“You look good, also.”
Anya was a Yugoslavian war refugee in her early twenties, with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. She wore a businesslike blue dress with white trim and a white belt, an ensemble that played down her bosomy shape. We’d had a brief fling a while back, but her boss didn’t know it—because he was in the midst of a longer fling with his “secretary,” himself.
Anya was the office’s current “fair-haired girl,” as the staffers around here dubbed them, “cutie-pies” in her employer’s own terminology. Since her English was limited, her secretarial duties ran not to taking dictation but accompanying her married boss to cocktail parties and out-of-town speaking engagements.
A living room loomed straight ahead, with a formal dining room off to my left; but this was not a social call—the lady of the house, Luvie, spent most of her time at the family farm, anyway. Anya led me down the right a few steps, into the office area, ushering me—wordlessly—into a book-, paper-, and memento-flung study where her boss sat typing furiously at a stand to one side of his big wide wooden desk. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, fingers flying, the tall, bald, sturdy-looking journalist seemed oblivious to our entrance.
Beyond an open double doorway opposite the desk, a larger office area hummed with activity, a file cabinet- lined bullpen with three women and two men, typing, talking on the phone, interacting. Anya smiled and nodded to me, as she went out and joined them, shutting the doors behind her, though I could see her through the panes of glass, positioning herself at the wire service ticker, watching stories come in, doing her best to read them.
Sunday was one of Drew Pearson’s deadline days—he had his weekly radio broadcast tonight and he and his staff were prepping frantically for it. (One key figure around here, legman Jack Anderson, was not present: a Mormon, he didn’t work on Sundays, though he toiled his ass off on Saturday.) About twenty years ago, Pearson had gone from being a journeyman Washington newsman to a national figure by appropriating the technique of Manhattan and Hollywood gossip columnists for his “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
That syndicated column—growing out of a book not unlike the
Speaking of Chicago heels, I stood rocking on mine, my hands in my suitpants pockets, waiting for Pearson to come up for air and notice my existence. This study had dark plaster walls decorated with photos of Pearson with show business figures (Sinatra among them) and national political luminaries, including a couple presidents and Senator Estes Kefauver; a few political cartoons, lampooning Pearson and his sometimes controversial stands, were framed and hanging here and there, as well. I was thinking about what an egomaniac this guy was until I realized these reminded me of my own office walls.
This was homier than my Monadnock suite, however, cozier—snapshots lined the mantelpiece of a working fireplace, and windowsills were stacked with books and magazines and one sill was occupied by a slumbering black cat. A primitive rural landscape and an oil painting of Pearson’s late father— neither very good—shared wall space with the framed photos and political cartoons.
Pearson stopped typing, heaved a sigh, and flipped the fresh page of copy on a desk lined with paper-filled wooden intake boxes. He had still not acknowledged my presence. He glided over, backward, on his swivel chair and got behind the desk, and turned to me, finally bestowing that foxy grin I knew so well.
“Must you always come by on broadcast day?” he asked, standing to his full six three, extending his hand. Just as he typed rat-a-tat-tat style, he talked the same way, having trained himself to sound like an elitist version of Walter Winchell, for the radio version of “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
Reaching across his messy desk to shake with him, I said, “Remind me—what
The bustle of the bullpen provided background music.
“No such animal, as you well know.” He gestured for me to sit and I took a hard wooden chair across from him.
Pearson settled back in his chair. He had an egg-shaped head, close-set eyes, a prominent nose, and a wide mouth adorned with a well-waxed, pointy-tipped mustache. Under the purple smoking jacket, a white shirt and brown-and-yellow bow tie peeked out. Gentlemanly, aloof, he would have made a fine British butler.
“Thanks for making time for me,” I said.
His arms were folded; he was rocking gently in the swivel chair. Then he halted in midrock and he reached for a jar of Oreo cookies on the desk, took off the glass lid, and dug himself a couple out; then he told me to help myself.
I passed. This—and cheating on his wife, and not paying me promptly—was his only vice. He was a Quaker and did not smoke, though he took hard liquor, albeit not to excess. He also did not pepper his speech with “thee” and “thou,” which would have been a little hard to take, considering his superior manner.
“I understand you’re not cooperating with my friend Estes,” he said.
Suddenly I felt as if I’d been summoned by Pearson, even though it had been me who arranged the appointment.
“I haven’t even met Senator Kefauver yet,” I said. “But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Drew, that I don’t intend to compromise the privacy of my clients.”
An eyebrow arched. “You won’t testify?”
“If the committee calls me, I will, sure. But they won’t learn anything except name, rank, and serial number. If you could pass that info along to your ‘friend’ Estes, that would be swell.”
“Your visit does have something to do with the Crime Committee, though,” he said.
On the phone, I had indicated as much, if vaguely. Arguably, I could have handled this—and the other conversation I’d come to D.C. for—over the long-distance wire; but Pearson was one of the most paranoid men in a paranoid town, and refused to talk frankly on the telephone. He had his office swept for bugs on a weekly basis, and made most of his own calls from pay phones.
I said, “Yes—I would appreciate your insights on a couple of matters related to Kefauver.”
