Words Matter

Writing to Make a Difference

Mary Kay Blakely, Amanda Dahling

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826273642
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Newspapers and magazines have been steadily shrinking, and more and more former subscribers have gone to digital and internet sources for the news. Yet it has become increasingly clear that "short takes" don't satisfy many readers, who still long for nuanced, long form journalism. By providing examples of classic magazine articles by professional writers, all of whom are graduates of the Missouri School of Journalism, this book fulfills the need for more sophisticated, thought-provoking essays that will resonate with both the general reader and students.

The book is divided into three broad categories: profiles, first person journalism, and personal memoirs, and includes the original articles as well as a "postscript" by the writers in which they discuss what they've learned about writing, journalism, and the business of getting published. Useful for students and instructors in writing programs, the book also appeals to writers interested in both the art and the craft of successful writing.

PART I

Profiles of People, Places, and Issues

THE MIRANDA OBSESSION

Bryan Burrough

Paul Schrader took the first phone call at his hotel in New Orleans. It was 1981, and Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver and went on to direct American Gigolo and other films, was in Louisiana to shoot Cat People, with Nastassja Kinski. The woman on the line introduced herself as Miranda Grosvenor, and before Schrader could get rid of her, she had somehow managed to keep him talking for 20 minutes, gossiping about Hollywood and a number of famous men she seemed to know all about.

Intrigued, Schrader invited Miranda to call back, and she did, again and again. “She would just call you up,” says Schrader, “and she was very, very charming. Funny. Sexy. It was incredible. The information she had on people was very accurate. She knew who was where and who was going to do what project. Once that happened, you got into the game, too, because she knew half the dirt on someone, and you added 10 percent. Then she took that 60 percent and went to the next person. . . . And there was always sort of a tease, how good-looking she was, wait till you meet my friends. It was all about talking, flirting, power networking.”

Repeatedly, Schrader arranged hotel-lobby rendezvous with the shadowy Miranda, but she never appeared. Perplexed, he phoned one of the names she had dropped, Michael Apted, director of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Nell. Yes, Apted confirmed, he had talked on the phone with Miranda, too; no, he didn’t know who she was, either. Apted mentioned that Richard Gere had a host of his own Miranda stories to tell. Schrader also reached Buck Henry, the screenwriter and occasional Saturday Night Live host, who confessed he too was captivated by Miranda’s calls, though he also knew her only as a voice over the telephone. Amazed, Schrader nevertheless had neither the time nor the energy to unravel the mystery of his newfound friend. “This went on for five, six months,” he says, “till finally it got so frustrating, all these aborted meetings, I just kind of let it go. I never found out exactly who she was.”

Nor, apparently, did Robert De Niro, who, friends say, also took Miranda Grosvenor’s phone calls. Nor Billy Joel, who tried out songs in progress on her answering machine and considered turning their strange relationship into a musical. Nor Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band, who attempted to meet her at a Louisiana hotel. Nor, in fact, did most of the dozens of well-known and well-to-do men on both coasts who answered calls from Miranda during the 1980s and suddenly found themselves drawn into the most fascinating, invigorating telephone conversations several of them say they ever enjoyed. It wasn’t sex talk, everyone agrees, but it was flirty, gossipy, and more than a little mysterious. “You actually started living for these phone calls,” remembers Brian McNally, the noted Manhattan restaurateur and hotelier. “I was absolutely—I mean, I couldn’t wait for her call. She made you feel fantastic.”

“A lot of nights she was my only friend,” says Joel, who understood that Miranda was also phone pals with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Sting. “As they say, she did give good phone.”

The story of Miranda Grosvenor, the riddle of who she really was and why she finally disappeared from the phone lines, has grown into a kind of urban legend in certain circles in Los Angeles and New York. The men who talked to her, a number of whom now decline to confirm they did so, came from all walks of the high life; they were actors and directors, rock stars and record producers, athletes and politicians, even a journalist or two. “[I believe] we’re talking about hundreds of people,” says Buck Henry. “This went on for 15 years. There’s lots of people who think they have seen her, and it was not her. We’re talking about someone who can con people into saying they saw her. It’s very complex.”

With her mellifluous, accentless voice—Henry thought she was British, others heard a hint of Manhattan’s Upper East Side—Miranda Grosvenor was a silky phantom who told men she was beautiful and blonde, lived in the South, did some modeling, and looked after her fabulously wealthy father in New York City. Many men believed her; at least a few actually fell in love with her.

“Patrick believed she was the most ravishing woman on earth, with a red Ferrari, a powerful family, airplanes landing on the lawn,” recalls Cynthia O’Neal, whose late husband, the actor Patrick O’Neal, became one of Miranda’s most fervent phone pals a decade before his 1994 death. “She called him endlessly. I remember arriving at an airport someplace and Patrick was being paged. It turned out to be her. . . . In the early stages, Patrick was really, really—well, she was intriguing. It made me nervous. Personally—and I didn’t say this to him, not till after, when Patrick would talk about her—I kept seeing this image of this lonely, very fat girl sitting in a room. I don’t remember how it ended, but he never talked about it afterwards.”

The name Miranda Grosvenor, in fact, is one that any number of famous and respected figures would just as soon forget. “No, never heard of her,” Gil Friesen tells me from his car phone one morning in Beverly Hills. Friesen, a former president of A&M Records, is now president of the board at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“From the phone,” I clarify, having been told that Friesen was on close terms with Miranda.

“Oooooh. . . Ohhhhh, my God. Yeah,” Friesen says. “Oh, my God.”

Friesen takes a moment to collect his thoughts as I list the names of some of Miranda’s confidants. “Jesus,” he finally says. “Well, Bob De Niro and Quincy Jones I can confirm. I know that through Quincy.”

Friesen dates his relationship with Miranda to the early 1980s, her heyday. “She called me in the office,” he remembers. “She just had an incredibly sexy voice and she had a great game, delivery, come-on. She said she was from—where?—Louisiana? I’ve never been there, but I was ready to go. . . . We were going to hook up in Florida and of course that never took place, because that was never her intention. Her game was just to have fun with this. You know, Quincy thought she was this really large woman.”

Friesen laughs. “This went on for weeks,” he continues. “She keeps you on the line because she has a very, very engaging way of making you feel that she is dying to talk to you. She knew the male psyche quite well. [Eventually] I think I just dropped it, once I put two and two together and realized this was one of the silliest things I had ever done. It wasn’t going to go anyplace. It wasn’t real. It was just someone with a switchboard and a vivid imagination.”

Brian McNally, who has operated some of Manhattan’s most glamorous restaurants, such as Odeon and Indochine, received the first call at his Tribeca loft in 1982. It was supposedly a wrong number, but then the woman on the line, who introduced herself as Miranda Grosvenor, seemed to have a spark of recognition. “Oh, you’re the guy who has Odeon!” she exclaimed.

“So we started talking,” McNally remembers. “She sounded very funny, charming, and incredibly sexy. The whole situation was sexy, though she never, ever spoke about sex. You couldn’t get her on the subject. We talked for 20 minutes. So I said, ‘Call back.’”

And she did. Before he knew it, McNally was hooked. Miranda seemed to know everything about everyone, especially in Hollywood—which director was considering which scripts, which actor was secretly dating whom. She alluded to friendships with Warren Beatty and Ted Kennedy. “It was amazing—she knew all these disparate sorts of people, all of them famous,” McNally says. “Ask Buck [Henry], ask everyone—everyone was completely obsessed with this girl. It was just extraordinary.”

Whatever doubts McNally had about Miranda’s contacts evaporated when she phoned him one day at Odeon. A busy dinnertime crowd was buzzing around him when an aide handed him the phone, saying it was “Miranda from New Orleans.”

“So who all’s there today?” she asked.

McNally craned his neck and rattled off several names, including that of Alexander Cockburn, the Anglo-Irish journalist.

“Alex!” Miranda cried. “I know him!”

“No, you don’t,” McNally replied.

At Miranda’s insistence, McNally walked over and handed the receiver to Cockburn.

“Oh, hi, Miranda!” Cockburn said.

“How did she do it? I don’t know,” says Cockburn, who spoke off and on to Miranda when he lived in New York in the early 1980s. “She would just ring up and say something flattering. She probably told Brian what great spring rolls he made. She would gab away, and she was very funny. She obviously had a romantic effect. We weren’t talking about Socrates.”

McNally says he began to have second thoughts about Miranda only after an episode in which he heard firsthand the effect she had on men. “She had a tape of Alex, on [her] answering machine, I think, and she played it for me,” says McNally. “It was very funny. Alex was begging. ‘Why haven’t you called? You were going to call. I have your Solidarity T-shirt for you.’” McNally was disconcerted to discover that Miranda might be taping her calls. Still, he kept talking to her for months after. He couldn’t help himself. It was Miranda who stopped calling. “She dumped me!” he yelps today.

“I got the call in the middle of the night—this was in ’80 or ’81,” remembers Buck Henry. “It was a confusing long-distance call, apparently from somebody I knew. I called back, got an operator, but of course [I now know] it was all phony. It was an act. Ultimately I’m talking to this girl who says she has no idea who I am, and I have no idea who she was. During the conversation she suggests I am remiss not to know her, because she is this great-looking English girl going to school at Tulane.”

Henry, like so many of his peers, was entranced by Miranda. “She was hip, funny, smart,” he says. “If I brought up someone, she would know something about that person a civilian wouldn’t know. What she did brilliantly was cross-reference everybody. She networked everything. I knew right away it was some kind of con, but I liked talking to her.”

In the weeks to come Henry spoke often with Miranda, who always seemed to know his whereabouts, whether he was in New York or Los Angeles. Occasionally an operator would break into the call and say something like “Senator Kennedy calling from Aspen,” an experience remembered by McNally and others as well. Yet Henry couldn’t dismiss it as a put-on. Once, as he was fishing for information about her, Miranda volunteered that he would meet someone she knew the following Tuesday night. She suggested cryptically that he ask that person about the restaurant ‘21.’ That Tuesday, Henry was on The Tonight Show, and during a commercial break it hit him. He leaned over and asked Johnny Carson, “Did you ever have anyone come up to you at ‘21’ and say they’re a friend of mine?” A look of recognition crossed Carson’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “A blonde girl, good-looking too.”

“My mind reeled,” Henry says. Ever since, he has made a hobby of collecting all the information he can about the woman who called herself Miranda Grosvenor. “I have a book’s worth of material on her,” says Henry. “I couldn’t begin to tell you the whole story. It would take 10 hours to tell it all. . . . The stories are too long, and I want to save some of them. . . . And I’ve only scratched the surface. Some of it is really dark and strange.”

The real story is indeed dark and strange. But it is also a love story. Or two. Or more.

On a cul-de-sac high in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, behind the gates of a sprawling Art Deco—style home Ronald Reagan built for Jane Wyman in 1941, Richard Perry gazes out at the evening lights of Los Angeles. Perry, 57, is a fixture in the L.A. music scene: one wall of his den is lined with the gold records he has produced over the years for the likes of Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, and the Pointer Sisters; on another are dozens of candid photos of Perry with friends and collaborators, an arm around Frank Sinatra, cuddling with Diana Ross, sharing a laugh with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Perry’s once longish brown hair is now tastefully short and gray. He is an earnest, thoughtful man with a smooth baritone, a romantic who after two failed marriages lives alone in this one-acre compound, surrounded by Tiffany lamps, 1940s-era furniture, and two hissing cats.

“My story,” he says, sinking into a desk chair and pouring himself a glass of 1989 Château Lafite-Rothschild, “begins with a phone call.”

It has taken considerable prodding to get Perry to talk about the events that, friends say, preoccupy him to this day. He isn’t proud of what happened, nor is he ashamed. But he knows what people may say about a man who fell for a woman he had never met. He doesn’t want to sound pitiful. He doesn’t want to sound cruel.

She reached him at home for the first time on a night in May 1982. Somehow, giving only the name “Ariana,” she managed to keep him on the phone. In retrospect Perry realizes she had done considerable research on him. She knew his résumé by heart and within minutes had coaxed him into a conversation about his passion for 1950s doo-wop records. She knew all about Big Joe Turner and the Platters and even mentioned a classic recording he had never heard but later rushed out and bought, a duet by Ray Charles and Betty Carter. “I’m open and adventurous,” Perry concedes. “I was having fun with it. I was getting off on this mystery woman.”

They talked for 20 minutes, and he invited her to call back anytime. That led to another long talk and then another and another, until Perry realized he was looking forward to her calls. In a throaty, sexy voice, Ariana was funny and empathetic and made him feel wonderful about himself without being obsequious. She gave him a nickname, “Sicko.”

In their second or third conversation she said she lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but attended Tulane University in New Orleans. She said she had done some modeling.

Perry had just broken off a long-term relationship with an actress, and as spring turned to summer he found himself increasingly drawn to the witty, wise woman on the phone. They began talking two, three, sometimes four times a day. Before long Perry was scheduling his studio time around her calls; he made sure to finish work every night by seven, then he would race home, lay out his dinner, pour a glass of wine, and put Ariana on the speakerphone as he ate. They would talk late into the night.

“As it grew,” Perry says after a sip of wine, “she would weave her spell and make you feel closer and closer and closer to her, until you’re saying to yourself that this is the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met in my life. I thought, I’m falling in love with her.”

The photographs and letters didn’t hurt. Perry had pushed to meet her, but she always had an excuse: She had to study. There was a problem with her father. She had to work. But she did send him a photo, cut out of a magazine, of a lithe, voluptuous model. A separate snapshot showed a white Ferrari parked on what appeared to be a college campus, with a blonde behind the wheel. Perry admits he swooned.

Then, at a recording-industry cocktail party, Perry ran into Gil Friesen. When Friesen asked how his love life was faring, Perry told him everything. An odd look crossed Friesen’s face. “The same exact thing happened to me,” he said. And then Friesen told Perry of the frisky calls he had taken from Miranda Grosvenor, who said she lived in Baton Rouge but attended Tulane. Both men realized it had to be the same woman.

“It was a knife through my heart,” Perry says simply. Yet so deep were his feelings for the woman on the phone that he willed himself not to believe Friesen. “I was just livid, incensed,” he says. “[I thought] Gil was doing this just to fuck with me. I felt no other human being could experience what I’m experiencing now. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Shortly after his talk with Friesen, Perry discovered that his friend Buck Henry was also obsessed with Miranda Grosvenor. Henry’s perspective, however, contrasted sharply with his own. Henry’s initial infatuation had given way to a bemused disillusionment, and while he continued taking Miranda’s calls, he had begun to investigate who she really was.

Henry’s suspicions were triggered by a picture she had sent him, a photocopy of a leggy blonde model standing on a rock in a magazine fashion layout. “I thought it was a really bonehead move on her part,” Henry says. “The model was fairly well known at the time, and it took me about 10 minutes to find out who the model was. I thought, Wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: The Journey of Writing
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Profiles of People, Places, and Issues
• Part II. First-Person Journalism
• Part III. Personal Stories and Memoirs
• Afterword: Defeating That Crippling Sense of Inadequacy
• Last Words
• Contributor Biographies