I stayed up there hiding for about a half an hour after that because I thought they were going to come on up, take my film, maybe throw me off the roof. Who knew what they would have done at that point? But they didn"t come. They never found me.
Those pictures made the front cover of almost every magazine in the world. The story was everybody thought Elizabeth Taylor was getting ready to die and here she was hooked up to the IV and they"re bringing her into the ambulance. Since everybody else had left and I was the only one there, it made the pictures exclusive and that"s mostly why it-probably why it became really a big deal at that time. These photos to me were the like Pulitzer Prize of paparazzi and put me in the exclusive six-figure club. A small group that has made six figures from a single photo.
So I guess now I"m known for that-for my tenacity. For always staying and hanging in there, starting earlier than anybody else. That"s part of-I don"t know what you call the word. That"s part of the way I work. I always start early and, you know, the early bird gets the worm, so to say. But it"s not a nonstop party, you know what I"m saying? I"ve been beat up and thrown in jail and handcuffed a whole bunch of times. I"ve been kicked, punched, fined thousands of dollars, had my windshield broke, my car smashed up. I mean, this all has happened numerous times.
The celebrities, sometimes they know we"re there. And they can"t call the police and say, "Hey, there"s a photographer down the street trying to take my picture." Because it"s not against the law. So they"ll say, "There"s a criminal down the street." The cops don"t know what they"re getting into. They get the report that there"s somebody suspicious on that block, they move in on you, and the celebrity drives away laughing.
This one time in front of Michael Jackson"s wife"s-I don"t even remember her name any longer. Not his new wife. Anyway, she calls the cops and says there"s a guy out there with a gun. And I was driving a black Dodge Ram with a redneck camper on the back with a Vietnam sticker on it. And the SWAT team comes, and I"m in the back of the camper sh.e.l.l watching out a side window, trying to see if she"d come out of her door. I"m not even looking at the street. And then I hear on the megaphone, "You in the black truck, come out." So I open up the back hatch and I guess they didn"t really expect someone to come out the back, so they panic. The first thing they do is grab me by the shirt, by my collar, drag me down on the ground, and lay me out. There"s a .357 Magnum pointed at my head, another guy on the side with a shotgun, and three police cars with cops all standing with their Magnums pointed at me. Finally they let me go. No apologies, no nothing. And if one guy would have shot I would have been Swiss cheese lying on the ground.
But, you know, that doesn"t bother me. It"s just part of the job. [Laughs] I mean, I"ve seen death in the face. It doesn"t bother me.
The one really bad situation was when Alec Baldwin punched me in the face and broke my nose. That was a couple of years ago. The a.s.signment was, they said, "All you have to do is shoot video. Alec Baldwin is comin" home with the baby. We already have somebody on the street doing stills. There"s an open place across the street, just go park there and shoot video when the car pulls in." I thought that sounded easy enough.
So I get on over there, and I park across the street. Completely across the street from his house. I"m not anywhere near his property. About half an hour later he comes up. As soon as he pulls into the driveway, I have my video cam rolling. He doesn"t even help his wife. He comes right over to my truck, bangs on the windows. Looks inside.
He can"t see in, but I can see out, "cause the windows are tinted. So he looks in, makes a whole bunch of hollering, goes back into his house, comes back out, bangs on the windows some more. And he"s got something under his jacket. I didn"t know what it was, but it wounds up to be a can of shaving cream. So he covers my window with shaving cream. I still have my video camera going from inside, getting him spraying my window. Then he walks across the street.
So I just think it"s over. So I opened my back hatch, and he comes runnin" across the street and tries to engage me in an argument. Which I didn"t want any part of. He starts arguing and reaching for the camera, and I keep on putting it behind my back with my right hand and stepping back.
And he keeps coming toward me, coming toward me. The next thing I know I tripped over some garbage cans that happened to be on the sidewalk. And I"m tryin" to regain my balance and he punches me in the face, knockin" off my gla.s.ses. Well, now I"m disoriented. I don"t want to be in an argument with this guy, and I can"t see any longer. So I"m looking around for my gla.s.ses, and he"s looking around for my gla.s.ses. And he finds "em first and hands "em to me. And he says, "Here." So I"m tryin" to put my broken gla.s.ses on, and he starts yellin" some other stuff, "You got what you deserved, now get the h.e.l.l out of here." So I turn around to walk away. And he kicks me from behind! So once I got into the safety of my vehicle, I cursed at him and said, "f.u.c.k you, now I"m gonna sue you." And I was kinda really upset at the time.
I made my way to the corner and I called 911. He runs in his house and calls 911. A few seconds later, police are coming from every direction you can imagine. And the cop says, "You"re going to be arrested for a.s.sault." I said, "Well, I didn"t a.s.sault anybody. That stupid a.s.s Alec Baldwin punched me in the face, and he kicked me when my back was turned." But they didn"t really care about what I had to say.
They finally pieced it all together, and realized that I was right, "cause there were eyewitnesses. So then I signed a piece of paper, and they took him away and he had to spend four hours in jail.
We went to trial. And the jury didn"t like me. They liked the movie star. So they let him go. Instead of listening to the facts of, yes, I was across the street, I never-everybody thought that I had jumped in his face from behind a bush. I never left the vicinity of my truck which was parked across the street. He had no right no matter what I was doing to punch me in the face and kick me in the rear. His lame excuse was that he thought I was a kidnapper, and the jury believed him. Why didn"t he-if he thought I was a threat to him in any way- from the get-go all he had to do was dial the police, instead of causing the ruckus that he did. Why didn"t he do that?
Anyway, the jury believed him, and they didn"t like me and he gets off the criminal charges. And I wound up having to pay my doctor bills. But you know, they always let celebrities go. "Cause everybody loves them.
I myself don"t care about celebrities and n.o.body that I know cares about "em. But that"s neither here nor there, really. The fact is movie stars and famous people will always be followed. They always have been, and they always will be. Because the public has this incredible appet.i.te for it. People just want to know what they do, you know? Where do they go? Where do they eat? What are they dressing like? What are they wearing today? Where do they live? What do their houses look like? What kind of cars do they drive? Who"s their girlfriend today? What"s their new addiction? I don"t question any of that. But I have no interest in who they are or what they do. I don"t think of "em as being despicable. But I don"t think of them as being any different than anyone else.
They deserve whatever they"ve earned for what they"ve done to get where they are, but they have no rights to privacy. If Madonna can go naked on a public street to get her picture taken, what right of privacy does she have? If Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman can go have s.e.x on a movie with people watching "em while they"re being filmed, what right to privacy do they have?
They"ve given up-because of the way they work and because of their lifestyle, they have no rights to privacy. They have a lot of money and a lot of power and they use that money and power to try to buy the privacy that they don"t have the right for. They live in fortresses, let me tell you, surrounded by security. But if they come out of their fortress, they can be photographed. If they want to stay behind their walls and build their walls high enough, if that"s the way they want to be-and some of "em are-then that"s where their privacy is. But as soon as they come out, they"re subject to anybody who wants to take their picture. Legally. And I think that"s fair. If I die tomorrow, I have no regrets of anything that I"ve done.
And you know what? These celebrities, as individuals they"re n.o.body. They"re here one day, gone the next. But these pictures and photographs and stories have been going on forever.
So, for me, I just take the pictures. Most times I don"t even know what the stories are about. I just have fun taking their pictures. If people will buy "em I"ll take "em. I"ve made a real nice living out of it. I started a scholarship fund in my name at Pasadena City College, you know? I"ve been lucky. The feed, the thrill of the hunt for being a paparazzo is just-I just love it. It"s like adrenaline. After the days of waiting and waiting and waiting against all odds that can possibly be against me, my win is just getting the picture.
In fact, I"ve taught my wife how to do this. She loves it, too. [Laughs] And she don"t give a s.h.i.t just like I don"t give a s.h.i.t. She just goes and does it. And she doesn"t let anybody push her out of the way, either. And she"s tiny. She"s been with me on stakeouts. I taught her how to use the video camera. [Laughs]
And you know she"s just from a small, tiny village in Hue, in Vietnam. I met her "cause, well-it"s a long story-but basically I went back there after that Alec Baldwin thing because for a while I just didn"t really feel like working. And so I met this young girl in Hue while on vacation-that"s all she"d known all her life. Most people that come from a country like that they never leave their little city or their little village. They just don"t-the opportunity is not there. And with me, we traveled from one end of Vietnam to the other while waiting for her visas and now that we are together in the U.S. she goes with me on these a.s.signments sometimes. It"s amazing. She"s picked up on English better than anyone I"ve seen. And she"s working parttime and going to school. She"s already driving, she has her own car. And she"s got an A and a B in her first two cla.s.ses at Pasadena City College where I started. She"s amazing. [Laughs] We have a lot of fun.
There"s nothing better than finding a politician who"s stepped out of line.
JOURNALIST.
Brian McGrory.
All I ever wanted to do was write for a newspaper. [Laughs] I know that"s corny to say, but, I mean, I started my own newspaper in elementary school. I just always knew what I wanted to do. And I think it"s always been sort of two things that have drawn me to it-first of all, I love writing. I love the whole exercise of writing. I love the challenge of putting thoughts to paper, finding just the right word, the right rhythm, the structure in which that rhythm flows. And second, I have-and for some reason I always have had- this very overt disregard for authority. I absolutely disdain authority. And when you write for a newspaper it gives you license to challenge authority at every turn. You know, your job is not to trust. Your job is essentially to be cynical toward authority and to challenge it. And that combination is what drove me into journalism, and that combination is what keeps me in.
In college, I did an internship for a small paper near Boston. Got hired by that paper when I graduated and I worked there for a year. Then I gradually, you know, worked my way up to get hired by the Boston Globe to write for a suburban bureau on the south sh.o.r.e of Boston, where I grew up. And then, at the Globe-once you"re in the weekly section-the next step is to get on the main metro desk and write about all of greater Boston. And after about a year and a half, they brought me in to do that. Then once you"re in the metro section, your only goal is to get out of metro and be on the national staff. [Laughs] And after a couple years, they made me national reporter.
That was great stuff. I just roamed around the country, writing a lot of off-the-beaten-track features. Like I went to Florida and spent a week in the newsrooms of the supermarket tabloids figuring out how they make their decisions what to publish. Or once I wrote about Mexican bandits robbing trains along the U.S. border. Guys who would literally, like, put boulders in the tracks to stop the trains, race over the border, which is about ten yards away-just, you know, pillage the trains-and then race back over the border. Pretty fascinating stuff. And then I"d also do breaking national stories, like the O.J. Simpson trial. I was in L.A. for that. And I went to Oklahoma City in the aftermath of the bombing and sat with people to determine how they coped with their losses after the initial media frenzy had left town and they were left alone, realizing that their son or wife or husband or parent wasn"t around anymore.
I really enjoyed that job. I held it for a year and a half or so, and then they sent me to Washington, D.C., to the Globe"s Washington bureau. They made me their correspondent to the White House. Which was a promotion, you know, but on a couple of different levels it was frustrating. Because, well, on the national beat, I was on my own, doing whatever I wanted. In Washington, suddenly I became part of the ma.s.sive White House Press Corps. It was quite interesting to do it for a short stretch, but it was wearying. It"s a real herd mentality down there. You get fed stories like you"re an animal. You"re literally fed and watered with press releases and little off-therecord comments that keep you going and make you feel important.
And then the Monica Lewinsky story broke, and it"s like that times ten. This cycle began where common sense and truth were often d.a.m.ned in the name of beating your compet.i.tor and getting a story out the next day. There was even false information printed. We saw a lot of that during the Monica chase. The Dallas Morning News printed a story they had to retract. The Wall Street Journal printed a story that they had to retract. It became a vicious, vicious cycle of just throwing stuff into print. You"re sitting at your desk and Wolf Blitzer is coming on the tube every ten minutes at CNN with some new pseudo-revelation that some White House official whispered in his ear a few minutes earlier-you know, a senior administration official will say that they"re considering having the president testify before the Senate in his own defense. And you know that"s never going to happen. But within seconds your bureau chief is calling to say, "You gotta get this! You gotta get this!" While you know it"s all entirely meaningless. It"s completely momentary. But suddenly you"ve got to get people that will either shoot it down or bring it up. And by the time your paper comes out in the morning it"s gonna evaporate into absolutely nothing.
Reporting, I think ideally, is kind of an art form. A lot of it is really subtle stuff like how you"re able to lure information from people, how you work with sources. You bargain with people all the time. And you gradually learn the power that you have-how to use, you know, a sort of carrot and stick approach. People love attention in this society. They thrive on public attention. That"s the carrot part. You offer them attention for helping you with information. Or you can offer something-more favorable treatment in return for their cooperation-a good story about them. You do that. And you also-if someone tells you that they"re not gonna cooperate, you know, you might push them into a situation where they may feel like they have to cooperate. Because as much as people like public attention, people dread negative attention. So if someone doesn"t cooperate, you get the information you"re looking for somewhere else, and you make d.a.m.n sure that readers know who didn"t cooperate and why.
There are a lot of different tricks. The ultimate trick is to fall just shy of the overt threat. You might want to tell somebody, "I"m gonna screw you as hard as I physically can if you don"t help me." But the art comes in letting that precise sentiment be known without uttering those exact words. [Laughs] It may not always be the most gentle process, but I think it serves a higher goal. I mean, journalists-we have to honor our historic role of being a watchdog to government and to the powerful. Some of these guys-these politicians-go through so much of their lives with, you know, their little aides just telling them that everything they"re doing is right and good and virtuous and it"s going to change society as we know it-they get fat in the head. And very self-centered and self-indulgent. And there"s nothing better than finding a politician who"s stepped out of line, and then you try to do a small part of bringing them back into what their job is supposed to be. Because that"s helping people.
But with the Lewinsky thing, it was just bedlam for near nine months. It just became, you know-that wasn"t the type of reporting that I wanted to spend my life doing. I mean every day was some new revelation or accusation. And they were almost all meaningless. There was no real story to chase. Or no new story.
Then, on top of that, one of the difficulties of being there with the Globe is that-as good as we are or we think we are or we know we are in New England-in Washington we"re not nearly as relevant as the New York Times or the Washington Post. So we tend to get over-looked when administration officials or investigators are looking to leak material. So there were always people in the White House who I needed a whole lot more than they needed me. And I had never really been in that situation before as a reporter, so I didn"t enjoy that very much.
But then something kind of fortunate happened, for me anyway-there were two very publicized controversies up here in Boston involving a pair of Globe columnists who were accused and found to be fabricating material in their columns. And both of them had to leave the paper. And so I was brought back from Washington to become one of our two new metro columnists. So now, for the last nine months, I"ve been covering Boston again, basically-and it"s great. I mean, I can say whatever the h.e.l.l I want to say two days a week about whatever the h.e.l.l I want.
I have the opportunity-what are the two things this week that I want to write about? Do I want to write about an old woman in a nursing home who is, you know, serving as an example for everybody else because she is overcoming a disability? Or do I want to write about how the mayor is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the land development project on the waterfront? Do I want to write about myself for a day? It"s really fun.
At the same time, it"s been a big change. Writing for a general audience in your own voice is not always an easy thing to do. It takes a while to get used to. As a reporter, you kind of have it drilled into you that you have to remain as impartial as you possibly can. The truth is, I mean the kind of well-known secret of journalism is that impartiality is very difficult. You know, among reporters, among editors, among anyone in the news business. But still you have it drilled into you that as a reporter you"re not weighing in on things with opinion, you"re trying to take things as straight down the middle as you possibly can.
Then, suddenly, as a columnist every expectation is that you come in with opinion. And that you come in with flair and a style that is, you know, very much different from what you"ve been used to doing since the very early moments of your career. That in itself is pretty daunting. It takes a while to get accustomed to that new freedom. And then, compounding that, in this particular job, I replaced a very well-known fixture here in Boston. One of the two columnists who got fired was a white Irish guy, Mike Barnicle. One was a black woman, Patricia Smith. And because I was the white Irish guy who got this job it was just a.s.sumed that I had replaced Barnicle. So I came in after this guy who had done this column for twenty-five years. He had a very defined voice. His nickname around here was "Boston Mike." He was well known around the country. So I didn"t feel like I could really impose myself on my readers right away because they were very much used to something entirely different. I"m trying just very gradually to find my own voice and be myself. And I hope that ultimately the column will succeed.
It can be very scary. Twice a week, you have a completely empty canvas which you have to fill. When you wake up the day before a column is due and you don"t have an idea yet or if something has fallen through, it"s really terrifying. [Laughs] And even when you get it done, you have to have a thick skin, you have to get used to people giving you their opinions on how you"re doing and what you"re thinking. It"s a little bit jarring at times. [Laughs] Like, I wrote a column last week on the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and how she"s gonna step down. The New York Times made a great big deal in putting the story on their front page. So I wrote a tongue-incheek column poking very, very mild fun at cla.s.sical musicians, essentially floating my own name, you know, suggesting myself as a possibility for the next conductor. Saying these guys just stand up in front of a band and wave a wand, and since I own my own tuxedo, I could do this as easily as anybody else.
Well, I got voluminous amounts of e-mail on this, ninety percent of which came from people saying-you know, this sounds immodest-but people saying, "Wonderful column, you made me spit up a doughnut on the subway this morning, I showed this to all my friends, blah, blah, blah." They thought it was great. But the other ten percent were from cla.s.sical music buffs or Harvard types who wrote to tell me that I was a moronic simpleton dragging the dialogue of the city down into the gutter. And they were vicious in their a.s.sessment of me as a person and as a writer. I guess I could see their point, but it was a joke. Just a joke! [Laughs] I have yet to write what I perceive is a funny column without ten percent of the public being completely offended.
I think that the ultimate goal is to provide some sense and some reason to what"s going on, you know, in our metropolitan area each week and to weigh in on the topics of the day. I mean, it"s a complicated world out there. There are things happening all over the place that are very difficult to explain. So you try and maybe explain them a bit. And if all is going well and right, you become a fixture, and people end up turning to you in the paper, hopefully out of habit, just to see what you have to say. And you"re hopefully providing some sort of voice of sanity to a reader a couple of times each week that might help bring some reason to an often unreasonable world.
So, you know, I"m not saying I"m a good metropolitan columnist yet, but I think if I stay at it long enough I can get better and better. And I definitely want to keep at it. This-here-this is it. I think it"s the best job in town. As a metropolitan columnist, more so even than as a national columnist, you have the possibility of having a real impact in your community. It"s much more immediate and much more real. I"ll stray down to Washington or write about national issues on occasion, but I like to keep most of what I do local. And when you"re writing about the life of a city-people read that stuff. You know, people really read it! I mean, you"re actually living in the place where you have impact. You"re running into the people you"re writing about. Yeah. I mean, the mayor hates my guts these days because-just-I don"t like some of the things he"s been doing, and I"ve put it into print. We used to play golf together! [Laughs] Now he hates me. [Laughs] It"s a plum job.
I go out on millions of lunch dates
and drinks dates and client meetings. I"m out all of the time.
BOOK SCOUT.
Tanya McKinnon.
A year ago, I was an editor at a small academic press in Boston. I was editing Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, bell hooks, people like that-intellectual authors. I had an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology and I was very progressive. Maybe progressive to a fault. [Laughs] It was a good position for me in some ways, but then I had this mini-crisis and I realized I didn"t want to do it for the rest of my life. Editing"s slow work and it"s not financially rewarding.
I already knew I didn"t want to go the academic professor route with all that dirty politicking and no paycheck at the end of it, so I started to look around for another publishing job. And, in the meantime, my best friend from graduate school and I wrote a book together about cats and dogs. It came out last March. It"s about how there are cat people and dog people-you can be canine, feline, or binine. It"s a spoof of self-help books, sort of, and it"s fun and lighthearted and really commercial. I decided that if my life was going to be so dirty and social anyway, I may as well be compensated.
My book is not going to make me rich and I don"t know if I"ll ever write another one, but it was a nice paycheck and it gave me an introduction to the larger world of publishing. The real world, you might say. I got an agent who took the ma.n.u.script to Andrews & McMeel-the publisher that puts out Dilbert and Erma Bombeck- that kind of wholesome American, good, clean fun. And I saw the way this agent worked and I thought agenting seemed like a really interesting place to be. You get to have the same kind of relationships you do as an editor, but you don"t get bogged down with a book for a year. Your author delivers, you go through one or two revisions with them, and then you send out a project and then it sells. You use your talents, but it"s not as stagnant as editorial.
So I tried to make the switch to being an agent and I was offered two positions, both as a.s.sistants, because I didn"t have experience. But I thought, hmm, I"m thirty-one years old, I don"t want to be an a.s.sistant. I"m more ambitious than this. And I"d heard about what"s called book scouting and it sounded interesting. So I interviewed with this really dynamic young woman who has her own scouting business, and she hired me without experience. She"s one of the top scouts in New York and she trained me. And, as it turns out, scouting is probably what I should have been doing all along.
A scout"s job is to provide their clients with preliminary information on book ma.n.u.scripts that are being sold in the United States. We have sixteen clients-eleven foreign publishers and five film production companies. So like if Random House buys a book for even a hundred thousand dollars, our job is to know that and to report on it to our foreign publishing clients immediately so they can decide if they want to buy the international rights.
It used to be that it wasn"t until the finished books were in the stores that foreign publishers bought an American book. Now, thanks to scouting, a European publisher can get the book twenty-four hours after its rights are sold in the States. We"re giving them a preemptive edge. And Hollywood producers want that same edge. Like say Nick Evans-the guy who wrote The Horse Whisperer and Loop-the whole film community is waiting for his next book. Well, the minute that ma.n.u.script is completed, we"ll have to get it to our clients so they"ll have a shot at buying it first.
Eighty percent of our information comes from open sources-like newspapers and magazines-but the other twenty comes from our ability to get stuff that other people can"t-stuff that depends on your relationships in the industry and your moles. A lot of what makes a good scout is just having incredible social skills. You have to be tactful, diplomatic, and really smooth. We"re kind of like the CIA. We understand how to approach a very diverse group of people-from Europeans to foreign rights people in New York, to agents, to editors-we"re talking to everybody. I go out on millions of lunch dates and drinks dates and client meetings. I"m out all of the time.
It"s truly exhausting sometimes. I mean, you have to be so socially adept because it"s an overwhelmingly compet.i.tive business and you have to be very aggressive, but you really have to hide that under your smoothness. And then you also have to have a phenomenal memory for all of these book t.i.tles and where they sold them abroad and who the option publishers are, and who their agents are and what a particular author"s history is-if he moved from agent X to agent Y-because you work with every agent and every publishing house in America and you have to be on top of every book coming out of every house. You have to be incredibly detail-driven.
I have symbiotic relationships with agents and editors. For example, I"ll tell editors what"s on submission and they"re able to call up agents and say, "I"ve heard about this project, I"d really like to see it." And, likewise, I tell agents what projects are out there. We all work together and, of course, I have pretty developed relationships with particular editors and agents so our tastes have started to line up.
I don"t deal with finished books. In fact, I"m frequently looking at unedited ma.n.u.scripts. This can make the job very nerve-wracking because we"ll sometimes say, "Aww, this doesn"t hang together," and then it"s a different book when it"s edited. Not usually, but sometimes. I mean, clearly we"re not stupid-we"re book people. More often, I"ll read a ma.n.u.script and think, "This has problems but it"s good. An editor could really clean this up." And I"ll say that.
In a lot of ways, I"m creating a buzz on these ma.n.u.scripts. I mean, because I have a privileged position vis--vis ma.n.u.scripts, if I love something, I"ll get on the phone to a publisher or an agent or a film company and I"ll talk it up, and that"ll be the first impression anyone in the industry is having. A scout"s word can put a spin on a book from day one, which is very exciting.
Fortunately, scouts are salaried, so we don"t have a pecuniary interest in any particular book. We"re on retainer-we get a flat fee every month from our clients by contract and our income is steady. That means we just report on any book we think will be of interest to our clients. We learn their taste and they learn ours. It"s kind of an ideal situation.
The downside is that it"s a ton of work. I read two or three ma.n.u.scripts a week on my own time. That"s not part of my tento twelvehour days during which I write coverage-which are like reports on the ma.n.u.scripts-and go to my meetings. And it"s not like I"m going home carefree: I hope for weekends with no reading and I never get them. It takes a toll.
Also, as a scout, the book world dominates your social world. You go to parties all the time within a small gossipy community. Your friends are the people in publishing you talk shop to all day long. The only thing I ever hear is, "This just sold to so-and-so." It would be nice to break out and have friends with other interests, but I work so much I don"t see that happening anytime soon. Likewise, a vacation seems kind of out of the question right now. I mean, it"s really hard to go away in scouting because if you leave for a week you"ve missed, like, thirty books.
Sometimes I feel like I"m chasing marbles down the hill. I have to read incredibly fast. I took a speed-reading course because I was going crazy and last time I tested I read six hundred words a minute. You can"t speed-read literature, but most of what I"m looking at is commercial fiction where you"re basically reading for plot. It"s not like the language is so intricate or beautiful that you need to pause and think. I mean, most of it is like, "She picked up the gun and shot him."
So it"s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I"m stressed, I"m tired, overloaded, I"m constantly looking, constantly on. It"s a burn-out job. I never sit back and internalize anything. I don"t read for pleasure anymore. But I haven"t burned out yet. [Laughs] In fact, I still get very excited every morning.
The thing that plagued me in university publishing is that I have a really commercial sensibility. I wrote a commercial book. And while I understand academic texts and I"m an admirer of good, clean intellectual writing, my real gift is that I can look at an unedited jumble and say, "Somebody might pay money for that at Barnes and n.o.ble." And it"s very rewarding for me to just use my intuitive sense-a smell that a ma.n.u.script or proposal could be something and then see that book get picked up and make money for one of our clients. That"s just thrilling.
I read the news to Atlanta.
ANCHORWOMAN.
Monica Kaufman.
I"m an anchor on the local news for WSBTV 2 in Atlanta. We"re an ABC affiliate. I"ve been here for twentyfour years. I anchor three shows a night-the five o"clock, six, and eleven o"clock news.
I"ve been a reporter of some kind ever since I can remember. In high school, I worked for my school newspaper and I also worked for the Louisville Defender, which was a black newspaper in town. I was always interested in television, but growing up, I didn"t see people like me on the air, and it never occurred to me that I could do television. So I got into newspapers, what I knew. I went to work for the Louisville Times as a newsroom clerk. And that was a wonderful experience-in part because they ended up sending me to Columbia University when their program for minority groups started. This was in 1969, right after the riots of the sixties when there weren"t many black people working in white-owned newspapers, television, or radio. So the newspaper sent me to Columbia-to their graduate school of journalism. The paper paid for it and it was great, and a great opportunity to work with people like Norman Isaacs, the famous newspaper editor, who was teaching there.
After that, a year later, I went back to Louisville and went from newsroom clerk to a general a.s.signment reporter and then I went to the women"s department of the paper. I left there after five years and went to Brown-Foreman Distillers to be the a.s.sistant editor of their inhouse magazine. Which wasn"t for me. I only stayed for nine months. It was really a big change, moving from a place where you"re used to getting both sides of the story to doing public relations, basically. Because, writing for an in-house magazine, there"s only one side of the story and that"s the company"s. And we had labor problems at that time and I had to write speeches, so I knew very quickly that I was out of my element. So I tried to get a job in television.
Now, at that point, there weren"t that many women nor minorities on the air and I probably would have had an easier time of it if I"d gone back to newspapers. But I saw the power that television had. Yes, a newspaper could do a story and get changes, but television could do the same story and get changes much faster. It was a combination of what I call "social worker fervor," a desire to be an educator and-heaven forbid I should say this-but acting. I"ve always liked the acting part of it a lot. And it is acting-you can"t read every story the same. So I decided I"d take the skills that I had as a reporter and and move them over to television.
It was a very hard transition to make. The first place that I tried out for a job in Louisville basically told me, "You still look like a college student, your voice is horrible. Come see us again, later on." [Laughs] So I did the things I needed to do-I took a charm course and I took a speech course, to learn how to put on makeup, how to do hair, how to dress for television. Because it"s a visual medium and anyone who says it isn"t is lying.
And this is actually how I got into TV-I started going to modeling school every Friday night and we did this kind of informal modeling for a big women"s department store. We would put clothes on and go to this nearby restaurant and just go from table to table-literally spinning a narrative about what we were wearing to get people"s attention. And I met a woman in there one night who asked me, "What are you doing when you"re not doing this?" and I said, "Actually I"m working at Brown-Foreman and trying to get some skills to get into TV." And her husband was Tom Dorsey, who was the news director at WAHS-TV in Louisville. She was enough impressed with me that she wanted me to meet him and, well, I gave him my bio on the spot, then did an interview for him the next week. Then I started to work at the station.
WHAS-TV hired me as a reporter, an on-air reporter. When I look back on it, that modeling stuff was the best training I could have ever gotten for doing live news. Because if you"re on a.s.signment, on location, you don"t really have time to write anything up. You maybe know all the basics-the facts-but what you say, it"s mostly all off the top of your head. So all the facts and figures I had to memorize selling those clothes off my back and all the improvising I had to do in those restaurants-those are the things that help hone skills for doing live shots. So it was a very good experience. [Laughs] You couldn"t do that now. That was a different time. But I still use that experience today. I went to Tokyo a while ago on a.s.signment and I was talking off my head like I was modeling again. [Laughs]
So anyway, I started as an on-air reporter at WHAS-TV and then I became the weekend anchor, and then in 1975, I came to WSB-TV as an anchor. And I"ve been in Atlanta ever since. I"m very happy here. It"s a big market-I think it"s the number ten market in the country now. When I came here, I think it was number sixteen. So I"ve moved into a bigger market without ever having to move, which is wonderful. And it"s just a great city. And this is a great job to have.
On a day-to-day basis, I"m a reader. I read the news to Atlanta. And I have no problems saying that, but, of course, it"s not all I do. I mean, I"m not just reading the words off a teleprompter. When things come in, I go over them very carefully. I copyedit everything before I read it. And I can write it, too-I"m still an interviewer and a writer. And a story conceiver. I"m involved with story content, story research, story writing, and so forth as much as I want to be. I have specials that I produce. In fact, one of the specials I did several years ago won two national awards. It was called, "Hot Flashes: The Truth About Menopause." And this was before menopause became the hot subject that it is today. I won a national award from American Women in Radio and Television, their big award, beating out doc.u.mentaries done by ABC, NBC, and CBS.
And then I did another special-that again was my idea and I produced it-that had to do with the Georgia High School a.s.sociation and its discrimination against girls in sports. I do those types of things. Even though my t.i.tle is anchor, I still pride myself on my ability to interview and to write. I even do a personality interview show that runs every quarter. I"ve been able to interview people from Paul Newman to Barbara Walters to Sarah Ferguson to former presidents.
Another big part of my job is doing public appearances. That"s one thing that"s helped me stay in this market for so long. I go speak to schools or I speak at side groups or I judge contests. I serve as president of the Atlanta Tip-Off Club, which is a basketball club and I"m very involved with United Way. And then I also do the official tree lighting-we have a Christmas tree in Atlanta that"s lighted every year by Rich"s Department store and I have been the MC on that tree lighting for television for years.
I do an average of three public appearances a week, sometimes more. [Laughs] During ratings times, it"s a lot more. Like this weekend, I"m bowling for the Holy Field Foundation, and this Sat.u.r.day night I"m singing for Habitat for Humanity. Someone"s written a song and I"m singing it as the introduction for the fund-raiser for Habitat. I have three appearances this weekend alone. Because it"s ratings time. So it"s kind of hectic.
We"re in ratings a lot. We"re in them now in September, we"ll be out of them one week in October, then we"ll be back in them until the first week of December, then we"re off until the middle of January, when we pick them up again. And they end the first week in March and then pick up again the last part of April through July.
Ratings are crucial. I mean, my position is secure now, but for new people working their way up-those people are out if they don"t get good ratings. That"s why I started my public speaking when I first got here-I wanted to get around in the community so when homes were called, people would know my name and know me as an anchorperson and therefore they would hopefully watch. And obviously they did, and that"s how I"ve been able to keep my job.
You can"t worry about ratings too much, though. I mean, you do all these things and that helps, but you can"t change your personality. Either people like you or they don"t like you. That"s my basic philosophy. You just have to get out there and be yourself.
My days are, like, I go to the gym every morning. Then usually my first appearance is a luncheon thing and by the time I get done with that it"s three in the afternoon. I get in here to the station at three-thirty and I go into makeup. That"s usually finished by fourthirty. Then I do promos-little things we do before the news show comes on. And then I sit at the computer and start editing copy, reading exactly what"s been written for the day. I get finished with the five and six o"clock shows by seven, then we do "teases" before the eleven o"clock news come on. Things like, "Coming up on Action News tonight at eleven."
Then I"ll go home and have dinner from about seven-thirty till about nine-thirty. Sometimes I also have public appearances during this time, but I try not to. Then I"m back here and I start proofreading the eleven o"clock show. Then I do that show and we"re finished at eleventhirty-five and then I check my e-mail and voicemail and I"m usually out of here at midnight. [Laughs] And then I come home and I"m so wired I usually don"t go to sleep until two-thirty in the morning.
It"s a lot of work. And it gets even busier when I"m doing my own stories. Like tomorrow, I"m working on a series about grandparents, about them raising their grandchildren, so I need to be at the station tomorrow at noon. I"ll be out in the field shooting until threethirty and then I"ll come back to the station. I"ll be working almost a seventeen-hour day. [Laughs] I"m fifty-two years old. That"s a long day for anybody.
It seems I"m working harder as I get older. But I don"t mind. I get a ton of vacation so I"m not going to complain. I get seven weeks a year. [Laughs] It"s great-I veg out, go rollerblading. And then I get back to work.
I think a hard work ethic just runs in my family. My mom, you know, she"s my mentor. She just had a high school education, was a maid when I was growing up. My parents were divorced, and she never made a lot of money-but she was never on welfare because she said there were women who needed it more. She just had one child, she could make it with one child. And she had some horrible jobs, she used to hock her engagement ring in order to pay my tuition. I went to Catholic schools all my life, and that"s how I was able to go, because she would work horrible jobs and hock her engagement ring-whatever she needed to do to pay the tuition. She has always been my guiding light.
When I came here, there were no black people or women doing the six o"clock news in Atlanta. It was very hard at first. I had black people calling in and saying I wasn"t black enough and I had white people calling in and saying I was too black, or saying stuff like, "Why do we need a woman on? Why do we need a black on?" There was no voicemail then, so I had all these messages like this relayed to me. Or I just answered the phone myself. I heard all kinds of things. A lady called me once because one of the males I was working with, I touched him on the air once, and this lady called in and told me that I didn"t know my place and "That"s the reason why n.i.g.g.e.rs didn"t belong on TV." And I told her, my place is right where I"m supposed to be. I was very nice to her. Kill them with kindness.