Now You Know
Scovell, Kitty Dukakis with Jane
NOW YOU KNOW Kitty Dukakis with Jane Scovell/Simon and Schuster/315 pp. $19.95 Joe Queenan I have a disease. It is a disease I have never before discussed in public, a disease I am mortified to...
...Moron is a term of endearment," I would assure infuriated novelists whose books I had panned...
...Knowing of my disease, yet insisting that I review Now You Know was like inviting Dean Martin over for 400 margaritas...
...That's why this sentence—snidely observing that her coauthor Jane Scovell's previous ghostings involved women who need to go on a diet (Marilyn Home and Liz Taylor), while Now You Know involves a woman addicted to diet pills—is going to be the last nasty remark I ever make in my life...
...I hit the proverbial bottom last summer when I wrote a mean article filled with mean remarks about my wife, a co-dependent victim who has become the enabler of my meanness by saying things like "Joe isn't really a mean person...
...It is a disease I have never before discussed in public, a disease I am mortified to identify, yet a disease that plagues me every waking hour of my life...
...As I grew older, my addiction grew worse, manifesting itself in scathing movie reviews, vicious biographical profiles, and savage articles about captains of industry, titans of culture, paragons of virJoe Queenan is a frequent contributor to Barron's and other publications...
...But I am not a nice person...
...There I entered an intensive-therapy program where I learned to come to terms with my addiction...
...I am a meanaholic...
...Not three pages into Now You Know, I realized that I was heading straight for Relapse City...
...Yes, I am an individual who can only derive joy from being mean to other people...
...It is a disease that afflicts a shocking number of Irish-American writers, a disease that ruins our marriages, turns our children against us, and strangles the budding flower of our talents...
...I am a meanaholic...
...It's my disease, you see...
...I'm a sick person getting nicer...
...Not Mr...
...It is a disease I inherited from my Irish-American father, who inherited it from his Irish-American father, who inherited it from his 100 percent Irish father...
...When Kitty says, "Going south called for lightweight garments, while heavier clothes were needed for northern climes," the disease in me cries out, "I paid $19.95 for this...
...Then Kitty Dukakis's autobiography arrived in the mail...
...I am just such a person...
...When Kitty moans about suspicious hairdressers infiltrating Miami beauty salons, perhaps for the sinister purpose of undermining the already reeling Dukakis campaign, I start to gag...
...I t all fell apart right then and there...
...A nice person wouldn't have made fun of Kitty for fuming over Jesse Jackson's refusal to eat her fish teriyaki and instead ordering take-out chicken...
...Nothing—wife, children, friends, expense-account lunches at Le Cirque—meant anything to me anymore...
...I wrote a nice article about the actor Mandy Patinkin for a movie magazine...
...Even as a child I would sneak off to a corner to write mean stories about good people, accusing them of being shills, phonies, morons, and whores...
...It's my disease...
...A nice person, a truly recovering meanaholic, would have glossed over Kitty's brain-dead comment about the imprisoned Nazi Rudolf Hess: "It's hard to sympathize with murderers, no matter what their age...
...After six weeks I began to notice a decisive change in my personality...
...You see, I'm not a sick person getting sicker...
...And a nice person wouldn't cackle and guffaw at her description of Jackson as "lactose intolerant...
...I am niceness-intolerant...
...I felt cured...
...I blame The American Spectator for a lot of this...
...My disease swept over me, and in twenty minutes I was right back where I'd started, being mean, mean, mean...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...Yet as the years drifted by and the vicious articles grew more virulent, even I was forced to come to terms with my addiction...
...And Kitty Dukakis's book left me twenty-five hours on the debit side...
...Sleaze-ball is not an offensive term," I would tell venture capitalists angry at my use of that word to describe them...
...I said nice things about deposed Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry in a book review for this magazine...
...I felt uplifted...
...Not me...
...The reference to your mother was a gag," I would tell other victims of my malevolence...
...It is a disease that can only be conquered when the victim has the courage to admit that he is powerless to combat it...
...tue, and people like Susan Sarandon...
...Like most addicts, I have spent years and years denying my disease...
...it's just that he grew up in Philadelphia...
...I lived and breathed for one thing alone: to be mean...
...But it isn't me doing this...
...Desperate, seriously contemplating taking my own life, I checked into the Robert Fulghum Detoxification Center in Shady Grove, Maryland...
...I felt transformed...
...Sure, I could have dwelled on Kitty's four miscarriages, her civic activism, her work in getting trees planted, her neck problems, her love of her children...
...I don't want to find myself at age seventy still pointing out that the photo on the cover of Now You Know makes Kitty look beautiful, while the one on the back flap of the dust jacket makes her look like a woman who should choose a better brand of rubbing alcohol...
...I don't want to spend the rest of my life making fun of people like Kitty Dukakis just because they think the nice thing about being wife of the governor of Massachusetts is getting good parking spaces...
...Meanaholic...
...I said even nicer things about a bunch of New York Times reporters in a book review in the Wall Street Journal...
...A nice person wouldn't have cited Kitty's idiotic remark: "The business of running for the presidency—and it is a business—is a serious matter and shouldn't be treated with a devil-may-care attitude...
...When Kitty glosses over the incident with the rubbing alcohol, I want to know details: brand name, label configuration, would she consider doing endorsements...
...But for a meanaholic, niceness is something he has to work at twenty-four hours a day...
...I don't want to go on this way...
...That's the sort of thing a nice person would have done...
...I am a man who can no longer help himself...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
