Exclusive: Reporters in Love...and War Paperback - 2005

Excerpt

My husband, Jim Mulvaney, dashing and handsome though he may be, is delusional about his appeal to the human race. Let me walk you inside his brain: It is a Saturday in America. Summer. Inside Mulvaney’s brain, it is always summer. No school, no shoes, no shirts. Not even his favorite shirts, plaid with coffee stains. On this sunlit day, men are mowing lawns, pitching baseballs to their sons, having sex with their wives. Suddenly, all these Viagra-free specimens, all these fathers of exclusively male children, have a single thought.

They all want to go to the movies.

And why is that?

The Jim Mulvaney Story.

“Mulvaney!” I say. “You have to be kidding.”

He isn’t.

“Their wives will love it, too,” he tells me.

His blue eyes flash like a smile; that is never a good sign. My middle-aged, long-term husband still believes that every one of his stories is a gem. Even the ones he makes up. As in: Is that “true-true” or “Mulvaney-true”?

Some of his stories are gems.

He was, for example, the last white guy out of Tiananmen
Square.

That’s a true-true story, packed with danger and suspense.

Unless you’ve heard it twenty, thirty times.

I have.

Now, when those eyes of his gleam and he starts using the little Mandarin he knows, I fake a paper cut, an asthma attack, a hemorrhage if need be.

But let’s get back to the movie.

“Mulvaney,” I say, “I just can’t see people rushing off in droves to see a movie about a middle-class kid from Queens who became a newspaper reporter.”
This is when he reminds me that he wasn’t just a newspaper reporter.

“I was a foreign correspondent,” he says, affecting the professorial tone he developed at forty.

“So were half your friends, Mulvaney. You don’t see them foaming at the mouth to tell their life stories.”

He swaggers up to his certificate.

“I know,” I say. “You won a Pulitzer Prize. So did three-quarters of your friends.”

“Barbara,” he says, “need I remind you that I was the last white guy out of Tiananmen Square?”



No matter where he works, my husband will always be the quintessential newspaper reporter. He understands the criminal mind, the tortured psyche of the downtrodden. So why does he have such a hard time figuring out himself? He can’t, for example, imagine why he isn’t rich. It’s not, he says, as if he doesn’t try. Over the years, he has proposed any number of get-rich-quick schemes, including the manufacture of one-size-fits-all dentures. “I need you in on this” is what he always tells me. “Mulvaney,” I say, “I am a writer, not a dental hygienist.” If I have one job as a wife, it is to dissuade Mulvaney. He says we would be rich if I helped him. I say we would be rich if he had a longer attention span.

“We’ll need a book to go with the movie,” he says.

I want to be my husband’s biographer about as badly as I want to open a restaurant that serves fried bugs (another can’t-lose “moneymaker,” based on a Mexican concept that would not have traveled well).

“You’ve got it backward,” I say, hoping to distract him. “Books come first, or at least they should.”

“You have to write the book,” he says. “You are a writer and you know me better than anyone in the world.”

Often, I wish I didn’t.

“Maybe we both can write the movie and the book,” he says. “We can write together.”

I remind him we do very little together without having an argument. Taking out the garbage requires an arms negotiator and a peace accord. The word that comes to most people’s minds when they describe us is “incompatible.”

Even my mother agreed that Mulvaney and I were incompatible, although she did not see this as a problem.

“Marriage, dear, is not about daily comforts,” she told me. “It’s not about getting along and it’s certainly not related to anyone’s career.”

Who, I asked her, said anything about marriage? “Who said anything about marrying Mulvaney?”

“Marriage,” my mother insisted, “is about whether you can tell funny stories, even in hard times, preferably about one another.”

She believed we could, perhaps should, invent those stories. Like Mulvaney, my mother is not a stickler for veracity.



Chapter One

The Barbara Fischkin Story


On a muggy summer morning in the early eighties, I crept along in my war-torn Chevy Nova, inching east with the station wagons on the packed Long Island Expressway. The sign at the construction site said to merge. Fiddling for a city radio station without static, yearning for anything decent, I almost missed my allotted opportunity to squeeze into the only open lane, causing the man behind me to honk wildly, as if this tie-up was all my fault. But crankiness does not cause traffic. It is the other way around. A lone seagull fluttered through the carbon monoxide, and on WBAB, Radio Long Island, disco blared. I couldn't believe they still played disco here. Hadn't John Travolta just checked into a nursing home?

Why, I asked myself, was I on my way to the Suffolk County bureau of Newsday? Why was I even on Long Island, a place I swore I would never live or work?

Because I wanted a better job, if not in Manhattan, at least close to it.

But was it worth this?

I had to remind myself of the facts.

I worked at the Knickerbocker News, a small afternoon daily in Albany, a paper that viewed winning the Pulitzer Prize as a vicarious experience. Newsday, I told myself, might not be the New York Times. But unlike the Times, it had the good taste to do more with my resume than throw it out.

And unlike the paltry "Knick," Newsday had a circulation of 600,000 and growing. So what if it called itself "America's Finest Suburban Newspaper"? At least its slogan wasn't "You've got to get The Knick at Night." I'd been in Albany long enough. Gone to college there, too, a misdirected journey that began because I didn't want to live with my parents in Brooklyn. Brooklyn wasn't Manhattan.
Miraculously, another lane opened. I enjoyed an entire five seconds of carefree driving before another seagull, a bigger one, landed on the road in front of my car. Why didn't these birds stay at the beach where they belonged? I slammed on the brakes and, as the human honking behind me accelerated, swerved and saved that stupid gull's life. In celebration, I flicked off the radio. Even if I could dance, I would have hated disco music. Its philosophy, though, was another matter: Twirl fast, long, and hard with a temporary partner. I had nothing against romance, even a quasi-exclusive romance, as long as it didn't get in the way of my job or my own adventures.

Like the men in Albany did.

The men in Albany, the ones I wound up with anyway, were all Irish and certifiable. Sure, they looked presentable on the surface, even good-looking, thanks to several generations of American nutrition. But they were the types who would invite you cross-country skiing, then get you lost for hours on a trail that headed nowhere, including home. Albany, I was convinced, was where Irish Catholic boys--they were all Catholic--went after they robbed stagecoaches or tied up their mothers but before they were sent permanently to hell. It was like that island where Pinocchio grew donkey ears, except in Albany bad boys were admitted into the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

The sanest man I knew in Albany was, unfortunately, Mario Cuomo. Irish, no. Catholic, yes. Cuomo was about to become governor and the party faithful believed that eventually he would be President, because he was such a great orator and an intellect, too.

Usually, all Mario Cuomo ever said to me was "Barbara! You've lost weight."

I was not as flattered as he'd assumed I'd be. But it did convince me that Mario Cuomo was, indeed, brilliant. When he made that remark, phrasing it as a statement and not as a question, it always made me stop and remember the way my mother would scream gleefully, at the top of her lungs from a dressing room in the Juniors department of Macy's Flatbush Avenue:

"That is not a dress for you! That is a dress for some flat-chested little Twiggy!"

Sometimes I'd forget the question I wanted to ask him.

Also, Mario Cuomo was married, apparently monogamous, and too old, although not as old as some of the people I covered. As the junior reporter in the Capitol Bureau, one of my assignments was the dreaded "After Sixty" column. Since I myself was solidly Under Thirty, the Knick News refused to run my photograph with it.

In retaliation--and to combat boredom--I decided that the "senior" beat needed a criminal justice angle. Within a year, I'd interviewed all the old people in state prisons, always asking Cuomo for comment.

"Lieutenant Governor, don't you think this man has served his time?"

"Barbara," he'd reply, "you look thin."


Newsday had to be better.

Only I didn't have a job there yet.

All they'd said was that I could "try out" for a week. They were going to make me prove that I could cover Long Island, and I couldn't even perform this humiliating audition in a civilized atmosphere.

Newsday's headquarters were on Stewart Avenue in the rarefied village of Garden City, in the heart of Nassau County, a mere twenty-six minutes from Times Square. But I had been told to go to the Suffolk County bureau instead. It was in a place I'd never heard mentioned in any book or movie: Ronkonkoma, New York.

I saw a bumper sticker that said Pray for Me. I Ride the L.I.E. In front of me stretched more cars, more road. On my right and left I passed the backs of housing developments and shopping centers. I didn't think I would like Long Island any better from the front.

Particularly not Ronkonkoma.

Ronkonkoma was smack in the middle of Suffolk County, and Suffolk County, according to my quick research, was the second of Long Island's two counties, the stepsister, the wild, wild east until you got to the Hamptons. I already knew as much about Long Island as I wanted, and it was my impression that the Hamptons didn't count as part of it, inhabited as they were by summer people who read only the Times and believed they were in Martha's Vineyard.

No, the Hamptons had nothing to do with Ronkonkoma. Ronkonkoma was very far and yet not far enough.


The traffic became worse. At L.I.E. Exit 60, late for the first newspaper audition of my life, I negotiated the relentless curve of an off-ramp and decided that those who passed into the heart of Suffolk County never returned. The cars I saw traveling west were a mirage.

Off the Expressway, I got lost.

Most of the houses had aluminum siding. Wood and brick appeared sparingly, as if those materials were proscribed under some odd suburban rationing program. On the relentless commercial strips, I calculated one pizzeria and two fast-food emporiums for every ten aluminum-sided houses. For variety there was a fried clams and ice cream stand with a plastic orange roof. And for gourmets, a Ground Round.


Maybe Newsday would see it my way and move its Suffolk bureau out to the Hamptons, the chic Long Island, if you could imagine such a thing.

Then I could fly to work.

In a private jet.


Mulvaney is looking over my shoulder.

"The book is supposed to be about me! Why is Mario Cuomo in it?"

I have not actually agreed to write anything.

"Well, you knew Cuomo, too. . . ."

"But you don't talk about me and Mario," he says, pointing like a madman to the delete key. "This is about you and Mario! You are not supposed to provide excruciating, irrelevant information about your early life unless you are a really famous author. Which you will be. Once you write about me."

"Mulvaney," I inform him, "if I do write a book about you, it will be mostly about me."

"Okay, so you want to include your childhood because you were already dreaming about me then. You were in love with me before you even met me."

I have to admit there is a sweetness to his strategy that disarms me. He can still do that, so I do not say what I am thinking, which is that falling in love with Mulvaney might be easier if you haven't actually met him.


Chapter Two

First Mulvaney Sighting


Newsday's Suffolk County bureau took up the first floor of a stolid office building, design inspired by Joseph Stalin. I rushed inside, followed a sign to the newsroom, and found myself walking down a stark hallway, adjusting my black wraparound skirt, which had threatened to come undone several times during the long drive. I'd worried about dressing more formally and shouldn't have. Newsrooms are not known for their fashion sense or decor, but this one was in a league of its own. Bare pipes and masses of wires screamed "building code violation." The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard, last waxed before I was born.

Amazingly, everyone wrote on computers, clunky and rudimentary, but at least they had them.

At the Knickerbocker News we were in a "transition period," which did not mean we were trying to put our paragraphs in logical order. No, the Knick's idea of transition was purely mechanical and far from successful. After we typed our stories, an editor added odd symbols, which were then scanned by a computer that made more mistakes than the grizzled and occasionally amiable composing-room drunks it had replaced.

Not that Newsday had achieved technological perfection, either.

Touch-tone, for example, was not a concept embraced by the Suffolk County bureau of America's Finest Suburban Newspaper in the early eighties. All the phones had dials and all the reporters wore headsets that made them look like Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In, particularly the men.

It was a good thing I hadn't come to Long Island looking for a husband, Jewish or otherwise. All I wanted was to be in a place where I could cover good stories and where there might be some men who were presentable and not nuts. I had nothing against romance. But I didn't see why that had to distract me from my work. Couldn't you have a torrid dalliance with a man who was not crazy and did not sap all your energy? I looked around at the men attached to those headsets and ruled out torrid. True, these men swiveled industriously in their chairs and dialed their phones ferociously. But they had pasty faces and sported bellies that popped the buttons of short-sleeved wrinkled white shirts in dire need of Clorox. These were not men you bring home to Mother, particularly my mother, whose taste in everything except her own husband, my father, ran to the flamboyant.

Newsroom? Gloomroom was more like it.

"Welcome to Long Island," said a gangly man, who dressed differently from the others. But not necessarily better. He fidgeted with the wide buckle on the cloth belt of his mustard-colored leisure suit, the type that had been fashionable, briefly, in the seventies. He was, I suspected, that bane of all reporters, an editor.

"And to America's finest suburban paper," he continued, swigging from a can of Coke. "You're late," he said. As if it was a good thing.

I looked at him.

"We pride ourselves on our traffic," he explained.

"What am I doing here?" I said.

"Excuse me?" he replied, pretending to cough.

"I mean, what might you want me to cover?"

"Maybe Huntington."

"Didn't Walt Whitman live there?"

"Walt Whitman," the editor said approvingly. "They named the best mall in Suffolk County after him."

He pointed to a desk and I sat. The men around me stopped swiveling and dialing, smoothed their sorry shirts, stood, nodded, and examined my chest with what I suspected they imagined were surreptitious peeks.

Albany started to look good.

I took a deep breath, crossed my arms in front of me. They squinted in confusion. "It's yoga," I said. They gazed at me as if I had suddenly switched languages. "Gets me revved up to report."

I knew that some men at Newsday had once teamed up to write a very entertaining, very dirty book called Naked Came the Stranger, publishing it as the apocryphal adventures of a fictional suburban wife gone awry. Nobody here, though, looked capable of even dreaming about such a project. Maybe all the guys who wrote that book were in Garden City.

The editor in the leisure suit summoned me to a big table in the front of the Gloomroom. The City Desk. Except there was no city here. He handed me notes for an assignment about Ronkonkoma residents who were vomiting their guts out after eating at Local Clams, the orange-topped HoJo's hopeful I had passed on the way in. I turned toward the door, wondering if I should quit before he actually offered me a job.

A rubber band flew into the air. The editor retrieved it, then picked up a Suffolk County Hagstrom's and tossed it at me. He had the demeanor of a boy who had never been made to sit in the corner, a place he obviously belonged.

Unless you have Typhoid Mary on the loose, food poisoning rarely makes a great, or even a conclusive, story. Was it the chef's fault? Or the dishwasher's? Have the waiters been spitting on the orders? Did somebody have the flu? Is the place in question a dive or a culinary jewel having a bad night? With Local Clams I could eliminate the culinary jewel possibility. But I did not discount the chance that this was a trick played on tryouts, a test to see if I could make a nothing story into something. Into anything.

My thoughts were interrupted by a series of loud, quick stomps, an obscenity shouted into the smoky air, a round of cheers. I gazed up at yet another version of the Newsday male, better-looking than the others but potentially certifiable, just like the men I'd known in Albany. Not tall or dark but good-looking, if a bit Napoleonic. He wore a plaid short-sleeved shirt that fluttered in the air behind him as he stomped, more purposefully now, in the direction of me and Mr. Leisure Suit. He pushed by me and slammed his tapered reporter's notebook onto the City Desk Without a City.

"Excuse me," I said to the plaid back.

The back ignored me. "I speak to cops," he told the editor, slamming his notebook once more for emphasis. "Do not ever ask me to interview a police department public information officer again. I do not speak to anyone in public relations. I speak to cops, robbers, murderers, any level of mobster. I do not speak to PR men!"

I tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me," I repeated.

"Huh?" He turned. There was a coffee stain a few inches below his shirt collar.

"You shoved me." He had curly brown hair, flaming blue eyes.

"Who are you?" he asked, and looked me up and down. Unlike the other male reporters, he did not attempt to hide what he was doing.

Media reviews

“As I read this screwball comedy of two insane but lovable journalists, I kept thinking: Hepburn and Tracy. Fischkin and Mulvaney doesn’t have the same ring, but you will laugh as hard, and love–just love!–the zany characters Barbara Fischkin has created (or exposed, with a wink). Exclusive is a joy to read.”—Ken Auletta, author of Backstory: Inside the Business of News

"A crisp read buoyed by a delightfully caustic voice."—Publishers Weekly