For a Revitalized Bernstein, It’s Just Another Star Turn

Watergate reporter and bon vivant Carl Bernstein, “one of the best friends . . . we gossip columnists have ever had,” is being born again as a celebrity this month, thanks to several major magazines. And, with minor reservations, he likes it.

Bernstein, who teamed with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post to expose the Nixon Administration’s dirty tricks, seems almost ubiquitous with appearances in Vanity Fair, Fame, New York, Vogue and Rolling Stone, where his book “Loyalties”--the first in more than a decade--will be serialized starting next week.

The book also has received kind words from New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith, who acknowledged Bernstein’s importance to her trade and devoted portions of two columns to Bernstein last week.

In fact, it’s the book, which many thought would never be finished because Bernstein was trapped in the snares of his own foibles, that has prompted the rainbow of glossy effusion. By the dramatic conventions of celebrity journalism, “Loyalties,” to be published next month by Simon & Shuster, is being touted as Bernstein’s comeback from the dark pit of failure to the bright open spaces of renewed success.

His book charts Bernstein’s investigation of his parents and the Truman era when they were members of the Communist Party. Among other things, it is a look at the little-known period of Red-hunting in this country leading to the storm of McCarthyism.

Bernstein himself believes that the long profiles in Vanity Fair and Fame are “reassessing the oversimplification” that has dogged him and colleague Woodward since they took on Richard Nixon.

‘Gossip Mentality’

“The journalism surrounding us has always been pretty reckless and careless, which is to say that it is vastly oversimplified,” Bernstein said from New York where he lives. “Much of it has been infected by a kind of gossip mentality--it’s either gloom and doom or hitting the stratosphere.”

The new articles “reflect a good deal more reality,” he added.

Fame and Vanity Fair chart Bernstein’s jangled, tangled life after his spectacular success with Woodward in two books, “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.” Episodes include Elizabeth Taylor sending him out to buy electric blankets, his drunk-driving arrest, his brief marriage to writer Nora Ephron, who turned their union into the scathing best-selling novel “Heartburn”--later a movie with Jack Nicholson playing the character based on Bernstein--and his late-night wanderings through New York’s cafe society in the company of glamorous women. (Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein in the movie “All the President’s Men.)

“Bernstein became the court fool of gossip columnists and moralists alike, his social life vilified, and the down time necessary to produce ‘Loyalties’ endlessly contrasted with Woodward’s prodigious output,” Toby Thompson writes in Vanity Fair.

But Fame and Vanity Fair, as well as the favorable review in New York by Eric Pooley, dance fairly lightly over Bernstein’s checkered past in favor of dwelling on Bernstein’s complicated relationship with his radical parents, Al and Sylvia, and their troubles with the witch-hunting arms of the federal government. Those troubles included years of FBI surveillance, including a stakeout of Carl Bernstein’s bar mitzvah.

The respectful treatment by slick magazines of his book about what he sees as a black hole of American history pleases Bernstein.

“The really wonderful thing is that the people writing these pieces ‘get’ the book,” he said, explaining he doubted that his complex exploration of a complex and controversial subject would get serious treatment in trendy magazines.

His Parents’ Protests

“Loyalties” is causing a stir partly because it represents Bernstein’s account of pushing into his family’s history against their wishes. His parents, who saw his efforts as a wounding excavation of the past, cooperated reluctantly--when they did at all. While he is clearly fond of his parents, the book also is about Bernstein’s lingering resentments over a childhood that he remembers as chaotic.

Final Manuscript

In a postscript to the book, Bernstein writes that his father refused to read his final manuscript and “was resigned to the inevitability of its publication and to the certainty that the book would say my mother and he had been members of the Communist Party; nevertheless, he wanted to register his disapproval in the strongest terms.”

Bernstein’s father, an attorney for a federal workers’ union who pleaded the Fifth Amendment before a Senate subcommittee, ran a laundry in Washington for several years because his notoriety made other employment impossible.

Thirty years after those hard-scrabble days, Bernstein contemplates the investigations of his own past with some detachment.

But he is not totally immune to the irritations of the media. For instance, the Fame story by Charles Mann quotes an unidentified friend recalling a Bernstein comment about the perils of paparazzi. “He said, ‘Bianca (Jagger) and I were just minding our business at Elaine’s, and all these people were staring at us. And so we tried to slip away to Studio 54, and the photographers there were unbelievable! We couldn’t even have a nightcap in peace!”

Bernstein flatly denied ever making the statement, adding, “Nobody would ever talk like that.”

By his lights, the Vanity Fair article is the better of the two big stories, Bernstein said. “I think that the Vanity Fair piece is certainly the more careful of the two and it was not done in a hurry as was the Fame piece. . . . I think Vanity Fair does some serious journalism sometimes, while Fame is a little bit more what its name implies.”

The genesis of the Fame article, publisher Steven Greenberg said, was in a bar where he bumped into Bernstein a few months ago. Greenberg recalls Bernstein saying, “ ‘I hear somebody at Fame is doing a piece on me. I would appreciate it if you could kill it.’ ” At the time, Greenberg said, he was unaware of a story being in the works or that Bernstein had written the book.

But the suggestion sent off alarm bells and he called Fame editor Gael Love who confirmed that no Bernstein story was planned, Greenberg said, noting that the two immediately decided that a Bernstein profile was in order.

A Setup?

In retrospect, Greenberg now believes that “maybe Carl was setting me up, using a little child psychology on me.”

Orchestrated or not, Bernstein hopes the round of publicity attending the book will lead to a new look at the Truman presidency, particularly Truman’s decision to require all government employees to sign loyalty oaths, the action that led to almost endless troubles for Bernstein’s parents.

Bernstein singled out an interview with Truman adviser Clark Clifford as a key portion of “Loyalties” and a reason why Truman, whose historical reputation has waxed in recent years, should be reconsidered.

In that interview, Clifford admitted that the President issued the loyalty oath order because of political pressure. “There was no substantive problem (about federal workers’ loyalty),” Clifford told Bernstein. “It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria. I don’t believe any of us ever felt really threatened, Carl. I don’t believe anything there constituted a genuine threat.”

Said Bernstein: “People, through this book, seem to be able to understand that these progressive people, including many who were members of the Communist Party, were real patriots and not disloyal.”

A Brighter New Yorker

This week’s issue of the New Yorker really is the “special anniversary issue” that the cover tag says it is. For its 64th birthday, the magazine has the familiar cartoon profile of Eustace Tilley gazing at a butterfly on the cover.

But on the inside, the unrelieved black-and-white of the editorial content has been broken with color for the first time--a four-color, four-page spread of cartoons by William Steig.

Titled “Scenes From the Thousand and One Nights,” the cartoons illustrate scenes inspired by the classic collection of Arabian tales. The issue also marks a revamping of the magazine’s “Goings On About Town” section, a roundup of events in New York City. The section now includes brief essays atop calendars of events for such categories as Dance and Night Life, as well as enlarged drawings that make the tiny-type section more accessible to the eye-strained.

Home, Hazardous Home

Meanwhile, Architectural Digest is publishing its first piece of fiction in its March issue. It’s a short story by John Updike about the hazards of burglar alarms and furnaces, how they can lead to domestic strife and maybe divorce court. Actually, except for a dash of dialogue at the end, the story resembles a comic essay more than fiction.

It begins this way: “The burglar alarm and the furnace keep fighting. Early in the morning, when with a snort and rumble the furnace comes on and heat begins to pour in palpable sheets from the radiators, the alarm feels suddenly imposed upon, and lets out its enormous, heart-stopping wail. The sound seizes us in our bed and lifts us up, aglow with surging adrenaline, into the dawn darkness, our dazed brains flooded by images of rapine, theft, air raid, disaster.”