My Secret Life : Sober-Sided Times Reporter Ventures Into Raucous World of Tabloid Journalism

The U.S. Air Force was poised to wallop Baghdad, and the crowd around Lou Colasuonno’s desk was trying to compose a headline that would have about the same effect on readers of the New York Post.

“EVE OF DESTRUCTION,” wrote Colasuonno, managing editor of the country’s brassiest tabloid. “TERROR FROM THE SKIES,” I suggested. “IT’S SAUDI DUTY TIME,” offered Jimmy Lynch, who sits next to Colasuonno.

“KISS IT GOODBYE” was the eventual winner, inspired by a photo of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein kneeling on a prayer rug with his face pressed to the ground. This must have scored a direct hit with some readers, because the Pentagon lost no time ordering a stack of copies of the Jan. 16 edition.

I was at the Post for a few days last month after an editor dared me to shed the restrained style of the Los Angeles Times to learn the rambunctious arts of tabloid journalism. A reporter for the New York Times told me this assignment was like “training to be a juvenile delinquent” and predicted I would need months to recover.

The truth is, this is the way a lot of reporters who write about subjects such as zero-coupon bonds and political redistricting would prefer to spend their time, although they’ll never admit it.

The Post, a block-square gray monolith overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River, is the torch-bearer of a tabloid tradition that speaks to New York’s cops and cabbies with blaring headlines and simple, punchy sentences. The Post nearly folded last September, but if the strike-battered Daily News shuts down, the 700,000-circulation morning daily may be the country’s largest-circulation tabloid for a long time to come.

The paper sees its mission as reporting “what people talk about in elevators and saloons, in language they use in elevators and saloons,” said Jerry Nachman, the Post’s Twinkie-loving, phrase-spouting editor. One way it does this is by turning the lives of people such as entrepreneur Donald Trump, Mayor David Dinkins and hotelier Leona Helmsley into pop caricatures called Donald, David and Leona that New Yorkers can gossip about, detest or admire.

When the headlines really work, they can become as much of an event as the news itself. In some weird way, all this helps make a cold and sprawling metropolis a village.

Many reporters at the Post are proud of the paper’s raffish image and don’t have much time for dailies that would never lead with a story about Donald Trump’s girlfriend or call a murderer a “beast” in a headline. At the Post, writers at such papers are scorned as “serious young journalists.” Some contend it can hurt your career if people think you are one.

“Most people who write for newspapers today could be at insurance offices,” said Mike Pearl, a gentlemanly 61-year-old criminal-courts reporter whose hunger for mayhem hasn’t been slaked by nearly 25 years at the Post. Pearl was probably thinking I fit this category when he told me this, but he politely kept it to himself.

The Post is far different from the way it was between 1976 and 1988, when Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch owned the place and editors weren’t always picky about making a story live up to the sensation promised by its headline. These days, the Post gives less attention to gruesome crimes, and its editors boast with justification that they lead the way on many issue-oriented local stories.

Yet the Post’s editors want to keep that hard tabloid edge that separates them from the competing New York tabs, the Daily News and New York Newsday, which is owned by the corporate parent of Los Angeles Times. As I learned, one of the constant topics at the Post is how to go far enough without going too far.

The question seems to come up almost every day when the editors pick the front-page headline, which is called “the wood” because for years the inches-high letters were carved from oak.

Headline selection takes place about 5 p.m. at Colasuonno’s desk, which is often a jumble of story lists, wire-service photographs and page dummies. Any writer, copy messenger or copy clerk is welcome to kick in ideas. Often the hour attracts a clot of scribes who stand around scratching their heads, rubbing their jaws and offering up their hairiest notions.

Colasuonno punches the suggestions into his computer terminal and sometimes prints them out on a long sheet to give everybody a chance to see how they look. Then Colasuonno, Metropolitan Editor John Cotter and Lynch, an assistant managing editor, discard the crazier ideas and pick a reasonable one.

Only some nights they eliminate the reasonable ideas and pick the crazy one.

When the headline really works, murmurs of “All right!” and “That’s it!” ripple through the gathering. If the headline flops, it will be mourned around the desk for days.

One that misfired was “UP YOURS!” which the editors used for a story about a day of United Nations debate that condemned Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. The editors decided after the first edition that the headline was a bit too strong and pulled it--but by then, 30,000 copies had been printed.

On Jan. 16, for a story about Saddam’s underground bunker complex, the editors rejected “MOLE MAN OF BAGHDAD” (too flip), “SADDAM GOES BUNKERS” (too British), “DESERT RAT” (too complimentary--it was the nickname of British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery) and my limp pun, “SADDAM UNDER IRAQ.”

“HOME ALONE” was the choice, but it was replaced later that evening, when the Air Force pounced on Iraq, with the all-time, world-beating tabloid headline: “WAR!”

The editors consider a jingoistic tone just part of tabloid style, reflecting what they assume is their readers’ views but not necessarily their own. Of the three who most often write the headlines, Cotter describes himself as left wing, Lynch is more conservative and Colasuonno is in the middle.

The editors swear by their collective headline-writing style, which they think is the best way to flush out a maximum number of good ideas while screening out the bad. But one drawback is that it’s not always easy to figure out who deserves the credit.

V.A. (Vinnie) Musetto, the paper’s arts and leisure editor, is generally credited with writing the Post’s most famous headline: “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.” But as many as a dozen other writers and editors also have laid claim to the idea, Colasuonno said.

The Post’s reputation for zany headlines means it sometimes gets credit it may not deserve. Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith, who broke the story that Donald Trump had forsaken wife Ivana for model Marla Maples, has complained that the public thought the scoop was the Post’s.

The Post put the Trump-Maples story on the front page for six straight days, starting with “SPLIT” and culminating with “BEST SEX I EVER HAD”--a quote attributed to Maples by an unidentified friend. Circulation was up by 150,000 by the end of the week.

Editor Nachman said he had no fear the Friday headline was libelous because he couldn’t imagine Trump’s lawyers filing briefs to prove that it wasn’t the best sex Maples had ever had, or that Trump was hurt by such praise. “It was the most libel-proof head ever,” Nachman said.

I didn’t have to worry about offending anybody with my headlines, since the Post editors accepted precisely none of my suggestions. But I consoled myself with the hope that I would acquit myself better working on Page Six, the Post’s premier gossip page.

New York’s celebrity caricatures romp through the Post’s gossip columns even more frequently than across its front pages. In an afternoon at Page Six, I worked on items that involved Trump, alleged mob boss John Gotti, Danish aristocrat Claus von Bulow, Nancy Reagan and a personality of growing gossip interest, Saddam Hussein.

Page Six is one of the paper’s most-read features. Sometimes a big part of the job of the column’s two writers, Frank DiGiacomo and Joanna Molloy, is simply picking up the phone quickly enough to gather all the nuggets strewn by the vengeful, the publicity-hungry and the celebrity-mad.

One big source of calls is restaurateurs who ring up in search of free publicity whenever someone of even marginal celebrity stops to sup. When a star visits Tuttobene, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the management “calls before the busboys have even scraped the crumbs off the table,” said Molloy.

The ex-wife of a well-known New York sportscaster calls whenever she starts feeling her alimony isn’t adequate. Disgruntled former employees are a rich vein of information.

DiGiacomo says his tipsters come from all backgrounds. But his regular callers seem to share two similarities: a helpless compulsion to call Page Six, and the fact that they “never, never get out of bed before noon,” he said.

In my afternoon at Page Six, we tried to forecast future developments in the Gulf crisis. Naturally, we didn’t want to doing anything as obvious as calling the kind of Mideast experts who roost these days on network TV shows: We called a few astrologers.

Joan Quigley, former astrologer to Nancy Reagan, mistakenly thought the war might not begin until February. But in an observation worthy of any think-tank analyst, she asserted that Hussein “might win from this, even if he loses.”

After a few more calls, I was able to confirm a tip about von Bulow, the central figure in the film “Reversal of Fortune,” about how he was accused, then cleared, of trying to murder his wife, Sunny. Von Bulow had just persuaded the film’s makers to cut from its British and French versions a three-second clip in which it was alleged that he spent five days alone with his mother’s corpse after she died.

DiGiacomo congratulated me on pinning this down--then whittled the baggy sentences I’d written into a few punchy phrases.

I also played criminal-courts reporter. My assignment was to cover the trial of Daniel Rakowitz, a Texas-born drifter accused of strangling and chopping up his girlfriend, Monika Beerle, in a dispute over a Lower East Side apartment.

The Post had tagged him “the Monster of Tompkins Square Park,” and her “the Swiss Miss.”

The day I sat in on the trial, an ex-con testified he saw Rakowitz serve soup that had a finger floating in it to the homeless of Tompkins Square Park. Even in New York, cannibalism still has some novelty, and at the courthouse pressroom, the idea that Rakowitz had served a bouillabaisse of his girlfriend provoked some reaction.

“God,” breathed criminal-courts reporter Pearl, “that’s great tabloid stuff.”

Pearl’s press-room desk is surrounded by what is known as his “Wall of Shame”--actually, three walls covered by photos of the diminutive reporter with celebrity felons and a selection of classic Post headlines: “NIGHTMARE AT HOT SHEETS HOTEL,” “SHE WAS NICE TO ME, THEN I KICKED HER OFF THE ROOF,” “LOVERS’ TRYST TURNS INTO RAPE TERROR.”

He offered me a grain of wisdom about the job: It’s very difficult to know from one day to the next what the Post editors will accept in crime stories.

The Australian and British editors who ran the paper for Murdoch tended to love any story that could be topped by a headline with the words terror or shock . But sometimes they would surprise you by replacing your details with the phrase unspeakable acts , as they once did on a Pearl story about torturers who used rats to gnaw human entrails.

With this unpredictability in mind, I called my story in to the news desk. I suggested that the first sentence be something like, “A drifter accused of murdering his girlfriend served a stew of her body parts to the homeless, jurors were told yesterday.”

I thought about all the newspaper crime writers with gravy-stained ties and unpressed suits who had delivered lines like that. I thought about Hildy Johnson and Front-Page Farrell and Charles Foster Kane. It was an exhilarating moment.

The editors at the other end of the line obviously weren’t thinking about glorious tradition. They toned down my sentence, leaving it to say simply--and more accurately--that a witness had testified that Rakowitz had served soup with a finger in it.

The headline writers kicked around some ideas like “FINGER-LICKIN’ GOOD,” then settled for the straightforward “SLAY SUSPECT FED US VICTIM--WITNESS.”

I was naturally disappointed that they had changed my sentence, but at least the episode made somebody’s day. Cotter told me later that the staff had found it pretty amusing that the editors had had to rein in the guy from the L.A. Times, who was clearly, they all thought, “too tabby for the tabloid.”

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Correction

The quoted ABC daily circulation for Newsday, including New York Newsday, for the period ending Sept. 30, 1990, was 714,128, compared to the New York Post’s 510,129. During the New York Daily News strike, Newsday had gained about 100,000 papers daily, while the Post had gained about 200,000, according to statements by the papers. The daily circulation of all editions of Newsday thus was about 800,000 at the time of publication, compared to the Post’s 700,000.

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