Years ago, the wonderful Walt Harrington came to our newsroom and fired us up.
We were at the start of a storytelling revival, trying to find our way back to craft, and Walt’s book “Intimate Journalism” had just been published.
In the book, Walt quotes Will Durant, a famous historian and philosopher: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.”
Now ask yourself: How often do journalists write about what happened on the banks?
It has resonated with readers (nearly 26,000 people have recommended it via Facebook alone), and it’s not hard to see why. Who hasn’t done or said something they regret? And how powerful are the words, “I’m sorry?”
Tom’s story – about a man who agonized over his actions as a boy and wanted to make amends – has a level of intimacy that we should strive for as journalists.
What stops us?
Perhaps we question whether this kind of story is newsworthy. Maybe we’re scared to get too personal.
But as Tom explains:
As the days passed, I thought about this strange tale. There was no news. If no one ever heard a word about James Atteberry and Larry Israelson, it wouldn’t matter.
Or would it?
A good feature story is about something universal. When it comes to apologies, no one gets a pass in this life. Everyone deserves one, and everyone needs to give one. When I mentioned this letter to people, I found a story more universal than any that I’d written in years. Everyone told me they had someone they wished they could apologize to. And they told me that by the time they realized that truth, it was too late.
In my case, it was something that has haunted me for decades.
Three things struck me about this story, from a writer’s perspective:
First, Tom recognized there was a story. That is suchthe battle sometimes, seeing what is right in front of us. There was no news as we traditionally define it but definitely something compelling. I suspect Tom mentioned the letter to others because it resonated so deeply with him, and my guess is that it was almost tugging at him to not be ignored.
Second, Tom’s use of the first person. Sometimes reporters become characters in a story and have no business being there. In this case, Tom was clearly an important figure, as he became the way one man found another.
But also, his own story brought home the universal truth:
Months later, the girl left school. I never saw her again. The school I attended has been torn down. I have forgotten the names of many of my old classmates. But not hers. For years I wanted to apologize.
Third, this story reminds us that is it never too late to revisit the past, and in fact, sometimes years must go by before people can work up the courage to expose – and confront – their weakest moments. Again, Tom explains:
The beauty of an apology is that everyone wins because it reveals not only who we are, but who we hope we are.
I’d argue that part of the reason newspapers are in trouble is that people rarely get emotional when they read our work.
I cried at the end of this story.
Maria Carrillo (@havana58) is the managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot and a two-time Pulitzer juror.
We chose Wright Thompson’s ESPN.com piece “The Kid Who Wasn’t There” as our latest Notable Narrative because the story added a chilling layer to the odd life story of Guerdwich Montimere, the grown man who passed himself off as a Texas high schooler and became a basketball star. So much of Thompson’s work, though, merits an admiring read: the why-you-should-love cricket story out of India, the Billy Cannon story out of Louisiana, the ode to writing and writers out of a bar called Elaine’s. A Kansas City Star newspaperman turned long-form features writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, Thompson writes off the world news, via the prism of sports. “He writes long and often personally, and he lays his heart out there, which is a rare thing these cynical days,” as Esquire’s Chris Jones once put it.
We caught Thompson on the road this week in our mutually native Mississippi. He was driving from his home in Oxford to a story in Alabama, but didn’t want to say, at least publicly, what the story was. It was kind of hard to hear each other, and Thompson kept yelling things like “Oh look! The Natchez Trace!” but we managed to cover everything from story conception to deadline music. You may want to think of Thompson’s comments as part master class on narrative journalism and part travelogue.
I had just re-read his great piece on Junior Johnson, the godfather of stock-car racing, and was saying how fun it can be, covering NASCAR, and so we started there.
Paige Williams: Those guys are just not like anybody else.
Wright Thompson: And the way Junior Johnson talks – those are poems. It’s “bored-out” and “stroked” and “cammed” – they’re like the best kind of poems because it doesn’t matter what the words mean, it’s just how they sound.
Those boys are smart, too.
Thompson at Hemingway's house during a reporting trip to Cuba. The line above his head marks Hemingway's height.
Junior Johnson has an innate understanding of physics. I mean if Junior Johnson had been born to your family or my family, Junior Johnson would’ve been, like, a particle physicist. The things he invented!
The best thing about writing about racing isn’t so much the tech stuff or who won or lost, it’s the characters. I remember this thing about Richard Petty rolling a car pretty good – he went over an embankment and out of sight and everybody ran over to find out if he was dead or alive, and he was sitting there in front of the smoking wreckage and all he said was, “Anybody got a Coke?”
They’re like that! It’s unbelievable! Like Junior Johnson threatening a U.S. marshal – Junior Johnson is not someone you want mad at you, even at 80. Junior Johnson would whip my ass. I wouldn’t fight Junior Johnson – are you kidding me? Like, the story about him cheating in his son’s soapbox derby, hiding the lead in the floorboard of the car –
They figured out how to get by.
I talked to Mike Krzyzewski, the coach at Duke – the thing that’s interesting is that Junior has an eighth-grade education and is really embarrassed about it. The thing he wants more than anything in the world is for his son to go to college, and so they went and toured Duke. And to hear people describe – Junior Johnson’s father had a second-grade education, so to go from a second-grade education to an eighth-grade education to touring Duke? I mean, the look on his face.
What about your family, if you don’t mind my asking?
My mother’s side of the family were well-to-do Delta planters. My dad’s side of the family was sort of the opposite; they grew up in South Mississippi, very, very small farm. My grandfather was a really smart man who had to go home and run the family farm – I feel like there’s a little Willy Loman there, had to go home and do this job. And so they were middle-class as that era of Mississippi goes, but my dad and his brothers all went to college. There’s a doctor, a lawyer, an advertising executive. So in some ways it’s from the farm to working for a media company, with a generation in between – a pretty standard story. From making things to helping people who make things to working with ideas. Oh, hey, “Welcome to Okolona: the little city that does big things!”
Is that Monroe County?
I do not know the answer to that. My father, who could name every county in Mississippi, would be very upset.
Chickasaw County. I’m Googling.
Oh, look at this! This is the high school football field! It is the Charles Faulkner Field, “home of the Chiefs.” Faulkner died in Okolona, I think, right?
Byhalia.
Oh, that’s right, at the sanitarium, drying his ass out.
And he’d had a heart attack.
It wasn’t drinking that killed Faulkner, it was stopping. It was like: Heroin didn’t kill Jerry Garcia, quitting did.
Faulkner died at the Wright Sanitarium, Wright.
And this is the 50th anniversary of his death. He died 2 1/2 months before Ole Miss integrated.
Oh, he was only 64.
Yeah, well, those were 64 hard-ass years. Did you read William Styron’s obituary about him in Life magazine? It’s incredible. (His niece), Dean Faulkner (Wells), who’s just died, she had this great collection of first editions because every single writer who came to town came by to kiss the ring. She had this Gideon’s Bible inscribed: “Dear Dean, I wrote this book for you. Love, Bill Styron.” You know.
It’s 11:15 in the morning. How long have you been up?
Today? I snoozed until about 6:30.
Morning is your best writing time, right?
I want to be in the chair writing by 6:30, and I want to be done writing for the day by 2. There are always five or six stories going at once so I need to sort of do the daily maintenance on them. I’m just much better right in the morning. And also, I can have a day ruined very easily, which I’m trying to get better about because it’s stupid to be superstitious, but, like, if I oversleep the day is shot for me. I can’t go start at 10. It’s ruined.
When did that start for you?
It was by necessity. At the Kansas City Star I wrote a 3,000-word takeout every week. We would have a meeting on Monday – we would go out to lunch and plan. I would either stay in town or be on an airplane that night or Tuesday; I would report Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, usually come home Thursday or Friday. The story would run on Sunday, so I would wake up Saturday and write live. Every hour counted.
Yeah.
The difference between starting at 6 and starting at 10 was the difference between having a story that worked and having a hot mess. So I just got in the habit. And I just do better if I have a long stretch of day in front of me. To the eternal annoyance, I think, of my editors, I don’t want to conference-call about the presentation of a story before I’ve written the story. I like the long stretch of a day in front of me.
What do you do to get yourself into that writing space?
I drink an absurd amount of coffee. And I have a song mix that I listen to that I’ve listened to basically for 10 years. I mean, I add songs as I find them, but I listen to music.
Wait, wait, wait – you listen to the same song mix that you’ve listened to for the past 10 years?
Yes. That started for a very specific reason, though: I wrote in press boxes, where it’s loud as shit. And so you need something to drown out the noise. So I had a mix that I made that was calm. If I had 17 minutes to write I wanted a little soothing music.
Now you know that I have to ask what’s on that mix.
Hold on. Okay. (Reading from his iPhone.) “Writing Mix: Charlie Daniels Band, ‘Mister D.J.;’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,’ Tori Amos; ‘Little Rock,’ Collin Raye; ‘Hallelujah,’ Jeff Buckley; ‘Brothers in Arms,’ Dire Straits; ‘Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,’ Don Williams; ‘New Orleans Ladies,’ (LeRoux); ‘Good Riddance,’ Green Day; ‘This Old Porch,’ Lyle Lovett; ‘Sunrise,’ Norah Jones” – fuck, that’s an odd one – “‘Lonesome Blues,’ Shooter Jennings; ‘Stuck on You,’ Lionel Ritchie; ‘Walking in Memphis,’ Marc Cohn; ‘Photograph,’ Charlie Robison; ‘The Wrestler,’ Bruce Springsteen; ‘Amsterdam,’ Coldplay; ‘Little Motel,’ Modest Mouse; ‘The Freshman,’ The Verve Pipe.”
Well, now I have to make the playlist.
That’s embarrassing! Why couldn’t I have said, you know, Motley Crue, “Home Sweet Home?”
No! It’s great!
I’ve stolen songs. “Amsterdam” is Tom Lake. “Little Motel” is Chris Jones. Somebody’ll mention a song that they write to and I’ll go, “Ooh, I like that,” and I’ll put it on the mix. Sometimes I’ll take things off. I took off Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” because I liked it too much. It was distracting.
(Charlie Daniels is playing out of position on that list for now − clearly he doesn’t like being told what to do − but the others should work.) What else is on your list, from other writers?
I’ll have to do a reconstruction of it.
Do some liner notes.
Exactly. Liner notes. The Green Day song got added because I was writing a story about Tara Peck, a high school soccer star in Kansas City who was killed in a car wreck. Her mom was a nurse. Her mom was in the car, tried to give her CPR. I basically spent several days between Tara’s death and her funeral with her family and her best friend. They put together a playlist for her funeral and her mom sort of went through her closet, the whole thing. I was basically embedded with the family as I wrote this story, and all I remember is the last line: “She would have been so many things.” That was 10 years or so I guess. So they played that song at her funeral – it was her favorite song – so I put it on the mix.
See, it’s all connected. It’s not just a playlist. It’s not just a mix. There’s important stuff at work there. I have “Shadow Boxing” up (in which Thompson tracked down the boxer Jim “Sweet Jimmy” Robinson) and was reading that before we started talking, too.
That’s my favorite story.
Why?
Well, the persistence. I like that it worked. I mean, I chased that story for seven years. That’s an exaggeration because that’s not all I did, but every couple of months for a couple of days I would go look for Jim Robinson. And the thing that broke it open was, I figured out that he was in Miami. I write about this in the story, but I set up a 305 phone number and made up a flyer and put it up all over town, the last place he’d been seen. And I went home. And four days later the phone started ringing. It was just really interesting in terms of what it means to exist. It’s sort of a story about the effacement of memory and the nature of loss. My editor and I worked on that a lot. His name’s Jay Lovinger and he’s unbelievable. He’s a lion. He’s edited Gary Smith and David Halberstam and Hunter Thompson and Richard Ford. He was the managing editor at Life magazine and the No. 2 guy at Inside Sports. I’ve said this a lot but it’s true: He changed my life. The experience of doing “Shadow Boxing,” sort of walking around the block in the Bronx, where he lives, and talking about it – that’s a very, very special story to me.
And there are echoes of it in the Jerry Joseph story. How do you pronounce Joseph’s other name, (Guerdwich Montimere)?
GURD-witch Mont-a-meer.
Okay.
Although I slip up and still call him Jerry. It’s weird.
These stories sort of echo each other. They’re quest stories but they’re also about identity.
Identity comes up a lot in my stories. Because I like to write about place and all place is, is a way to code identity. People love a place as a sort of construct to pass things on. I wrote this thing about Nazareth, Texas, about the girls’ high school basketball team, and I’m sort of obsessed with this idea of reverse manifest destiny. Frank and Deborah Popper are professors – one’s at Princeton and one’s at Rutgers, they’re married, and they do all this incredible research about Buffalo Commons, but essentially – you’ve seen the end of “Dances with Wolves” where they have the quote, something like, “In 1890 the frontier closed.” The thing that’s interesting, the frontier is reopening. I mean there are counties now that were settled in this mad rush West – all these places settled in this mad rush West, and some of them are drying up and blowing away. If the central core of American identity is manifest destiny and if it turns out that we didn’t actually settle the continent in the way that we say we did, what does that mean? This is just a really interesting time for identity in America. The little towns are drying up and blowing away. If you’re from a place like Mississippi, you see it – everyone moves to Memphis, they move to Birmingham, they move to Atlanta, they move to Charlotte. All of the ways in which we learned who we are, they’re changing, and they’re changing very, very rapidly.
Do you look for stories that allow you to explore that, and are you interested in exploring that idea in a longer-form way, like in a book?
Not really. I mean my attention span is such that I’m sort of over it when I’m over it. You know?
Yeah. I do.
Maybe that’s bad but the last thing in the world I want to do is go revisit Jimmy Robinson. I mean that just sounds crushing to me.
It’s like you put all your energy into it for this one amount of time and burn yourself out on it.
Yeah, and then it’s over. And I want to move on to the next thing.
Jerry/Guerdwich: A lot had been written about the guy but no one had done a long-form narrative until Michael Mooney’s GQ piece – what did you want to do with your story that had not been done?
I love Michael’s piece. I thought he did a great job. And he also had a mission and I thought he nailed it. Everything that’s in the story I had, basically, when his came out, but I kept trying to fill the gap. I was really relieved that he didn’t have a couple of (my) people, because that would have killed (my) story. I remember when it came out – I was at dinner, I got a text message that it was out, I drove up to Off Square Books, I bought it, I drove back to Snackbar and I read it in the parking lot. And I immediately thought, “Wow, he nailed this.”
I was also relieved. There were so many different stories to tell and I think all of them are good. I just had to make sure he didn’t tell mine. That was the thing I was worried about. I was always locked into the twin-brother narrative. That was going to be my story no matter what.
The other thing was, I was coordinating with a television producer, so this was a TV piece too – I went to Texas as a print reporter, I went to Texas as a TV reporter, they went to Texas without me, I went without them, and so we were working on the story the whole time with Drew Gallagher, the producer, and then the people who shot it, the Texas Crew.
So it was a logistical challenge because the story existed – right now it exists in three forms. There’s the television story, the dot-com story that we’re talking about, and there’s the magazine story that’s totally different. The hardest part was sort of bringing it to the finish line in all of its manifestations. I’m glad we did. I could be wrong about this but I don’t think there’s anybody in media who’s doing it like this. Honestly, I think this is the first integrated newsroom. It’s not like having a photographer go shoot some video. It’s world-class producers and camera crews – it’s just an interesting thing that’s happening, and it’s cool to be a very small part of it.
The New York Times interactive team is doing some interesting stuff, but taking smaller pieces of big stories –
Yeah, but these are television networks. So it’s a little unfair. We have an enormous news-gathering operation – the walls are gone. Everyone talks to everyone. It’s totally exciting. It’s hard sometimes because you end up being the center of the hub and some of the logistics are difficult, but it’s fascinating if for no other reason than I have found out that a shot of tequila perfectly fits between the wings of an Emmy.
Good to know.
And you can spear the limes on the lightning bolts. It’s perfect.
Our new “Notable Narrative,” “The Kid Who Wasn’t There,” by Wright Thompson of ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, unearths the other half of the strange tale of Guerdwich Montimere, a Haiti-born basketball talent who famously passed himself off as a high school player named Jerry Joseph in Texas before winding up in every kind of trouble. Thompson’s story caps two years’ worth of detective work involving layers of double identity, betrayal, even voodoo:
This mystery isn’t about the lives of Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph; it is about how other people perceive those lives. It’s the tree falling in the woods thing. What does it mean to exist? Is identity based on how you feel or how other people see you? Is the story Jerry told the newspaper a lie? What if the facts are false but the emotions are real? Would that make it partially true? Fiction written about combat is often more real than any journalism, so which has a greater connection to the truth: fact or emotion?
With more than 1,000 pages of typed interviews, notes and documents, Thompson might’ve found himself lost in reporting that stretched from the mountains of Haiti to Florida to Texas. Instead he pulled off the triple narrative of Montimere and his troubled twin brother, Guerdouin, and of Thompson himself, a journalist deeply intrigued by the nature of identity. Thompson’s appearance in the story gives readers a handhold, a point of entry, a relatable guide when we’re not quite sure where to put our alliances or trust. His skill for staying calm in the face of complexity shows in the consistent grace notes of his writing:
He paints a picture of South Florida hallways full of kids from Haiti, from Cuba, from the Caribbean and Central America, people with no past and no paperwork. Communities don’t care if someone is too old; a few years seems like a silly reason not to get an education. Entire neighborhoods become a haze of facts and dates. People learn to differentiate between the real you and the you that is constructed to make it through the world. Identities are fluid.
Other magazine writers, including Thompson himself, have told the Jerry Joseph story well, but “The Kid Who Wasn’t There” takes the story “to the finish line” for Thompson, as he puts it, by exploring the twin relationship and therefore the shadow self. We may never fully know why, or how, this man Montimere became a boy again, but as Thompson so beautifully shows, sometimes it’s enough just to ask the questions.
Coming Friday: Check back for our conversation with Wright Thompson about this story and his other work for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.
If the flight attendant was concerned about my tears, or if the little girl in the pink hoodie across the aisle was curious: Reading at 13,000 feet makes one susceptible to mood swings. It’s a scientific fact. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly had done a bait-and-switch on me.
Rehagen
On its surface, “Still Life” is “the tragic story of John McClamrock, a high school football player paralyzed during a violent tackle.” Hollandsworth plays to our expectations with the obvious construct of innocence approaching doom, particularly on the day leading up to John’s accident. The physical description − the bell-bottom jeans, patterned shirt, the red El Camino, the “china-blue eyes” and the long black hair − drops us into the 1970s and sets us up for loss. No longer will John be a 17-year-old boy eating a Whopper and cranking the volume on the Allman Brothers and going on mini-golf dates with girls who like him, not after that shattering moment that sounds like “a tree trunk breaking in half.”
Then, 979 words into the narrative, John’s mother, Ann, steps into the story. We meet her standing in the hospital, listening to doctors tell her that her son might not make it through the night. The first time we hear her, she is responding to a doctor’s ominous question about her religious preference:
“I’m Catholic,” Ann said, giving him a bewildered look.
This isn’t simple dialogue, as we will learn. Those two words sum up the source of Ann’s resolve. Her faith then leads her to make the statement that sets up her impending prominence in the story:
She slowly turned to the doctor, her hands trembling. “My Johnny is not going to die,” she said. “You wait and see. He is going to have a good life.”
As quickly as Hollandsworth has brought Ann to the forefront, he must nudge her offstage. John’s story has reached its climax, with the accident, so now must come the falling action. The news media visits, as do a couple of Dallas Cowboys. Local businesses and teachers and schoolmates hold bake sales and benefit dances. Letters arrive from all over the country, even from President Richard Nixon. In a phone interview with the Dallas Morning News, John declares that he will walk again, even play football again. “I will never give up,” he says, providing the Disney optimism we’ve been trained to expect.
As John utters these words, Ann is holding the receiver, a beautiful detail that prefaces the narrative’s true climax, which comes two grafs later as Ann, her husband, Mac, and John’s brother, Henry, are summoned to the rehab center’s conference room:
One of the staffers took a breath. “We’ve found that ninety-five percent of the families that try to take care of someone in this condition cannot handle it,” she said. “The families break up.” She handed them a sheet of paper. “These are the names of institutions and nursing homes that will take good care of him.”
Ann nodded, stood up, and said, “We will be taking Johnny home, thank you.”
At that moment, John’s story ends. Ann’s begins.
John’s accidental paralysis is unfortunate, something he is forced to live with; Ann’s confinement is a choice. “Still Life” turns on that choice. Hollandsworth recognized that an epic protagonist isn’t defined by what happens to her, but by what she makes happen.
Our bookmarks have been busy lately what with all the good stuff to read and watch and hear. Some of our recent favorites hail from CNN.com, Grantland, the New York Times magazine and Esquire. In case you missed them, here are four pieces worth your time:
Mauritania’s endless sand dunes hide an open secret: An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the population lives in slavery. But as one woman’s journey shows, the first step toward freedom is realizing you’re enslaved. (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)
Slavery 360°
For the CNN.com multimedia narrative “Slavery’s Last Stronghold,” reporter John D. Sutter and photographer/videographer Edythe McNamee spent eight days in Mauritania, the last country to abolish slavery but one in which an estimated 3.4 million people still live enslaved. Sutter and McNamee ferreted out an ugliness that the government denies still exists:
We ducked into the shade of a tent to muffle the sound of our potentially dangerous conversation. Within eyeshot was another tent camp, slightly larger. There, we met a man who appeared to be Fatimetou’s master. Mohammed, an older man with a toothy smile and slightly lighter skin, told us in a nonchalant manner that he holds workers on the compound without compensation.
“We don’t pay them,” he said through a translator. “They are part of the land.”
Moulkheir Mint Yarba, an escaped slave living in Noakchott, Mauritania (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)
Sutter and McNamee produced a prose narrative, photo slide shows and a 23-minute documentary film that tell the story of Moulkheir Mint Yarba, a slave who believes her baby was left outdoors to die:
The usually stoic mother … wept when she saw her child’s lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The master who raped Moulkheir to produce the child wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would work faster without the child on her back.
Trying to pull herself together, Moulkheir asked if she could take a break to give her daughter a proper burial. Her master’s reply: Get back to work.
“Her soul is a dog’s soul,” she recalls him saying.
The project’s massive audience – within the first three days of launch the piece received 2 million page views – owes to the importance of the subject matter but also to the powerful presentation. CNN.com broke from its regular design for this package, as Justin Ellis pointed out recently, with a magazine format that works: “big photos, big, full-width text, type treatments, dropcaps, integrated slide shows and video, and a general design depth that indicates this isn’t just another CNN.com story.” We’d add that the rapid-read sidebars wrap the story in quick (but not shallow) context. “Why slavery still exists in 2012” breaks down the politics, geography, poverty, religion, racism and education in one-graf nuggets. The sidebar on ethnic groups explains – sometimes in as few as 36 words – the interrelationships of white Moors, black Moors, black Africans and Haratine.
Altogether, as a model of multimedia narrative journalism, it’s hard to do better than this.
Fantasy baseball’s first pitch
In “The Lost Founder of Baseball Video Games,” from Grantland, Bess Kalb tells the story of John Burgeson, a Midwesterner who coded an early version of fantasy baseball for an IBM 1620 computer and who, at nearly 80, Wikipedia’d himself some credit. (Good for you, dude.)
Here’s Kalb:
The only 1620 in the country available for viewing is in a storage hangar at an IBM office complex outside Fishkill, New York. The complex is a sprawl of identical, brutalist buildings with labyrinths of corridors that lead to clean rooms and windowless offices and locked doors marked with biohazard signs. There, I’m greeted by Paul Lasewicz, IBM corporate archivist, who leads me into an enormous storage hangar where the old machines live under plastic tarps. It’s an eerie place, inert, echoing, cold.
A hundred or so grandfather clocks retrofitted with oversize rotary dials hang in rows from ceiling to floor on the far wall. Dissected typewriters are splayed out on shelves. There are old power cords peeking out from under the tarps, and Lasewicz tells me several of the machines could be fully operational if switched on. This is electronic computing’s zombie graveyard.
We step around a forklift parked in the middle of an aisle and stop in front of a covered mound the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Lasewicz looks pleased. “That’ll be your 1620. Almost mint.” He unveils the machine. It’s a desk mounted with a cockpit dashboard attached to a typewriter. Nothing about it screams, “Play baseball on me.” Next to the “IBM 1620” decal on the mainframe, in faded pencil, someone had drawn a smiley face.
It’s been a little over a year since The Atavist debuted as a groundbreaking digital platform for long-form multimedia storytelling. Narrative journalists had been bemoaning the shrinking storytelling acreage, so this app-based venue was met with substantial interest. “E-books are more than a publishing platform,” as New York magazine referred to the genre, “they’re a whole new literary form.”
So, is it working?
We asked Evan Ratliff, an Atavist founder, that question the other day when he dropped by the Nieman Foundation for a visit. Here, edited for clarity and length, is some of the conversation between Ratliff and fellows, staff, guests and Paige Williams, who teaches the foundation’s Narrative Writing seminar.
Williams: Let’s start with an explanation of how The Atavist works.
Of the three people who founded it, two of us came from the magazine world, so we have a very magazine-heavy perspective on how we approach things. One of them is myself – I was a freelancer for 10 years – and the other one is Nick Thompson, who’s an editor at the New Yorker and was my editor at Wired. The third guy, Jefferson Rabb, is the most crucial person. He’s the guy who actually builds everything you see. He’s the coder and the designer and he’s the person without whom we couldn’t do any of this because we’d just be assigning stories and not have anywhere to put them.
Our original idea didn’t have that much to do with multimedia. We just wanted to find a place to tell long stories. You’ve all probably experienced or are intimately familiar with the decline of word counts. I’ve only ever worked in magazines. I never worked for a daily newspaper except in college, so I came into journalism wanting to write 10,000-word stories. That’s what I thought everyone got to do when they got to a certain stage of their career. Come to find out that what used to be the 10,000-word story, if it ever existed, was now the 3,500-word story.
Ratliff (photo: Jonathan Seitz)
I had just done (“Vanish”), about when I tried to disappear. It ran at about 14,000 words, and I just felt like this is what I want to be doing. But there was no place to do it. So we thought, “What if we created something online that would allow us to (publish longer stories)?” We started looking at these phones and tablets. I had just moved to New York and I was reading on my phone on the subway. We started saying, “Maybe there’s something we could build for this.” We ended up with (The Atavist).
We assign stories basically just like a magazine. People send us pitches. The outside limits are 5,000 to 35,000 words. Everything is heavily narrative. The multimedia component also grew out of (“Vanish”). Over the course of it I gathered a lot of media, but in the end there was nothing really to do with them because the magazine just didn’t have the resources to build some elaborate construction that included the videos as part of the story. So we had this idea, “What if we took that approach with stories but integrated it into the narrative?”
So what you’re looking at now is our iPad app. The one for iPhone looks the same. We also sell the stories as text-only on Kindle. So we sell them on Kindle, we sell them on Nook, basically as books. “The Kalinka Affair” is our most recent. It looks just like a short book. It’s probably 30 to 50 pages. It’s designed like a book. There are no images in it except for the cover, for a variety of highly technical and financial reasons. The multimedia versions we only sell in our app, or in iBooks we sell a version.
Dina Kraft: So you call it an e-book.
Yes, an e-book.
Carole Osterer: Is the text-only version available in the multimedia version? It wasn’t clear on your website.
Yes and no. This will answer that question. So, “Lifted” is a story that I wrote when we started out. It’s about this robbery in Sweden. These guys stole a helicopter and broke into a cash depot with $150 million in it.
Carlotta Gall: I bought that on my Kindle.
Ah, so you read the text.
Gall: I bought some photos as well.
Early on we were putting photos in the Kindle (version) but we stopped doing that because they were charging us fees for how big the file is, which we didn’t know until we got the (financials) back and said, “Why aren’t we making much money on this?”
So in the Kindle version it would’ve started (with the text-only) Chapter One. In the iPad/iPhone version it starts with the actual surveillance footage from the robbery, which I got from the Swedish prosecutors when I went to report the story. They gave me a DVD with all the footage on it, and I edited it into this sort of condensed version of the guys breaking in. They use a sledgehammer. For some reason the cash depot with $150 million in it has a skylight, which they just smash their way through. And they had a ladder; they had measured it to fit. They’d designed it all based on a heist movie that they’d watched. It’s very dramatic. There were actually cameras inside the cash cages. And so our idea was that this is the real lede to the story, this is the lede as we really want it to be. If you think of this as a lede that’s going to hook somebody and never let them go, it’s hard to do better than this. You can, of course, (do it) with brilliant prose; it’s just a different approach to how to tell the story. (After the video) you’re dropped into Chapter One, where it’s a month before, and two guys are sitting on a bench, plotting this.
To answer your question, (on the iPad/iPhone version) you can get clean text and photos all the way through without links, without any distractions. It’s all about the story. If you see on the side here, there’s a little gray triangle and this thing on the left that says “online extras.” If you tap those you get little bits of text that raise up, which can be anything. Predominantly for us they’re characters, footnotes, maps and timelines.
Anna Griffin: Are you planning that kind of thing as you’re writing or do you think about it afterward?
Generally we do it afterward. Our approach is so new and strange that we have reporters treat it different ways. Some of our writers really get into this stuff, so they’ll show up with everything they want to go into the story, and then other ones could care less.
Griffin: What’s your preference as an editor?
I like it when they care. So I’ll just show you a few other things in different stories. “Piano Demon” is about a jazz musician from the 1920s and ’30s whose name was Teddy Weatherford. He was at one time one of the most famous jazz musicians in the world. And then he was this kind of lost character who went abroad, and he was very famous in China, and then he went to India and he died. This reporter Brendan Koerner had come across him and found all this research on him and spent months and months and months researching, and he also found his music. So his music is laced into the story. It’s the soundtrack, which can play along with the story.
Adam Tanner: Do you have to buy the rights to the various pieces of music?
In some cases yes and in some cases no. These are orphaned works, so for these we’re in some way taking our chances. But because Brendan Koerner probably spent more time trying to track down this guy than any person on earth I’m pretty sure (Weatherford) has no descendants.
Tanner: What about the classical piece (of music) at the start of the heist thing?
That was composed by Jeff, one of my co-founders; he’s trained in music composition. There are audio clips laced into “Piano Demon,” so if you see him talking about ragtime there’s a clip of him playing ragtime. That’s an example of where Brendan was sort of like, No I don’t want that clip there; there’s a better 15-second clip. We had days and days of back-and-forth about what were the appropriate clips.
from "Mother, Stranger," by Cris Beam
Sometimes we’ll do just fun things. “Island of Secrets” is by a writer named Matt Power. He writes for Harper’s and other magazines. This is about – he went to Papua New Guinea to track this guy who was trying to find tree kangaroos on this island in New Britain. We made a kind of in-house animation that’s this sort of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” style. So we try to mix it up. We did a memoir, “Mother, Stranger,” by a writer named Cris Beam. She teaches at Columbia and she’s written about juveniles, and we got her to write about her upbringing, which was very, very dark. Hermother was a prostitute and (Cris) left home when she was 14, never saw her mother again, and she only took a few things with her. One of the things she took with her was her diary from when she was 7 years old. (In the multimedia version) you can flip the pages of it. People are really moved by her talking about the names her mother called her.
We also have audiobooks in every (story), so there’s an actual audio version of the author reading the story. And you can flip back and forth between the audio and the text, and it keeps your place. That’s something you can’t do in print. Book publishers do it, but there’s this sort of legacy thing where book publishers have two revenue streams, the audiobook and the prose book. In (the digital) medium there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put them together and give people the option to do one or the other.
We’re trying to find ways to both integrate the media and to layer in all this other information but also to preserve the power of the story first and also preserve the journalism. Every story is fact-checked, every story is treated like a story at The New Yorker or Harper’s or any other magazine.
In terms of the (fee) model, it’s different than either magazines or books. It’s really like grabbing parts from both. We’ll pay the writer a fee plus 50 percent of the royalties. The royalties come after the platform takes its percentage. Most of these platforms will take 30 percent. After that, whatever we get, we give the author half. Which means that if the story doesn’t do well, the authors end up getting paid maybe what they’d have gotten paid to write for Harper’s. A dollar a word is the standard. But the story also has the possibility to do very well and for the writer to get paid, in some cases, several times what they could’ve gotten even at the highest-end glossy.
Williams: Someone ran a story the other day about what authors were earning. (David) Dobbs was in there, some others.
David Dobbs is a science writer, but the story he wrote for us was this thing called “My Mother’s Lover.” It’s a reported memoir. His mother, on her deathbed, revealed that she’d had this affair 60 years before, during World War II, that had altered her entire life in this very dramatic way. So (Dobbs) spent almost a decade figuring out who the guy was and finding his military records – he disappeared during the war – and contacting his family, and then unspooled this whole narrative.
Williams: What’s the (most recent) story?
It’s by Josh Hammer, who used to be (Africa) bureau chief at Newsweek. It’s a story so well known in France and Germany but less so here. It’s sort of complicated, but this French guy was married. He had a daughter. His wife left him for this German doctor and took the daughter with them. And some years later the daughter suddenly died and it came to light that the doctor had probably raped and killed her. This father then spent three decades trying to bring this guy to justice. The German government wouldn’t deal with him – they basically said there’s not enough evidence – so he essentially hired a kidnapper to go kidnap the guy and – well, I don’t want to spoil the end.
Over the years Roy Blount Jr. has written a number of superb magazine articles, one of my favorites being “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” a profile of the great Southern raconteur Jerry (pronounced Jay-ree) Clower.
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The piece, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1973, possesses many virtues, among them its substantial length. Clower, a regular on the Grand Ole Opry, was the kind of humorist who liked to spread out, and Blount gave him 10,000 words in which to do so. Some reference works refer to Clower as a “stand-up comedian,” but that’s not quite right. More accurately, he was a teller of tall tales in the tradition of Mark Twain and Davy Crockett. Clower developed his storytelling skills while employed as a fertilizer salesman in Yazoo City, Miss. (customers were more responsive to riotous yarns than to dry recitations regarding crop yields), and he perfected them on the sports banquet circuit. He did not do schtick. He did rousing narratives designed, in his words, to “fling a cravin’” on an audience. This is a craft that requires space.
Blount begins the piece with a simple scene-setter. After giving a description of his 270-pound subject (“a startling apparition”) on the dais at a post-dinner speaking engagement and, importantly, establishing that Clower had played defensive tackle for Mississippi State, he essentially gets out of the way. Three-fourths of “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” consists of Clower stories. By my count Blount includes 20 of them, and he lets Clower tell the majority in his own voice. This has to be a record for stories within a story, and Blount appears to flat-out relish it:
The stories Clower tells are more or less true… Clower compares himself favorably, and aptly, with such country-humorist predecessors as Andy Griffith and Brother Dave Gardner when he says, “I don’t tell funny stories. I just tell stories funny.”
He tells them all over, not just at sports banquets. In his time he has enlivened many a broiler festival and county fair, at least one tobacco-spitting contest and an armadillo festival. He has appeared at the Grand Ole Opry several times, on the David Frost and Mike Douglas television shows and on stage with country-music stars as far north as Boston.His two record albums have together sold 650,000 copies and he says with a characteristic lack of false or even true modesty that he has never had an audience that did not warm up to him eventually.
Some of Clower’s tales involve the antics of the Ledbetter siblings (Ardell, Bernel, Raynell, Marcell and W.L.). Others, including “Knock ’im Out, John!” from which the article takes its title, concern coon hunting. Most, however, are devoted to Southeastern Conference football. Clower wasn’t very good at the game, which, it turned out, was a boon to his career as a humorist. Success stories aren’t funny, but embarrassing ones are. A player from a religious college, for example, once knocked Clower down face first in such a way that he ended up eating dirt. This warrior for Jesus then declared: “The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth.” Clower should have written him a check right there. Here, as Blount presents it, is the whole thing:
“This Preacher Mayfield forearmed me back of my head. He shoved my face down in that dirt and that grass, and my bottom lip and bottom teeth just scooped up a big mouthful of that dirt like a dragline.”
Clower sticks out his bottom lip and teeth and assumes such a graphic dirt-biting expression that his rapt audience can taste turf through the three-color ice cream. He shudders and makes a series of massive, agonized mouth-pawing motions. “I jumped up spittin’ and knockin’ the grass and the dirt out of my mouth, and I said, ‘Fella, you the dirtiest thing I ever played against in all my life. And you supposed to be a Baptist preacher!’
“And he stood up erect − they had done throwed the ball for a touchdown − he stood up erect and popped his hand over his heart and he pointed his long finger right in my face and he said, ‘The Bible says, the meek shall inherit the earth.’
“And I had just inherited a mouthful of it.”
A few readers may feel that Blount lets Clower go on a bit too long about old times, and in truth some of the stories regarding now-forgotten athletes do feel a little dated. But by and large, they hold up. Not only was Clower a spellbinder, but he was also something more. He imbued his yarns with insights into a fast-disappearing rural society, and my sense is that Blount realized as much the instant he first heard Clower open his mouth. That is why he generously quotes Clower’s account of calling home from the site of an away football game. Such a call required someone to fetch Clower’s mother from her house and take her to a country store where the neighborhood’s only telephone was located. Just that deftly, Blount uses Clower to establish that there was a day in America when many families did not possess what now is considered a basic. Academics talk about oral history. Journalists practice it.
For our latest Notable Narrative we chose Kevin Sack’s “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked,” a New York Times story about an unprecedented chain of kidney transplants. We admired the story as a deft and moving example of explanatory narrative, and because Sack, a two-time Pulitzer winner, chose an unlikely protagonist, with deeply touching consequences. How did he pull it off? Here’s our recent telephone conversation, edited for length and clarity:
You were dealing with a huge amount of complicated information. Could you talk a bit about how you organized it, and how you presented it in such a graceful, moving way?
To report “60 Lives,” the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell, Kevin Sack and Nicole Bengiveno scrubbed in for surgery after surgery.
It sounds a little silly to say that a story like this wrote itself, but to some extent the material was so compelling that it made the job a little bit easier. There were certain things that I knew were going to have to be included in the roughly 5,000 words I was allotted. Pretty much from the beginning I felt there was going to be a certain logic to writing it in a roughly chronological way, or at least with an emphasis on the first link in the chain and the last link, and with the rest of the story composed of equal parts explanation of how the chains work – the medicine, and what I witnessed in the operating rooms – and the history of these chains, and the best human stories that I could find from within the chain. Before I started reporting, I assumed that at every link there would be a great narrative tale. By definition there had to be: Somebody’s giving up a part of themselves for a loved one. How uninteresting could it be? The challenge was gonna be to find out about as many of those links as possible in the time allotted, given the other things I was going to have to accomplish, and then picking out the best tales. When you look at the story there’s only a handful of stories in it, out of the 30 transplants. There were a lot of great stories left on the cutting room floor on this one, sort of by necessity.
The biggest decision I had to make in terms of how to structure and write it – I longed to simplify the story by focusing on a smaller number of people. I was concerned all along that even if I minimized the number of characters there would be too many characters. I didn’t want it to get bogged down in a long list of names. People wouldn’t be able to keep it straight. And the stories would start to dilute each other. Ultimately I decided that that was wrongheaded.
What do you mean?
The central character was the chain itself. And by definition the chain consisted not of a handful of people but of 60 people. What made it miraculous was that there were 60 participants and that these kidneys flowed relatively seamlessly from one link to the next. And so I decided that to focus on a central character kind of undercut what the story was all about. Once I wrapped my head around that, I think I got more comfortable with the notion of doing it the way I did, with a number of central characters. I kind of dip in and out of each of their tales rather quickly, mainly because I have to. As I was reporting the story, Amy Harmon’s great piece about the autistic couple in love ran, and I was envious because she was able to tell a story that essentially was about the socialization of autistic people through the eyes of a single couple. I was a little jealous and wanted to find a way to do that, but then quickly decided that the point of the (kidney) story is that there were 60 characters, not that there were two.
Where did this story come from?
I’m certainly not the first person to write about these chains. There was a New England Journal of Medicine article in, I think, ’09 that was about the first of these chains that were structured this way, with a Good Samaritan starting a donation to the waiting list and then non-simultaneous operations. So there was a flurry of stories after that, about these chains. I was covering Obamacare at the time. We were sort of in the thick of legislative battle, and it wasn’t something I was going to be able to get to at that point but I filed it away as being interesting.
I had a change of jobs back in the fall, where I got assigned to this new team of reporters created by Jill Abramson to doenterprise stuff on lifestyles. It was sort of broadly defined, and my part was that I going to continue to write about health-related issues. I had a list of story ideas that I put in front of my new editor, Adam Bryant, and he quickly got interested in the kidney-chain story. So I went out to see sort of what had been written, whether there was any room left to do something interesting, looking for, you know, an angle that would sort of give us a reason to do it, and to do it in a big way. My third or fourth call was to Garet Hil, whom I’d started to hear about and read about. He was in the middle of what was going to be the longest chain ever constructed. So I suddenly had my angle. I took it back to Adam and to others at the paper and there was a lot of enthusiasm about it and resources put into it quickly.
Such as?
A very quick decision to make it a big multimedia project. So: photographers assigned, graphic artists assigned, interactive designers assigned, a video journalist assigned. And sort of involvement from people on the masthead at the paper in terms of getting their attention and early signoff, an assumption that we’d probably do it at two pages long. All those things were in place pretty quickly.
Where in the chain was the transplant process at that point?
They were exactly halfway through. I found out about it in early November, and they were in the middle of this long bridge, as they call it, between donations. This was a point where a recipient had been transplanted – their paired donor had yet to donate, typically for some sort of logistical reason. This was the longest pause in the chain. It was from I think late September to early December, almost two months.
Which people in the chain? Could we look at it that way?
Identify which ones?
Yeah.
I think it was No. 16, Rebecca Clark. Yeah. John Clark, No. 15, had received his transplant, and his wife, Rebecca Clark, did not donate until Dec. 5. He had been transplanted on Sept. 28. My initial concern was, Well I’m not gonna be in on the beginning of this and that’s gonna be awkward, to do a narrative that way, because I’m gonna have some stuff that’s much more vivid than the rest of it. In retrospect, I think it ended up being an advantage. First of all, it cut the time of the project in half. For a project like this it was relatively quick: 3 1/2months from conception to publication.
Wow.
And also, it made what I did see fresher, I think. It wasn’t that difficult to go back and reconstruct the first half of it. And the timing worked out kind of just right, because once I found out about the chain from Garet it gave me a month to get my ducks in a row before surgeries actually started again. So I was able to spend that time reconstructing the first half. I went to New York and spent a day with him at his office on Long Island. I interviewed a lot of doctors and people in the field, read a lot of journal articles, and also was able to get the rest of our team up and moving. They started collecting names and IDs and photos of people in the first half of the chain. Which was a process. So the timing worked out nicely.
A man’s child needs a kidney transplant. Despite successfully enlisting an organ donor, the man finds the U.S. transplant network frustrating and ineffective. To spare other families needless anxiety, he sets up an independent kidney registry (the only kind of registry in this country, since there’s no centralized database) and uses his background in quantitative mathematics and data management to build specialized software that matches “Good Samaritan” donors to potential transplant recipients.
One chain of transplants grows, person to person, across the country, to an unprecedented length. And yet if just one individual changes his mind along the way, the chain breaks and someone could die. So, buried in the man’s algorithms are the fates of potentially hundreds, even thousands, of people, given the country’s escalating diabetes rate and demand for kidneys.
That single-protagonist scenario of the man and his chain has built-in narrative potential. Does the man succeed? Does he ultimately fail? Where does the story crest? How is it resolved? Whose lives are affected? Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that the man is an ex-Marine − an ex-reconnaissance ranger − with a Wharton MBA, and that he’s “Disney-hero handsome.”
Kevin Sack might’ve taken that predictable storytelling approach with “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked,” a New York Times story that we’ve been eager to name a Notable Narrative since it ran in mid-February. But Sack, a two-time Pulitzer winner who covers health care for the Times, decided on a more surprising protagonist: the transplant chain itself. Between the first and last surgeries we meet women and men who literally gave pieces of themselves to others, a transfer of life that started, improbably, with a confessed curmudgeon who one day simply decided he wanted to give a stranger a kidney:
What made the domino chain of 60 operations possible was the willingness of a Good Samaritan, Mr. Ruzzamenti, to give the initial kidney, expecting nothing in return. Its momentum was then fueled by a mix of selflessness and self-interest among donors who gave a kidney to a stranger after learning they could not donate to a loved one because of incompatible blood types or antibodies. Their loved ones, in turn, were offered compatible kidneys as part of the exchange.
The narrative engine in this piece is both procedural (what function or dysfunction of the country’s kidney-transplant situation contributed to this chain’s success) and personal (desperate people, literally dying for a break).
Policy narratives, like investigative narratives, often focus on paper trails and bureaucratic breakdown at the expense of human emotion. Yes, you have to document the dysfunction; yes, go ahead and FOIA your little heart out. But the narrative journalist’s other job – the equal, and equally difficult, job – is connecting that reporting to the human experience. It’s not enough to simply find a family or an anecdote that represents the subject matter and then book-end the investigation with a couple of poignant scenes. The human factor demands equal consideration and reporting time if the overall piece is to reach its greatest potential. Some explanatory-narrative writers may consider the human reporting the lesser work journalistically and therefore spend less energy on it, but as Sack’s piece shows, the human reporting is entirely the point.
Coming tomorrow: Kevin Sack talks with Storyboard about how he and his multimedia team pulled this story off.
That might be a normal journalist’s reaction to news that the subject of a mega-profile for a magazine cover story has declined to be interviewed for the piece. But in the mid-1960s Gay Talese was anything but a “normal journalist.” When Frank Sinatra offered not so much as a “Buzz off!” in person, Talese kept reporting in his meticulous way as the persistent eyewitness, eventually writing a Sinatra story that caused a national sensation and pioneered a narrative style of nonfiction later dubbed the New Journalism.
“Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” appeared in Esquire in April 1966. In October 2003, for the magazine’s 70th anniversary, editors pronounced the Talese piece the best story Esquire had ever published. And of course the story appeared in Talese’s classic story collection “Fame and Obscurity,” which New York University’s journalism department named No. 43 among the 20th century’s top 100 works of American journalism.
Why’s it so good? I could point to any of the usual signposts for superb literary nonfiction – scenes, dialogue, characters, interior monologues, the beginning, the ending, digressions and a structure that suggests a larger meaning. The 15,000-word story is as finely crafted as Sinatra’s (and Talese’s) custom-tailored suits. I prefer today to praise the humble but honest work that should come with any journalism, new or old: reporting.
Talese’s curiosity fuels his research in such an expansive way that we learn the paradoxical tale of Sinatra the arrogant, tempestuous celebrity and Sinatra the lonesome, sentimental man, a part of whom,Talese writes, “no matter where he is, is never there.” It required prodigious reporting to write with such confidence a crystalline description that serves as the essence of this piece.
The mastery begins with Talese reporting on Sinatra’s origins and family life. Biographical details abounded. Sinatra had been the subject of published articles for decades. How could Talese bring something fresh to the task? First, he was Italian-American. He understood Sinatra’s culture from an insider’s point of view. He knew the relevant layers of cultural experience and where to mine the telling details, the “remarkable juxtaposition of the pious and the worldly” − the photographs of Pope John and Ava Gardner, the statues of saints and holy water, and a chair signed by Sammy Davis Jr., for instance, all in Sinatra’s parents’ home. Best of all, he landed an interview with Dolly, Sinatra’s mother, “a large and very ambitious woman,” an agile player in Hoboken’s Democratic political machine and not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased “merely by a child’s obedience and good appetite.”
Without saying it outright, Talese underscores the region’s historical political tensions when he writes:
In later years Dolly Sinatra, possessing a round red face and blue eyes, was often mistaken for being Irish, and surprised many at the speed with which she swung her heavy handbag at anyone uttering “Wop.”
She threw a shoe at her son when she learned he wished to become a singer. “Later, finding she could not talk him out of it – ‘he takes after me’ – she encouraged his singing,” Talese writes. Such reporting on family history forms the foundation that allows us to savor revelations that Talese deftly introduces through scenes in Las Vegas, a New York saloon, a poolroom, a recording studio and a movie lot. We have context for our character because Talese has shown us the origins of Sinatra’s world.
Now pay attention to the minor characters. Talese assigns them illuminating roles to help us understand Sinatra. Here is how Talese deals with a dreaded story obstacle: the press agent. In this case, the anxious flack is Jim Mahoney, and we learn Mahoney has plenty of reason to worry:
Still, Sinatra seems ever present, and if Mahoney did not have legitimate worries about Sinatra, as he did today, he could invent them – and, as worry aids, he surrounds himself with little mementos of moments in the past when he did worry. In his shaving kit there is a two-year-old box of sleeping tablets dispensed by a Reno druggist – the date on the bottle marks the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. There is on a table in Mahoney’s office a mounted wood reproduction of Frank Sinatra’s ransom note written on the aforementioned occasion. One of Mahoney’s mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him – the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film, Von Ryan’s Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy – and Mahoney then proceeds to roll the little train back and forth on the six inches of track; back and forth, back and forth, click-clack-click-clack. It is his Queeg-thing.
We are wringing our hands by the time we finish reading about this poor guy and his woes. Yet by developing Mahoney as a character, even only slightly, we somehow see Sinatra more clearly.
