I Remember Nothing Read Free Page A

cracking jokes and smiling a great white toothy grin. He was in a manic phase of his manic depression, but no one knew this; no one even knew what manic depression was.
    Graham had married Katharine Meyer, whose father owned
The Washington Post
, and he now ran
The Post
and the publishing empire that controlled
Newsweek
. But according to the telex, he was in the midst of a crack-up and was having a very public affair with a young woman who worked for
Newsweek
. He had misbehaved at some event or other and had used the word “fuck” in the course of it all. It was a big deal to say the word “fuck” in that era. This is one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy when I see movies that take place in the fifties and early sixties; people are always saying “fuck” in them. Trust me, no one threw that word around then the way they do now. I’ll tell you something else: they didn’t drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine. I mean, someone did, obviously, but most people drank hard liquor all the way through dinner. Recently I saw a movie in which people were eating take-out pizza in 1948 and it drove me nuts. There was no take-out pizza in 1948. There was barely any pizza, and barely any takeout. These are some of the things I know, and they’re entirely useless, and take up way too much space in my brain.
    Philip Graham’s nervous breakdown—which ended finally in his suicide—was constantly under whispereddiscussion by the editors, and because I read all the telexes and was within earshot, even of whispers, I was riveted. There was a morgue—a library of clippings that was available for research—at
Newsweek;
morgues are one of the great joys of working in journalism. I went to it and pulled all the clips about Graham and read them between errands. I was fascinated by the story of this wildly attractive man and the rich girl he’d married. Years later, in Kay Graham’s autobiography, I read their letters and realized that they’d once been in love, but as I went through the clips, I couldn’t imagine it. It seemed clear he was an ambitious young man who’d made a calculated match with a millionaire’s daughter. Now the marriage was falling apart, before my very eyes. It was wildly dramatic, and it almost made up for the fact that I was doing entirely menial work.
    After a few months, I was promoted to the next stage of girldom at
Newsweek:
I became a clipper. Being a clipper entailed clipping newspapers from around the country. We all sat at something called the Clip Desk, armed with rip sticks and grease pencils, and we ripped up the country’s newspapers and routed the clips to the relevant departments. For instance, if someone cured cancer in St. Louis, we sent the clipping to the Medicine section. Being a clipper was a horrible job, and to make matters worse, I was good at it. But I learned something: I became familiar with every major newspaper in America. I can’t quite point out what good that did me, but I’m sure it did. Years later, when I got involved with a columnist from
The Philadelphia
Inquirer
, I at least knew what his newspaper looked like.
    Three months later, I was promoted again, this time to the highest rung: I became a researcher. “Researcher” was a fancy word—and not all that fancy at that—for “fact-checker,” and that’s pretty much what the job consisted of. I worked in the Nation Department. I was extremely happy to be there. This was not a bad job six months out of college; what’s more, I’d been a political science major, so I was working in a field I knew something about. There were six writers and six researchers in the department, and we worked from Tuesday to Saturday night, when the magazine closed. For most of the week, none of us did anything. The writers waited for files from the reporters in the bureaus, which didn’t turn up until Thursday or Friday. Then, on Friday afternoon, they all wrote their stories and gave them to us researchers to