AN ACCIDENTAL NOVELIST
A Literary Memoir

1
      The Pundit
     
     
      Here I am a novelist. Who would have imagined it? Certainly not anyone who knew me during my first forty years. By some mysterious process I ended up a storyteller, and I did it while clinging to the mast of a sinking ship. I have written sixty western and historical novels for such publishers as Doubleday, Forge, Ballantine, Fawcett, Bantam, Pinnacle, Signet, Walker and Company, M. Evans and Sunstone. Add a few short stories to that. I have received various awards along the way, and more favorable reviews than I can remember. I’ve had a handful of unfavorable ones that I remember all too well.
      It was not my youthful intention to write fiction. I had settled on journalism as a vocation, and hoped someday to become a pundit. That would be a fine life. I would wear horn-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket and a bow tie, and impress the world with my erudition and wisdom. I would live happily in some noble manse, and two or three times a week I would wire my wisdom to a metropolitan paper such as The New York Times, or The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. I would be married to an elegant and wise woman, entertain important people at my dinner table, study the day’s news as it arrived by teletype in my private study, and then I would whip out my columns and hand them to a little twit who would hasten to the nearest telegraph office. And I would enjoy the fruits of my wisdom: a fine salary, a secure position, the pleasure of influencing national politics and public policy, and of course, an award or two, maybe even a Pulitzer.
      Richard Wheeler, the Pundit. The next Scotty Reston. The next Walter Lippmann. I had all sorts of opinions to peddle. I read all the pundits. I knew how to write the studied opinion, the oblique criticism, the startling insight, the gracious concession. I knew the names of all the nation’s pundits. I could tell you all about Tom Wicker or Anthony Lewis and what they thought. I could tell you what William F. Buckley was thinking.
      At least I was ambitious. Young people are certain they know what’s what and what’s right, and that went double for me. But a funny thing happened en route to becoming a great pundit. I kept getting fired. I lasted only a year or so at the Phoenix Gazette, an afternoon daily no longer in existence. That was my first career job. I was toiling on the editorial pages, editing letters and syndicated columns, learning how to stuff them into holes on the page that were invariably smaller than the material I was dealing with.
      I spent a lot of time inhaling smoke down in that grubby composing room, surrounded by clattering linotype machines and compositors in grimy aprons who would stuff the type into the holes in the page forms. Then they ran off a gummy page proof which it was my duty to correct, and heaven help me if I let some typos slide by. I enjoyed the pungence of hot lead and black ink, and even now it evokes pleasant nostalgia in me and most anyone else who labored on papers during the hot-lead era. The typesetters and compositors and stereotypers and pressmen all had their separate skills, and were the elite of the trade-union world, and worthy of respect. And if they sometimes needled a green youth, which they did, it was only to let that youth know that journalism and printing were not vocations that could be mastered by any fool off the streets. They were like wise old master sergeants having some gentle fun with some poor shavetail lieutenant.
      I had landed that job largely as the result of writing a popular Henry Mencken-type column for the University of Wisconsin campus newspaper, The Daily Cardinal. In it, I diligently insulted and offended as many people and groups as possible, and gauged the success of each column by the number of howling letters that would flood into the offices of the student paper. These columns caught the attention of a publisher named Gene Pulliam, and won me an unusual opening job: I began my journalism career not as a cub reporter, learning the news business from the ground up, but as an editorial page assistant.
      Once in a while the Gazette’s editor , Ed Fitzhugh, would even let me write an editorial. I remember writing an obituary editorial for Ernest Hemingway. It was hollow because I knew little about him and had read little of his fiction. That meant I had to cull my information from the obituaries that were arriving on the chattering teletypes. I should have learned something then, but I didn’t: you don’t venture opinions, especially public ones, without a thorough knowledge of what you’re opining about. It was a superficial look at the author’s life and work.
      But that didn’t deter a young man in his twenties, blissfully proceeding ahead on a fast-track to punditry and fame. Wasn’t the world grand? Wasn’t sleepy little Phoenix the most delightful place on earth? Wasn’t my new wife, my college partner in crime, Rita Middleton, sweet and funny and wicked? Wasn’t Scottsdale a paradise? Wasn’t Arizona magical? We honeymooned in Oak Creek Canyon and I returned to the editorial pages, thinking the world was my auditorium. Shortly after we had been married the publisher invited us to a soiree at a Phoenix hotel honoring Clare Boothe Luce, who was thin, gray-haired, and striking. We were introduced to the great lady as newlyweds. She eyed us shrewdly from her perch on the velveteen divan, and said she was sure we deserved each other. That was a classic Boothean remark, which I still cherish.
      Then one day, out of the blue, Ed Fitzhugh summoned me to his sanctum. The conversation went something like this:
      “You know,” he said, “you’ve started near the top of the profession, and it was our mistake. Your job is usually given to someone who’s put in years of reporting and maybe some editing in the newsroom. I’m sorry we started you at this level. The problem is, you’re writing and editing without a proper background. You have some abstract book knowledge but you don’t know how the world works. You simply haven’t lived long enough. A few years as a beat reporter, writing up stories about politics, public affairs, births and deaths, obituaries, and all the rest of it, would have given you the seasoning you need.”
      He handed me an envelope.
      “Here’s a check for two weeks. We’re letting you go. I’m sorry things didn’t work out. I’ll be glad to recommend you for another job, as long as it’s at the level where you can begin to absorb this profession. You have some skills, and you worked hard, but you’re not ready to work on an opinion page.”
      Fired.
      I stumbled out of that office, bumbled down the marbleized stair to the front door of the newspaper, stepped into the hot desert air, and found myself staring at the tan fortress that had just ejected me. I walked the block a couple of times, and then returned to an alien building to collect my stuff. Ed Fitzhugh was right. He also was wise, and had charitably given me a long time to prove myself, which I never did. The young Richard Wheeler didn’t know how the real world worked, and his editorials weren’t exactly astute.
      There was nothing to do but clean out my desk and leave. I stopped to tell my friend Ed McDowell, over on the morning paper, the Arizona Republic, of my demise as an employee of Phoenix Newspapers. He and his wife Carol and Rita and I had become friends. Ed eventually landed at the Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times.
      It was harder to tell Rita. She had gotten a job she enjoyed as a publicist with a Phoenix playhouse, and now everything would change. I would have to find work elsewhere. We would have to give up our honeymoon apartment on Thomas Road, near the Phoenix Country Club. We would have to find jobs and start all over again.
      Fired. She eyed me gravely. She had her own humor, which consisted of thinking up the most startling and outrageous things that could be said about anything. But this time she said nothing.
      I could detail a downward-spiraling career in journalism here, but it is not necessary. I want to explore how I ended up a novelist against my better judgment. Suffice it to say I worked several more papers, with more or less ignominious results. Surprisingly, I ended up on the editorial pages of the Oakland Tribune a bounce or two after my hasty exit from Phoenix, and there I survived for several years. That paper occupied an old tower in downtown Oakland, with ancient oak desks that had been scalloped with cigaret burns. Its editors wore green eye shades. The stink of long-dead cigars permeated the whole place, even the paint on the walls. Some of the editors had a hootch problem, but so did most of the news staff at the Tribune. The wire editor, who had a doctoral degree, was effective only around eleven each morning. His task was to select and paste together the foreign news stories from rival AP and UP wire services, and he had only a brief window each morning in which to do it. It required several screwdrivers for him to reach functionality and stitch together the international news, but one screwdriver too many meant that the Tribune would publish no foreign news that day. It was a fine line, but he usually got the work out before lapsing into afternoon delirium.
      My editorial page editor, Jack Ryan, was famous for asking Marilyn Monroe what she wore to bed, which turned out to be Chanel Number Five. I arrived one morning to find him stretched out on a work table. I couldn’t arouse him and his moribund snooze was making me very nervous. I decided to wait, and circled the block a few times, getting up courage to call for a hearse, but when I returned he had vanished. He resigned soon after, and I found myself editing the opinion pages. So there I was, a genuine pundit at age 28, and the youngest editorial page editor of a metro paper in the country. I had more or less reached my goal in life.
      Rita had gotten a job writing advertising copy in a local agency, and fell for one of her employers. They went off on business trips all the time, and I was too dumb to figure out what sort of business. I just kept on adoring her. She had started at the University of Wisconsin at age fifteen, part of a Ford Foundation experiment to accelerate the education of the very bright. School was a snap for her; but coping with the University of Wisconsin’s adult life and readily available 3.2 percent beer was another matter. She was tall, beautiful, funny and wicked, and after a few years in Oakland she divorced me. I abandoned the Tribune; it hurt too much to hang around Oakland. Eventually she married the guy, and later divorced him, lost her marbles, was institutionalized, and then she died in 1984 at age forty-four of lung cancer. Sometimes deep in the night I remember her and have a conversation with her. She still has that wicked smile.
      A few more journalist jobs followed. I worked for Reader’s Digest in Washington D.C., ensconced in its elegant offices off Dupont Circle. These were as unlike the Oakland editorial offices as could be, with oriental rugs, gleaming desks with inlaid leather, hunt etchings on the walls, and lush leather furnishings. I lasted only a few months, though I did meet several genuine Washington D. C. pundits, and basked in their wisdom. But alas for me, I remained in a funk about losing Rita, and one day they found me at my desk, tears on my cheeks, semi-coherent.
      I was long gone from my Wisconsin family, but my parents took me in. It took a while to get past Rita, but I did.
      More newspaper jobs followed: the Billings Gazette, the Nevada-Appeal in Carson City, the Billings Gazette a second time, and briefly, the Press-Gazette in Green Bay. I was a general assignment reporter at the beck and call of assorted Napoleonic city editors, and I was discovering that I wasn’t much good at it. It requires some brass to be a good reporter, and I am a born wimp. In spite of all that, I somehow won a major journalism award. It was from the American Political Science Association honoring me for “distinguished reporting of public affairs.” A series on air pollution, written long before it became a national issue, won it for me.
      That was during the Vietnam war, a fight that intruded every day upon the newsrooms of the world. In Billings I had written a story about an army sergeant who was returning to Nam for his third tour. A few months later the wire came to the Gazette: the guy had been killed in action. A telegram went simultaneously to his widow, announcing the death. That’s how things were done in those times.
      The city editor summoned me. “Wheeler, call her up and get a reaction story.”
      A reaction story. Call the widow up and get her reaction and write it up. Just dial the lady. I returned to my bullpen desk knowing it was beyond me, and the city editor was a monster.
      “Mrs. Jones, how do you feel about your husband getting shot? Will you miss him? What will your children think? Do you favor the war? Is this Richard Nixon’s fault?”
      I sat at my desk unable to make that call. I stared at the phone, knowing absolutely I could not make my fingers twirl that dial. I also knew that if I disobeyed the City Desk Napoleon who popped reporters hither and yon like yo-yos on a string, I’d better start looking for another job. Eleven o’clock was looming. That was the deadline for the afternoon edition, and my deadline for that story, and I still couldn’t manage it. But at about two minutes to eleven, knowing my job hung in balance, I forced my fingers to turn that dial. Click, click, and then ring, ring. Thank heaven, the woman’s mother had arrived and took the call, and I managed to croak out a few questions. Yes, she said, the widow had received word. She was in seclusion. She was torn to pieces. Her mother would be there with her.
      I thanked the mother for confirming the news, and wrote the story, thin as it was, hating the city editor, hating journalism, hating newspapers in general and specifically the Gazette. I suppose that editor was typical. He belonged to one party; the local politicians belonged to the other, and he saw his opportunity. Prior to an election, he assigned me to do candidate stories on them all, and “cut their throats.” That is a request I have never forgotten. I didn’t obey him because I refused to do any throat-cutting in the news columns. Throat-cutting is reserved for the opinion pages. Each candidate was written up as accurately as I knew how, and in fact a few of them cut their own throats with no help from me.
      I won a few best-story-of-the-month awards at the Gazette, but even so I wasn’t good at it. The ideal reporter swiftly develops rapport with the people he interviews. Contrary to the notions about reporting that emerged during the Watergate period, good reporters are rarely adversarial. The best stories rise from a reporter’s innate curiosity and carefully cultivated sources. Some stories I wrote well; others, especially in the realm of politics, or getting material from public officials, I was not very good at and the stories were thin. I gradually understood that these deficiencies went to the core of my being because I am non-confrontational.
      I sought to change my career track to editing, and hoped that I could be a good newspaper editor. For a while I did succeed as an assistant city editor, but the editorial ladder at any paper is wrought with politics, and eventually I got bumped back to reporting to make room for a hotshot kid out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University who was going to the top and was being groomed to be a publisher in that newspaper chain.
      I had scraped together enough to buy a half-section of Montana land north of Billings, in dry country called the Bull Mountains. I paid $39 an acre, or $12,500 in all, on a contract for deed. It had hay meadows, a couple of springs, a stock well, serrated tan sandstone cliffs, and a lot of jack pine. There I lived in a weathered log cabin, learned how to raise and ride horses, and how to enjoy rural life in a rural state. I loved that place, and thought I had my very own piece of the West, which I would keep forever. I had lots of visitors, and rented pasture to some people at the Gazette, which resulted in great riding at least in the summer months. I more or less turned myself into a horseman, wore Levi jeans, boots, cowboy hats, and pretended I knew what I was doing.
      But after I had been shifted back to reporting, I didn’t do well, and eventually got axed by an ambitious new editor. He was an urban fellow full of journalism school notions, who once came to my ranch in Bermuda shorts and sneakers, and just barely escaped being bitten by a prairie rattler. If I had not yelled at him, he would have taken the fangs right in his hairy calf. He did a sideways arabesque, thanked me profusely, and within a few months, he and the managing editor fired me. Newspapering is like that. The guy ended up a publisher out in Oregon. I walked away from the Billings Gazette knowing a chapter had ended, and seeing little future at all.
      So there I was, in midlife, knowing my journalistic career was over, and I had utterly no employment prospects in that field. Too many hirings and firings. I was single, too. I had a few romances, but nothing serious. I couldn’t make payments on my Montana paradise, and had to sell it. I made a little on the sale, enough to keep me afloat for a year, anyway. But what to do? I sure didn’t know.