Then there was me, the youngest of the five regulars and the most talented, at least as a writer. But my battles with the bottle had cost me the assignments I once had and sent me to this gray room in this gray building at 11th and State on the dingy southern fringe of downtown, which might rate as okay duty for some reporters, but not for me.
Would I ever break out? I asked myself that question every day. In truth, I’d blown a lot of assignments in my partying days and I knew I had a lot of atoning to do. Bob Lee, the managing editor since Beck’s retirement in ’37, told me when he sent me to Police Headquarters that “If it hadn’t been for that Capone piece that Mr. Beck and the Colonel had liked so much, you’d be out the door.” And I got the clear message that if it were up to Lee, he’d be the one pushing me out that door.
“What about you, Snap, you’ve been awful quiet,” O’Farrell drawled. “Do anything interesting over the weekend?”
I should have let his question pass, which would have been easy, but discretion has never been my strength. “Went to the theater with my son. We saw Helen Hayes in The Merchant of Venice.”
“Hot damn!” Metz slapped his thigh. “That’s Shakespeare, now, isn’t it? This boy here’s up and gone Shakespeare on us. Whaddya think of that, Dirk?”
O’Farrell did a practiced eye-roll. “Perhaps you do not understand, Mr. Metz. Colonel McCormick, suh, expects all of his loyalists to be cultured, and don’t you forget it. Comes with any job in that grand Gothic citadel on North Michigan Avenue that we ordinary folk know as Tribune Tower. None of that low-life stuff that we lesser minions engage in. In fact,” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that our Mr. Malek here has white tie and tails squirreled away in his closet for such events as the noble Tribune expects him to attend.”
“Ah, the secret and exciting life of Steven Malek, bon vivant and boulevardier, first-nighter and swell,” Farmer intoned between drags on a misshapen cigarette that he had rolled. “And to think, we all toil side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, with this social lion.” Anson Masters delivered a bass rumble from deep within. “Much as I hate to disrupt this enlivening badinage, we have a public that clamors, yea demands, to be informed. Let’s get to work.” As senior man in the pressroom, he was its unofficial — and self-anointed — chairman of the board. He also liked to view himself as its conscience, which was amusing, since he was easily the laziest among us. Nevertheless, pressroom reporters were slaves to form and habit, and far from the cutthroat competitors that some novelists and playwrights — including Hecht and MacArthur — liked to portray Chicago journalists.
The hoary practices in all the pressrooms in town, including Police Headquarters, was share-and-share-alike, or sink like a rock. Consequently, almost every story to come out of the building at 11th and State was pooled. For example, a reporter would get the particulars on the arrest of a suspect in the strangulation of a prostitute and shuffle back to the pressroom, where he’d mete out the details to his scribbling “competitors.” Each then would phone his respective city desk to dictate the story, and nobody would get into trouble with his editors for being scooped.
Occasionally, though, a young buck, in most cases a newcomer to the beat, would play Lone Ranger like I did my first week at City Hall back in ’30 when I phoned in an exclusive on an alderman who told me that he planned to run for city clerk. The morning my story ran, I was met with silence from the other reporters in the pressroom. After an hour of being pointedly frozen out of all the usual banter, I went to the men’s john, and the Examiner reporter, a stocky grouch named Clyde Crockett, who’d been around since before the Columbian Exposition in ’93, followed me in and bellied up to the urinal next to mine.
“Malek?”
“Yeah?”
“What you did, that was jackass stupid, you know?”
“That so?” I answered, hoping I sounded tough.
“That piece of yours on Considine running for clerk.”
“But...”
“Shut up and listen, hotshot.” He didn’t turn his head or raise his voice, but he didn’t have to; each word sliced like a knife. “You try that once more, Malek, just once more, and by God, we’ll freeze you out of every fucking story worth having that comes out of this building, right down to a press release announcing the replacement of an assistant custodian. Your high-and-mighty starched-collar bosses up in that damn tower of theirs will think you’re sitting in some bar all day getting plastered instead of working, and they’ll fire your ass inside of two weeks. Understand what I’m saying, or do I have to repeat myself?”
I looked straight ahead and nodded.
“Good,” Crockett rasped. “Don’t ever forget it.” Thus I was indoctrinated into the sharers’ club.
At Police Headquarters, the responsibilities were divvied up. I had got the Homicide Division for two reasons. First, I had an in with its top dog, the curmudgeonly Chief Fergus Sean Fahey, because I’d done a long Sunday feature on him that he liked back in ’35 when I was a general assignment reporter. Second, and more important, as low man in seniority among the reporters for the dailies, I was nominated for that beat because nobody else wanted it — too much work. A lot of news came out of Homicide, and the others preferred to let me dredge it up and deliver it to them on a plate, which I more or less faithfully did.
Besides, as Eddie Metz had said with irrefutable logic, “You should have that beat, Snap. Your paper has the biggest news hole in town, and we all know that Homicide generates the most stuff. It’s only fair — as long as you deal us all in, of course.” And deal them in I did, of course.
As we started dispersing to make our rounds of the building that January Monday, Packy Farmer stopped us with a bellow. “Wait! We’ve got to do a pool on Martindale, remember?”
“What’s that all about?” the City News kid asked, wrinkling his nose in puzzlement.
“Oh yeah, you’re new, you wouldn’t know,” Farmer said, not unkindly. “We decided in December that we’d each toss in a fin — you don’t hafta, of course, not on your salary — and guess what date this year the good and great and noble Lloyd Martindale announces that he’s graciously consented to run for mayor of this here burg. Whoever comes closest takes the pot.”
“Martindale? Why would he want to be mayor? Isn’t he a millionaire?” The kid’s face was still a question mark.
“Who the devil else the poor Republicans gonna run?” Anson Masters snorted. “Right now, the best they can do is Dwight Green, whose claim to glory was putting Capone away, which any second-rate prosecutor could have done given the caliber of Scarface’s defense. The only other possibility is Big Bill Thompson, horrible to say, and this town had more than enough of him in City Hall when they tossed him out on his fat ass in ’31. That pathetic old fraud doesn’t know when to quit.”
“Kelly’d knock either one of those two off easy,” O’Farrell put in. “City’s solid Democratic now; about the only way the Republicans can win is with a reform candidate, which is what Martindale purports to be, whether you buy that or not. So he’s probably their logical choice. As far as his being a millionaire, kid, you’re right, but don’t hold that against him. He never earned a cent of that himself. It was his grandfather and then his old man who built up the family steel business. I doubt if Lloydie himself has ever even been inside that big mill out in South Chicago. He’s not one to get his hands dirty. In fact, he’s what you might call a dilettante — heavy into culture, opening night at the opera with his society wife, stuff like that.”