Corporate culture drained of its colorful characters

In my early years at The Times, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the ‘70s, I often marveled at the stylish prose turned out by several colleagues whose writing was so evocative and so lyrical that I came to think of them as poet-journalists. When Bella Stumbo died early this month, at age 59, she became -- sadly, shockingly -- the fourth member of that elite group to succumb at a relatively young age. Dave Smith died in March, at 64; Chuck Powers in 1996, at 53; Jim Stingley in 1984, at 43.

Talent and early death were not all these four had in common. They all worked hard and played hard, with booze, drugs and inner demons as not infrequent companions. And they were all genuine characters. Jim shambled through the newsroom, unkempt and unshaven, looking more like a lumberjack than a reporter. Dave had various psychological problems, and in 1968, after he wrote a long, brilliant profile on a deeply troubled mass murderer named Benny Smith, one editor here nicknamed Dave “Benny the Shrink.” Chuck and Bella were a couple for a while -- a ferociously tempestuous couple -- and I can still recall Bella punching Chuck in the mouth during one of their more public quarrels at The Times’ local saloon.

I miss these four--and their talent. I have at my desk, in a file labeled “Others’ Epics,” copies of several of their stories. An early paragraph in Dave’s Benny Smith profile: “Inwardly, in one dark valley where his mind comes more and more to dwell, and where no one else can see, corrosive fantasies leap and flicker, finally taking on life of their own -- stronger than that of their quiet, timid creator.”

Dave, Bella, Chuck and Jim were all long gone from The Times when they died, but I think their absence symbolizes a void in our profession (and our society) that’s even greater than their talent. There aren’t many larger-than-life characters being hired in big-city newsrooms -- or stepping into the larger political arena -- these days.

The only true character I can recall The Times hiring in the past decade or so lasted about two weeks in the mid-’90s. His newsroom colleagues ridiculed him and complained about him, and he got no support from the then-top editors. He left in a New York minute.

I’m not saying that today’s reporters aren’t good. Most newspaper staffs are better than they were 30 years ago -- better-educated and more sophisticated. Many, at The Times and elsewhere, are fine prose stylists. But they aren’t characters. They aren’t colleagues about whom you go home and say, “Geez, you’ll never guess what Bella [or whoever] did today.”

This is more than a lament for the good old days. And I certainly don’t long for the days when many reporters played poker in the newsroom, took free meals and gifts with both hands, and drank their lunch out of half-pint bottles stashed in the bottom drawers of tobacco-stained desks. But I’m convinced that when you take the characters out of the newsroom, you also take some of the character out of the newspaper.

Newspapers are generally more responsible today than they used to be. But they’re also -- often -- less interesting. There are far fewer stories of the sort that make a reader say, “Wow, I never thought I’d see that in the paper.” I’m thinking of a mood piece Chuck wrote after hanging out with derelicts in MacArthur Park, for example, and I’m thinking of an impressionistic blend of hippie dialogue and quasi-dramatic construction, written by Dave Felton, another of The Times’ 1970s poet-journalists.

One reason for the absence of such stories is that the editors who run newspapers today are less likely to be colorful characters themselves. Again, I’m not saying they’re not good journalists. Some are better than their predecessors. But in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when I first started writing about the news media, several top editors --Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, Gene Roberts at the Philadelphia Inquirer-- were not just excellent journalists, they were also unconventional, eccentric and eminently quotable. Their papers reflected that in various ways -- as witness the Post’s gutsy, adrenaline-filled pursuit of the Watergate story.

Have such characters disappeared entirely from the big-city editing ranks? No, not entirely. New York Times executive editor Howell Raines -- a fly-fishing Southern charmer who quotes “Dizzy” Dean, “Bear” Bryant and W.B. Yeats -- would fit most folks’ definition of a character. That doesn’t mean an editor who’s a character will necessarily hire reporters who are characters -- or that only characters hire characters. Bill Thomas, a superb editor, is the golf-playing son of a Midwestern banker. No one would call him a character. But he hired and/or inspired all of The Times’ prose poets of the ‘70s.

Times have changed, though. Newspapers are increasingly part of large conglomerates run by men with MBAs on their walls, rather than printer’s ink in their veins. In a time of increasing competition for the reader’s time and the advertiser’s dollar, newspapers and their parent corporations don’t think they can afford characters, risk-takers, people who might embarrass them and damage the price of their stock.

It’s in politics too

This corporatization of our culture -- the rise of respectability and the decline of raffishness -- is happening throughout society, especially in the bland-leading-the-bland world of politics. Who could have envisioned the people of California -- the state that gave the world “Big Daddy” (Jess Unruh), “Gov. Moonbeam” (Jerry Brown) and “the Gipper” (you know who) -- having a gubernatorial race this year between the aptly named Gray Davis and the stupefyingly stolid Bill Simon.

“When I was a young political journalist,” R.W. Apple of the New York Times told me not so long ago, “there were plenty of honest scoundrels and jolly rogues in American politics.... Wayne Hays. Lyndon Johnson. Charlie Halleck. Everett Dirksen. There were a lot of great characters around in American politics--rich, intriguing, prolix, often demagogic.”

Now? We have a lot of dreary centrists and technocrats clinging to the middle of the road-- ideologically and stylistically.

The media are at least partially responsible for this. Our increased scrutiny and cynicism, the powerful role television has come to play, the reliance on polls and the resultant emphasis on who’s-ahead, horse-race journalism have all served to homogenize the candidates and to discourage some potential candidates from running -- and some running candidates from saying or doing anything risky, anything not pretested by polls and approved by consultants.

But changes in the press corps have also contributed to this graying of the political process. “Reporters,” says Jim Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, “now take themselves too seriously.”

As the media have become less quirky, less eccentric, they’ve become less tolerant of quirkiness and eccentricity in the candidates they cover. Much of the character has disappeared from the political process as well as the newspaper--and society is poorer for that.

Some characters may be only characters, unworthy of our respect. I shudder at the thought of a character like Strom Thurmond in the White House. But whatever their flaws, we could sure use a Teddy Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson in the White House and an Everett Dirksen or Mo Udall in Congress -- and a Bella Stumbo in the newsroom. Given what she got B.T. Collins, then chief of staff for Gov. Jerry Brown, to say about his boss (he’s “out in Uranus half the time”), I would love to see her writing about Trent Lott.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com