He was snapped up right outside those august gates of academia as a general assignment reporter.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make you get coffee for me,” Steven told him during a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Only Becky, with whom Jamie made eye contact, seemed to acknowledge what a shitty thing it was for Steven to say.
Jamie, as usual, hid his envy and did his best to tolerate Steven, who always looked like he was ready to make a smart-ass remark—and often was. When they were boys, Jamie would complain to his mother that his cousin was a braggart and that he made Jamie feel like he was good at nothing. Molly would say, “He needs to make himself feel better because he hasn’t had it so easy.” Jamie could at least understand Steven in that context.
They were in grade school when Steven’s mother, Aunt Marge, began substituting scotch for her husband’s companionship while Lou worked night shifts in the composing room. By the time Lou caught on, she was deep into an alcohol-fueled affair with Freddie the mailman from down the block. They ran off when Steven, an only child, was in sixth grade. Uncle Lou raised him alone. Steven spent many a night doing his homework on the floor in Jamie’s room, sleeping on a cot a couple of feet from Jamie’s bed.
“My mother’s a drunk,” he said one night with the lights out. “I’m glad she’s gone.”
Jamie didn’t answer. He liked Aunt Marge for how she playfully teased his father for “only smiling on the day he gets a tax refund from the government.”
On nights before non-school days, Uncle Lou would take Steven to the office, where he would sneak away from the composing room to spy on editors and reporters hunched over keyboards—index fingers pecking away, covering for other fingers untrained. Steven was drawn to that life early on.
“He wants to be one of the big shots,” Lou would say, affectionately grabbing his teenage son around the neck. He said this once in the company of Morris and Jamie. Jamie wished his father had a comeback regarding Jamie’s future plans. But Morris had not a clue what Jamie was contemplating and neither for the most part did Jamie. They would stand by quietly, awkward and resentful.
When he was hired as a reporter, Steven scoured the streets for little people under siege by landlords, city agencies, anyone in power. His writing was filled with bold, effusive commentary—leaving Cal Willis rolling his eyes and a finger on the delete key.
Occasionally Willis even wondered about the veracity of Steven’s quotes. They were so well-timed and pithy that any editor worth his salt and cynicism would question if they originated from the notes of a meticulous journalist or the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter.
“You sure he said this?” Willis would say.
“Here, it’s right in my notes,” Steven would respond.
There was no arguing with the fact that his cousin produced front of the paper copy. Within three years, he was off the general assignment schedule and given the freedom of an enterprise reporter. The column came soon after, before Steven turned thirty. It was more specialized than Pat Blaine’s—a demagogic, union-touting, Wall Street-bashing voice for the worker. Steven volunteered the title—“In Labor”—and even rendered a crude drawing of an old waterfront boss choosing his crew from a ragged crowd of workers. It became his logo.
The column was relished by the city’s unions, admired by some editors uptown at the Times. One of them called Steven to say, “We might consider you after you’ve matured as a writer and toned it down.”
He immediately went to Maxine Hancock and informed her of The Gray Lady’s quote-unquote interest. She offered him a raise and a contract.
“How would it look if I signed a contract and quit the union?” he said. Of course he gratefully accepted the raise. Mission accomplished, salary upgraded, he ridiculed the notion of going to the Times and writing stories he compared in style to text book math.
He proclaimed the Trib “my paper” and its readers “my people.”
But Steven’s column seemed to become an endangered species in the early reign of Leland Brady. He was too much the bleeding-heart to suit a publisher who had made his fortune in his native Dublin and later London and the Canadian provinces by generating readership less with personal conviction than sheer ambition. While longtime Brady associates described him as an avowed conservative, the editorial position of his newspapers was typically opportunistic. In New York, where the Times spoke to the liberal majority, Brady’s mission was to steer the Trib to the far right, to become so much the enemy of the Times and of Godless New York that even the Man Upstairs might sign on for home delivery.
Leland Francis Brady was well known in Ireland and the U.K. for his cozy relationships with the well-heeled and connected. Leveraged with a string of publishing houses, he rewarded his new friends with lucrative book deals. He fashioned himself as a more eccentric, flamboyant Murdoch and became known for his posh gatherings aboard luxury yachts. He reveled in being referred to by the broadsheets and trade magazines across the Atlantic as the hottest press lord. He conferred on himself the eminently bogus title of Lord Leland Brady—and ordered his companies worldwide to do the same.
He arrived triumphantly aboard the Vanessa Queen—named for his wife—in New York harbor to stuff enough cash into Maxine Hancock’s account to allow her to live luxuriously for her remaining days. The newsroom mourned her departure and welcomed Brady with a front page that read: LORD, HELP US. The staff’s true feelings were expressed in the late edition when the comma between LORD and HELP was mysteriously dropped.
Two days after the sale was complete, Brady rented the ballroom at the Waldorf and threw a bash for the city’s power brokers. Mimicking his social rituals abroad, he began throwing the occasional and extravagantly catered Friday night dinner party aboard his yacht. He drew up the guest list on Monday mornings for the city room manager he inherited, Carla Delgado. Rare was the invitee who declined, who wanted to risk not being a friend of the man who had come to New York to expand his influence in the New World.
In the blink of an eye, the Trib went from Hancock’s rugged and unaffiliated coverage of City Hall to unquestioning support of a conservative agenda. With an election coming up, Brady threw his editorial might behind Republican challenger Harold Zimmerman, summoning his city editor Willis into his office every day for a review of the next day’s political news. Armed with a bright red marker, Brady would check off stories or draw a large X right through the ones he didn’t approve of. The incumbent Democrat’s coverage was cut in half. When Willis groused, Brady offered him early retirement, with four weeks’ pay.
Willis was the first black city editor in the history of mainstream New York City journalism, still the highest-ranking African-American at any of the papers. He loved the Trib. He spent so much time in the newsroom—routinely working twelve-hour days—that reporters joked he had no apartment and slept on a Greenwich Village bar stool.
The upshot was that Willis was not about to surrender his job to Brady that easily.
Steven, conversely, was emboldened by the union protection he had for as long as the union could protect itself.
“Mr. Kramer, the champion of organized labor, if I am not mistaken,” Brady said when he made his introductory newsroom rounds. He was a massive man, six-foot-four and more than three hundred pounds, with thick dark hair that belied his sixty-four years. He had a taste for exquisite silk scarves.
“I write about jobs for New Yorkers, Mr. Brady—the ones who are your readers,” Steven responded.
“If our readers need a job, they may consult the want ads,” Brady said.
“The ads we run are for minimum wage jobs,” Steven said.
Brady laughed, much too smugly, in Jamie’s opinion, who was standing nearby.
“Travel the world as I have, young man, and you may discover that most people live terrifically contented lives on no great abundance of money,” Brady lectured. “What they most want is to have the faith that they can live and worship peacefully, without fear of being shot by a mugger or blown