonald’s and a Baskin-Robbins.”

  “Aha!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Much like Hercule Poirot, I think I’ve solved the mystery of the added weight.”

  Faron stared down at his cottage cheese. “Don’t worry about my weight. Just worry about this Laurie Bateman interview. When can we do it?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I find out more from my friend Janet who set this up.”

  “The sooner the better. This could be a huge ratings-grabber for us, Clare. Just what we needed. It’s perfect.”