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AS A JOURNALISTIC STARLET IN OAKLAND |
 When they say, "Jerry was sent to the Tower," this is the one they mean: The Tribune Tower in Oakland, CA. |
JER FINDS CREATIVE FREEDOM IN OAKLAND
of TheColumnists.com
Mired in a dead-end future in The San Francisco Chronicle city room surrounded by too many stars for me to get noticed, the good fairy descended upon me when I heard from the paper’s drama critic--a bowtie-wearing dandy with the dandy name of Paine Knickerbocker--that The Oakland Tribune had lost both its first and second string theater/film critics, Herb Michaelson and Dennis Powers.
They had quit the same week--the twitchy, fast-talking Michaelson to take a job as San Francisco correspondent for The Sacramento Bee and the wry, soft-spoken Powers to serve as publicist for an exciting new theater company that had just landed in town, The American Conservatory Theater, led by the mad genius Bill Ball.
(Herb Michaelson, then married to my old high school classmate on The Aegis, Marlene Gherra, was steeped in `30s newspaper lore--he owned a copy of “His Girl Friday” and ran it regularly. He died in his early 50s, and Dennis Powers, after a stroke, shot himself.)
I hustled like mad for the Oakland critic’s job--getting my clips to the features editor within a few days, and was hired with surprising, almost suspicious, ease, much to my amazement. Only eight years after my calamitous internship at The Tribune, I was now back as its theater and film critic/columnist. It was great to be a minor star on the hometown paper I’d grown up reading, if not delivering (I delivered the rival Post-Enquirer, an evening rag, and after it folded I delivered The Shopping News twice a week--secretly, because I was 17, ancient for a paper boy.)
The Tribune was then a fat and sassy operation. A self-satisfied Republican bible everybody in town read, it was owned by the Knowland family whose favorite son was conservative Sen. William F. Knowland, a burly, balding guy with a buzz cut who looked like a Central Casting politician, and acted like one.
Knowland (whom comic Mort Sahl dubbed “The Senator from Formosa” for his anti-Communist diatribes) was rarely seen around the paper except when his limo pulled up at the side entrance and he made a rare appearance in the rococo Tribune tower, Oakland’s tallest, most impressive spire. It was a few blocks from the furniture store where my dad worked, E. Bercovich & Sons, at 17th & Franklin Streets, adjacent to a gym run by a bouncy, curly-headed muscle man named Jack LaLanne--the first studio in his body-building empire.
Knowland never mixed with the hoi-polloi except when stuck with one of us in the elevator, where he invariably inquired (in a gruff voice he meant to sound hearty), “Had your vacation yet?,” a line much mimicked by the staff. Whenever I’d get in the elevator with the paper’s droll sports cartoonist, Lee Susman, Lee would bark, “Had your vacation yet, son?”
The Knowlands pretty much ruled Oakland in the `50s and `60s, but from reading The Tribune--sports page aside--you never would guess the city had a huge black population. Once a year, the society editor would deign to cover a black cotillion. Otherwise, about the only black faces you ever saw in the paper belonged to thugs and athletes, primarily baseball icons like Frank Robinson, Curt Flood, Vada Pinson and, to be sure, a basketball legend named Bill Russell, who led the all-black McClymond’s High teams that dominated the high schools’ Oakland Athletic League and ran roughshod over my own also-ran all-white Oakland High Wildcats.
Knowland’s Tribune created a mythical Caucasian city until H. Rap Brown’s famous chickens came home to roost in the late `60s, when the Black Panthers erupted and challenged the official Tribune version of Oakland life.
Those hostile chickens first gathered in my very midst when the Black Panthers emerged from the same halls I had walked only a few years earlier at Oakland Junior College, the converted University High School on Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way), in a black ghetto, my home for two years before transferring to San Jose State. I got my journalistic feet wet at Oakland JC as editor of The Tower, a campus weekly printed at Laney Trade School.
Unbeknownst to anyone then--anyone white anyway--“OJC,” as it was rather sneeringly called by UC students, was a staging area for the Black Panthers. I may well have sat in freshman English class with Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver, then part of a heavily black student body. Until OJC, the only blacks I had ever encountered were in gyms and football fields or on record albums and TV shows.
Our advisor on The Tower, John Gothberg, was a nervous novice journalism teacher with thinning red hair and a stammer, a tall, shy fellow with an apologetic manner who had high hopes for us all and a kind word for everyone, no matter how ill-suited, on the little campus weekly.
Gothberg took us all seriously and gave me enough confidence to believe I could actually be the paper’s editor; before that, I’d never taken charge of anything, let alone a newspaper. It was the quiet, persevering Gothberg who set up those internships at The Tribune where I cowered at my desk for four Saturdays trying to master the art of producing two-paragraph auto accident stories in under an hour.
William Knowland’s post-Senatorial life, after decades as a blustering GOP powerbroker, came to a pathetic, wholly unlikely end when he divorced his wife and took up with a woman who allegedly bled him dry. He was said to have gambled away the family--and Tribune--fortune on his girlfriend at Reno. The bullish old senator finally killed himself at the family home on the Russian River.
His son Joe Jr., a dapper wannabe song and dance man who appeared in amateur theatricals, was considered a lightweight by the staff--a joke really, with no newspaper experience and little apparent interest in running The Tribune. He helped run it into the ground despite a valiant belated rescue operation by a successor, the black editor and publisher Robert Maynard, a whiz from The Washington Post who spent his time in Oakland looking for bail-out money until he died in his 50s, and the once mighty Tribune all but expired with him.
The Oakland Tribune is still around, barely, a wispy shadow of its former thundering self, the circulation down from a high of a quarter million readers when I worked there to about 40,000 today, a sad saga of a once vital, proud, if racially backward, newspaper gone to almost throwaway-sized seed.
Yet it’s still there, bought by the Alameda Newspaper Group run by Dean Singleton, the renowned slash-and-burn Denver mogul who also owns several profitable suburban papers. The Tribune survives now on the earnings of the conglomerate, a kind of charity case, but at least Singleton returned the paper’s headquarters to the grand old Tribune Tower, a symbol of the newspaper’s glory days when it overlooked (and looked over) the city like a castle. Singleton has now decided to move the paper out of the Tribune Tower again and into an office on a barren stretch of land between the airport and the Coliseum.
My own four-year stay there was relatively calm, happy and un-traumatic, unlike my earlier seven years struggling to stay alive as a fumbling general assignment reporter. I wrote what I liked, however I liked, just as I had at the San Jose Mercury, and was finally and completely in my cultural element. I even drew a few caricatures, my thwarted first career, that ran with the column now and then.
The toughest part of that dream job was driving across the Bay Bridge after seeing a play in San Francisco and, at midnight (wife Mary cooling her heels at a nearby desk for two hours), trying to bat out a cogent, entertaining review--then driving back across the Bridge to our San Francisco apartment. I’d often turn in at 3 or 4 a.m., and have to get up at 8 for a 9 a.m. screening, battling to keep awake through some dismal two-hour film, then drive back over the Bridge to the Tribune office to write a Sunday piece or a review of the movie I’d seen that morning.
Even wide awake, watching movies at 9 a.m. seemed a preposterous idea, probably the choice of The Chronicle’s critics, Paine Knickbocker and his assistant, the rambunctious John Wasserman, a wild man who loudly voiced his opinions at movies he disliked, hurling rude epithets at the screen during Jerry Lewis comedies as the rest of us sat by chuckling or wishing he’d shut up. Wasserman was a phenom, a dark, handsome guy who wrote scathingly witty reviews of the second-string movies he was given by Knickerbocker and quickly built a following.
I thought he was overrated, but maybe I
was just jealous. Wasserman was roundly catered to by publicists,
editors and colleagues. He fancied himself a star, and he was
in a way, but mixed a bit too cozily with showbiz stars, becoming
pals with Woody Allen and many of the singers and rock performers
he also covered--and occasionally took to bed. He had an affair
with Joan Baez I learned of when I was invited to her home for
a reception after a Baez concert and saw cuddly photos of her
and the late Wasserman on her refrigerator. He was killed in
a head-on auto crash on a freeway, as were a couple in the oncoming
car; he’d been drinking.
Wasserman was a journalistic rock star on the big local stage
but I was a notable supporting player on The Tribune (or
“The Trombone” as Clint Eastwood once told me he called
it when he’d delivered it himself as a kid in Oakland.)
People who had known me growing up wrote fond letters--teachers,
neighbors, classmates, even a speech therapist I’d had in
grade school. I had made good, even if only in Oakland, but that
was plenty of fame for me at the time. At least I wasn’t
miscovering fires and writing obits of former parks commission
heads.
There was a huge emotional satisfaction at being drama critic on the paper that had once reviewed my father when he performed with the Berkeley Community Theater and the Orinda Dramateurs. Indeed, I was only two critics away from the critic, Theresa Loeb Cone, who had regularly praised my dad’s acting. After Theresa left, Herb Michaelson took over--and then came me, completing a circle.
The Tribune had its share of characters, like the harrumphing liberal editorial cartoonist Lou Grant, who was always at odds, politically, with the paper, and did the best Knowland impression of anybody. Before his cartooning career, Lou had been a radio comedy writer for “Duffy’s Tavern.”
Grant was a constantly embattled guy, seething at this or that, an ideal personality for an angry outspoken political cartoonist. The editors were always trying to tone him down for his anti-LBJ/Nixon drawings, but he scared them off. You didn’t want to take on Lou too often; he’d bite your head off--or even worse, talk your ear off.
Lou shared an office with Bill Fiset, who wrote an Oakland gossip column but labored in vain in the large, looming, overwhelming shadow of Herb Caen across the Bay at The Chronicle, who was just about the best in the business. Fiset had been a witty TV critic who got blanded out when he tried to find anything amusing or noteworthy to write about in the drowsy suburban East Bay, where nothing much ever seemed to happen, at least not in his column.
Like a lot of newspaper guys I met, Fiset was far more amusing in person than in print, where he seemed to feel a need to dumb down, or make palatable, his items--unlike Caen, a master at sticking in the needle and twisting it. Fiset wanted to be liked (unlike the lethal Caen), Bill’s downfall as a gossip columnist, but he relished the soft life even if he always seemed slightly embarrassed by his column.
The Tribune had a lot of stagnant talent. As with so many longtime staffers, if they didn’t move on, or up, they got badly stuck and, after a time, cynical and bitter, playing out their years until retirement. My editor was a prime example: Dave Gustafson, who had little to do and spent about half the work day at The Hollow Leg, a saloon across the street, sipping three-hour lunches. A chain-smoking guy in his 40s with splotchy red cheeks and a bulbous boozer’s nose, he would wander from office to office chatting up everyone, pretending he was busy.
Dave rarely had to make a major executive decision. The department was smoothly run by his assistant, Don Shepherd, an efficient bespectacled guy who mocked his besotted boss and, indeed, most of the editors there. The biggest decision Dave ever made that involved me was deciding between which of two candidates would be my assistant. I'll call these two fellows Jack Martin and Jim Watson because they're still around and might not like the notoriety. I had known both of them from college, and either choice would please me, so I left it to Dave because I didn’t want to make the painful decision between two equally smart, well-qualified friends.
Gustafson agreed they were each very good but finally recommended Jim, who became my assistant for four years, taking over in 1971 when I quit. When Jim showed up for work on his first day, however, Gustafson took me aside in mid-morning and, with a sheepish little laugh, confessed he had confused their names and chosen the wrong man! Dave leaned more toward Jack, not Jim--my little secret until now. Neither guy ever knew that the second choice got the job--until I told them just before this column went online. They both got a big laugh out of it.
Other minor players were: Mort Cathro, the travel writer, a skinny guy who barricaded himself in a corner of the office behind cruise-ship brochures, edited the Sunday travel section, rode horses in Moraga and sang barbershop arias; Russ Wilson, an aging jazz critic who wore a beret and ended every sentence with “man,” sprinkling his conversation with certified hip lingo; Alan Ward, an ex-sports editor (whose sports column was called “A Ward to the Wise”) turned feature writer who liked to impress you with his erudition (“Did you know the word ‘Saturday’ actually comes from ‘Saturnalia,’ an ancient feast?”); Bob MacKenzie, a witty TV critic and onetime Arthur Murray dance teacher who became TV Guide’s critic before deserting print for TV; and Paul Hertelendy, a tall, slender music critic born in Hungary who was full of painful puns and amusing asides I didn’t always get. (Yes, the same Paul Hertelendy who's now "Paul the Poet" for TheColumnists.com.)
Paul’s replacement one summer was a big rangy guy with floppy blond hair, one wandering eye and a slightly imperious manner who wound up at The New York Times as its classical music critic--then pop music critic, then dance critic and even editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section. That was John Rockwell, a renaissance man whom nobody--certainly not me, anyway--paid any attention to at The Tribune, where he seemed just another guy passing through but was someone it might have been extremely wise of me to befriend rather than ignore.
Years later, when he was promoted to cultural
editor, I sent Rockwell a freelance piece at The Times
that he failed to respond to despite my little reminder of our
tight Oakland Tribune kinship 30 years earlier. It’s
a tricky business.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000
by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This
special extract from a work in progress is published by special
arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should
be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below.
This excerpt first posted here April 9, 2007.
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