The Last Debate (39 page)

It’s the story of how no articles by me about the Williamsburg Debate came to be published in
The New American Tatler
—or any other magazine.

I was on the phone to Jonathan Angel, my
Tatler
editor, within minutes after returning to my hotel room that night from my rendezvous with
Sid Nelson. I detected a less than enthusiastic tone in Jonathan’s reaction to what I was saying. It was most uncharacteristic and surprising, but I dismissed it on grounds that he was distracted, probably by a roomful of dinner guests.

“Jonathan, I need to go to Greece to confront Howley,” I said.

“I’m coming to Washington in the morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about it then.”

I had no idea until that moment that he was coming to Washington, and when I went into the office the next morning I discovered I was not the only one. Neither did Jennifer Gates or any of the other bureau staffers.

Jonathan arrived around eleven o’clock. He was wearing his usual uniform—a long white canvas cowboy overcoat over tailor-made bleached blue jeans, square-toed black boots, a white tux shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. His dark brown hair was long and tied in a ponytail. He was thirty-five years old and probably thought his getup made him look twenty-five. Not so. He resembled an old hippie, and all of them are at least forty-five.

He went around the office spreading a few seconds of joy to each of the others before he came into my office and closed the door behind him.

“I’m killing your project,” he said.

“No!” I screamed.

“We’ll pay you a fifteen-thousand-dollar kill fee—double the usual—and then we zip it all up. You give me your notes and tapes and everything else. We flush them down the toilet of journalism and move on to other things—and back to the asshole basketball coaches, I should say.”

There was an item in the “Media Whirl” column of
The Washington Post
under the headline
WRITER DRAWS EDITOR’S BLOOD
that said I slugged Jonathan and “grabbed him by his ponytail and slung him against a wall.” That is not true. It is true that I was angry and I expressed that anger physically. But all I did was throw a softball at him. The ball, left over presumably from somebody’s office softball game, was there in an ashtray on the desk I was using. Without really thinking, I picked up the ball and hurled it right at Jonathan. Unfortunately, we were only ten yards apart. I threw it too hard and the ball hit Jonathan in the forehead. He fell backward over a chair, hitting the back of his head against the sharp-edged
comer of a metal file cabinet. A tiny bit of blood did come out of a tiny wound, but it was nothing serious. Within minutes he was safe and calm, I was calm, and we talked it out.

The specific words between us are not important. What matters is that he adamantly refused to give a reason for canceling the debate assignment other than “It’s a matter of priorities.”

I said it had to be a matter of some kind of politics, that Howley or somebody like him had gotten to him or the magazine. Jonathan kept denying that, and I kept saying I did not believe him and he kept saying he did not give a shit what I believed, those were the facts.

Various other stories since the original
Post
item have distorted what happened even more. The New York
Daily News
said five of Jonathan’s teeth were kicked loose when I “stomped him in the mouth as he lay on the floor.” One of the grocery-store tabloids said I attempted to throw Jonathan out the window of our office to a certain death seven floors below. Another said the real hostility between Jonathan and me resulted from a “gay lovers’ quarrel”—despite the fact that neither of us is gay.

Although I did not need it, the entire episode provided me another lesson in how grossly irresponsible some elements in the press of the United States of America can be these days. They write and speak lies about people—even about journalists, people of their own kind.

The truly important purpose of my scene with Jonathan for me was making sure nothing disappeared down any toilets of journalism. I refused the extra kill fee and insisted that I felt bound only by our regular contributing editor’s contract language. That stated that if a commissioned article was rejected by the magazine on completion, then I would be paid a $7,500 kill fee and then be free to sell the article or other articles based on the material to another “outlet.” In all of my six years as a contributing editor at the
Tatler
, nothing like that had ever happened. They commissioned, I completed, they published.

“I’ll see you and double that,” said Jonathan when I stated my contract case.

“Double what?”

“I’ll pay you thirty thousand dollars for the right to flush,” he said.

Since the agreed-to fee for the completed and accepted work was only $50,000, it was clear to me that something was going on. And it was also
clear to me that whatever it was meant very much to somebody, somebody with access to Jonathan,
The New American Tatler
, and a lot of money.

I declined the offer.

“All right,” said Jonathan, “we pay you the full fee as if it had been accepted.”

“The full fifty thousand dollars?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

“Maybe you don’t have any choice.”

He was right. The contract was clear on that. If they paid the full price it was theirs and only theirs. Except for the book rights.

I nodded my agreement and he said: “This means the end of our relationship—yours and the magazine’s, you know.”

I knew. “I keep everything I’ve done on the coaches’ story.”

“Bullshit. That belongs to us, too, and I want it.”

It was worth a try.

Within a week three things happened:

M
y imagination went before me to Santorini. By the time I actually set foot on the place, my mind was already soggy with questions and answers, my soul was already marked by the scars and dripping with the juices of the battle. I had seen myself in triumph. I had seen myself in defeat. I came, I conquered; I came, I failed. I rose to the heights. I fell on my face. I, the hero; I, the defeated.

I spent the night in Athens after the flights from London-Heathrow and Washington-Dulles so I would arrive on Santorini as rested as possible. But my racing mind allowed no rest. I was too fully consumed by the Chapman
v.
Howley—ta-da-ta-da!—coliseum-like dimensions of what I was about to do. It was so bad that I almost didn’t pay any attention to the island of Santorini, or Thíra, as it is also called.

It was only during the last few minutes of the forty-minute flight from Athens on a small two-engine Greek-airline plane that I even looked down and out of the window. What I saw first was the sparkling blue of the Aegean Sea and then a treeless island of dark red, green, and brown volcanic ash with white buildings scattered over it.

One of the white buildings was my hotel, the Santorini Palace, which was in Fira, population two thousand, the island’s major town. The ride in a twenty-year-old Mercedes taxi from the small-everything airport took less than ten minutes. It was at the hotel-room window that I began to realize what this island was all about. Fira and I were perched together on the top of a cliff. The water of the Aegean was out there in all directions, but it was also straight down,
way
straight down at the end of a sheer several-hundred-foot drop. The view down as well as out to sea and to several other even smaller islands was absolutely spectacular.

But I was not here as a tourist to view spectacular sights. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, the air was hot and dry, and I was ready. I went off to find Michael J. Howley.

All I had was Howley’s address. The young man at the hotel’s front desk, who spoke excellent English and said he had uncles and aunts who made and sold beautiful gold jewelry, gave me directions. It turned out to be a short, easy walk down a narrow street that paralleled the edge of the cliff. I paid little attention to the jewelry and souvenir shops and the open-air restaurants and bars on both sides of the street that I passed on the way to the residential area where I would find and confront Michael J. Howley.

What if he isn’t there? What if he went back to Washington? Or Istanbul? Or Kalamazoo? What if he is there but won’t talk to me? What if I have come all of this way physically and emotionally for nothing? What if he gets mad? What if he throws something—a Softball, maybe—at me? What if he throws
me
off of this cliff?

There he was.

Michael J. Howley. There he was in front of me and down to the right. Michael J. Howley, in person. He was not in Washington, Istanbul, or Kalamazoo. He was here. Exactly where I wanted him to be. There he sat in a white folding chair on a balcony patio of a house that jutted out from the cliff below the path where I walked. He was reading something, a book, something. He was dressed in white pants and a short-sleeved light blue polo shirt. Everything I had seen here thus far was either white or blue.

I went off the path to a small retaining wall and peered over at him. I was now less than fifteen yards away.

“Hello, Mr. Howley,” I said.

He turned around and saw me—my head, at least—from over the wall. “Oh, shit!” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Leave me alone, Chapman.”

“Can’t do that.”

He stood up and faced me. The look on his face was not a pleasant one. It was as if he had been smacked hard.

“Stay away from me,” he said. “I really do mean that.”

“I have come a long way to talk to you,” I said. “I will not leave until I do.”

“My sister said you called her. And she talked to you. I can’t believe she talked to you.”

“Everybody’s talked to me, Mr. Howley. Everybody but you.”

Howley turned back the other way. His view in that direction was the same one of the Aegean and some islands I had from my hotel room. Then back to me he said: “I have nothing to say to you. Absolutely nothing. If the
Tatler
is stupid enough to spend big money sending you to Greek islands on wild-goose chases, I cannot help it or feel responsible for it.”

“The
Tatler
is out of it now,” I said. “I am doing a book.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“You hoped the
Tatler
had killed the story for good, didn’t you?”

Now he was looking right at me.

“I know nothing about people who do your kind of journalism,” he said.

“The kind that tries to find out about why four journalists would take the electoral process into their own hands and decide who should be the next president of the United States?”

“The people voted, goddamn it! We didn’t interfere in the goddamn electoral process! I am tired of hearing that crap!”

I bit hard into my tongue for several critical seconds. The silence paid off.

“We can’t go on yelling at each other like this,” he said to me. “Go on down the path. You’ll come to a shiny brown door with a small painting of a man-in-the-moon on it. I’ll let you in.”

I then drew in and expended my first real breath since I’d seen Howley there before me.

He let me in, but he did not offer me his right hand or even a casual word of greeting. I followed him through a sparely furnished sitting room.

The microphone! There was the microphone! The one Meredith had thrown at Howley. There it was lying on an end table. Howley had obviously taken the microphone as a souvenir—a trophy. I wanted to stop and pick it up and hold it. But I kept moving behind him through a small dining room and then a wide-open glass door to the balcony where he had been reading.

The microphone! There was that microphone!

He walked to the far edge of the patio, the one opposite the water, the islands—and the drop. I came up to his right side.

“A whole civilization was destroyed here,” he said.

“Where … what?”

“Do you know about the Mycenaeans?” he asked.

“No, not really,” I replied.

“They lived around here way, way back—more than a thousand years before Christ. They had a language and they made pictures … and then there was an eruption of a volcano over there.” He pointed down and away in the direction we were facing. “It caused death and destruction as far away as Crete seventy miles from here. The people on Thíra—Santorini—must have known it was coming because no bodies were ever found here.”

What is this he’s telling me? I am not here to worry about lost civilizations and volcanic eruptions. I’m here for Chapman versus Howley!