Life in a ‘Chili’ Bowl

Jim Lehrer, who was a newspaper columnist and novelist long before TV claimed him as a network anchor, was driving through Texas in 1984 and stopped at a Dairy Queen restaurant, the kind of place that is the biggest thing going between two very small towns.

“There was a guy in the restaurant who kept telling the waitress that he’d given her a $20 bill when she’d only given him change for a $10,” Lehrer recalls. “He got very angry about it, and I got the hell out of there. Down the road, I started wondering what would have happened if things got out of hand.”

The incident became the basis for “Chili Queen,” a play by Lehrer that will have its West Coast premiere on Friday at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. “Chili Queen,” which is scheduled to run 3 1/2 weeks, recently played in Houston; Palm Beach, Fla.; and Nyack, N.Y. It was performed off-off-Broadway in New York City and at the Kennedy Center in Washington years ago.

“Chili Queen” is the first play by Lehrer, the longtime anchor and executive editor of PBS’ “NewsHour.” And, although it was written in 1985, the play has a prescient theme: the influence of the media on news events.

The lonely characters in “Chili Queen” become fodder for a minor media frenzy when their dispute turns into a “hostage crisis” fueled by TV and print reporters.

“The media can influence the outcome of a story by their reporting on it,” Lehrer says. “In my play, the incident escalates because there are cameras and reporters outside covering it.”

Lehrer himself was near the center of a real-life media frenzy in recent weeks: the reporting of allegations that President Clinton had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and encouraged her to lie about it in a deposition.

On the day the story broke last month, Lehrer was scheduled to interview the president about his upcoming State of the Union message. Lehrer’s interview--in which the president denied the affair and allegations of suborning perjury in a grand jury investigation--was carried on all the other major TV networks and reported in front-page stories around the world.

Lehrer asked Clinton if he had had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky; the president’s response--”There is not a sexual relationship”--was quickly parsed by some critics, who wondered whether Lehrer should have asked whether the president had ever had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

“I was sitting very close to the president, and it didn’t seem to me that he was playing games with words,” Lehrer says. “I read his remarks as a blanket denial.” The president made his denial even more emphatic in remarks to reporters at the White House the next day.

Lehrer said that viewers have reacted strongly to his interview with Clinton. “I’ve had mail from people asking me how could I ask the president about his sex life, and mail from others saying why didn’t I press him further on this question or that one. Most people have reacted positively, though, to the way the story was handled. I felt that I had to ask the question because of the way the story was breaking.”

Lehrer, whose newscast reaches about 3 million viewers per night, said that he has been too busy doing his own program to study the coverage of the Lewinsky story on other TV networks. But while other news outlets have discussed allegations of oral sex, a purported semen-stained dress and other salacious details, Lehrer said, “We’ve tried to stay with the public record--for example, Monica Lewinsky’s mother testifying before a grand jury. We’ve had no discussion about oral sex and no mention of the dress thing. . . . Our mission is different from some of the cable-news channels--they’ve got to have that Lewinsky story [extensively] because people are tuning in to see it.”

Still, Lehrer said the Lewinsky coverage is not merely salacious, as some critics have charged.

“We were proud that ‘The NewsHour’ was O.J.-free,” Lehrer said, referring to the program’s lack of coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, “but we cannot be Lewinsky-free.

“This isn’t just a story about sex. It’s an important story. We shouldn’t be running it all day every day, but we should be covering it.”

The 63-year-old Lehrer has been anchoring “NewsHour” from Washington since he teamed with Robert MacNeil on PBS in 1975. “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” with MacNeil anchoring from New York, became “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in 1995 when MacNeil, who is also a novelist, retired from the show to concentrate on his writing.

Since closing the New York studio, Lehrer and the producers of the “NewsHour” have expanded the role of some correspondents outside the East Coast, with Elizabeth Farnsworth interviewing guests from San Francisco.

“We’re putting on more West Coast guests,” Lehrer said, “and we have reports from around the country. It’s so easy to get caught up in being too Washington, D.C.-oriented; we try to focus elsewhere as well.”

Lehrer has written 12 books (including “Viva Max,” which was made into a film with Peter Ustinov) and several plays since “Chili Queen.” Married to novelist Kate Lehrer, he writes early in the morning, before beginning his day on “NewsHour.” “It’s exhilarating to hear your words performed by actors onstage,” he says.

Why the long wait on a West Coast production of “Chili Queen”? “It got good reviews in the New York Times and other places when it played off-off Broadway in New York in 1986,” Lehrer says. “But when it came to the Kennedy Center in 1987, the reviewer absolutely killed it. The play was pretty much dead until a theater director in Houston started looking for contemporary plays about Texas. I’m proud of the fact that my name was torn off the front page of the play when he saw it--so he didn’t know who wrote it before he read it and liked it.”

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* “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” airs weekdays at 6:30 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.