You Got A Lot Of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend-With Positively Fourth Street In Mind.

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

The weekly magazine racket has always been a tough nut to crack, what with frequent deadlines, although not the absolute horror of the daily newspaper grind which chewed up more by-line reporters and scratching on the walls newshounds who went to ground in an alcoholic stupor than you could shake a stick at, and last minute stuff that snatched even the best editor, the best pressman, the best distributor. If you don’t believe me just look frenzy that the late Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo of blessed memory put the late night deadline editors at Rolling Stone through when that magazine was in its non-glossy format in its better days as describe in The Great Shark Hunt and other razor-edged pieces. While you had to take a lot of what a stone-cold drug crazy gun nut fast motorcycle over the edge guy like Thompson wrote for a candid world with a suspicious mind the deadline battles had the ring of ink-stained truth. So you can imagine what the guys who were just trying to hold on to their little space as police beat reporters went through to keep from going under. Every reporter, every would be-reporter from that high school rag to Vogue should have stock, and lots of it, in Johnny Walker Red because that is the only thing that will see you through in your old age. 

 

That is what drove the famous feature writer Benny Bancroft from the field of honor (his term) who started out with big dream boat dreams at the East Bay Other (that bay being Frisco Bay of course) before he went over the edge into big time syndication at Wright’s Guardian after his expose of Willie Stark that time down in Fresno. Brought him down from the big dream boast dream of bringing unsullied objective news and candid fierce opinion to the common clay. (Nobody ever knew, except me and I was Benny’s friend so I would take the secret to the grave if I had to, that his expose of Stark was bogus, had been paid for by Willie himself in cold hard cash, and lots of it, as a dodge to win a tough election where he could use the main stream media coverage as a foil to show he was working for the little guy against the snarling press and Benny with his reputation for hard-hitting honesty was the perfect foil, as long the cash envelope showed up every Friday afternoon). Those were the good old days, good old days in the news business being about two years and maybe less. The good old days before that alcoholic stupor he found himself fighting off daily didn’t help either.

But the latest tidbit in the weird life of Benjamin Bancroft hit everybody in the business by surprise when they heard the news that he was leaving publisher Jeb Wright’s Wright’s Guardian.  Knew as well that leaving that rag under the circumstances in which he left while in stable condition, meaning still standing, was part of the price to be paid for a free and democratic press and other blah, blah trite expressions when they rang up a toast to Benny at the old hang-out, Jake’s Lounge on West Seventh Street, New York City to say good-bye in his absence. (And in the next breathe half of the them, the newsies, not the opinion page writers, sports nuts, police beat bums or society page belles, were scampering for the telephones to see if news editor Irving Goldman needed an experienced by-line writer, on easy terms since times were tough just then and Jake was getting antsy about running up the tab so high.)  

That was the public story anyway, that bit about the alcohol getting the best of him, distorting his objective judgement and candid thoughts, creating too many missed deadlines, which nobody saw or heard about until the end when Jeb through Irving pulled the hammer down because Benny’s “assistant” Penny Patterson worked her ass off to feed the presses whatever she thought Benny would have thought about whatever issue she wrote about if he himself had thought about the damn thing. [Whee!] And yes that “assistant” thing needs all the quotation marks around it to support the word since not only had she been a budding just graduated student of the Columbia School of Journalism (Class of 1964) when she first came to the Guardian but through their daily working together had become Benny’s paramour even though she was twenty years younger than him and worse that he had been married when they started “shacking up together” (her term), and wayward ways with the truth on the decreasing number of articles that he actually put pen to paper on.

The way sneak journalist (his actual title since that was the way he operated, the way every “sneak” had to operate in the cutthroat world of weekly scoops even at the expense, or maybe particularly at the expense of fellow writers) Roy Kline pieced it together for the highest bidder (also standard in the business where they were like gypsies here today, gone tomorrow to the next high bidder), These Modern Times was in the best tradition of his part of the racket. Nobody around town knew him, knew much about Roy Kline except that he was a free-lancer out of work who hung out like every other free press personage in some gin mill when not working. In his case, his lucky case the Starlight Lounge down the street from Jake’s on West Seventh where the “executives” of the publishing world, the working executives anyway if not the paycheck writers anyway, you know the various editors, ad sellers, photo layout people, graphic design people, all those who depend on the by-line writers and scratching newshounds for the daily bread, including Irving Goldman who would stop in the joint for his lunch (three whiskies, straight up, left empty when he left and an egg salad sandwich usually left half-eaten).           

One day Roy was sitting at the bar talking to Red Darling the bartender when Irving came in with another guy and sat a couple of stools away from him, a guy in a suit and tie so an executive of some sort, ordered his three whiskies and sandwich (although Red knew the routine five days a week so really did not need to be told what Irving was going to order and thought Irving was just trying to “cut” him, and maybe he was). After his first quick shot Irving started grousing about one of his reporters, about a guy who worked for him, who used to write good stuff that needed little editing that would make him jealous that he could write so well without a coach, him, Irving, to help him along, who was hitting the sauce too much and his work suffered. He wanted to get rid of him but didn’t know how, didn’t want to except he didn’t want booze hounds working for him (and deadline problem children although he was agnostic about that paramour Penny business since he had had a few midnight flings himself  including a run at Penny before she settled in on Benny).

Problem was that the two of them had started out in the business together working as copyboys for the Cleveland Free Press and kind of rode to the top of the New York mag pyramid together. Roy would not know until later that Benny, award-winning Benny dragged Irving in his wake, made it a condition of coming to the Guardian that Irving do his editing and in the course of things Irving had found his métier as editor-in-chief as opposed to third-rate hack writer. All this talk was grist for Roy’s mill. He had a big idea, a moneymaker idea.

A couple of days later, a Friday, Irving came in and did his usual ordering at the bar from Red. Then Roy coming across from a table on the side went to Irving and started to chat him up. Said he had heard that Irving was an editor of a big time magazine and did he need a stringer, a guy to pick up the pieces on a story. Irving nixed that idea, which was just an idea to him and not a good one either, since he had more stringers than he knew what to do with. So no. Roy presented his “credentials,” showed Irving a few of the exposes that he had uncovered about guys in business, guys who had something to hide, guys too in the publishing industry. Irving was still non-committal. Then Roy laid out what he had heard at the bar when Irving had been in a couple of days earlier. Irving perked up a little, the bait was set.    

Irving, once he agreed to Roy’s plan, once they decided on a price (and an introduction to Toddy Marlowe the publisher of Rock Today in Chicago to see what he needed done by a sneak journalist since Toddy’s whole operation depended on digging up scandal on stars, wannabe stars, hell even their dogs), did not want to know anything, anything at all about the means just get rid of Benny anyway he could without letting out the gaff. Here’s some irony-immediately after that lunch meeting with Roy Irving went back up West Seventh to his office and on the way ran into Benny and they talked for a good five minutes about the days back in Cleveland when they were young and hungry and look at them now. Jesus.   

The unwinding of Benny Goldman was simplicity itself once Roy got himself insinuated with the crowd at Jake’s, got to know the players. The ploy was obvious, Benny and his honey Penny once he found out that while Benny was not living with his wife (his second wife as it turned out) he was still married to her and so Benny was ready bait for some adultery plan in the staid New York divorce courts of the 1960s). The squeeze was on since as part of professional sneaking around he found out the old Jeb Wright would tolerate lots of stuff, lots of bad behavior but he considered his magazine a family one and so no hanky-panky that he knew of would be tolerated. And so one fine day in the mail, as you already might suspect, old Jeb got a fistful of lurid dated and time-stamped photographs of Benny and Penny going into and coming out of the Hotel Troubadour on West Ninth.

But Roy’s plans were almost foiled because the old man realizing that Benny’s by-line is what sold copy, what sold advertisers on expensive advertising campaigns too, fired Betty out of hand (that’s Penny, okay but Roy had called her Penny to the old man and it had stuck). Irving was a little frantic when Jeb called him in to break the news and have him do the actual deed. That’s where the worry was for not, that’s where Benny’s alcoholic stupor came into play. He would miss the deadlines first, then with one exception an article about some scumbag drug-dealers using nine and ten year old kids, girls too, to “mule” their drugs for them from Mexico, his writing vanished, fell off the charts until Irving showed the old man that the decline of the magazine’s revenues could be directly traced to the decline of one Benny Goldman the gig was up. (Even Penny’s saving his worthless ass by doing the damn by-line was not up to his level and the readers, and hence the advertisers, knew something had happened, another guy had fallen off the edge of the world.

Even then Irving played the simpleton saying he didn’t know how the whole thing had come to pass but the old man had sent the word down, and that was the law, Benny you understand don’t you. Get this-maybe the magazine could use Benny as a stringer. Roy laughed all the way to Chicago when he heard that one after he too had toasted Benny at Jake’s that fatal last night in town. Laughed loudest when he looked again at Irving’s gold-plated introduction to Toddy Marlowe.