Eminentoes
Terzian, Philip
Don't get me wrong. Being a celebrity is not entirely tedious. I like being called to do a piece for the Atlantic. I like being interviewed by Time. I like making money. I have returned from...
...De mortuis nil nisi bonum...
...I have returned from television to discover that I have a magnified reputation that does get in the way...
...It is said that when she was hired she admitted to the Post's editor, Benjamin Bradlee, that she had never written anything before...
...Sally Quinn, Time, July 17, 1975 The philosophers of weight-watching insist that inside every fat man is a thin one yearning to get out...
...Excited gossip has it that she is working on a Washington novel...
...She can dish it out, as they said at Smith, but she can't take it...
...She can speak shamelessly of how delightful she is...
...That Sally failed so miserably, then, is explained only two ways: either television news-reading is a much more difficult craft than anyone suspected, or Sally's flair rests soundly in the lap of the Post's vulgarity, and could not be adapted to the outside world...
...It is funny—unintentionally, of course—although Sally's humor is an acquired taste...
...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...A Lana Turner of the lino-type come to life...
...The Washington Post sent down Sally Quinn —hitherto the chronicler of receptions at the Honduran Embassy, interviewer of George Wallace's mother-in-law—to get the details ignored by the wire service accounts...
...Hughes is the most fearless person I ever met...
...Who, after all, cares whether Henry Kissinger is a swinger, secret or otherwise...
...She now co-habitates with Bradlee, and as the editor settles into an undignified old age, he no doubt has the satisfaction of knowing the torch of banality has been passed, and passed with a vengeance...
...In her recent reminiscence of her days at CBS, We're Going to Make You a Star Sally Quinn and the Telegenic Intellect (Simon and Schuster, $7.95), Sally denies this particular version of the story, but it rings true...
...She refers persistently to her Smith education while betraying no evidence of it...
...And Sally will be there, pencil in hand, hand on hip, hip against the street lamp of Illumination, a wad of gum stuck firmly to the roof of her mouth...
...To make an ass of oneself in the presence of millions is doubtless an unpleasant experience, and that, together with Sally's natural emptiness of mind, led her to seize what was for her the only conceivable rationale...
...This is the sort of job interview every journalism graduate dreams about, the eager novice, willing to work, plucked from obscurity to try his hand at what is usually reserved for more seasoned, experienced folk...
...Certainly not I. Anyway, if, as Freud suggests, our physical ills are sometimes transferred in place from one part of the body to the other, this book may very well be Sally's solution to that problem...
...She wanders off the track in many and revealing ways...
...She left CBS, ostensibly to join the Washington bureau of the New York Times, until she discovered how insensitive Clifton Daniel can be...
...The literature of self-aggrandizement is a field both broad and fertile, and even the Post recognizes that it cannot go on publishing Watergate sanctimony forever...
...The movie star Warren Beatty is "bright, sensitive and serious and has a clearer understanding of his environment than most- people I know in any situation...
...One morning, leaving her apartment building., she encountered a CBS photographer at the front door...
...My subject, however, is Sally's book, trumpeted by her publisher as a "hilarious" account of her misadventures at CBS...
...Who among us can countenance the image that passage conjures up—Sally's toothy visage hunched over the toilet in an agony of frustration, exhorting her reluctant bowels to do their stuff...
...But she is primly, ferociously indignant when other clever,mordant observers train their eyes on her...
...Sally's thesis is that she was cruelly unprepared for the task of reading news stories into a camera...
...I always thought an understanding of your environment had something to do with knowing to come in out of the rain...
...She is instead tormented by predictable demons: jealous newspaperwomen, rapacious, sexist CBS executives, a cruel recurrence of her acne, insensitive people to the left and right of her...
...Someone who could virginally sit down at her Post desk and type her way to glory is naturally expected to The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 15 duplicate the feat under other circumstances...
...What she doesn't realize is that CBS's error of omission was more than likely her own fault...
...So much for Sally and broadcast journalism...
...Sally also has a peculiar inability to convey personalities, except her own, and that only by inference...
...It should be good, perhaps as good as Tom Wicker's or Willie Morris...
...This is where the fun begins...
...Likewise, Sally's candor, while selective, is intense and wide-ranging...
...Sally Quinn is a reporter for a supplement of the Post called "Style"—as opposed to substance, to be sure—and was for a time the sensationally unsuccessful co-hostperson of something called the CBS Morning News...
...Sally sent back what has since remained a classic of its kind: a long, loving description of the path of the bullet through the woman's brain, the blood splattering onto the camera lens, the contorted face, the stricken technicians...
...Barbara Walters is "warm, generous, loyal, dignified, humorous...
...She thought he was the man who hounded Jackie Onassis in much-publicized ways a few years ago...
...She has no sense of perspective, no humor, no sense of the absurdity of her situation, no inclination to review her debacle with a measure of irony...
...An interesting theory, and not without its general application, for I have long believed that by the same token inside every metropolitan newspaper is a National Enquirer champing at the bit...
...Now she is back at the Post, her spiritual home, the womb of inconsequence from which she strayed and to which, like the prodigal daughter, she has returned...
...What rock star, speaking frankly into Sally's microphone between gigs, has anything to say...
...It is her contention that CBS should not have unleashed her without some elocution lessons, without learning the minutiae of television production...
...His lack of fear...
...This is largely the complaint of a Washingtonian who must put up with it every morning jostling on the bus...
...but it can get out of hand and be not just disarming but excruciating as well...
...0 injustice...
...Her career, such as it is, has been founded on the Post's predilection for missing the point of what it sends its troops to cover, for splashing the moronic and the contemptible across its ample pages as the heroes of our time...
...Had she stood along the Via Dolorosa we would know what she was wearing, where she ate dinner after the unpleasantness and the freshness of the thorns in Christ's crown...
...Nor, might I add, is the Sally syndrome a passing phenomenon...
...Nobody's perfect," smiled Ben, who ought to know, author as he is of the recent Conversations with Kennedy...
...Sally seems not to have been able to do this...
...The only person I met who has no fear at all is Hughes Rudd...
...Sally speaks frequently of herself as a clever, mordant observer of the passing circus...
...It is mostly a matter of show business, however, with the attendant importance of clothes, hairdo, winning smile, mastery of the difficult names of foreigners, keeping a straight face in the wake of the men and events that shape our times...
...Her portraits rely upon adjectives strung imaginatively together that could apply interchangeably, or to a dog...
...Men are either handsome or ugly, cities exciting or dull, jobs well-paid or ill-paid...
...that is understandable...
...Trendiness in all its guises has crept slowly but inexorably into the surrounding pages, a temperamental virus that is not so easily shaken off...
...Of course, it goes without saying that Sally can't write very well...
...Undoubtedly television news requires some skill, a facility for looking up from the warmed-over AP dispatches now and then and projecting sincerity, shock, impatience, or whatever...
...Hysterical, Sally ran away screaming, but the wheels of the Barbie Doll mind were grinding nevertheless inside: "My mind raced to what I would wear in the courtroom when I sued Ron Galella to stay at least fifty yards away from me...
...However, her prose has a piquant quality to it that is difficult to convey, impossible to duplicate...
...Sally, as might be expected, takes a different view...
...Sometimes, indeed, the characteristics Sally treasures are mysterious...
...Sally Quinn, meanwhile, is regaining her land legs...
...Hughes Rudd a "feisty, gutsy, bright, funny dame who doesn't mince words...
...Hilarious it is, like a painting by a schizophrenic—crude, artless, yet matchlessly revealing...
...kept me going...
...She was away for awhile and things have happened, new faces have arisen, embassies have opened and closed, prostitutes, transvestites, professors of sociology, homosexuals are there to be interviewed...
...It is educational, too, telling us more than we ever wanted to know of Sally's personal tastes, romantic life, her scorn for sham, cowardice, hypocrisy, the military-industrial complex, women with moustaches...
...And Sally needn't worry about fading influence or lack of space...
...As an illustration of the biter bit—and if the reader is willing to indulge that view—the book is incomparable...
...Walter Cronkite "easy, natural, unaffected, smart, gentle and funny...
...Unhesitatingly, I choose the latter...
...About a year ago the hostess of a morning television show in Florida committed suicide by shooting herself on the air...
...This was a stylistic departure for Sally, but instructive in what it showed about her, about the newspaper that provided her abundant columns of space, about the putrefaction that lies festering in the souls of Washington's movers and shakers...
...But I am not a failure...
...Several pages, for instance, are devoted to a lurid description of her bout with constipation...
...Her flat mind can but relate stories as she alone experienced them, her inane presence the axis around which events revolve...
...But it is disheartening that she and her newspaper lust so vigorously after the second-rate, that so many newsworthy opportunities are missed—or worse, ignored—that so vacuous and uninteresting a figure as Sally should be its selling point, a force to be reckoned with in the capital of the Western world...
...I am not a loser...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
