Just My Bill

 

Bill Zehme, in his element.

"I started spelling “chemo” k-e-e-m-o whenever I wrote it out because I thought that made it sound fun. And then “hot sauce” and “glow juice.” It’s so easy to fall into a vat of hopelessness. You better bring some levity to this. And you better laugh every day. Because if you forget how to laugh, cancer will just spin you out." -- Bill Zehme, Chicago magazine, Dec. 2016

My ol' buddy Bill died this weekend, at 64, nearly 10 years after being diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. We first found each other and bonded in the mid-80's when we were both young celebrity journalists, and we ended up helping each other get launched at various places. 

But I hadn't seen Zehme since he came to New York in February 2013 for an Andy Kaufman event in a 50-seat gallery, Andy being one of his many, many showbiz deep dives, this one came out booklength - 1999's "Lost in the Funhouse: the Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman." 

It was typical of Bill to choose to decipher one of the most confounding, hard to nail down celebrities to walk the earth and approach it with the same work ethic and clarity of wordsmithery that shamed most other people who toiled in the trenches of celebrity journalism, whether he was doing so for Playboy, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, or - less characteristically - Spy. 

Bill was a fanboy, but not a mindless one. He spelunked for humanity where most would only see cartoons: subjects who few would take seriously, like Liberace, Regis Philbin (with whom Bill wrote TWO very Bill-titled books, "I'm Only One Man!" and "Who Wants to Be Me?"), Jay Leno, and Barry Manilow ("If he could be anyone else, he would be Sting. 'He's on his own path,' [Manilow] says, admiringly. 'I wish that I could be as brave as he has been with his career and his life.' Next choice: Tom Waits. 'He sings from his kishkes.'").

Also, impenetrable subjects like Warren Beatty, who refused to answer any questions, so Bill published the timed length of Beatty's infernal pauses and summarized, "To interview Warren Beatty is to want to kill him. It is also to become fond of him. He seduces anything that is not mineral."

Also, Carson, who talked to nobody, Letterman, who didn't suffer fools, Bozo the Clown, and Sandra Bernhard, whose public persona everyone was afraid of. When he handed in his profile for the Rolling Stone Comedy Issue I edited, I tripped on his first line: "She's not so scary."  Spoiler alert, I protested. But Bill won me over -- it's the question everyone wanted to know, and once you got that out of the way, you could hang with her, as he did, most improbably. 

Sandra: Not so scary?

Bill was a tall guy -- in fact one of his email handles was "TallGuyInc" -- and had the unassuming, midwestern, gee-shucks I can't believe I'm talking to you demeanor that ingratiated him with everyone - subjects and editors. Perhaps he was overcompensating for his 6'5" height to put people at ease. He saw the world clearly, but he also cherished the value of cheeseball showbiz, and found ways to convey his enthusiasm and insight with mighty turns of phrase, never falling into the trap of repeating himself. 

He was also the world's biggest Chi-town booster -- I visited him there several times, and he showed me Wrigley Field, the Twin Anchors - one of Sinatra's favorite local hangs -- and a Greek Taverna with live Opa Opa music whose name escapes me. He later wrote a book decoding Sinatra's approach to life, which included mid-90's correspondence between him and Sinatra - who otherwise had not cooperated with a member of the print media for 25 years.

Bill, Cubbie booster, me, ye olde Wrigley

But he also ably navigated LA, where he would later relocate. And when Spy magazine held a promotional event there, he miraculously pulled strings with his hometown employer, Playboy, to get Spy's editors invited to a shindig at Hef's mansion, grotto and all. 

I saw Bill a couple more times in both cities, then lives intervened. He divorced first.  I had cancer first, around 2010, and kept it pretty mum. Bill's first hit in 2013. 

As the quote up top shows, Zehme tackled his cancer with the same kind of cheerful derring-do and devil-may-care breeziness as his art. 

But despite the "lookback now that it's over" tone to that uncharacteristically personal article, the fucking disease wouldn't leave him be. It derailed his personal Moby Dick of a project, a comprehensive Carson biography; the fact he confoundingly had no health insurance (Oh, Bill!) both ate up his book advance and lost him his domicile (as he would call it). He got some TV documentary work to tide him over, but he never finished the book, which was to be called “Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait.” 

Before a 2017 trip to Chicago, I reached out to try to see him, and he made it seem possible, but then pulled back. My sense from other friends was that he didn't want old pals to see him in his current state. 

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And then this: 

In the cosmic way the universe works, after Willis Reed died, BUT BEFORE BILL DID, I was going through one of my many unsorted piles of my life to dig out an autographed photo of Reed - and out fell an envelope from the Vanity Fair Chicago office, postmarked September 2, 1986, that I had no recollection of receiving or saving. 

It hailed me, in Bill's inimitable all-caps, as "THE AMAZING DAVI!!" - a reference to my then-recent freelance piece for US magazine about The Amazing Randi, the magician who had recently been awarded a MacArthur Genius recipient. 

I set it aside to read after I finished my work this weekend; in the interim, I got a text from our mutual friend David Rensin that Bill had been in hospice (which I hadn't known) and had passed. 

This morning I trepidatiously opened the envelope,

The Aggravating Aggregatorsphere

"I'm sure you've seen this," someone emailed me, with a link to the story on a website called "The Daily" about Aaron Sorkin cleaning house on the show I'd worked on, HBO's The Newsroom.

Actually, I hadn't, nor had I ever heard of the website before. (Thankfully, I at least already knew the news, having been notified by email the previous week, because sometimes in this business, as with my last job working on Eliot Spitzer's show at CNN, you learn such news about yourself from the press.)

What troubled me, more than the public nature of my personal job situation, was the reporting -- which got cut and pasted and parroted endlessly over the next 24 hours in places from The Hollywood Reporter to Entertainment Weekly to New York magazine's Vulture column to the Huffington Post, The National Review (!) and way, way many other places.

It was inaccurate and lazy.  As it drifted through this aggregator foodchain, maybe one writer would add some opinionating to it, like Grantland, but none of it was based on any further reporting. Nobody has the budget to do anything any more but repeat, and the rush is to get it on your website fast before people start going to someone else's website instead.

Basically the information in these dozens, perhaps hundreds of stories, remained the same four bullet points:

• that only one writer was retained -- not true. (Three were.) 
• that her name is Corinne "Kinsbury." (it's Kingsbury). 
• citing a Sorkin quote in Vanity Fair (below), that all the writers do is "research" 
• and quoting an HBO spokesman that such turnover is "nothing out of the ordinary.”

The sum total of reporting, as far as I could tell, was one unnamed "source" who said he'd fired everyone but his ex-girlfriend. The Hollywood Reporter led with reporting that contradicted this -- yet still repeated it:

According to HBO, the Aaron Sorkin drama set behind the scenes of a cable news network is replacing about half of its writing staff, though one source close to the show tells The Hollywood Reporter that everyone on the show's writing staff except for Corinne Kinsbury has been let go.

Even Grantland, which decided to make a "point" about the firing, did so with a lot of hyperbolic extrapolation and presumption:

The real question is whether this was a par-for-the-course power move from a controlling showrunner or the first sign that the very noisy drumbeat of criticism... has reached Sorkin’s well-tanned ears. While it’s never a good thing to see anyone out of work, it’s the second scenario that’s preferable. Just like his unlucky in love male leads, Sorkin’s undeniable gifts are always at their best when paired with a tough-minded foil, someone who will stand up to the speechifying and push back against the predictable plots...

Corinne and ex Tate Donovan
at NYC Newsroom premiere

Anyone wanting to find out how to spell Corinne's last name need only have looked at IMDB, or even Google. They might have even had fun with the fact that she had a cameo in episode 5 as the stripper. Even better, they might have found out what she actually contributed to the series, which was a lot of the 20-something romantic plotlines. But instead it was enough reporting to just say "ex-girlfriend."

Anyone wanting the accurate number of writers who were cut -- or chose not to return -- could have found out with a well placed phone call or two. Anyone who really believed Sorkin employed eight writers to merely do "research" needs to really examine what that would mean. And anyone who thinks nobody in the room "stood up" to him doesn't have any concept of what the real, very hard and rewarding job of writing for Aaron is.

Writing for Sorkin -- and I have done some for all four of his shows -- means throwing 100 ideas at him that he will reject 99 of. That he will belittle and wrestle and often turn into something else. But he walks into the room every episode not knowing what he wants to write, and walks out with episodes finished.

We all worked really hard for him, beating out plots, scenes, historical scenarios, speeches, etc., for him to put in his genius machine. Yes, he writes the scripts.  And, unlike when he was up against network deadlines and 22 episode seasons, he even rewrote them, to notes from producer Scott Rudin, HBO, and yes, even the writers' room.

Also: why didn't anyone research HBO's statement? Was there this much turnover between seasons one and two of Sex and the City or Sopranos or Six Feet Under or The Wire? What about patterns in Sorkin's hiring?  The two seasons of Sports Night, the four he ran West Wing --  he never had the same writers' room twice. Why is this? 

There are a lot of potential answers, it's not my place to provide them here. But back when I was reporting for Rolling Stone, at least one reporter would have tried.  

Speaking of reporting, that huge April Vanity Fair spread on The Newsroom included this little parenthetical aside about Scott Rudin by writer James Kaplan: "(And, who, I should note, has optioned my 2010 Frank Sinatra biography for film.)" Were no other reporters available? It's the kind of blatant conflict of interest VF editor Graydon Carter would have flagged in his days at Spy. And if I were in Kaplan's shoes, I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking the gig. But that thinking makes me a dinosaur. 

What's scariest about the propagation of this particular simple-minded news story is that I actually know something about it, so I can see the holes. So it means there's a lot more out there I'm reading that is just as unvetted. In the internet-dominated era, how often are we digesting information that has been similarly turned into presumed knowledge and hardened into fact, almost impossible to unravel or correct?

That is one of the burning issues that helped inspire Aaron and all of us at The Newsroom to begin with. And it is clearly far from being settled. 
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Update, August 1, 2012: Deadline Hollywood just posted a story quoting Sorkin at the TCA's denying the facts of the firing story. Deadline gloated how wrong the original Daily story was -- but didn't do any reporting itself. A lot of what Sorkin claimed is also easily checkable.  I leave it to others to find out what's what.