There are men that you meet and forget. And then there are
men who keep you up at night...like Slaid Warren.
It's not what you're thinking. Yes, the newspaper photo
made him look like a runway model with his deep-set
brooding eyes and long dark bangs swept back off his
forehead.But that was all beside the point.
Slaid worked for one major New York City newspaper, and I
worked for another. So the thrusting and parrying between
us was professional, all business, and it took place in
print and on the phone, not between the sheets — not those
sheets, anyway. We weren't lovers. We weren't friends. In
fact, we had never even met.
So, you know that I would have done whatever it took to
scoop him, not only to get ahead professionally and win
kudos from my colleagues, but also to enjoy the end-of-the-
day phone call that inevitably followed slighting my
success,thus convincing me of my triumph.It was usually
brief,just a couple of sentences.But in those few
seconds,I chalked up the fact that I had him in a headlock
and it wasn't where he liked to be.
"You missed the story," he said dismissively in one of our
early conversations just months after I had been given the
column. Of course he started the conversation without
bowing to convention and introducing himself.Unthinkable
to him that someone couldn't recognize his voice, and
anyway, we had an ongoing dialogue, interrupted just to
allow for new columns to appear.
"If it helps you to deal with it,"I said,leaning back in
my chair and warming to his discomfort with the
realization that my column had left him in the dust. He
laughed heartily as though acknowledging a good joke.
"No,babe,"he said,abruptly cutting off the laughter like a
motorboat engine suddenly out of power.
"Dealing is not the point. I was out nailing the real
story. Your column was filler." Before I could respond, he
hung up.
To backtrack,Slaid Warren and I both covered city
politics."Slaid in the City" was his column. He had me
there. How could I hope to top that? Through no effort of
his own, he had the good fortune to be born to parents hip
enough to give him a cool, albeit weird, name. The only
damage I could inflict was to write him e-mails spelling
it S-L-A-Y-E-D, in keeping with that of readers who
disagreed with him.
My column,I'm loath to admit,had an agonizingly mundane
name, echoing a sparrow chirping: "Street Beat." Nothing
there to summon the grit and substance of a tough
investigative column. Then there was my vanilla name:
Jenny George. As one well-intentioned boyfriend once
commented, "It sounds more like the name of a cheerleader
or talk-show host than a serious reporter. Why don't you
just change it?"
Just change it? Although there are more things about me
that I would change than not, my name isn't one of them.
And while a name that was heftier or more commanding —
Lana Davis Harriman or Katherine Clotilde Porter III, for
example — might have drawn me into public prominence
faster, I love and respect my parents — imperfect as they
showed themselves to be when naming their children. (Can
you imagine Burt as a name for my older brother? If they
had a second son, would he have been Ernie?) Anyway, it
was the name they gave me and it seemed almost
sacrilegious to consider changing it. Whatever.
As for the column,it had been called "Street Beat" for
years, it was well read, and as my editors saw it, why
mess with success? To their credit though, they weren't
interested in redesigning the paper and coming up with
younger, hipper column heads like, "Thing," or "What I Was
Thinking," that other papers presumably thought would
attract younger readers because they sounded edgier. The
paper was secure in its identity and fortunately it had
even advanced to the point of covering music written after
the "Blue Danube Waltz."
I had put in ten years at the New York Daily before taking
over the column, starting as a secretary — not an
assistant, the term used more often these days — right
after college. Since I showed outstanding capability in
juggling the phones and discreetly giving everyone the
proper messages so that their colleagues didn't find out
that headhunters were returning their calls, or worse,
places like AA, I was asked to stay on after my six-month
probation,sparing me the humiliation of circling ads in
the Times and calling people in human resources, a name
that made me think of organ banks.
I was promoted to editorial assistant, and finally cub
reporter, which meant that I earned the right to go
downtown to cover a press conference by the Consumer
Product Safety Commission on lawn-mower safety (never mind
that as an apartment dweller I had never even seen one)
and up to Connecticut to report on a factory that made
walking sticks.I had my shorthand to thank — or blame —
plus my trusty tape recorder and my reputation for staying
with a story until every source was questioned practically
to death.I'm not sure if that's because I'm tenacious
about ferreting out the truth, or that I'm so insecure
that I overresearch. Let's just say that I took the old
journalism adage to heart —" If your mother says she loves
you, check it out."
The column was actually something of a gift following a
tense investigation of a shelter for women who were
victims of domestic violence. I spent two nights in one
and wrote a story exposing the failures of the system,
including a lack of policing that led to boyfriends
finding their way in and spending the night. Apparently
the current columnist had opened the paper one morning to
find an obit of a colleague who died at age fifty of a
massive heart attack and immediately submitted his
resignation so that he could spend more time with his
family. But ultimately the decisive factor that led to my
becoming a columnist with all the power that comes with it
might well have been the fact that the stars were in
proper alignment.
In any case, it was a prized, if competitive, job. It was
a bit daunting, at first, to find myself up against some
ace metro reporters, including Slaid, who had a far wider
net of contacts than I did and far more experience. Being
male didn't hurt him either, plus he was slick at taking
advantage of the buddy network built up through jobs at
various papers and magazines, so that disgruntled insiders
seemed to gravitate to him. Then once he sat down with
them, he was one of the guys and always on their side, at
least until he was in front of the computer screen and the
story came out.
And how was I viewed? Think perky former cheerleader. In
fact, I was told on my thirtieth birthday that I had the
cherubic face and fawning grin of an eighteen-year-old
Goldie Hawn.Not a bad thing, but needless to say, with
only one year now on the job, I had a lot of catching up
to do to earn credibility and authenticity.
But back to Slaid. Be assured that I would never denigrate
a colleague needlessly. He was known to be trustworthy to
a fault, at least judging from the fact that months back
he had spent a few weeks locked up in prison for refusing
to turn over his notes after he interviewed a mafia don
following the murder of a member of a rival family.It led
to a juicy column and his refusal to cooperate with a
police investigation on the grounds that New York's shield
laws protected journalists from turning over their notes
and revealing their sources.
I don't believe for a minute that Slaid withheld his
notes — as some of my more mean-spirited colleagues have
flippantly suggested — because he knew he could count on
his buddies from the six o'clock news to make a show of
hanging out supportively at the prison 24/7, guaranteeing
that his popularity would soar, not to mention bringing
him hearty fare like pasta alfredo and osso bucco from
Little Italy so that he would be spared the ordeal of
subsisting on prison food. That wasn't such a really big
deal. After all,he didn't get to drink the Pinot Grigio or
the Barolo. They were confiscated; I know that for a fact.
But watching him on TV, I realized that he oneupped me in
another, more fundamental way. As he was interviewed
coming out of prison (and the hype! You'd think he'd
served twenty years and a wrongful conviction was
overturned),he stops and turns to stare directly into the
camera's eye,speaking softly,in a controlled, almost
wounded kind of way — like an Italian film star in a
noirish setting. No one could miss the fact that his deep-
set eyes and shadow of a beard, combined with the upturned
collar on his worn sport jacket,gave him that soulful
bedroom look that I know he was going for. And what did he
say? Would you believe he quoted James Madison? "'Popular
government without popular information or the means of
acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.'"
Bravura performance. The erudition coupled with the
intensity of his look. Little me, on the other hand, would
try and fail at impersonating the lost, waifish air of a
Daryl Hannah type. Instead, I'd look vulnerable and
helpless. Instead of alerting viewers to the fact that my
incarceration was part of a distressing new pattern of
attack on the freedom of the press, I would merely look
distraught as though I was weathering the flu. I'd
undoubtedly say something rambling and incoherent because
I hadn't slept well due to the hard beds and thin
mattresses, the claustrophobic sizes of the cells and the
overcrowded conditions. My hair would be twirled up in a
ponytail so that it didn't droop like seaweed because of
the absence of Aveda Sap Moss shampoo or Kiehl's Silk
Groom (do they let you take those things to jail?) — my
lifelines to vibrant hair. And without Nars Orgasm blush
and Chanel lip gloss, I'd look merely washed out, not
sultry columnist wronged by the system.
So instead of reporting it, Slaid Warren was the news for
a good week after that, and as I learned, spending time in
the big house, especially for holding such high moral
values, can really up your Internet-chatter quotient, not
to mention boosting future book advances. If I didn't know
better, I would have guessed that Slaid had arranged
it,maybe even sleeping with the judge (who was divorced
and not half-bad-looking, even in her muumuu-size black
robe) to set the whole thing up.
But these days,praise the Lord,Slaid was out,a free man —
free to take himself to movie premiers and hang out at all-
night celebrity-backed restaurant openings that were
destined to be covered in the next day's papers where he
was photographed snuggling one fetching model or another
and generally cavorting with the A-list.