Deadline Dame : HEADLINE JUSTICE; Inside the Courtroom: The Country’s Most Controversial Trials.<i> By Theo Wilson</i> .<i> Thunder’s Mouth Press: 238 pp., $22.95</i>
When Theo Wilson died last month, an era died with her. For Wilson, the longtime star courtroom reporter for the New York Daily News, was without peer. Her talents (and they were many and widely admired) were rooted--and were permitted to flourish--in a world that, with her passing, sadly no longer exists. Wilson’s world was one of manual typewriters, Western Union operators transmitting fast-breaking stories over telegraph lines across the country (and sometimes across continents), reporters who composed songs about the stories they covered with lyrics so bawdy that they couldn’t be printed in the family newspaper, crusty but lovable city editors who refused to attend meetings with management consultants and classy, tabloid newspapers that gave stylish writers seemingly unlimited space on big stories that held in thrall their millions of ordinary readers.
“Headline Justice,” Wilson’s memoir of a life lived from deadline to deadline, offers the reader a guided tour to that vanished world. “The most wonderful thing about starting out in the newspaper business when I did [1938],” Wilson begins, “and where I did [Evansville, Ind.] was that I was thrust into a world of fiercely independent, creative, well-read, vastly underpaid and overworked people who loved the newspaper business so much, cared about writing so passionately, that they stayed in a job distinguished by low wages and long hours.
“We were paid so little that we could tell the city editor to go screw himself; we could argue with the guys on the desk about how the copy was being handled. We were free spirits who loved being with each other and being on the inside of the stories that other people could only read about. We could stop all conversation at a bar with our shop talk, which always was the most interesting shop talk in any place where we congregated.”
From her $10-a-week start in Indiana, Wilson migrated to Richmond, Va., then Philadelphia and finally back to her hometown, New York, where she became the first woman on the Daily News’ hotshot rewrite desk and later the paper’s national trial reporter. At the peak of her career, Wilson had a vast audience: The News had the largest circulation in the country, 2.5 million daily and 4 million on Sunday. Wilson’s reporting, which was in some considerable measure responsible for those loyal readers, was valued highly by her employer. During one sensational murder trial in 1966, the paper not only publicized her work on television commercials, it bought ads on 1,000 billboards throughout New York City.
One of the reasons New Yorkers liked the paper so much was that the News had sass. It was the sass and savvy of writers like Wilson, who could turn a “dumb little story on a fire in Central Park” into a reader’s delight as illustrated by this opening sentence by one of Wilson’s colleagues: “Fire broke out in an elm tree in Central Park, apparently caused by a squirrel smoking in bed.”
Wilson doubtless exaggerates the virtues of that seemingly less complicated era--a time, it ought not to be forgotten, that was frequently stained by yellow journalists and hacks of all stripes.
Still, Wilson’s relationship with her editors for a healthy chunk of her three decades at the Daily News is enough to make a modern-day reporter ache with envy. “At all the trials I covered,” she observes, “I was the only reporter who did not have to tell the editors in advance how much space I might need for that day’s story. And although I filed four, five, even 10 times as much copy as any other reporter there, I was always the first one finished. I used to leave the pressroom listening to reporters arguing with their editors about their stories, complaining about being rewritten, screaming about being second-guessed. I didn’t have to go through that with the News.
“I was lucky for a long time. The Daily News was considered the best trial paper in the country, and the editors I worked with always knew how to handle a trial. Actually they just knew how to handle fast-breaking news of any kind, even if it meant tearing the paper apart at the last minute.
“They understood news, and they understood their millions of readers. They had style, they had humor, they had grace under pressure. They were professionals.”
It didn’t last. On Dec. 31, 1969, legendary News city editor Harry Nichols was forced to retire, taking “the gusto and the joy” with him. His departure was the start of a slow erosion at the paper, Wilson writes, leading to problems on stories grand and small. In the end, she concludes, the reason the paper declined and she eventually left was because the “writers weren’t allowed to speak to the readers any more.”
Wilson, however, never forgot how to speak to readers. She was a writer through and through. She cites Joseph Conrad’s great dictum about the writer’s job as “above all, to make you see.” Wilson saw herself as her readers’ eyes and ears, all the more so because her career occurred in an era before live television was permitted inside a courtroom. The key to her success, as her close friend and veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch writes in her foreword, was that Wilson made her readers feel that they had entered the courtroom and that she had taken them inside the skin of the principal actors in the drama unfolding before them.
That critical gift is on full display in the chapter in her book about the 1981 trial of prep-school headmistress Jean Harris on charges of murdering her longtime lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, author of the best-selling “The Complete Medical Scarsdale Diet.”
Wilson was convinced that Harris should have been convicted of manslaughter after committing “a classic crime of passion,” rather than the more serious charge of second-degree murder. But that would have required Harris, described by Wilson as a woman “who didn’t look as if she could pick up the wrong fork, much less a loaded gun,” to admit to the jury that her relationship with Tarnower had gone sour and that she had been pushed to the brink of madness by the wealthy doctor and his new, younger mistress. “To this day,” Wilson writes, “Jean Harris cannot admit that she had killed a cold and unjust lover in an unplanned, uncontrollable explosion of blinding, consuming outrage. The genteel headmistress could not let the public see what she had become, a powerless and obsessed woman filled with anger and self-pity, pleading, crawling, begging for crumbs at the table of Hy Tarnower.”
The first time I saw Wilson, the 5-foot, 1-inch, 101-pound writer was being pursued by a phalanx of reporters all vying for her attention and counsel. The scene was the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse as the government espionage case against Pentagon Papers leakers Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo was about to implode in April 1973. The pursuers--ranging from a rookie radio reporter to a New York Times veteran--asked Wilson about complicated legal points and pressed her about what they really wanted to know: “What’s the lead?,” meaning “How do I start my story?” What they all knew, of course, was that this tiny woman, once described by an admirer as a “nuclear-powered pixie,” was simply the best reporter there.
In “Headline Justice,” Wilson demonstrates why she was the best trial reporter in the United States for 30 years--revered by her fellow reporters, valued by her editors, beloved by her readers and respected by judge and attorney alike. She revisits, entertainingly and penetratingly, the scene of some of her biggest cases: Murder prosecutions against Dr. Sam Sheppard, Dr. Carl Coppolino, wealthy businesswoman Candy Mossler, neo-hippie Svengali Charles Manson and black militant scholar Angela Davis; the tawdry Confidential magazine libel trial; and, of course, the Patty Hearst saga. Along the way, the reader is given an education on courtroom tactics--how the brilliant defense lawyer Percy Foreman, a man “with the noble head of a Roman senator and a voice like a great church organ,” utilized an obscure Florida statute in the Mossler murder trial so that he could give the final, final argument, depriving the prosecutors of their normal right to a rebuttal just before the jury began to deliberate.
Wilson amuses with the tale of how an overweight juror got stuck in a movie theater seat as he tried to figure out whether actress Maureen O’Hara and her boyfriend really could have consummated an assignation in Row 35 of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, as Confidential magazine alleged in a 1957 article. And she eviscerates a fair number of the participants in the O.J. Simpson trial, castigating a judge “too green to control it,” journalists who allowed themselves to succumb to the lawyers’ propaganda, defense attorneys whose rhetoric outside the courtroom was laid on so thick that even so rigid a First Amendment hard-liner as Wilson is forced to say that a gag order would have been appropriate and prosecutors whose “presentation of evidence was so disorganized it was difficult for even an unbiased observer to follow or be convinced by it.”
This is hardly a preachy book, but Wilson delivers a brief sermon to the judiciary, urging them not to overreact to the Simpson case. This woman of the word remained to the end a steadfast defender of the live courtroom camera, despite how unpopular it has become with California judges in the wake of the so-called Trial of the Century. “With judges refusing to allow the public to see trials on camera, we have retrogressed. The camera is the most honest tool of the criminal justice system, if it is allowed to show the public a trial, unadorned from gavel to gavel in the courtroom--without the TV celebrities, without the brain-dead interviews, without the second-guessing pundits.
“As citizens, we have a right to see our system, warts and all, and judge for ourselves. Nobody should have the power to deny us, the taxpayers, the right to watch what is happening in the courts we pay for or should be allowed to tell us that by watching a trial on a camera, in our homes, we are jeopardizing any other citizen’s rights.”
The only flaw in her brisk account of a life lived full to overflowing--including covering political conventions, space shots, royal weddings and the return of POWs from Vietnam--is her omission of at least as many important trials as she included. There’s nothing, for example, on the trials and tribulations of John DeLorean, the Boston Strangler, Claus von Bulow, Claudine Longet, Maurice Stans, the Son of Sam or Sirhan Sirhan, on whom Wilson pinned one of her most memorable leads after enduring weeks of psychobabble testimony about the mental condition of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin: “Sirhan Sirhan is sick, sick, sick.” I also looked in vain for more than a few trenchant paragraphs on the most politically significant case she covered--the Watergate-era Pentagon Papers prosecution, which was eventually dismissed because of government misconduct, including Nixon White House violations of Ellsberg’s and Russo’s right to a fair trial.
Still, this regret is of little moment when her exemplary life and work are considered. There are lessons here for writers, editors, readers, judges and lawyers. They are the lessons of steadfastness and trust, honor and humor and, above all, grace under pressure. These virtues are redolent of the finer aspects of an era that, whatever its faults, Wilson was sincerely able to romanticize in this lively book. With her death from a cerebral hemorrhage in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, that era can now be said to be over. Even an unsentimental look calls for genuine admiration.