A MIRACLE! I CAN NOW SPELL ‘PULITZER’

The morning paper arrived Thursday. And for possibly the first time in my life, I didn’t immediately turn to the sports pages.

When you win a Pulitzer Prize, you want to read about it in the paper. You want convincing, tangible evidence, if only to make sure that the previous day hadn’t been a dream.

There it was, in good old black and white. No dream.

I faced an immediate dilemma: what to wear the day after. Unless I’m going out on an interview, my usual office attire is jeans. But somehow jeans seemed inappropriate for a Pulitzer winner. Jeans were me. But this was no time to be me.

A tux? No, that would be overdressing. Maybe a three-piece suit. But not with my penny loafers. Shouldn’t I buy some wing-tipped shoes? I sweated it out. . . .

Everyone wants to know what I was doing when I found out about the award. It would be nice to report that I was in conference with a network president or that I was at my word processor turning out a brilliant essay on the future of television in a technological age. But I wasn’t.

I was interviewing a star in a Hollywood restaurant. Not very Pulitzerish.

Summoned to the phone, I heard the voice of Times Executive Arts Editor Robert Epstein. The first thought that runs through your mind when your boss pages you in a restaurant is that you’re being sued for libel or being fired. Instead, Epstein gave me the good news about the Pulitzer.

I hadn’t expected it. I hadn’t even contemplated it. So I couldn’t comprehend it. I was overwhelmed.

A real trouper, though, I returned to my table and continued my interview with Jane Alexander. Everyone wanted to know afterward whom I had been interviewing. I thank the heavens that it was Alexander, one of America’s finest actresses. TV is so eclectic that I could have been interviewing anyone. I envisioned the headline:

Pulitzer Prize Winner Notified

While Lunching With Soupy Sales

When I left the restaurant to go to the office, I noticed that a piece of cotton was stuck to my tie. I wondered if it had been there during my interview with Alexander. Do those things happen to other Pulitzer winners?

Pandemonium awaited me at the office. Applause. Cheers. Confetti. Photographers. There was a champagne reception in the newsroom, where scores of my colleagues had gathered to hear a Pulitzer winner speak profundities.

But I was the same unprofound person I was before. Absolutely nothing was on my mind.

I thought of Martin Bernheimer, The Times music critic who won a Pulitzer in 1983, and of how masterful he had seemed at his reception. Bernheimer, who is erudite and at once witty and menacing, was born to win a Pulitzer. He wears a beard and his name sounds like an opera.

A Pulitzer isn’t supposed to go to someone whose friends call him Howie.

Nevertheless, the calls of congratulations and requests for interviews poured in all afternoon. It was all very heady.

Just when you begin to think grandly of yourself, however, there is always someone to put you in your place. A radio interviewer told me he had always assumed I was in my 60s.

There’s nothing wrong with older age, but I prefer staying middle-aged as long as I can.

Another interviewer was so impressed with my work that she wanted to know what I did at the paper. Several people asked if this was my first Pulitzer, as if you knock them off in handfuls. Someone else congratulated me, then said he knew someone who had two Pulitzers. After I was interviewed live on TV, my wife, Carol, called to tell me that I looked like a convict.

And on the way home that night, the freeway traffic did not part like the Red Sea.

The long commute gave me time to think about what had happened and time to feel the pressure. When a very smart and perceptive writer named William Henry III won a Pulitzer several years ago as a TV critic for the Boston Globe, envy and human nature prevailed. We critically pored over his columns, trying our best to pick them apart. That would probably happen to me too.

So for one thing, I would have to spell better (it took three attempts just to spell Pulitzer for this column). And I would have to write about weighty TV issues. I might even have to write intelligently about weighty TV issues.

When I arrived home, my wife and my daughter, Kirsten, greeted me like a hero. That lasted about 10 minutes. Then Carol got down to business.

“How much money?”

People sometimes confuse the Nobel Peace Prize, whose winners get a bundle, with the Pulitzer Prize, where prestige is the main award. I told Carol that Pulitzer winners get $1,000.

“Oh,” she replied. My wife is sometimes very pragmatic. Recently, when a lingering ache in the pinky on my left hand caused me to muse about being permanently disabled and unable to type, she informed me that I could always learn to type with my toes.

Actually, if my mail is an indication, many readers already think that I type with my toes.

Such thoughts place my Pulitzer in perspective. I awakened the next morning as sleepy as ever. As always, my wife mumbled. As always, my daughter grunted when I woke her up. As always, the cat was mad because it hadn’t been fed. And George Lucas hadn’t called about making a movie about my life. So I read the newspaper story about the Pulitzers and felt wonderful about it. But nothing had changed. And by the way. . . .

I wore jeans.