It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the news room was, as usual, the capital of Pandemonia. One of the editing machines was down and Mooney was getting a rubber ear from listening to all the complaints and excuses, an& the phone rang and Mooney snatched it up and snapped, ‘Forget it!’
Eula, his secretary, wisely replied, ‘Unh unh.’
And Mooney said, surprised, Unh unh?’
And Eula said, ‘It’s God.’
Mooney groaned. ‘Aw shit!’
Just what he needed. God, of all people. The Hare Krishna of all Hare Krishnas, owner of the moon , the stars and the rest of the universe, as well as the Boston Star, five radio stations and three TV affiliates, including the one for which he, Harold Claude Mooney, was Director of the News Department. Not News Director. Director of the News Department. Big difference, especially at Channel 6 in Boston. God, otherwise known as Charles Gordon Howe, among other things, was a fanatic about chain of command and titles. To Howe the title was almost as important as the job. Howe had once explained this philosophy at a rare meeting of his executives: ‘People are immediately intimidated by titles. It takes them a while to size up a person. But the title, the title gets ‘em every time. It says “Here’s the power,” bang, just like that.’
Well, Howe had the title. The Chairman. Not chairman of the board. The Chairman. An hour and a half from showtime, ninety minutes until the daily Circus Maximus, The Six O’Clock News had a stick in his mouth and was staring down his throat and who’s on the phone? The fucking Chairman.
He put a smile in his voice before he answered. ‘Mr Howe? Hal Mooney here.’
‘Mr Mooney, I know you’re probably wishing some kind of strange voodoo curse on me for calling you right now, but I want five minutes of your time. Then I’ll let you get back to work.’
‘Five minutes, sir? Okay, shoot.’
‘I want five minutes on Eliza Gunn. Sum her up for me. I’ll time you.’
‘Right now? Are you starting the clock this minute?’ Mooney said and chuckled, although he knew Howe was probably sitting on the other end of the line with a stop watch in his hand.
‘Right now.’
Mooney glanced idly at the clock over his office door, thought for a few seconds and started. ‘One of the best investigative reporters I’ve ever known. She uses it all, whatever it takes. She can be adorable if getting it takes adorable. She can also be serious if it takes serious, or funny if it takes funny, or heart—warming, or cold-blooded, or meaner than a goddamn cobra with tonsillitis, if that’s what it takes. Point is, she gets it. She’s Joe Namath his first year with the Jets. Every throw’s gotta be a winner.
‘The first thing comes to my mind is the cross-eyed tiger. She called it a hunch. I call it instinct, pure instinct, without which a reporter’s a dancer with a broken leg.
‘Thing is, it took me a little while at first, y’know, to see it. At first I figure she’s just cute, a little ditzy. I used her on light stuff.
‘But that tiger story, that was a doozie. The rest of the stations were treating it as a humour piece, y’know, a kicker. I mean, what the hell, how else you gonna treat a story about a cross-eyed tiger named Betsy Ross ho’s getting her eyes uncrossed? So everybody gets stuff on the tiger going into the operating room and the doctor talking about the operation, like that. Then they split.
‘Not her. She hangs in there. I even told her to leave the damn zoo. There was stuff fast-breaking all over town that day.
“I got a hunch,” she says.
“Whaddya mean?” I says.
“You know what a hunch is, for Chrissakes,” she says
‘I feel like a dodo. I got this five-foot, ninety-eight-pound twenty-two-year-old asking me do I know what a hunch is and me in the business — what, twenty years? Almost as long as she is old.
“Look,” I says, “I got shit busting all over the place, I’m the news director, get your ass in the van and get over to” — hell, I don’t even remember where.
‘Now, she’s on staff maybe two, three months at the time, she’s a goddamn receptionist before that, I’m the expert, she’s nothin’ short of an intern, so who’s the boss, besides, what does she know, right?
‘Wrong.
‘She says, “I don’t trust these assholes” — she talks like a longshoreman by the by—and I says, “What assholes?” and she says, “The vets,” and I says, “Isn’t this like three expert tiger doctors they got Out there?,” and she says, “I don’t give a shit if it’s the top vet, he’s got a funny look in his eye. Trust me.”
“Trust me”!
‘I’m looking the Six O’Clock News dead in the eye three hours away and she wants to tie up a camera crew, herself and a van on a hot news day because the tiger doctor has a funny look in his eye.
‘I make a little joke. I says to her, “Not as funny as the look in the tiger’s eye, ho, ho, ho,” and she gets pissed, starts giving me all this jazz about this tiger, how it’s real valuable because it has white under the black stripes inst.ead of yellow and how they’re just doing the operation to make the tiger even more valuable and then the zoo’s gonna sell it to some Arab king for some enormous amount of money and on top of that the vet’s in for some big fee.
‘A tiger, for God’s sakes.
“Get your ass outa there now,” I say s, and she says, I swear to God, she says, “Bullshit!’ And she kills the connection. Not only that, she leaves the damn phone off the hook and I’m ready to kill her and I’m dictating a memo canning her ass and at five-thirty she bombs in the door and the tiger is dead on the operating table and this big-time vet has fucked up royally and the zoo people are freaking out all over the place, and she’s got this hotshot doctor with his balls hanging out trying to get off the hook explaining why the tiger died and all they were trying to do was fix its eyes, and there isn’t another newsman within twenty miles and the next thing I know Cronkite’s
