“I love watching the people on the donkeys,” he said.
Donkeys? I had no idea what he was talking about. But I looked down and saw them. Several donkeys with people or boxes of things on their backs were slowly going up or down the side of the cliff, to and from the water and the port below, to and from the town of Fira on high.
“That’s nine hundred feet from here down there to the water—the port,” Howley said. “Eight hundred or so steps if you walk it with the donkeys. There’s also a cable car. You must have come in on a plane.”
“I did.”
“You missed the best part of being here.”
I hope not, Mr. Howley.
“Why did you come way over here to live?” I asked after realizing that I should take advantage of this small-talk opportunity to ease the hard way that might lie ahead. “How did you know about this place …?”
“My wife and I came here for three days on our honeymoon. We sailed and walked through the islands here on the Aegean. Started in Athens, ended up in Istanbul.”
Started in Athens, ended up in Istanbul. I liked the sound of that. I was about to say something pleasant to that effect, but I never got the chance.
“You don’t take silence for an answer, do you?” he said suddenly, roughly.
“No, sir. You of all people should understand that.”
“Why me of all people?”
“You know what it’s like to be onto a story.”
He shook his head as if to shake off a fly or a mosquito. He clearly did not like my attempt at identifying the two of us together. He clearly thought he was something I was not. He saw me as something beneath him. He was a real journalist. I was something less than that. Much less than that, no doubt, from the exalted place from which he peered down at people like me.
“I’ll give you an hour,” he said. “One hour by the clock. You can ask anything you want and then you get the hell out of here and away from me. Is that a deal?”
“No … hey, wait a minute. No. I need more time than that.”
“One hour or nothing. Take it or leave it, Chapman.”
Obviously, I took it. It was an opening, a beginning. One hour could naturally and casually grow and grow and grow. It was an offer I could not refuse.
There were several other white folding chairs there on the patio. He motioned for me to grab one and put it on the other side of a small table from his chair. “I’ll be right back,” he said. I thought maybe he was going for some coffee, tea, or something pleasant like that.
I got the chair and sat down. He returned in a few moments with a
portable alarm clock. There was no coffee, tea, or something pleasant like that.
He said: “Watch me, Chapman. It says it is now eleven forty-five. I am going to set the alarm on this thing for twelve forty-five. When it goes off,
you
go off. OK?”
Sure. I was not concerned. Once we were going, we were going.
“May I tape this?” I said, reaching into my small black canvas valise for a microcassette recorder and my large spiral notebook that I had filled with more than two hundred separate questions.
“No problem,” he said. “When I was your age we only took notes.”
That’s right, and you misquoted people, I resisted saying. That was the old journalism, Howley, the old journalism of inexact quotes and approximations and coziness with the powerful, I also did not say. We in the new journalism, Howley, keep our distance and we tape.
He did what he said he would do to the clock, sat down, and said: “The clock is running, Chapman.”
I had rehearsed and lived the opening line of questions as much as the tough, dramatic, jugular ones that I planned to build to for the thundering climax. All interviews develop a tone, a mood, a style, a life of their own. I felt it was important to establish at the beginning a tone of easygoing friendliness and then over time let it grow more confrontational and heated. The need for a soft takeoff seemed even more necessary now that I was in a position of having to work and con my way past an alarm on a clock.
“I guess Williamsburg has changed your life a lot?” I said. It wasn’t really a question. It was grease.
“That’s why I had to get away, why I came here,” he said. “It’s been incredible.”
“Tell me about it, if you don’t mind,” I said.
He did not mind. He seemed almost grateful even for the opportunity to talk about what Williamsburg had brought and wrought to him personally.
He said: “From that Sunday night on, there were at least three television crews and another five or six other of what now pass for reporters staked out in front of my house around the clock. The new ghouls of
American journalism. I had always ranted and raved about this barbaric vulturism, and here I was a victim of it myself. They even had them lying in ambush outside the
News
offices. These tabloid assholes—no offense, Chapman …”
“None taken, Mr. Howley. I am not a tabloid asshole.” I said it softly, but I said it. There was a limit to what I was prepared to take from this arrogant man in exchange for this interview!
He continued.
“These people yelled questions like—‘Hey, Howley, did you ever take a swing at
your
wife?’ ‘Hey, Howley, have you ever said “fucking” in public?’ ‘Hey, Howley, are you going to pick twelve disciples and start wearing sandals and a robe?’ ‘Hey, Howley, is it true the Greene campaign paid you a million bucks to do it?’ ‘Hey, Howley, is it true you were drunk that night?’ ‘Hey, Howley, are you on Prozac?’ Hey, Howley, you scum, you crook, you jerk, you thug, you bastard.”
He said the volume of calls, E-mail, faxes, mail, and other messages to and about him to the
News
was heavier than anything anybody could remember since the outpouring of emotion after the Kennedy assassination. “They brought it all in in huge gray canvas bags and tall stacks of pink call slips and audiotapes,” he said. “Our personnel department hired twenty-five people from some temp office to deal with it.”
He told me about Sam Rhodes—Henry, Joan, and Barbara had already told me all I needed to know about this man of Hollywood—and how he was now pushing a miniseries based on the Michael J. Howley story. It would begin with his early life, “wherever and whatever that was,” Howley quoted Rhodes as saying. The working title was “The Reporter.” Howley said he also listened to a voice-mail message from a man claiming to be Oliver Stone, a man Howley said he personally believed to be a Big Lie propagandist of Joseph Goebbels proportions and standards. “He said he wanted to make a movie about how most everything that happens to all Americans in all walks of life is controlled by seven or eight highly paid, highly visible people in the press like me—Mike Howley. He said he was sure he could get Costner to play me. Why Stone wasn’t laughed out of business years ago I do not understand.”
I bit my tongue again. Stone, lying propagandist or not, had a big following among people my age and younger. They believed his wild conspiracy
theories, whether people such as Howley liked it or not. But I did not come all this way to have an argument with Michael J. Howley about Oliver Stone.
Howley said he put the alleged Stone call in the same category with those about sweatshirts and requests to name everything from sandwiches and lawnmowers (“the Williamsburg Ripper”) after him. He, like Joan, also had many serious proposals for sex, talk-show regularity, books, lectures, and honorary degrees, among other things.
He said one of the most unusual was from a men’s hairstylist in Beverly Hills who wanted permission to develop a “Howley cut” based on the way Howley wore his hair that night in Williamsburg. Howley said what the guy didn’t know was that he wore it that way because his regular barber in Washington, an Armenian from Lebanon, had gone back to the old country for a family vacation.
“I created a monster and it was me,” he concluded after an extremely long recitation of his post-Williamsburg annoyances and opportunities.
“On lectures,” I said, “I guess Williamsburg changed the rate for you in a major way?”
“My lecture-bureau guy told my secretary I can now get seventy-five thousand dollars a pop—maybe more,” he said. “Can you imagine being paid seventy-five thousand dollars for talking for less than thirty minutes about life inside the Beltway or some other such crap? It’s goddamn amazing.”
It was indeed. “That puts you in the high brackets with Ronald Reagan,” I said.
“No comment,” he replied. I could tell he hated the idea of being likened to Ronald Reagan. Too bad, Mr. Howley.
“Why is it all right for journalists to take large speaking fees from conventions and interest groups but not OK for members of Congress and politicians?” I asked.
“Good question.”
“What’s the good answer?”
“We need the money. They don’t.”
“Is the real answer—journalists think they are better and purer than politicians and cannot be bought like politicians?”
Howley glanced down at the clock on the table. So did I. Did I want
to spend my valuable time here at the beginning in a discussion of journalism ethics? It was 12:10. Twenty-five minutes had already gone by. But ethics were important. They were part of the story. An important part of the story.
But I had to move on. I would return to ethics later in the interview.
I said: “If I could take you now back in time before the debate. Would you mind telling me where you were and how you were told of the invitation to moderate the Williamsburg Debate?”
I felt smart and extremely pleased when Howley seemed to let off even more steam and tension. He leaned back in his chair and, again, continued to talk fully and in detail.
He went through his lecture appearance in San Antonio, the flight back from Texas, the exchange with the American Airlines flight attendant, and his thoughts about 1980 and the press-plane obits. He even remembered what he ate and drank on the flight from Dallas to Washington National.
He told me about how and where he spent election night and a little bit about his late wife and how much he missed her and how he was sure she would have enthusiastically endorsed what he had done at Williamsburg. His description of the Majestic Theater in San Antonio, where he delivered his predebate lecture, was effusive. “It was built just before the Depression, right on the Main Street of town. The great ‘atmospherics’ theater architect of the time, John Eberson of Chicago, designed it with a Mediterranean plaza in mind. It had three balconies, total seating of twenty-five hundred, blinking lights like stars in the ceiling, which was sky blue, a cloud machine, a huge pipe organ, walls that were elaborate plaster replicas of Spanish and Moorish villages. The theater fell on bad times and some developer was going to tear it down, but the city of San Antonio—the mayor, I think it was Cisneros then—kept that from happening. They spent fifteen million dollars in city and private money to completely restore it, and they converted some old office space above it into apartments. The building is nineteen stories high.…”
I interrupted him. I simply did not care that much about a restored movie theater in downtown San Antonio, Texas.
There was so much to cover, to ask, to confront.
I moved him on to his phone conversation with Chuck Hammond of
the debate commission and then to Jerry Rhome. The answers got much shorter when he talked about his walk and talk with Rhome. It was clear to me that Howley was annoyed when it became clear through my questions that Rhome had talked to me.
“Why did you want to moderate that debate so badly that you asked Rhome to change the
News
rules to permit it?” I asked.
“It was not a case of ‘want.’ It was simply that I felt I should,” he said.
“But why?”
“That’s my answer.”
“What’s your answer?”
“I felt I should.”
“For love of country?”
“That’s it, Chapman. You got it.”
Rhome had already told me about their final laugh over Rhome’s order to make sure “Meredith loses his ass.”
I asked Howley how he took that crack.
“The way it was intended—as a joke,” he replied.
“How did you know it was a joke?”
“Because I am an experienced listener to jokes.”
I asked if he met with or talked to any of the other three panelists before going to Williamsburg. I knew the answer, but I wanted his confirmation and I wanted to ask him:
“Why not? Why not at least call them?”
“There was no real reason to call them. There was nothing special to talk about. The debate format the commission and the candidates signed off on was the simplest—the most controlled. I thought about giving them each a call to welcome them to the foxhole, but I got busy and didn’t do it.”
“Busy doing what?”
“Doing my job, for one thing. I work for a newspaper, remember?”
“Do you still work for that newspaper?”
“I’m on a long vacation now.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as it turns out to be.”
The enemy was approaching. The battle was now just over the ridge.
I felt the quickened beat of hearts, the flow of sweat on arms and necks, the smell of gunpowder and quinine. Charge!
I asked my first attack question. I did so gently, almost offhandedly. “Didn’t you think the other panelists had a right to know beforehand that you had something very special in mind for the format and the candidates?”
“They would have had a right if that was, in fact, the case. But it was not, in fact, the case. All of that happened later, after we got together.”
All right, all right. It was only a quick, light thrust, a pat—in and out. Only the beginning. A taste of what was to come.
I asked him if he recalled his first reaction to learning the names of the three journalists who would be on the Williamsburg panel with him.
“I knew Joan Naylor—I saw her as a pro, no problem. I saw the other two as nonentities, selected no doubt because of the color of their respective skins.”
“Did that bother you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you raise that point in your conversations with the panel?”
Howley snapped his head away from looking at me toward the direction of the sea. “I am not talking about what happened in Longsworth D,” he said.