Back at The Journal
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.
Bob Dylan
*
I seem to have done a good job as a stringer covering the University of Oklahoma for The Oklahoma Journal. I called in several stories that made the front page and, on a few occasions, rocked the boat and made the waves that a good journalist should be making.
I earned the wrath of a former English prof of mine who was the faculty advisor for the campus poetry magazine. When he attempted to censor the magazine, I got wind of it and wrote a story which earned me a byline. He cornered me in the grocery store the following week and, after informing me that “you don’t have any understanding of Shakespeare at all” (I had received an “A” in his class), complained that “I was called on the carpet by the chairman of my department because of your story.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking for a way out. I was only a college senior, and this fellow, although not much more than ten years older than me, was not only a former instructor of mine, but a full professor, and a Yale graduate who spoke through his teeth. I finally said, “If you got in trouble, it was because of what you did. I only reported it.”
But he didn’t and never would understand, in the same way that politicians always blame the press for exposing their wrongdoings and peccadillos. I walked away shaking from the ugly confrontation. But that’s one of the glorious things about being a newspaper reporter: if the bad guys blame you for exposing them, you must be doing your job.
*
Sent to discover what had happened to the Students for a Democratic Society following the events of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention (out of which grew the Weathermen, later to become the Weather Underground), I discovered a non-story. “There is no SDS,” its former campus president told me. Instead, leftist students were turning their attention to a new cause, known then as the WLM. I wrote the first story published in Oklahoma about the goals of the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement.
*
A star player on the OU basketball team leveled charges of racism against the sports department and the editor of the campus daily newspaper made a big show of secrecy while he huddled in his office with the player. Emerging from his conference, he ordered everybody in the newsroom to keep quiet, promising a huge scoop for the next morning’s paper.
But back in my apartment, I looked up the jock’s telephone number, got the whole story, and called it in to The Journal. Don Rice wrote the story; I only supplied the details. But my byline appeared on the lead front-page story the next morning, scooping the campus paper and resulting in its editor punishing me by ripping my name off of my newsroom mail slot.
I loved it.
*
And to my considerable surprise, I loved being a newspaper reporter.
This wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Like every J-major in history, I wanted to write the Great American Novel. But as an English and history major, also, and a stickler for details, I was suited for newspaper work.
You don’t last long as a newsman if you don’t have an excellent grasp of the English language, a pretty broad-based education, an ability to cut through the B.S. and spot the important facts, and be more than a little skeptical about anyone’s explanations. Be it the average citizen or big-deal public figure, explanations are always self-serving. I found the company of newsmen to be stimulating and each morning’s product to be a source of pride. Mostly.
*
The Journal newsroom wasn’t much bigger than the family room in an up-scale house. Crammed with metal desks and manual typewriters, flanked by a large, ever-clattering teletype machine and anchored by the city editor’s desk, it resembled a Breughel painting by 10 or 11 p.m. The noise alone could send a vulnerable person into complete autistic withdrawal.
I might be working on a piece of my own, only to hear Rice shouting, “Dimick! Pendley’s on the phone with a police shooting! Take the dictation!”
Short-staffed as we were, we all had a common goal: to beat The Oklahoman and put out the best damned newspaper we could.
(Well, all of us except management, which was concerned less with quality than with the bottom line.)
So I would take dictation. Sometimes the reporter on the other end of the line spun the story off the top of his head and I merely typed. Sometimes it was only the facts, and I would put them together into a coherent story to appear under his byline. It didn’t matter to me. The Journal was generous with bylines, which helped compensate for the lousy pay.
And somehow, amid all the bedlam, a product was created every evening that would hit the metro doorsteps before daylight.
*
We were young, we were idealistic (and, at the same time, cynical), we were educated, well-read, and we fed off of each other. We viewed ourselves as a modern reincarnation of the Algonquin Round Table, although our bon mots never made it outside of the newsroom.
Once we wrote a round-robin novel about the newsroom. Jack Bickham, prolific author and later a professor of creative writing at the OU J-School, wrote the first chapter and passed it on to another staffer. Nobody knew where the story was going, as each succeeding author added his own twists to his chapter. But nobody was spared, and we were careful not to let management see it.
A running joke throughout the novel involved reporter Rhoda Clary, sharp as a scalpel and just as sharp-tongued, and known for her expletive outbursts.
“Goddamn it, Rhoda!” Rice screamed. “We’re sitting on deadline and you hand me copy like this? Who said this quote? What’s his first name? Who the hell is he? Why do I care about his opinion? How old is he? What’s his mother-in-law’s name? What’s his collar size?”
“Shit!” Rhoda said.
*
We loved the paper and we hated it.
We loved it because we were covering stories The Oklahoman ignored: civil rights stories, police brutality, new-Democratic politics, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal. These stories didn’t find their way into the Gaylord papers. Or if they did, it was a watered-down and heavily edited version. According to The Oklahoman, there was no Watergate scandal until the impeachment proceedings began and it could no longer be ignored.
We hated The Journal for its hokeyness. It’s motto was “The Paper That Tells Both Sides” (and for the most part, it did), but it’s sub-motto was “Your Have-A-Good-Day Newspaper,” complete with vapid smiley face and a joke column on the front page.
It was embarrassing and it made us cringe.
We resented it because it paid its reporters almost nothing, while its advertising salesmen drove company cars and wore Gucci shoes, costing more than a reporter made in a week, along with their race-track checkered sports coats. And because, just once in a while, the ad salesmen arranged to have a story quashed or re-written. Usually by the Managing Editor.
The advertising manager did so well for himself that, when the paper folded, he landed a position as publisher of a Hearst newspaper and today, with no journalism experience other than forty years as a salesman, is a well-respected member of the Texas journalism community.
Frightening as hell to me, but then I’ve always been a bit behind the times. It’s happening all over the country. Liberals don’t control the media. Conservatives don’t control the media. Advertising salesmen control the media.
*
If I thought I received an education at OU (actually, I didn’t think that at the time, although I was wrong), I learned even more by working with professional newsmen. J. Nelson Taylor, for instance, had been on speaking terms with Ma Barker, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and other Oklahoma outlaws. Jack Bickham wrote the novel on which the Walt Disney movie “The Apple Dumpling Gang” was based. Bickham once asked for a long weekend off – Friday through Monday – because he had a contract to write a novel. He finished it in three days and it was published.
But mostly, it was the free flow of ideas from curious and well-rounded people that impressed me. I was still struggling to break free from my family and societal notion that “every man for himself” was not only the code of the frontier, but the basis of civilization. Rhoda set me straight one evening when a group of us were having dinner at a local slop-house and I had been spouting Ayn Rand philosophy about the virtue of selfishness.
“You know, there’s an apocryphal story about archeologists discovering the skeleton of a prehistoric man, maybe only thirty or forty thousand years old, who was missing his right arm,” she said. “But he had evidently died of old age.
“The story goes that this was the beginning of modern civilization. He obviously couldn’t live on his own with only one arm, so the group had to take care of him. Isn’t that what makes a society? That everybody sacrifices something for the good of the tribe?
“Otherwise, we could never have a police department, build a highway or have public education.”
Shit, as Rhoda might have said. It’s damned uncomfortable when somebody destroys all of your preconceptions with one speech. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, nor would it be the last. But still.
In 2005, the story ceased to be apocryphal, when a 1.77 million-year-old fossil was discovered in Georgia, in the former Soviet Union. The old man had lost all of his teeth but one, yet died of old age, indicating he had been cared for by his tribe. Other fossil evidence suggests that the Neanderthals practiced a similar charity toward the less fortunate.
*
I worked for The Journal full-time from May through October, 1969, when I had to report to
Journal Days: with Speaker of the House Carl Albert
the Army. As the youngest kid on the staff, I got all of the grunt work: writing obits, covering tea parties and charitable events (and learning to write a story when there was absolutely nothing newsworthy to write about), as well as being sent off to political speeches, corner-stone layings, gallery openings and the like. I also occasionally filed in for the beat reporters, including police and City Hall.
Rice gave me another of his rare compliments my last day on the job: “You’ve learned well, Dimick. I feel like I can send you out to cover almost anything and you’ll do a yeoman’s job.”
You’d have to know Don Rice to know how much his praise meant to me.
*
I was discharged from the Army in Oakland in January, 1971, and intended to stay in the Bay Area. Its diversity, its tolerance and its tolerance for diversity were like oxygen to me when I remembered the stifling atmosphere of Oklahoma City.
When I applied to law school five years later, I set my sights on Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, the top public law school in the state and one of the best in the nation.
Similarly, I only wanted to work for one of the two top San Francisco newspapers, either The Chronicle or The Examiner. But then, half of the reporters in the country want to work in San Francisco, and the city’s market for reporters was still glutted from the 58-day strike three years earlier, when the third daily newspaper, the News-Call-Bulletin (successor to three previous dailies) folded.
But unlike my later admission to Boalt Hall, I failed to gain entry in the world of San Francisco journalism. I received a cordial welcome by both major dailies and compliments on the contents of my stringbook, but no job offers. I did get an offer from The Richmond Independent, a gutsy little daily on the east side of San Francisco Bay, but was ambivalent about taking it.
I begged a few days to think about it, and while I was thinking, Oklahoma called. It was my old city editor, Don Rice.
Under the G.I. Bill of Rights, I had ninety days in which to demand my old job back at the Journal. It was my hole card, and I didn’t intend to turn it over until Day 89. But a college friend let slip to Rice that I was out of the Army, and there I was: forced to make a choice even though I had another month to go.
Rice: “Steve? How the hell are you? I hear you’re out of the Army. Clabes wants to talk to you.”
Clabes: “We’d like you to come back and work for us again. Don thinks a lot of you, and we think you could be a great asset.”
Me: “John, I just don’t know. I really want to stay out here. I’m trying to get on at one of the Bay Area papers. Actually, I got an offer just day before yesterday, and I’m trying to decide whether to accept.
Clabes: “We’ll make you entertainment editor.”
*
Damn! The job I wanted.
My high school involvement in speech and drama had given me a love for the performing arts, and I had been entertainment editor of the OU daily newspaper my senior year, in addition to writing my column and stringing for The Journal. I didn’t know a thing about music, dance or opera, but at least Oklahoma was too far in the hinterlands to have much in the way of dance or opera.
(My fanatical obsession with opera wouldn’t arrive for some years yet, but even today I wouldn’t feel qualified to write an informed review of an opera performance.)
During my brief stay at The Journal between graduation and the Army, I was sort of a second-string critic, covering in my spare time what the entertainment editor (and sole entertainment staff) had no interest in or time for.
And now they were offering me the job of entertainment editor (and, needless to say, sole entertainment staff.) That other paper in Oklahoma City had three people doing this job.
But still.
*
“What will you pay?” I finally asked.
“What did we pay you before?”
“A hundred and five a week.”
“What have they offered you out there?”
“A hundred sixty.”
“Ohhh, that’s pretty steep. The cost of living is a lot less back here, you know. We might be able to go a hundred and a quarter, but that’s really stretching things.”
Granted, this was 1971, and figures from then make no sense at all today. Gasoline cost 33 cents a gallon in the Bay Area and about 27 cents a gallon in Oklahoma City. Folks would drive ten miles to save a penny a gallon. But while reporters were earning salaries in the mid-four figures, the suede-shoe ad salesmen were into the mid- to upper-five figures.
*
My wife and I debated almost continuously over the next two or three days. We made lists of pro’s and con’s; we drew charts; we tried assigning different weights to different factors.
No matter what measure we used, the answer remained the same: stay in the Bay Area.
Except for the big-fish-in-the-little-pond theory. Career-wise, wouldn’t it make more sense to make a name for myself and then hope to move up to a more respectable paper?
No; according to all of our charts, it did not make sense. And, yes, we did it anyway.
*
“I need at least a hundred sixty, John.”
“Ohhh, boy. I can go a hundred forty, but that’s it. And you have to promise not to tell anyone else in the newsroom what we’re paying you.”
It was sometime later before I realized that Clabes exacted this same promise from all reporters. I shouldn’t tell anyone else what I was making for fear that they would tell me what they were being paid, which was generally more, although it might be less if he could get away with it.
And a kid with no better negotiation skills than this later decided to become an attorney?
Never argue with The Man, Mildred drummed into my head. Trust the people with the power.
And so, Mr. Bigfish headed back to Oklahoma’s little pond.
*
Life was good and Bigfish had it all: Theater tickets. Movie tickets. Symphony tickets. Rock concert tickets. The occasional junket to Los Angeles or Dallas with other critics to interview movie stars and directors – all paid for by the film industry. (We had no pride. Even The Oklahoman refused to let its staffers accept free junkets from the very people they were paid to critique, but The Journal couldn’t afford to be particular.)
I met scores of singers, actors, directors and producers, although few that most folks remember today: Barbra Streisand (the world’s most beautiful complexion), Robert Preston (who fondled my wife’s knee during our interview), Carol Channing (ecch), Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (double yecch), Yul Brynner, Darren McGavin, Don Ameche, Lauren Bacall, Burt Reynolds, George Peppard, Mark Rydell, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson, Roscoe Lee Brown, composer John Williams, Gene Autry, Alice Cooper, Jack Benny, Johnny Carson.
When a new film was released (usually a second-rate film, as otherwise, the Hollywood PR department wouldn’t have bothered with Oklahoma City), actors and directors would do “the tour,” appearing in backwater towns to give interviews in hopes of drumming up business. The studio releasing the film would split the cost of the promotion with the local theater-chain operators.
It was first-class all the way: the best restaurant in town, the best prime rib (no chicken ala king on these tours) and the best wine. Many years later and a world away, I realized that the Chateau Lafitte Rothschild I drank with George Peppard was still way beyond my budget. I charge more for half an hour of my time now than I earned in a week at The Journal, and I still can’t afford it.
Worse still, I didn’t even appreciate the finest of Bordeaux at the time. I had been the swine in front of which the money guys had cast their pearls.
*
It was a plum of a job, if ever a plum-of-a-job there was.
I grew to hate it.
*
The people with the money give favors, and they expect favors in return. And the Journal was all too willing to be a lapdog.
*
While I had been in the Army, The Journal’s long-time critic moved on, and the editors tried a variety of replacements. For a while, there was no regular entertainment staff, so general-assignment reporters covered concerts, plays and movies. For a while, the job was held by a graduate of the OU Drama School, a very talented actor, director and promoter, but just too “artsy fartsy” for the Oklahoma City readership. The readers seldom understood what he was writing about.
When I returned, subscribers were still steaming over two reviews printed in the last year or so, one of Elvis Presley and one of Tom Jones. Both reviews were brutally honest, describing the performers as fat, fatuous, tired, over-the-hill, and, especially in the case of Jones, with his wipe-my-face-with-your-panties schtick, pretty insulting.
You’d have thought the Journal had attacked Jonas Salk or Mohandas Gandhi.
Or Alfalfa Bill Murray.
It wasn’t only the subscribers who were steaming. Clabes hadn’t gotten over it. Evidently Russell Vaught, president and CEO of the corporation, held the managing editor personally responsible for every angry letter to the editor or angry telephone call.
I don’t know; maybe every lost subscription came out of Clabes’ hide. I do know it didn’t come out of Russell’s paycheck or considerable perks.
My second or third day back on the job, Clabes told me the story about the hate mail the paper had received for daring to print anything negative about Presley and Jones. I thought it was just an anecdote, and smiled appreciatively.
It wasn’t. It was a warning. But I’m a little slow sometimes.
*
Tom Jones came back to Oklahoma City while I was there. By this time, I had learned what The Journal’s parameters were, and sometimes knew how to get around them. I reviewed him as a cultural phenomenon – reviewed the audience, actually, with hardly a word about the performance – made my point, at least to my own satisfaction, and got away with it. I think the review was over Clabes’ head.
I took the same approach with Engelbert Humperdinck, whose career is still going strong today among the polyester crowd. Thirty years ago, he was already a ten-year has-been – except in places like Oklahoma City, where he still had masses of lonely, overweight women joining his fan club and crowding his performances. I deliberately avoided reviewing the singer in favor of reviewing the scene. Deadpan, as it were. If you knew what I was writing about…well, then you knew what I was writing about, and were properly appalled. If you were there screaming until you were hoarse, I didn’t do any more than report the facts, and you didn’t understand enough to be insulted.
*
But what do you do with the hometown theater groups whose productions are generally only passable and which are dreadful much more often than great? I never really came to terms with this uneasy question.
Influential British actor and director Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and inspiration for many other local theater companies across the country, was a one-man crusade for regional theater. He viewed it as a venue where actors and directors could do productions impossible to mount on Broadway or London’s West-End, enriching the public while honing their own skills.
I supported the philosophy (where else could you see a production of Krapp’s Last Tape or an early Edward Albee play?), but there was always the nagging problem of pedestrian productions. And the vast majority of Oklahoma City theater productions were nothing if not pedestrian.
Voices from the audience as we leave the theater: “Wasn’t that just great? My husband and I have actually seen Broadway plays that weren’t nearly as good.” “Honey, you’re gonna be reading about that actor out in Hollywood in a year or two. Wanna bet?”
Ladies, I want to shout, there’s a lot of drivel produced in New York, but the worst of it is better than this turkey! And “that actor” only has two expressions in his repertoire and stumbled over half his lines.
Then, of course, I would have to write a review while trying for two irreconcilable goals: 1) to be somewhat honest and not turn into a complete whore, and 2) to not get fired or ridden out of town on a rail.
Damned hard job for a hundred forty a week.
*
Oklahoma City University and a couple of the town’s theater groups sponsored a round-table discussion on the subject of theatrical criticism. The panel included me, the Oklahoman’s critic and Brendan Gill, long-time film, drama and architectural critic for the New Yorker.
Naturally, the moderator’s first question was whether critics should grade on a curve – treating local productions more generously than professional touring companies or Broadway productions. Did we?
Gill went first, explaining simply and eloquently that a group which charges money for admission must be judged against any other group which charges for tickets. The critic owes a duty to his audience to tell them whether the production is worth shelling out for, and a critic who misleads his audience is not doing his job.
The Oklahoman went next. This was a critic who never had a harsh word for any show. He would have given two thumbs up (had thumbs been invented yet) to my fourth-grade pageant about the marriage of Oklahoma Territory to Indian Territory.
“I don’t see my job as pointing out the failings of a regional production,” he said. “Number one, I don’t want to scare people away from the theater, or we won’t have any theater. Number two, I’m not sure that my opinion is any better than anyone else’s. I may not like a show, but you may love it.
“And I don’t think you can hold a local production to the same standards as a Broadway show. So I view my job as telling the readers what the production is about. And if a semi-professional group puts on a good show for them, I’m going to give them a good review.”
Now why hadn’t I anticipated this as the most logical first question and had an answer prepared?
“Umm,” I said. Good start, Steve.
“I…do…cut some slack. While I basically agree with Mr. Gill?…I just can’t apply an absolute standard to any and all theatrical productions. I go a little easier – but not much – on shows at the Oklahoma Theater Center, because they’re not Broadway. But they are an Actors’ Equity house, they bill themselves as a professional theater company, and they charge a pretty fair price.
“I’m a little easier on Lyric Theater? Because they’re all local actors, they don’t get paid scale, and it’s only summer stock.
“If you move down a bit, I might be slightly easier on each…lower level?…of productions?
“But if a show is bad, it’s bad. And if it’s bad, I have to say so. And believe, me, a lot of them are bad.”
*
At least, that’s what I said. The audience believed it, accepted it, and I even got a few compliments afterwards, including from the director of the University of Oklahoma Drama School.
And when I left Oklahoma City, one of the local actors whom I admired and respected the most told a mutual friend that I was “the best critic Oklahoma City has ever had.”
What I did, though, was a few degrees less noble. At least in my mind.
*
“Give it a good review,” Clabes smiled and slapped me on the back as I headed out one evening to a performance by the Lyric Theater, Oklahoma City’s summer musical venue.
Lyric by-and-large did a pretty good job with local talent. I usually did give it fair reviews. This production didn’t deserve it.
Backstage, after the performance, I talked with one of the performers who recognized how shallow the production was. “I told the cast ‘just wait ‘til Steve Dimick gets finished with this show,’” she said.
I got finished with the show about midnight, handed in my copy and went home. The next morning, there were two glowing reviews in the two morning newspapers, one under my byline. A word had been changed here, a sentence rewritten there, and it was no longer my review.
I could bitch and complain to Don Rice. If he thought I was wrong, he would just out-shout me. But he was never vindictive. So I did.
“Clabes changed it,” he said flatly.
“Oh, fucking great! What am I for? You want me to be like the guy at The Oklahoman, or you want a real critic? Hell, you could get a high school kid to write a puff piece about every amateur production in town!”
“Talk to Clabes,” he shrugged.
“Goddamn it! I’m paid for my opinions! What the hell good are my opinions if you won’t print them?”
“Talk to Clabes.”
Did I?
Of course not. If I had talked to Clabes the way I talked to Rice, he would have fired me in a minute, and jobs were damned scarce in OKC. You don’t challenge The Man. I was trapped.
*