The Last Debate (13 page)

Joan Naylor went directly to her room in the Inn and spent the evening there alone. She read up even more on the issues of the presidential campaign and watched television without the sound. No-sound television was a practice she and her husband Jeff had developed. It began quite innocently when Jeff discovered silence was the best way to enjoy
Monday Night Football.
While millions of others were out there being annoyed once a week by Howard Cosell, it was Frank Gifford, a perfectly nice and mild-mannered ex-football player, who did it to Jeff. Gifford seemed to be off in another world from where Jeff found himself on Monday nights. So to avoid going wherever that was with Gifford he turned off the sound.

From
Monday Night Football
Jeff found that all sports events, particularly the big ones like the World Series and the Super Bowl, were much more enjoyable to simply watch, not hear. Jeff and Joan then began watching an occasional old movie that way once they realized they already knew the story and the pictures brought enough of it back to make it make sense. The worst discovery was that some documentary and newsmagazine programming could also be understood and appreciated without the sound. In other words, you didn’t always have to
hear
Mike Wallace to know what he was saying. Even parts of most nightly news broadcasts were that way. Much of the news on television, world and national as well as local, was mostly predictable and readily identifiable by eye. A shot of a car and a body being pulled from the Potomac River says all that needs to be known. A shot of a secretary of state standing at
a microphone with King Hussein of Jordan does the same. As does the scene at the table in the Rose Garden at the White House, the pictures of civilians running from sniper fire or army tear gas or dying of starvation in Armenia, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Beirut, Rwanda, Haiti, Tibet, Burma, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or other places along the road to the New World Order.

The major asset of soundless television was that it was less stimulating to the blood and emotions and less occupying of the mind. That made it possible to do other things that required less than a full-blooded emotion or a full mind’s attention.

Like doing what she was doing now, which was talking to Jeff and the twins on the telephone. It was a conversation that Joan Naylor herself admits may have played some role—mostly unconscious—in drawing her toward Sunday’s fateful decision.

It began innocently enough.

“I haven’t done anything much yet, honey,” she said to Rachel, or at least she thought it was Rachel. She and Regina not only looked alike, they also sounded exactly the same. They were twelve years old, identically blond, tall, bright, athletic, and full of guilt-inducing, straight-for-the-jugular questions for their famous mother.

“Then maybe they didn’t need you to go down until in the morning,” said Rachel. Yes. Joan was now certain it was Rachel. Regina had come on another line.

“The movie was terrific,” Regina said. “You would have loved it. Except for the arm-sex parts. Dad made us close our eyes when they came on, so don’t worry.”

“But we didn’t,” Rachel said.

And they both laughed.

Arm sex?

“Did Dad tell you about the telegrams and the faxes?” Regina said, getting down to the serious business.

“I haven’t talked to Dad yet,” Joan said. “You answered the phone, Rachel, remember?”

“Every kook and kooky outfit there is has sent you questions to ask tomorrow night,” Rachel said.

“Some of them are really off the wall,” Regina said.

“You have really got to stick it to Meredith, Mom,” Rachel said.

“You really do, Mom,” Regina said.

And in alternating sentences, they said to their mother:

“I know how you are about not taking sides, but this is different.”

“He’s evil, Mom, I really do think so. So does everybody else.”

“Everybody.”

“Evil like the devil is evil.”

“This is different.”

“You can’t let him be president, Mom.”

“You really can’t.”

“We talked about it this afternoon with Dad and he agrees.”

“Dad says Meredith will turn race against race …”

“Rich against poor …”

“Baptists against Catholics …”

“Quakers against Jews …”

Joan said she had to resist an interrupting laugh. Regina and Rachel went to Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school in Washington known for its famous parents and smart faculty, tough academic and public-service requirements. The well-worn Washington joke that came to her mind was the one about Sidwell being the only place in America where Jews taught Episcopalians how to be Quakers.

“Gays against straights …”

“Cops against firemen …”

Joan could not let that one go. “Cops against firemen? Come on now, girls.”

“All right, maybe not that,” Rachel said. Joan was sure it was Rachel.

“You know I can’t do anything about this,” Joan said. “I am but a simple journalist. Put your father on.”

“Good night, Mom,” Regina said. “Good luck.”

“Good night, Mom,” Rachel said. “Good luck.”

And then Jeff was on the phone.

“How is my own personal Joan of Arc tonight?” he said.

“No comment,” she said. “What is this about arm sex?”

“No comment.”

“It’s bad enough that everybody else in the world is on my case about Meredith,” she said to Jeff after a few minutes of light and catch-up chitchat. “My daughters are doing it, too.”

“Sorry about that,” Jeff said. “I should have waved them off. I should have given them the old Momma-is-a-journalist-not-a-god line. I could have quoted some stuff from Mulvane.…”

“It’s not a line, goddamn it.”

“I know that, goddamn it.”

“Do you have the television on?” she asked.

“Yeah. You? An
Equalizer
rerun on some cable channel.”

“Is it the one with Pat Hingle in it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the same one I’m watching. I’m having trouble picking up the story.”

“Me, too. I remember seeing it before, though, because of Hingle. I think he’s a schoolteacher with a problem kid who comes to McCall for help.”

“I need to work on my questions and things,” Joan said.

“Good night, my goddess of the airwaves.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Within minutes she was back reading a briefing book the CNS bureau had done on reducing the federal budget deficit while also trying to figure out exactly what Pat Hingle and Robert McCall, The Equalizer, were up to.

Mike Howley went to the Inn’s bar by himself and ordered a nightcap—a Cutty Sark scotch on the rocks. He had taken only a sip or two of his drink when he received a phone call and left the bar.

He spent the rest of the evening in his room, No. 3255, drinking Cutty Sarks on the rocks delivered by room service and talking on the phone.

Among other things.

T
he sun rose Sunday morning across Colonial Williamsburg at 6:07, according to the weather-bureau record of that day. It was a magnificent rising, the sun coming up through and behind the trees beyond the Inn like a strip of bright red-orange neon. I can bear my own witness to that fact because I was already up and out at 6:07. This was my first trip to Williamsburg, and I was determined to see a little of it as well as do my job for American journalism and
The New American Tatler
.

I was also determined not to miss my daily jog. Running early in the morning was—is—my way to keep the body and the mind alive and alert. No matter the place or the weather, I run. I always run. Always.

So there I was trotting down deserted Duke of Gloucester, the main street and pedestrian walkway in the restored area, when I came across the second most famous couple in America. Jack and Jill. There they were, running in matching red, white, and green running suits coming right toward me. Any regular reader of
People
and similar magazines would not have been surprised to see them. They also always ran every day, no matter the place or the weather. Always. They ran side by side
together. Always, together, Jack and Jill. It was their trademark. It was their life. They most particularly ran together early Sunday morning, the day of their television program, the most popular of its kind on the air.

Here they were like a colored magazine photo, right in front of me. I smiled and said: “Good morning.”

“Right,” said Jack, not looking at me.

“Amen,” said Jill, giving me a quick smile.

They looked like they should have looked, Jack and Jill together there running side by side as they did every morning. Always.

Then in a few minutes there came another jogger my way. It was a man, younger and running faster than Jack and Jill. He caught my eye and stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for me to do the same.

“Hey, sorry, amigo,” he said, blowing wind out of his mouth. “But was that Jack and Jill who just went by here?”

“Yes, it was,” I said, anxious to get on with my run.

“Damn!” he said. “I figured they’d be out this morning. I wanted to meet them.… I’ll never catch them now. I missed them.”

“Sorry,” I said.

The man was young, probably in his late twenties, black hair, dark eyes and skin. He was wearing a gray sweat suit with
TEXAS IS HEAVEN ON EARTH
emblazoned on the front of the shirt.

“I am Henry Ramirez,” he said. “I am one of the debate panelists.” I may have imagined it—or been influenced by postdebate events and my later knowledge—but it seemed to me that he made “I am one of the debate panelists” sound as if he were announcing his presence on a throne of some kind.

I told him who
I
was.

“I’ve read your magazine a time or two,” he said. “Most of the stories are too long for me, sorry.”

I said nothing and made ready to resume my jog. I was weary of people telling me the stories in the
Tatler
were too long. I knew it and loved it. It was what made the magazine different from all the others. In a world of the short—short attention spans of readers and short visions of media owners—it was also most probably a difference that would not last much longer.

Henry Ramirez was still looking down Duke of Gloucester in the star wake of Jack and Jill.

“Someday I’m going to be one of them,” he said, again in the form of an announcement.

Even though I had never met or heard of this young man before in my life, I knew immediately what he was talking about. I knew he meant he was going to someday be a Jack and Jill. And I almost laughed.

It was not a surprise that he aspired to be a Jack and Jill. The remarkable success of their program,
Face to Face with Jack and Jill
, was being heralded as a major development in the fast-moving history of American television journalism. Columbia University seminars and think pieces in various journalism reviews were already authoritatively suggesting that this program was the future, the natural end result of a three-way marriage of the values from journalism, show business, and politics.

How it happened has been thoroughly reported. CNS’s thirty-two-year-old
News in the Making
, the mother of all Sunday-morning hard-news interview programs, had fallen to a weak third in the ratings behind NBS’s
Review of the Week with General Schwarzkopf
and ABS’s
Sunday Morning Ross
, hosted by former presidential candidate Ross Perot. CNS changed hosts four times in three years, sets and theme music three times in four years, and formats five times in four years. It expanded from thirty minutes to an hour, then went back to thirty, way up to ninety, and then back to an hour. The ratings remained the same. The problem, according to a
Washington Post
television critic, was that “CNS is mired in the boring business of seriousness, and until it gets itself unmired it is doomed to third place.”

A new management at CNS News, the fourth in six years, took that advice and decided to unmire. They fired all of the real journalists producing and appearing on the program and hired the Chicago clownalist Mark Southern to take over. He said he was going to get rid of the “pencil-neck professors and pundits in Washington talking to themselves” and replace them with real Americans. He said: “Americans are going to be on the show. Lots of people who talk like regular people are going to be talking, and the politicians are going to be listening to them. It’s going to be totally different.” He and his real Americans made broadcast
history. For the first time ever, a major network’s Sunday-morning program’s rating was BMS—Below Measurable Standards. The
San Francisco Chronicle
TV critic called the premiere program “an embarrassment for the host, the guests, the network, the industry, and real Americans with brains and taste everywhere.” Southern was fired the next day, the program was scrapped, and another broadcast-industry record was set. Southern had the shortest tenure of any host of any network news/public affairs program ever. One program.

And—for $3.2 million a year each, according to our “Tatler Media Intelligence” column—Jack Gilbey and Jill Christopher were immediately hired to co-create and co-host another whole new program and approach. Jack and Jill were the hottest public-affairs couple of the moment, possibly of all moments. Jack Gilbey and Jill Christopher had begun their public lives as successful political consultants. Jack worked for Democrats, Jill for Republicans. They worked against each other in one presidential campaign so much, so closely, and so intensely that they fell in love and into the news, the columns, and the magazines. During the campaign, their dates were sometimes covered by reporters and photographers. Their picture appeared on the cover of
Newsweek
, each holding a copy of a nasty press release and videotape cassette as if in a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. One unimpressed (“He’s lying with envy,” Jack retorted) critic claimed Jack and Jill got more favorable publicity and attention than either of their candidates. After the campaign they married, signed a multimillion-dollar his-and-her book contract, sold their story to the movies as a natural sequel to the early Hepburn-Tracy sagas, launched a major lecture tour (
Them
magazine said they got $30,000 for a joint one-hour Q & A appearance), and assumed joint ownership of a giant house in Georgetown and a forty-two-foot sailboat at Annapolis.