Eminentoes/Powertown Cupcake
Ferguson, Andrew
Ajournalist, said Karl Kraus, is someone who, given time, writes worse. The proposition may be extended thus: Every journalist has a novel inside him, and if he's smart he'll keep it there....
...But at the Post her colleagues saw the aura of the moral philosopher shimmering around her work: "Sally has an extraordinarily low threshold for hypocrisy," said her fellow Style writer, Richard Cohen...
...C)ccasion2dly, when she makes the Names chew the cud ("His jaw was square and he worked it when he was silent as though he were chewing his thoughts"), she downshifts and loads up on periods: "The dream had left her disoriented and confused...
...Chicago would soon make her a moll...
...Before these gabfests can get burdensome, though, she takes the Names into bedrooms and, leaving the lights on, commands them to copulate, which they do, with inexhaustible virtuosity...
...Hers is the Washington success story, just as Regrets Only is the Washington novel...
...Having absorbed the Washington sensibility she reduced it to its vulgar essentials, and her rise was swift...
...Sometimes they came, and the situation was getting out of hand...
...Sally's singular achievement was to take the sort of talk that buzzed through the Georgetown telephone wires every morning after a big party, dress it up as journalism, and dare her editors to smear it over the Style section...
...Her writing might be primitive, sometimes even incoherent...
...And so they were, as it turned out, but Sally fired off a 3500-word story saying they weren't...
...As a matter of course she did this with the Brzezinski piece, but then she added a new twist: She closed the first installment of the series by saying that during an interview with a female reporter from People magazine, Brzezinski had unzipped his fly in a crude sexual advance...
...She started with his clothes: "He is wearing green fatigues, freshly pressed and beautifully tailored...
...Andrew Ferguson is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...In Washington joiunalism, this marked Sally as an intellectual...
...borne ceaselessly toward the chimera of bestselling respectability and a big-buck option on a TV mini-series, they take sabbaticals or early retirement, and the novels come tumbling down...
...When "Fidelito," as she called him, drew a bead on her with his big baby browns, she went mushy inside—even with Ben right there beside her on the couch: "It is so penetrating as to make you look away, as though he suddenly knows all your thoughts...
...She also spends much of the book idling in neutral: This was the real problem between them...
...They are, so to speak, the overdrive in Sally's two-gear prose transmission...
...I n press interviews, Sally has taken to describing Regrets Only as a "comedy of manners...
...gossipy items culled from other reporters' notes were set down as definitive anecdotes...
...They left town...
...And the gargantuan result—a novel called Regrets O/i/v^—has likewise been parodied and pilloried by the reviewers...
...And what a friend Sally turned out to be...
...Bradlee hired her on the spot...
...The testament is delivered, moreover, by the high priestess of the cult dedicated to advancing the proposition...
...Sally collected some quotes from people who didn't like him, strung them together newspaper-fashion, and the next Sunday the "story" appeared on the front page of Style...
...She too was a well-known journalist, for many years the author of acerbic profiles in the Washington Post "Style" section before marrying Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Post...
...The promo materials say that Regrets Only is "The Washington 'Simon and Schuster, $18.95...
...She had transformed gossip by calling it journalism, and now it was social science: "a kind of contemporary anthropology," said Shelby Coffey, her editor at Style Her stories were longjust like science reports—and she often divided them into numbered sections: "The Nine Steps of the Power Grab," "The TVvelve Laws of Social Climbing...
...Anywhere else, I think, her chances would be slim...
...But why Sally's novel, and not (let's say) Tom's...
...He is not seeing us as journalists," she wrote, "but as friends...
...She had read a couple of dream books...
...As they sipped daiquiris in their Havana hotel suite, Fidel came to call...
...Even now, Sally boasts, Warren Beatty is thumbing through the pages, choosing his part...
...She has, however, brought in busloads of characters— by my count, twenty-seven in the first thirty pages alone But they are not so much characters, really, as Names to which she attaches gobs of awkwardly phrased dialogue...
...Novel, a biting inside novel of power, sex and politics as it is played in the greatest arena of them all...
...Here, for once, the publisher's hype strikes an unwonted note of truth...
...To give the illusion of time passing, Sally changes the clothes of the girl Names with great frequency and attention...
...Sally Quinn, former career girl and now middle-aged hostess extraordinaire, is a >\^hington celebrity of the first water, and if anyone knows Powertown, it is—as Sally might say—her...
...And so on, which helps explain why Regrets Only is 556 pages long...
...Her eyes settled on his hands: "the hands of an intellectual, sensitive hands...
...Joking with her at a party one night, Henry Kissinger called himself a "secret swinger...
...This was a new dream...
...Bidding for the paperback rights is feverish...
...Then she makes them argue, and then she makes them copulate again...
...She was a journalist: "I covered parties the way someone on the 'Metro' section covers a crime...
...Awriter who can't write, a reporter inhospitable to fact, a social scientist with the mind of a chronically horny sorority girl—it is fair to ask whether such a creature could have come to prominence anywhere but in Washington...
...Many of her stories, Uke the Brzezinski profile, were little more than extended rants laid out in columns and illustrated with photographs...
...Her editors bought it...
...You can almost hear the drone...
...These sound sentiments come to mind whenever Tom Wicker (let's say) puffs up like a blowfish and exhales one of his long, gassy potboilers, sending the prolix pages fluttering earthward as the reading public yawns and wise-ass reviewers snicker...
...At bars she pours Irish whiskey and ChabUs down their throats...
...As it turned out, that wasn't true either...
...It was customary for Sally, when writing about men she didn't like, to intimate to the reader that they had made passes at her, at the same time making it clear that she, siren though she was, had refused them...
...In clinging dresses and stiletto heels she crashed the salons where the Washington greats gather to praise one another, and scoop followed scoop...
...The relationship...
...But for some reason Sally Quinn and her novel prosper...
...It was like finding the cure for cancer," she said...
...When in 1969 Ben Bradlee first considered hiring her as a reporter for Style, she had never written anything longer than morbid valentines to an endless string of beaux...
...These copulation paragraphs— "copgrafs," you might call them— generally comprise short sentences hitched together, without aid of punctuation, to make one very long sentence...
...in New York, declassd Her legs may have been shapely in the early days, but not shapely enough for L.A...
...There was a recurrent theme in her dreams...
...She denied she was a gossip...
...To prove her point she sent blind quotes sailing through the story...
...During the final days of the first Carter campaign, a rich Southern couple bought a house in Georgetown and gained social cachet by claiming to be friends of the Carters...
...She takes the Names to dinner parties where she props them up at tables and shovels food into their mouths...
...Des [a boy Name] never wanted to talk about anything that involved the two of them...
...In Paris she would be considered in bad taste...
...gathered at the bottom...
...Regrets Only is as windy and empty as the city itself, a suitably bloated testament to Washington's current fixed idea: the "old town" really is the most interesting and exciting city in the world, the greatest arena of them all...
...None of the novel's most telling Washington touches—the flatulent dialogue or the bogus characters, the exhaustive sartorial details or the unconvincing talk of ethics—will come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Sally's career...
...In Washington restaurants she serves them delicious meals (some of Regrets Only is pure fantasy...
...She ended her eight-part series on Cuba with a tribute to the hero of the Sierra Maestra, presenting it the way she knew best...
...The Brzezinski story, she said, was a "study in the politics of the power grab...
...TWo months after its release...
...As she covered her beat Sally would occasionally hear talk of things Uke politics and foreign affairs, and her curiosity induced her to broaden her range...
...Leaving aside Henry Adams—as most people do—there is no reason to doubt that this is so...
...As they speak, she shoves the Names to and fro, dragging them in the White House gate to see the President on one page, then hauling the Names back to the newsroom the next, where she makes them speak long and loud about the ethics of journalism...
...The term is a familiar SOS nowadays, usually sent up by panicked first-time novelists who have reread the final galley proofs and suddenly realized that, while busily describing table settings, facial coloring, clothes, hair, and furniture, they have forgotten to include a plot...
...but Franz Boas probably couldn't write, either...
...While there, whether sober or pissed, the Names flap their lips in extended p r ^ ^ i / ^ <•/'*< discussions of vague but important issues—this imparts a Washington feel—competing for scoops about White House infighting, appointments to cabinet posts, and dealings with the Russians, who are not friendly toward Washington...
...Sally likes to watch...
...Doubtless the current example of Sally Quinn won't help matters...
...in London, impolite...
...In the sensible backwaters—Pocatello, for example—tho^ would wonder why she bleached her hair...
...Yet in the face of such discouraging precedent the hacks persevere...
...Fatuous, unreliable, and always willing to shroud her work in high purpose, Sally was the Posts kind of reporter...
...Fidelito spoke shyly: "I am not a truly powerful person," he said, and sliding the pencil from her mouth, Sally wiped it off and scribbled the quote down in her reporter's notebook, next to all her other adjectives— adjectives had always been a signature of Sally's stories, and for Fidel she emptied the closet: "surprisingly vulnerable, gentle and appealing . . . calm, logical, reasoned . . . highly complicated, sophisticated, intelligent . . ." It was more characteristic of Sally to find the enemy lurking at home: In a three-part profile of Zbigniew Brzezinski—such a funny name!—she portrayed him as a lecherous freeloader, an interloping con artist prowling the corridors of power, posing an inestimable danger to the country at large and especially to her friend from Georgetown, the button-cute and noble Cyrus Vance...
...That ended that...
...He read about it in Style the next day...
...It had acquired all capital letters...
...Her agent's phone jingles with calls from the coast...
...THE RELATIONSHIP...
...A hayseed from Pocatello, Idaho, moved to Washington and invited bigshots to his parties...
...The great legs would help her get the good quotes—^judging by the results, in fact, Sally developed an interviewing technique that resembled a journalistic Heimlich maneuver—and the lack of scruples and her big mouth would permit her to write anything she thought she heard...
...In 1977 she went with Ben to Cuba...
...In her retirement she too has barkened to the little voice telling her that deep wells of narrative talent could be tapped during a month or two at the keyboard of her IBM PC...
...It had taken on a huge meaning in their lives...
...the boy Names, being boys, are more rumpled—for instance, Sally would never fasten the top shirt button of a boy Name...
...But she knew how to throw a party, and she had connections in Washington society—her father had been prominent in the military—and she had other, more important qualifications as well: gnawing ambition, an utter lack of scruples, a big mouth, and great legs...
...whole paragraphs of unsupportable accusations appeared from nowhere, ascribed to "Brzezinski-watchers...
...Is there something in this particular coagulation of Southern torpor and democratic politics that affords opportunity even to someone who is, like Sally, wholly lacking in natural gifts save the gift of guile...
...Regrets Only is number seven on the New York Times bestseller list, and her friends at the Washington Post Book World have notched it up to number five...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
