Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  But weekdays I would work overtime to find a kernel of an investigative political story. I often ran this kernel by Bob; he seemed so willing to give me advice that it was hard to get him off the phone.

  I was perplexed. Didn’t he have better things to do? He was now district attorney of New York County—elected about seven months after the Times hired me—and it was a mammoth job. He oversaw hundreds of assistants who tackled thousands of crimes.

  But I suspected there was more. Did he have a wee crush on me? If so, I was sure it was innocent; I certainly didn’t have any romantic feelings for him, someone that old. But I did like it when I picked up the phone and heard his resonating voice: “Bob Morgenthau. Got a pencil?”

  After the Red Dye No. 2 story, Arthur Gelb officially anointed me an investigative reporter. Bob was so pleased it seemed as though he had been given the moniker himself. He asked me to lunch to celebrate. It would be the first time we met face-to-face since I did the UPI story on him some three years before.

  He suggested dim sum at a spot near his office in the Criminal Courts Building. From the moment we sat down, the rapport we had developed on the phone disappeared. Tension pervaded our booth. I had by now cultivated several news sources, become easy with them and skilled at making them feel easy too, but there was something mystifying here. Sitting, slurping the hot juice from steamed buns, we seemed to have little to say, looking up at each other and then quickly away. I kept peeking at his wide, exquisitely formed mouth, his gracefully large nose, and his dark grayish hair, which looked as if it had been cut with fingernail scissors. Unaccountably, the sight of him intrigued me. I had always disliked the mundanely gorgeous, the male model, the movie star looks. I like the unusual, the quirky, the kind of man you don’t see anywhere else.

  As I walked him to his office, I assessed New York’s new DA. He wore an outdated green suit with square shoulders and baggy pants that looked as if they might have belonged to his father. Smoke from his cigar, a big, fat smelly one, wafting over to my nose … the cigar, undoubtedly an illegal Cuban, protruding from the side of his mouth, making him look like James Michael Curley, the crooked former Boston mayor I remember from childhood.

  This was the heretic prosecutor who as former U.S. Attorney was supposed to handle only New York crimes but had extended an elastic arm into international arenas? The one who prosecuted white-collar criminals who had laundered billions in offshore accounts? This representative of the status quo who was increasingly feared (friends who brought in their corporate clients hoping for leniency were disappointed; in fact, Bob’s response could be particularly harsh), wasn’t he a kind of revolutionary in his own right? Deliciously subversive, without fanfare or public protest.

  No blown-up hair or shoes polished into mirrors. Messy desk, cracked leather. He could’ve cared less how he came across because he was secure and confident in his ability to slip through the cracks in the system to which he supposedly belonged. To meet someone so comfortable in his own skin, especially when I was not, was dizzying. His scheherazadian personality delighted me.

  * * *

  It was the fall of 1975. Nixon had resigned a year earlier; the takeover of Vietnam by the Vietcong and the official end of the war had been declared. President Gerald Ford had declared amnesty for draft dodgers, but still Roger was squirreled away in my apartment. NBC had let him go six months after it hired him. “That’s what I get for working for the establishment: fired for being a war resister,” he said at the time, but I was not so sure that was how it had happened. The closer we came to peace in Southeast Asia, the more the war protests waned, the more irate Roger became. If Nixon came on the air, for instance, he would hurl my sentimental yellow-quartz ashtray from London at the TV screen. Finally, I threw the ashtray back at him, splitting his lip. The neighbors complained—once they called the police—because our flimsy apartment walls reverberated with our fights. His endless curses about Vietnam finally had a deep effect on me. It made me question what really motivated him. As I listened to the shouts of my comrades burning effigies of Gerald Ford—the only president who had provided some kind of conditional amnesty for draft resisters—it struck me that for many, bringing anarchy to the country was personal. If they were troubled, if they had chaotic minds, then what better place to live than in a nation of chaos.

  I had been able to endure Roger’s rage against the Vietnam War, the draft, and the system, because he gave as much as he took. He had always understood how much my childhood haunted me, and he knew what to do about it. I usually avoided seeking comfort from my boyfriends; nevertheless, those nights when I woke in a panic, Roger always reached for me. By day, when he saw that look on my face, he knew that if he held me often in his big bear arms, I could finally let go of my sense of low-level dread.

  * * *

  I suppose today my mother would be labeled bipolar, but when I was a small child, she was simply God. She saw through me to my worst side. “I know it was you who stole half my petits fours on top of the icebox last week,” she might suddenly lash out. “Well, sister, God’s going to punish you. You’re going to walk into a wall,” upon which I would stomp off and promptly walk into a wall. When I was older, my beloved daddy was either away on endless “business trips” or at his workbench in the cellar, the sanctum where he could escape my mother and down his endless shots of Dewar’s. When I got home from school, I never knew who she would be or why. She could meet me with a smile and a dozen powdered doughnuts or, for no apparent reason, still in her pastel satin nightgown, chase me around the house with a yardstick. I both loved her and hated her. Since she never seemed to decide whether I was good or bad, I didn’t know either. This subconscious state of not knowing never left me.

  Like so many berated children, I vowed to make a success of myself, and when I did, my mother switched tacks. She treated me respectfully, almost reverently. I sent her every kudo I got from editors because it made her finally rejoice in me. She subscribed to five papers in case I had an article in them; she shared them with her friends and bragged when I interviewed movie stars or went to Buckingham Palace to meet the queen. She loved every word I wrote. Perhaps I was the tool that finally gave her happiness, status even. But it was too late; she had molded me into a person balanced on the precipice, doomed to be unsure when I woke up in the morning whether I would feel like the confident, successful woman or the dorky kid who had something wrong with her. In fact, both personalities were inside me: the outer bravado of a celebrated journalist and the meekness and self-doubt of a child.

  Roger wanted me to talk to Mother, resolve what had happened between us. But now that she was sick and dying, I just couldn’t. So he decided he could resolve it for me. He believed he could expunge all the stuff my mother made me believe about myself through the avant-garde therapies of the moment, even the ones that were half-cracked. We tried primal scream. I was supposed to close my eyes and let out my inner anguish in a series of piercing screams. But I was afraid of our already irate neighbors, and all I could produce was a pathetic mewing.

  We tried est and we tried Gestalt, both of which advocated taking the power out of memory, accepting your past, and just getting on with life. I went around for days repeating the mantra “I am what I think, I am what I think,” but my contrary nature could not put up with the exercise for long. As a joke, I began to say, “I think what I am,” causing Roger to fume.

  One night he turned off the lights and told me to lie down next to him. “Concentrate as hard as you can on terror,” he said. “Try to feel it. Be six years old again. Imagine the boogeyman crawling in your window. Imagine your mother coming at you with a knife.” I gritted my teeth, made my breath come fast, tried to envision myself charged with terror. But the only charge I felt was caused by Roger’s muscular thigh touching mine.

  Finally, he decided to apply his creativity to reinventing my childhood. He would dissect my memories and, like a father with a child, make them into stories. But he would change the cha
racters so that the little girl who balanced on two chairs to steal the little frosted cakes would be a perfectly nice girl and the mother would be so sane that she would laugh at the girl’s ingenuity. He taught me how I became the innocent scapegoat of my mother’s misery and convinced me, at least intellectually and at least for a while, that the jury was in: I was the definitive good child.

  * * *

  At some point, however, all the stories were told. It became increasingly clear that Roger resented me, his woman, who had risen far above him in journalism, a profession he aspired to. He had no job, no money, was living off me in a city he hated. Although Ford, by executive decision, had declared conditional amnesty in September 1974 for draft resisters, Roger resented the requirement that he do two years of public service and continued to be obsessed by Nixon’s crimes in Southeast Asia. We were near the end of our affair. I saw finally that his passion to keep Vietnam alive was more personal than political, that he was threatened by the fact that I was no longer the victim of intellectual hysteria: the belief that the people of “Amerika” would rise up and bring on a coup. Those who had given their youth, their prospects, to these enthrallments, what options did they have left? How could they now even survive within the system? Who would hire them?

  In late November 1975, he announced he was moving to Telluride, Colorado, a town in the Rockies populated by hippie refugees, ski bums, and trust-funders who were building little Victorian houses in the hills. He had visions of earning enough money writing for alternative magazines to build a little Victorian house too. He tacked a quotation up in our kitchen by the writer Richard Reeves, who left the Times after six years: “I’d rather be writing my novel.” It was meant, of course, for me.

  He pestered me constantly. “You say you want to write a novel. You’ll never write a novel at the Times. Come with me and really do something with your life.”

  For a while, I ignored him. And then, in January 1976, my mother died. With her went my ambitions to rise in journalism.

  2

  I stayed on at the Times for a few more months after my mother’s death, and then I abruptly quit. I decided this while standing in a hospital corridor, waiting to see if an attempted suicide by Representative Wayne Hays—hounded by the press for his carnal indiscretions—would be successful. It was June 1976, and I was in the middle of the congressional sex scandals.

  The New York Times hated being beaten by The Washington Post, which had come out with a story that Elizabeth Ray, a secretary of the powerful Ohio congressman Hays, had been hired exclusively to service him. So Arthur Gelb told me and another reporter, John Crewdson, to get on a plane and not come back until we’d found our own Elizabeth Ray. We combed Capitol Hill, but people were scared, making our mission difficult. I found myself lingering on the doorsteps of female staff members, waiting to ambush them when they came home. Finally, I was led to the reluctant secretary of a longtime Texas congressman, John Young, who admitted that she had gotten a pay raise after having sex with Young. We used everything we had to get her to talk, telling her she had a moral responsibility to come clean, assuring her of how much better she would feel. Yet when the exclusive was published, I certainly didn’t feel better. The loftier newspapers were justifying their participation in the frenzy as “investigative reporting” that uncovered the illegal use of taxpayers’ money, but they, like the tabloids, loved a lascivious piece of anti-news; it boosted circulation. A year after the Times printed the John Young story, his wife committed suicide. Two years later, the congressman lost his seat. I went into the bathroom and threw up.

  When I was assigned to the hospital to watch what would happen to Hays, I felt more like a ghoul than a journalist. Hays survived, but as a reporter I did not; I saw my profession from a different side of the prism. Nothing had seemed as important as racing around full of adrenaline to get the scoop of the month. Now it all seemed pointless and often destructive. My stories were too soon forgotten by everyone except the people whose lives they had ruined; the narratives I’d worked so hard to craft ended up lining the cages of parakeets.

  In actuality, the only person who mattered was my mother. Now that she was dead, there was little glory in what I did. She had been so taken with my success that she introduced herself as the “mother of the Pulitzer Prize winner.” She had appropriated me, but that was fine. I had been writing for redemption on a Sunday afternoon, to hear across the phone lines her peals of pleasure at my latest kudo. When the tip of my toe was blasted off in Derry, the first call I made had been to UPI dictation and the second to my mother. The acceptance in her voice finally released me.

  * * *

  It was in 1976, just after the Hays deathwatch, that I told Arthur Gelb I was going to leave the paper; it was, I said, one of the hardest decisions I had ever made. He tried to talk me out of it. Then he literally marched me into Abe’s office, as if to an execution. The executive editor was nonplussed: at that time, star reporters, in fact no reporters, ever walked out on the most exalted job in the profession.

  Arthur folded his arms in obeisance as Abe chastised me. “If you do this,” he said, his puff of black hair seeming to rise with his temper, “if you are foolish enough to do this, you will have nowhere to go but down.”

  “Uh-huh,” Arthur said, nodding sternly. “Down.” Arthur was never stern; he had always supported me, except when he was supporting Abe.

  “And I’d be surprised if you got up,” Abe said coldly.

  I stared at him. “Um, I’m sorry you see it that way,” I said, “but…” I suddenly started to weep. I babbled on about my mother, cancer, death, exhaustion, my novel. The two men seemed to back away from me. Abe held out his handkerchief and I took it, stupidly blowing my nose, wondering whether I could get back into the building to return it freshly laundered. Arthur started to put an arm around me, but it just hovered in the air. They both looked stupefied, alarmed. One of their most fearless employees had become a puddle on the rug. I was scared too. I had just sealed my fate. I would be nothing without the front page of the Times to prop me up. Who would want to read a novel by a nobody?

  Arthur dropped his arm. “Abe, she has had a rough time.”

  Abe just stood there staring wide-eyed at me. “Well,” he said weakly, “we could make an exception, call this a leave of absence. If she wrote some freelance pieces for us, she would still be part of the Times family.”

  I wiped my eyes with my sleeves and nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll write for you.”

  Abe stroked his dark bristled chin. “Okay, go write your book,” he said, and then, relieved that I had stopped crying, he added in a near whisper, “I don’t believe I’m saying this, but you always have a place here.”

  I tried to convince myself that I wouldn’t miss the excitement of the Times, that I would be happy writing on my own, and that I could learn to love Roger, now that I was to become just another independent unemployed hippie like him.

  The night before I was to leave to join Roger, the phone rang. I didn’t answer it. I was too engrossed in trying to finish a freelance piece for Rolling Stone. Then it rang again. I reluctantly picked it up to the blast of a familiar deep voice.

  “Bob Morgenthau,” it said. “Uh, my secretary is impossible. She never tells me anything, and I was just going through some documents and I found this invitation to go to a ‘peanut party’ at Arthur Schlesinger’s house tonight. He was a close adviser to Kennedy, you know. It’s for a good cause—to raise money for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign debts and I guess, oh, I don’t know, I think it might be interesting. I thought I might go.”

  “Really,” I said, baffled but intrigued.

  “Ah, I’m not going alone. I thought you could go with me.”

  “Oh.” Bob Morgenthau, my news source, was asking me for a date? And at the last minute! He must be hard up. I knew his reputation, had heard the joke about the book titled “People Who Said No to Bob Morgenthau”: it consisted of half a page. Well, I was about to
make the book a bit longer.

  “Thank you, but I can’t really. I’m in the middle of writing an article and it’s overdue.”

  “You can write that anytime,” he replied in a voice so emphatic that it felt as if Jann Wenner himself were giving me an extension. Still, I rarely let myself be coerced.

  “I have nothing to wear,” I said lamely.

  “I’ll pick you up at six,” he said, chuckling, and hung up.

  * * *

  And so, on that warm June evening, I found myself entering the portal of the Schlesingers’ Upper East Side town house, tightly clutching Bob’s arm.

  Inside, a fairyland. A ghastly fairyland of flowing chiffons, feathery boas coiling around swan-thin necks, sequins flickering like fireflies, creamy shoulders beneath satin halters, noses high, eyebrows raised, eyes on the door, whispers: “She can’t be wearing a Kenzo!” “How did she get into a Betsey Johnson?” Tanned ankles peeking out of palazzo pants, tiny dresses hugging anorexic bodies crowned by huge beehives. Living lollipops.

  I’m in a Fellini dream sequence. Naked. Every finger pointing at me. “She’s wearing a tie-dyed vest! Mud-colored bell-bottoms. Platform shoes. Is she a babysitter?” Hiding behind Bob as we make our way through the clots of glitterati—Kitty Carlisle, Diane Von Furstenberg, Brooke Astor.

  I suspected Bob had asked me to the party so he could sell me on some story, and I wished he would get on with it. I slunk off to find the bathroom—maybe I could at least twist my hair up in the back—when a petite, impeccably groomed woman stopped me.