Exclusive : Reporters in Love. And War

Book by Fischkin Barbara

My husband, Jim Mulvaney, dashing and handsome though he may be, is delusional about his appeal to the human race. Let me walk you inside his brain: It is a Saturday in America. Summer. Inside Mulvaney’s brain, it is always summer. No school, no shoes, no shirts. Not even his favorite shirts, plaid with coffee stains. On this sunlit day, men are mowing lawns, pitching baseballs to their sons, having sex with their wives. Suddenly, all these Viagra-free specimens, all these fathers of exclusively male children, have a single thought.

They all want to go to the movies.

And why is that?

The Jim Mulvaney Story.

“Mulvaney!” I say. “You have to be kidding.”

He isn’t.

“Their wives will love it, too,” he tells me.

His blue eyes flash like a smile; that is never a good sign. My middle-aged, long-term husband still believes that every one of his stories is a gem. Even the ones he makes up. As in: Is that “true-true” or “Mulvaney-true”?

Some of his stories are gems.

He was, for example, the last white guy out of Tiananmen
Square.

That’s a true-true story, packed with danger and suspense.

Unless you’ve heard it twenty, thirty times.

I have.

Now, when those eyes of his gleam and he starts using the little Mandarin he knows, I fake a paper cut, an asthma attack, a hemorrhage if need be.

But let’s get back to the movie.

“Mulvaney,” I say, “I just can’t see people rushing off in droves to see a movie about a middle-class kid from Queens who became a newspaper reporter.”
This is when he reminds me that he wasn’t just a newspaper reporter.

“I was a foreign correspondent,” he says, affecting the professorial tone he developed at forty.

“So were half your friends, Mulvaney. You don’t see them foaming at the mouth to tell their life stories.”

He swaggers up to his certificate.

“I know,” I say. “You won a Pulitzer Prize. So did three-quarters of your friends.”

“Barbara,” he says, “need I remind you that I was the last white guy out of Tiananmen Square?”
No matter where he works, my husband will always be the quintessential newspaper reporter. He understands the criminal mind, the tortured psyche of the downtrodden. So why does he have such a hard time figuring out himself? He can’t, for example, imagine why he isn’t rich. It’s not, he says, as if he doesn’t try. Over the years, he has proposed any number of get-rich-quick schemes, including the manufacture of one-size-fits-all dentures. “I need you in on this” is what he always tells me. “Mulvaney,” I say, “I am a writer, not a dental hygienist.” If I have one job as a wife, it is to dissuade Mulvaney. He says we would be rich if I helped him. I say we would be rich if he had a longer attention span.

“We’ll need a book to go with the movie,” he says.

I want to be my husband’s biographer about as badly as I want to open a restaurant that serves fried bugs (another can’t-lose “moneymaker,” based on a Mexican concept that would not have traveled well).

“You’ve got it backward,” I say, hoping to distract him. “Books come first, or at least they should.”

“You have to write the book,” he says. “You are a writer and you know me better than anyone in the world.”

Often, I wish I didn’t.

“Maybe we both can write the movie and the book,” he says. “We can write together.”

I remind him we do very little together without having an argument. Taking out the garbage requires an arms negotiator and a peace accord. The word that comes to most people’s minds when they describe us is “incompatible.”

Even my mother agreed that Mulvaney and I were incompatible, although she did not see this as a problem.

“Marriage, dear, is not about daily comforts,” she told me. “It’s not about getting along and it’s certainly not related to anyone’s career.”

Who, I asked her, said anything about marriage? “Who said anything about marrying Mulvaney?”

“Marriage,” my mother insisted, “is about whether you can tell funny stories, even in hard times, preferably about one another.”

She believed we could, perhaps should, invent those stories. Like Mulvaney, my mother is not a stickler for veracity.

Chapter One

The Barbara Fischkin Story


On a muggy summer morning in the early eighties, I crept along in my war-torn Chevy Nova, inching east with the station wagons on the packed Long Island Expressway. The sign at the construction site said to merge. Fiddling for a city radio station without static, yearning for anything decent, I almost missed my allotted opportunity to squeeze into the only open lane, causing the man behind me to honk wildly, as if this tie-up was all my fault. But crankiness does not cause traffic. It is the other way around. A lone seagull fluttered through the carbon monoxide, and on WBAB, Radio Long Island, disco blared. I couldn't believe they still played disco here. Hadn't John Travolta just checked into a nursing home?

Why, I asked myself, was I on my way to the Suffolk County bureau of Newsday? Why was I even on Long Island, a place I swore I would never live or work?

Because I wanted a better job, if not in Manhattan, at least close to it.

But was it worth this?

I had to remind myself of the facts.

I worked at the Knickerbocker News, a small afternoon daily in Albany, a paper that viewed winning the Pulitzer Prize as a vicarious experience. Newsday, I told myself, might not be the New York Times. But unlike the Times, it had the good taste to do more with my resume than throw it out.

And unlike the paltry "Knick," Newsday had a circulation of 600,000 and growing. So what if it called itself "America's Finest Suburban Newspaper"? At least its slogan wasn't "You've got to get The Knick at Night." I'd been in Albany long enough. Gone to college there, too, a misdirected journey that began because I didn't want to live with my parents in Brooklyn. Brooklyn wasn't Manhattan.
Miraculously, another lane opened. I enjoyed an entire five seconds of carefree driving before another seagull, a bigger one, landed on the road in front of my car. Why didn't these birds stay at the beach where they belonged? I slammed on the brakes and, as the human honking behind me accelerated, swerved and saved that stupid gull's life. In celebration, I flicked off the radio. Even if I could dance, I would have hated disco music. Its philosophy, though, was another matter: Twirl fast, long, and hard with a temporary partner. I had nothing against romance, even a quasi-exclusive romance, as long as it didn't get in the way of my job or my own adventures.

Like the men in Albany did.

The men in Albany, the ones I wound up with anyway, were all Irish and certifiable. Sure, they looked presentable on the surface, even good-looking, thanks to several generations of American nutrition. But they were the types who would invite you cross-country skiing, then get you lost for hours on a trail that headed nowhere, including home. Albany, I was convinced, was where Irish Catholic boys--they were all Catholic--went after they robbed stagecoaches or tied up their mothers but before they were sent permanently to hell. It was like that island where Pinocchio grew donkey ears, except in Albany bad boys were admitted into the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

The sanest man I knew in Albany was, unfortunately, Mario Cuomo. Irish, no. Catholic, yes. Cuomo was about to become governor and the party faithful believed that eventually he would be President, because he was such a great orator and an intellect, too.

Usually, all Mario Cuomo ever said to me was "Barbara! You've lost weight."

I was not as flattered as he'd assumed I'd be. But it did convince me that Mario Cuomo was, indeed, brilliant. When he made that remark, phrasing it as a statement and not as a question, it always made me stop and remember the way my mother would scream gleefully, at the top of her lungs from a dressing room in the Juniors department of Macy's Flatbush Avenue:

"That is not a dress for you! That is a dress for some flat-chested little Twiggy!"

Sometimes I'd forget the question I wanted to ask him.

Also, Mario Cuomo was married, apparently monogamous, and too old, although not as old as some of the people I covered. As the junior reporter in the Capitol Bureau, one of my assignments was the dreaded "After Sixty" column. Since I myself was solidly Under Thirty, the Knick News refused to run my photograph with it.

In retaliation--and to combat boredom--I decided that the "senior" beat needed a criminal justice angle. Within a year, I'd interviewed all the old people in state prisons, always asking Cuomo for comment.

"Lieutenant Governor, don't you think this man has served his time?"

"Barbara," he'd reply, "you look thin."


Newsday had to be better.

Only I didn't have a job there yet.

All they'd said was that I could "try out" for a week. They were going to make me prove that I could cover Long Island, and I couldn't even perform this humiliating audition in a civilized atmosphere.

Newsday 's headquarters were on Stewart Avenue in the rarefied village of Garden City, in the heart of Nassau County, a mere twenty-six minutes from Times Square. But I had been told ...