June 11, 2011
I realized I didn’t have a movie to screen for tonight’s midnight movie, so I to post some YouTube clips from one of my favorite movies, “All The President’s Men.” I’ve probably watched this movie over fifty times and I love it each time. It’s a true story and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were consultants for the film and I’ve read in interviews with both of them that the movie portrays how Watergate went down really accurately. I can’t imagine how exciting that would've been to break and write the stories that uncovered Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon and his whole dirty crew. I remember reading about it in the paper and later Woodward and Bernstein were on the cover of Rolling Stone. I read the book as soon as it came out and when I heard they were making a movie out of it with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, I knew it would be great. And it is. And I met Carl Bernstein once and he was a real nice guy. I’ll post that story, after the movie. Oh and I posted a couple of clips at the end to show you the real-life results of their work. Ready? Lights, Camera..."I am not a crook!"
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The Day I Met Carl Bernstein!
The year was probably 1995, and at the time I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I was publishing and writing a magazine called fishwrap. I started the magazine shortly after I moved to New York, seeking a writing job at a magazine.
Within the first two weeks of arriving in Manhattan in the summer of 1993, I had managed to get job interviews at People magazine, Entertainment Weekly and In Style. And: boom, boom, boom: was turned down by all three. In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to tell Jim Seymour (then the editor of Entertainment Weekly) that those list stories they do ("The Top 100 Movies of All Time!") are really boring and appeal only to the dumbest dullards on the planet. And maybe it was a mistake telling Cutler Durkee (I can’t remember his exact title, but he was second on the masthead of People magazine) while he looked disgusted at a clip of mine I had written about a homeless man who eats roadkill, that it had been fun smoking pot and drinking with that guy. And maybe, just maybe, it was a mistake telling the woman (I completely forget her name and title) that I thought In Style was a real piece of celebrity ass-kissing trash. In any case, being told in such short order to go away and not come back by all three editors was quite a depressing trifecta of rejection.
But in spite of their naysaying I picked myself up, dusted off my jeans and sent clips and pitch ideas to Spin, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Playboy, New York and any other title I thought might be interested in my unique writing styles and ideas for eye-popping stories. And this mass mailing of my clippings and feature article ideas were met with a thundering silence from the media elite in Manhattan.
“Oh well, I’ll show them,” I said to myself a month later, while looking for a night job, “I’ll publish a magazine and ridicule the whole stinking lot of those fuckers.”
Which is exactly what I did. The magazine, fishwrap, was mainly me making fun of all the assholes who wouldn’t hire me. While it almost guaranteed a blacklisting of sorts in the New York media world, it was great fun and it lasted around six years, till magazines got so stupid you couldn’t even make fun of them anymore. I always say it got to be like making fun of the retarded: It’s fun for a few seconds, but it’s too easy and gets old real quick.
But anyway, I digress. It was 1995 and I had just finished up the latest fishwrap. And it was a real beauty. It was our special “Just Say Dope” issue. The cover story was an interview with Stephen Hager and John Holmstrom from the magazine High Times. And we had a special “Bud of the Month” foldout that was of the cast of "Father Knows Best" with a circle around the head of troubled middle child Bud. What was great was after the show went off the air, the real life Bud was busted for possession of pot. It was a good issue and I was packing up comp issues that I would deliver all around town to the various magazines I made fun of.
I packed my bag up and started to head down Amsterdam Avenue towards the Time, Inc. offices. Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly were a stone’s throw away from the Time Life building, so I could hit quite a few magazines in this trip. My bag was stuffed with issues and I carried many more in one of those oversized Duane Reade plastic bags.
As I plodded towards midtown somewhere around 65th Street I happened to look over at a pay phone and saw a short weathered-looking man with grey hair talking into the phone. He was wearing a white trench coat. A younger, attractive woman stood by his left side. I looked at him briefly, then continued walking while thinking to myself, “I’ve seen that guy somewhere.” Three blocks further, I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Fuck me,” I said aloud to myself. “That was Carl Bernstein.”
Carl Bernstein. As in Woodward and Bernstein. As in the writers from the Washington Post that uncovered the Watergate scandal (when nobody else would cover the story). As in one half of the team who wrote all All The President’s Men, a book I’ve read about fifty times, and I’ve seen the movie probably more times than that. This guy was my hero. Carl Bernstein ripped Richard Nixon’s nuts loose and then put them on a silver platter and handed the balls back to the president and forced him to resign or be impeached. Carl Bernstein was one of the reasons I became a writer.
And I just walked past him.
“Stupid!” I said, hitting myself in the forehead. I really would’ve loved giving this guy a copy of fishwrap and telling him what a hero he was to me. And I walked right past him.
I decided in the slight chance against all odds to trace my steps back three blocks in the slight chance he was still around the area. I hurriedly walked/jogged back to the pay phone, but now a burly guy with a beat-up blue jean vest and giant ZZ Top beard was yakking away to some methamphetamine dealer a few blocks away.
I absent-mindedly walked another block and squinted in the distance a few blocks, and saw the back of a white trench coat walking down Amsterdam. It was him. I took off like a shot. One block, two blocks and I was standing right beside Carl Bernstein on the corner waiting for the light to change. I took a deep breath and then spoke.
“Excuse me,” I said nervously, while sweat rolled down my forehead, “you’re Carl Bernstein, right?”
He narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down. I was wearing old black Levi’s, black boots that were coming apart at the heel and a black shirt with a hole in the elbow. Plus, I was sweating profusely by now. I sweat heavily in normal conditions, but when I get nervous or unsettled, the sweat literally pours out of me. Think Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.
“Uh, who wants to know,” he said with a somewhat frightened look on his face. The woman tugged at his sleeve.
“Fuck,” I thought, “he thinks I’m a crazy person.”
I took a deep breath and started talking.
“Well, my name’s Marty and I do a magazine and you know you’re my hero, I hated Nixon and Watergate was great and it was you that did all that, and I’m a writer too and you know you’re my idol...” I was talking a mile a minute and sounded like a complete nut job, but I think Mr. Bernstein was just relieved I wasn’t the second coming of Son of Sam. He smiled and interrupted me.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down...Marty, you said?”
Holy shitballs, he was talking to me like I was a normal person.
Yeah,” I answered. “My name’s Marty.”
“Hi Marty,” he said smiling while stretching out his arm for a handshake, “My name’s Carl.”
I shook his hand and profoundly replied, “Uh, yeah, I know.”
“So what’s this magazine you say you do?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I excitedly shouted out while pulling one out of my bag and handing it to him. “It’s called fishwrap and it mocks the world of mainstream journalism,” I explained.
He flipped through the magazine and said, “You do the whole magazine yourself?”
“Well a friend of mine does most of the page layout, but I think of all the story ideas and write most of it myself,” I said proudly.
“Wow, that’s great,” he said while thumbing through the magazine.
“Well, I gotta tell you,” I said, going back into stalker mode, “you’re a real hero to me. I remember when the whole Watergate thing went down, man that was great. I was in high school and I remember reading the story and then reading about you and Woodward breaking the story and the book and the movie...”
“Yeah, those were heady times all right,” he said shaking his head. The woman now had a big grin on her face and was beaming a smile at Bernstein.
“You guys were on the cover of Rolling Stone,” I commented.
“That’s right, that was nuts,” he said, smiling at the memory.
Then an awkward silence settled in.
“Well, listen,” he said grabbing the woman’s hand, “we’ve got to be running, but it was great meeting you, Marty. Thanks for your magazine, I like people who make fun of the media,” he said, smiling and shaking my hand.
“Well, it was a real thrill meeting you.” My voice trailed off because I couldn’t bring myself to call him Carl.
Bernstein smacked me on the shoulder with the magazine and said, “Keep writing, my friend,” and headed off down the block.
I ran home and called some of my friends in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois. Nobody was around, but I finally got hold of my friend Moon at the finance office he runs. I called and his secretary said he was in a meeting and could she take my name and number and he’d call me back. “No,” I barked into the telephone. “You tell him to get on the phone right now, it’s a goddamned emergency.”
She put me on hold, and shortly Moon was on the other line.
“Marty,” he spat out excitedly, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong asshole, guess who I just met?” I asked.
“I’m in a meeting here,” Moon said sharply.
“Fuck that, I just met Carl Bernstein,” I told him in proud tones.
“Is this why you called?” Moon asked in a voice steeped in anger.
“Yeah, can you believe it? I gave him a copy of fishwrap and he told me to keep writing. Carl Bernstein told me to keep writing. And he called me his friend! Me, Carl Bernstein’s friend. Can you believe it?” I didn’t say anything else, because I realized he had hung up on me at the beginning of that last sentence.
I had to go into work, so I showered and couldn’t wait to walk in and tell everyone that I met Carl Bernstein and gave him a copy of my magazine. I worked the overnight shift at a small pre-press service bureau in downtown Manhattan. As I walked in, I quickly announced, “Today I met Carl Bernstein and I gave him a copy of fishwrap. And he told me to keep writing. And he called me his friend.”
Nobody even looked up.
“We’ve got a lot of rush jobs due tonight,” Giovanni, one of the daytime managers, told me.
So I started working. It was a long night.
That morning when my shift was over, I bought a six-pack of beer and went home and reread All The President’s Men.
Further reading: The Boy Who Would Be A Fire Truck, All The President’s Men, Washington Post and NY Times.
You also might like: Magic Markers, Mark Lindsay and Lindsay Wengler.
Five People on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List.
Paul Newman
Joe Namath
Barbara Streisand
Bill Cosby
Steve McQueen
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose,
Happy birthday, Jim.
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