Also, me, a member of the standing army of columnists.
Down the right side of the page was the customary list of the actors playing them — well, playing us — starting with Tom Hanks, cast in his Broadway debut as McAlary, the subject of the late Nora Ephron’s new play, “Lucky Guy.”
Curtain up.
The newsmen are standing at a bar, bellowing “The Wild Rover,” the Irish ballad.
For an instant, I wonder: Who were these people with our names and why were they singing those songs? This must have been what the von Trapp family felt when they saw “The Sound of Music.”
Then the action moved to the familiar racket of a newsroom. An editor yelling at a tardy writer that this was a daily, not a weekly paper; one reporter ducking an assignment, another one running harder, staying later and getting the best story. Icarus was cleared for take off.
On four March evenings in the tranquil New York of 2013, I sat in the Broadhurst Theater watching previews of “Lucky Guy,” a show set 25 years ago in the raucous, ragged city of 1988 about a friend who died young.
It took a couple of performances for me to lose the hazy filter of actuality — to get over myself and the people I knew, even though it is well-known that hardly anyone is more entertaining than journalists, certainly not to other journalists — and to recognize something besides the names. This was reality, sampled, with the pathos and comic folly remixed. The guts of it had stayed true, thrillingly so, to the life I had witnessed.
That was one more surprise to savor after 14 years of knowing about “Lucky Guy,” before that was its name, or it was a play, or it seemed at all likely.
IF MEMORY SERVES, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?
She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths.
Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.
What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.
He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”
What was? Almost anything.
If we turned up on opposite sides of some issue — let’s say that McAlary wrote that the police commissioner was a bum, and my column crowned him a prince — he would call early.
“This is good for us!” he’d say. “If they push him out, I’ll have the new guy. You’ll get leaks from the empire in exile, which is even better.”
At our dinner in 1999, Ephron did not touch her food. She had insisted that I order the veal chop, a bit bossy considering that we’d only met 90 seconds earlier.
She kept taking notes as I passed along McAlary lore.
Jim Dwyer, now at The New York Times, wrote columns in New York Newsday and The Daily News from 1986 to 2001.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/theater/lucky-guy-by-nora-ephron-as-recalled-by-jim-dwyer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss