Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  Now, it seems to me that an honest and appropriate response to my article (and one that could have saved much trouble in that dovecote) might have been a letter from the restaurant to New York magazine admitting error and promising to shape up in the future. But that, it seems, is not the way of businesses that are run by their public relations departments. What follows is an account of the Dove’s highly un-colombine counterattack.

  Act I. New York magazine reports a fair deluge of letters to the editor about my article. Most of them say “Good for you!” or words to that effect; a few come to the wounded bird’s defense: “... she has maligned one of the finest restaurants in New York ...” “I was shocked at your recent article about the Sign of the Dove and its lack of credibility....” (Do we already detect the fine hand of P.R. at work here?) Two communications addressed to editor James Brady appear to be of more than passing interest: a postcard signed Patti Fink, Westport, Connecticut, which starts, “I happened to be at The Dove the evening Miss Mitford recalls in her article. Unfortunately she did not mention what a scene she made and was drunk”; and a letter signed by Anne Williams of Kew Gardens, New York: “...I would like to tell it as I saw it from the table next door. I feel obliged to say that Miss Mitford was inebriated upon being seated....”

  Here the mystery begins, for a sharp-eyed secretary has noticed that these are both postmarked in New York City and bear the same postal meter number: 1147184! Ms. Fink of Westport and Ms. Williams of Kew Gardens sharing a postal meter in Manhattan? How cozy! Do these ladies actually exist? If so, could they be Dove-connected?

  Act II. I send an inquiry to the Postmaster of New York, who replies: “Kindly be advised that the holder of Postage Meter #1147184 is Med-Den, Inc., 1110—3rd Avenue, New York, N.Y.” This is indeed kindly advice, for that is the address of the Dove. Who, then, is Med-Den? The trail now leads to Dr. Santo, a dentist who owns the Sign of the Dove, doing business under the corporate name of Med-Den Enterprises.

  Act III. I discover via telephone Information that Mss. Fink and Williams are indeed corporeal entities. I get Patti Fink on the phone and ask her about the postcard. She sounds totally mystified —she never sent any such card, she has never been to the Sign of the Dove, she hardly knows anyone in New York. “I’m getting a little paranoid,” she says. “I don’t know who could have used my name.” I observe that I am getting a little paranoid myself, and give her my address in case some clue should occur to her later. In a few days, her letter comes giving the name of a childhood friend, Jane Porter, who works at Med-Den—and who has confessed to forging the postcard! “To say that I am annoyed about this whole situation is putting it mildly,” writes Patti.

  Act IV. Forward to Jane Porter. For the first half of our twenty-minute telephone conversation, she is extremely cool. I learn that she works for a public relations agency but is “not at liberty” to tell me which one; that she signed Patti’s name to the postcard because she did not want to get her agency in trouble; that she was at the Dove on the evening in question with a girl friend, sitting about three tables away from me; that she noticed I was “being kind of loud” and that “everyone was looking your way”; that she recognized me from a photo on one of my books; that she had read all my books but couldn’t remember any of their titles. Furthermore she reiterates that the Patti Fink postcard is the only communication she has sent to New York magazine. “You’re quite sure that you haven’t written another letter?” I ask sternly. “That’s the only one, Miss Mitford.” “You’re absolutely certain?” “Yes.”

  I feel I am not getting very far, so I make vague noises about the law of libel; I mention the Postal Inspectors and the dim view they might take of this use of the U.S. mails. I suggest to Jane that somebody has been using her. Does she not in fact work for Med-Den? “Yes, ma’am,” she answers despondently and floods of tears follow. From now on it is plain sailing.

  The second half of our discussion unwinds like a movie going in reverse. Jane now tells me (between sobs) that she was not at the Dove that evening; that she does public relations work for Dr. Santo at Med-Den; that there were terrible goings-on after my article came out: “Everybody was running around screaming, and everybody was trying to get people to write letters as I guess a form of retaliation, and New York magazine wouldn’t print any of them.” Business fell off, she says; the restaurant is no longer open for lunch. “Oh, like your article caused a lot of hoo-ha,” she wails. I realize that I am behaving like a prosecuting attorney, not my favorite role—I long to comfort her, but there is one other thing I must find out. “Please stop crying, Jane,” I implore. “Just answer this, and you’ve absolutely got to answer truthfully. Did you write another letter and sign it with the name of Anne Williams?” “Yes.” Oh, dear. I beg Jane to pull herself together, we murmur soft goodbyes, we hang up.

  Act V. James Brady, editor of New York, tells me he has been approached by Brenda Johnson of the Johnson & Morton Associates agency, who does public relations for the Sign of the Dove. Ms. Johnson had quite a long chat with Mr. Brady, in the course of which she divulged that my friend and I had been very drunk that evening; that I have a reputation in New York restaurants for getting drunk; that I was once kicked out of the Four Seasons for that reason; that my friend had now repudiated my version of what happened that evening. Curiouser and curiouser!

  So, back to the telephone for the Tale of Brenda Johnson, who answers with a sprightly “Oh, hi, Miss Mitford!” But as with Jane, the sprightliness first dims then vanishes and despondency takes over.

  Brenda Johnson tells me she has represented the Sign of the Dove for about two months—she works with Dr. Santos a couple of days a week. “He’s a wonderful man with broad interests, travels extensively ...” and she tells me all about his recent trip to Japan, but I want to get back to the article. What about the arithmetic on the bill? Well, “Dr. Santo does one hundred percent realize there was an error on the bill, he’s the first to admit that.” So far so good.

  Brenda, who is amazingly long-winded, now rattles off a great deal of other information: there were five bomb scares in the restaurant after my article, hundreds of letters and angry phone calls, “Kooks saying, you know, how dare you do that to people, you are unjust—it went on for days. Now they only get about one a week.”

  So, say I, that’s all of interest but what about your conversation with Mr. Brady? Allegations that I was drunk that night, habitually drunk in New York restaurants, kicked out of the Four Seasons for that reason? A torrent of words pours forth. I try to keep my end up, to make some sense out of what she is saying, but it is not easy. Her source, she says, was the Dove’s manager; he’d worked at the Four Seasons years ago and said there had been a problem, didn’t say kicked out ... she never did tell Mr. Brady I have a reputation in New York as a drunk; “I’m smart enough as a young businessperson not to ever say that about somebody ...” she never said my friend repudiated the story—oh, dear, now she’s crying. Damn, but I must get to the bottom of it, so when she pauses for breath (which is not often) I interject a question. What about the Jane Porter forgeries? She says she doesn’t know anything about them, so I read them out. She is shocked! She’d met Jane at work, up at Med-Den, but had no idea she could ever do such a thing. “I tell you if I even dreamed that she would do that I think that I would be so angry that I would bash her head against the wall.”

  “Rather a violent reaction,” I observe mildly, “in view of the fact you did exactly the same thing in your conversation with the editor of New York magazine.” After that, Brenda seems to run out of steam and shuts up. There is really no more to be said.

  Epilogue. Many of the cast of characters in this brief drama are no longer on stage. The manager has been fired. Jane Porter has been told her services are no longer needed. One puzzler remains: did Dr. Santo put Jane and Brenda up to their act? Both women told me no, he did not; but wishing to check further (after all, neither had been exactly candid when I had spoken with them), I called Dr
. Santo to ask him directly. His secretary told me he did not wish to talk to me. It seemed almost a relief, after the verbal barrage from P.R.

  CURTAIN

  Note: Some names have been changed to protect those of the guilty who have already suffered enough.

  COMMENT ON TWO “DOVE” PIECES

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Nora Ephron for getting “Checks and Balances” placed. I doubt I could have done it on my own, for I should never have dreamed that any magazine would want a full-fledged article about these events, and should have felt diffident about suggesting it to an editor.

  The morning after the Dove disaster, I was frantically looking for someone who would expose that rotten enterprise. I called up Mimi Sheraton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, to ask if she might consider running a letter from me in her column; she was sympathetic, but explained that Times policy is to refrain from printing letters pro or con a restaurant unless it has previously been reviewed. Thus far she had not reviewed the Dove. She might in the future, she said; but the future was too far ahead for my liking. I tried calling Betty Furness, consumer affairs radio and TV commentator, and got a recorded announcement: “If you have a complaint, write a letter and your complaint will be investigated ....” As I hung up, I reflected sadly that my shabby treatment at the Sign of the Dove was hardly a matter of vital concern to the average New York consumer, beset with daily iniquities in the prices and quality of children’s shoes, breakfast cereals, garage mechanics’ services. Who cares if two self-indulgent old ladies, admittedly willing to splurge on a good meal, get taken? It was perhaps the least important consumer issue in New York.

  Later that day I was sobbing out my tale to Nora Ephron. “Don’t budge,” she said. “Sit right there, I’m calling the editor of New York, I bet they’ll love it.” She did, and they did.

  So far so good. But I was leaving New York the next day, which meant dashing the piece off in a matter of hours; the editor wanted no more than 750 words, always difficult of achievement. The shape of an article depends on the length, and one has to plan accordingly, as one would in cutting the pattern of a dress for a doll or a grown-up woman. In many ways the finicky work of designing the doll’s dress is more demanding.

  I had long since learned that you exceed the required length at your peril, particularly at the low end. If an editor asks for 6,000 words, he may allow considerable leeway, anywhere from 5,500 to 6,750 if that is what it takes to say what needs saying. But as I discovered some years ago when doing occasional reviews for Life, 750 words generally means an allowance of no more than twenty words either way. A Life review was always sandwiched snugly between two columns of advertisements, which for some reason the editors deemed less expendable than the wit and wisdom of reviewers.

  I fiddled around with the Dove piece, trying to devise a 750-word “shape” for it, while the precious hours slipped by. There are few things more frustrating than working against this kind of deadline, when it begins to seem as though nothing will come right—and that perhaps, after all, the story is hardly worth telling. How to convey the bite and drama? Ah! Now I had it—a playlet, five acts and an epilogue, would at once solve the problem of condensing the narrative and obviate the need for transitions, always great space-consumers. Once I had written “Act I,” “Act II,” and so forth, on separate sheets of paper, the story fell into place quite satisfactorily.

  My title, “April Fool at the Sign of the Vulture” (our misadventure having occurred on April 1st) was changed by the editor, who thought “Vulture” might be defamatory, to “Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove.” Actually this was the better title, a felicitous play on words which got the name of the restaurant right into the headline where it would catch the eye of Dove fanciers and disparagers alike.

  After “Checks and Balances” was published, I began to think that, judging by the flood of letters from disgruntled Dove diners forwarded to me by New York magazine, maybe I had after all hit on a consumer issue of sorts. Typical was one from a man who was entertaining relatives from out of town: “Even though my wife and I are used to eating in many of the better restaurants in the city, we were quite unprepared for the astronomical bill,” he wrote. He paid up with his credit card, adding 15 percent for the tip. The maître d’ came over and asked loudly before the assembled company, “Do you intend to leave the rest of the tip in cash? It’s customary at the Sign of the Dove to leave 20 percent.” But my favorite letter was from a woman who said she had “often fantasized” writing an article like mine. “Just to add insult to injury,” she wrote, “I pursued the matter further. I called the Sign of the Dove and made a reservation for six persons for dinner. Two hours after making the reservation, I called and insisted on speaking to the manager. When he got to the phone, I told him that I had made the reservation, but that after reading your piece, I wouldn’t dream of subjecting myself or any of my friends to such a place....”

  The real drama began with the “Patti Fink” and “Anne Williams” communications. It is such unanticipated responses to an article that, in my experience, are the true reward of the writer, transcending even the pleasure of seeing one’s work in print and getting paid for it. (The Dove, in fact, paid off twice and I recovered the cost of the dinner many times over.) For days after the editor of New York sent me the Fink/Williams communications, and told me of his conversation with Brenda Johnson, I lived in a state of concentrated excitement as clue after clue emerged: the New York Postmaster’s identification of Med-Den as owner of Postage Meter No. 1147184; the discovery through “Patti Fink” of the whereabouts and occupation of “Jane Porter”; the link between Med-Den and TSOTD....

  Having verified the Dovish connection with the mystery postage meter, I embarked on the time-consuming job of tracking down and interviewing “Patti Fink,” “Jane Porter,” and Brenda Johnson. In all, I must have spent four or five hours on the telephone with those wailing ladies. “Patti” was clearly an innocent; “Jane” sounded like a sad sack, an underling ineptly trying her best in this, her first job, to curry favor with the boss, and hardly a person worth contending with. Not wishing to cause these two sufferers further misery, I gave them fictitious names in the article. But I was not about to let that self-styled “smart young businessperson” Brenda Johnson off the hook. Her name and that of her public relations agency are authentic.

  While generally refusal of the principal to talk creates serious obstacles for the investigator, sometimes, as in the case of Dr. Santo, silence may prove to be golden.

  The Dove saga got quite a play on television; it was discussed on the Dick Cavett and Phil Donahue shows, and on some local programs. New York kept the joke going for a while in their Competition page. A prize-winning entry to the competition in which readers were asked for TV pilots not likely to be seen on the air: “The Silent Dr. Santo. In this new adventure series, detective/gourmet Jess Mitford searches for the exclusive and mysterious Dr. Santo. Clues lead her to a once-fashionable East Side aviary.” And another, in a competition asking readers for an example of bad news (such as, “Looks like ringworm to me, Farrah”): “Miss Mitford, we’re calling to confirm your table reservation....”

  WAITING FOR O’HARA

  NEW WEST / January, 1978

  Is he in heaven, is he in hell,

  That demn’d, illusive Pimpernel?

  The Scarlet Pimpernel must have been one of the most seductive, attractive men in all literature to devotees of Baroness Orczy’s novels; incomparably daring, resourceful, his motives unmixed with base desires for worldly wealth, Jack O’Hara is such a legendary figure to me. Money means little or nothing to him; he probably lives on a mere pittance. He pursues his curious path in life only for the joy of it; for sheer pleasure, not profit. And what a tightrope he walks! Dangers stare him in the face, but he never flinches. A brilliant researcher with a mind like a steel trap, he devours and analyzes facts with the rapidity of a computer.

  To set the scene for this Gothic tale: It w
as a dark and stormy night—or, rather, it was actually a bright mid-drought November, 1977, morning in San Francisco—when attorney Dave Pesonen’s secretary dashed to the courthouse and dragged her boss out of a hearing. A whispered conference ensued. There was a message, she said, from Jack O’Hara, a printer who was employed at the P. G. & E. print shop. O’Hara had just received an emergency, top-secret order from P. G. & E.’s Los Angeles investigator concerning Pesonen’s client, who had a major lawsuit pending against P. G. & E. O’Hara was instructed to print up a confidential report on the client, compiled in 1972, including logs of a nine-day wiretap of his telephone plus reams of correspondence with B. B. D. & O., the advertising agency that represents P. G. & E. O’Hara could not be reached on the print shop phone—that would be too risky—but he would call Pesonen’s office back from a pay phone within the hour.

  Pesonen, hardly able to believe his good fortune (for this is the sort of documentation of an opponent’s skulduggery that every lawyer dreams of), excused himself from the hearing and rushed back to his office to await O’Hara’s call, which came through as promised. “He sounded very overwrought,” Pesonen told me. “He’d worked for P. G. & E. for fifteen years; he didn’t think much of my client but he did feel that this kind of unauthorized, undercover surveillance was dirty pool. I said I’d love to have a copy of the report—how could I get it? Could I bring it to my office at night Xerox it? He became even more agitated—no, that was out of the question. He could do it for me on the P. G. & E. copying machine, but there was a problem about the paper. The machine takes a special kind of roll—Kodak Triple A— which is only carried by certain suppliers. I wouldn’t know where to find it, he said; he’d have to buy it himself as the paper in the shop is closely inventory-controlled. He would need two rolls, costing eighteen dollars and twenty-five cents each. It would have to be done that very day because he had been ordered to destroy the plates. He had time off that afternoon to go to the ophthalmologist, would meet me and collect the money for the paper.”