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The van with Penny Bakersfield and the tape reached WCBL-TV fifteen minutes after Louise Dutton had walked in, trailed by two cops. There was time enough for News Director Leonard Cohen to get the story out of her, and to decide what he was going to do about it, before they put the tape up on a monitor, and he got a good look at it. It was even better than he hoped. There was a sequence, just long enough, thirty-odd seconds, for what he wanted. It showed Louise being put into her car, driven by a cop, and then following a police car out of the Waikiki Diner parking lot.
Cohen edited it himself, down to twenty seconds exactly, and then he sat down at his typewriter and wrote the voice-over himself for Penny to read.
“This is a special ‘Nine’s News’ bulletin. A Philadelphia police captain gave his life this afternoon foiling a holdup. ‘Nine’s News’ co-anchor Louise Dutton was an eyewitness. Full details on ‘Nine’s News’ at six.”
He got the station manager into the control room, ran the tape for him, and with less trouble than he thought he would have, got him to agree to run the thirty-second spot during every hourly and half-hourly break until six. They would lose some advertising revenue, but what they had was what, in the olden days, was called a “scoop,” or an “exclusive.”
And then he went to help Louise prepare her segment for the six o’clock news. He thought he would have to write that, too, but she had already written it, and handed it to him when he walked up to her. It was good stuff. She had looked kind of flaky, which was understandable, considering the cop had been killed in front of her, but she was apparently tougher than she looked.
And when they made her up, and lit the set and put her on camera, she got it right the first time. Perfect. Her voice had started to break twice, but she hadn’t lost it, and the teary eyes were perfect.
“You want me to do that again?” she asked. “I broke up.”
“It’s fine the way it is,” Leonard Cohen said; and he went to her, and repeated that she had done fine, and that what he wanted—what he
insisted—was for her to go home and have a stiff drink, and if she needed anything to call.
Then he sat down at the typewriter again, and personally wrote what he was going to have Barton Ellison open with, fading to a shot of Louise getting into her car with the cop to go home.
“Louise Dutton isn’t here with me tonight,” Barton Ellison would solemnly intone. “She wanted to be. But she was an eyewitness to the gun-battle in which Philadelphia Highway Patrol Captain Richard C. Moffitt gave his life this afternoon. She knows the face of the bandit that is, at this moment, still free. Louise Dutton is under police protection. Full details, and exclusive ‘Nine’s News at Six’ film after these messages.”
What I should have done, Leonard Cohen thought, was go to Hollywood and be a press agent for the movies.
****
Stanford Fortner Wells III did not own either a newspaper or a radio or television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It might be closed on Sunday, as the comedian had quipped, but it was the nation’s fourth largest city. It was also a “good market,” in media parlance, which meant that newspapers and radio and television stations were making a lot of money. Since Wells had been in a position to be interested, none of the City of Brotherly Love’s five newspapers (the Bulletin, the Ledger, the Herald, the Inquirer, and the Daily News) had come on the market, and only one of its five television stations had. The price they wanted for that didn’t seem worth it.
When Louise called and told him she had accepted an offer to go with WCBL-TV in Philadelphia, therefore, there was not one of his people instantly available on the scene to deliver a report on what his daughter would encounter when she got there.
In his neat, methodical hand, “Fort” Wells prepared a list of the questions he wished answered, and handed it to his secretary to be telexed to the publisher of the Binghamton, New York, Call-Chronicle, not because it was the newspaper he owned closest to Philadelphia (it was not) but because he knew that Karl Kruger knew his relationship to Louise Dutton. Karl would handle the last question on the list (“Availability adequate, convenient to WCBL-TV, safe, apartment for single, 25-year-old female”) with both discretion and awareness of that question’s especial importance to the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Wells Newspapers, Inc.
Karl Kruger’s report on Philadelphia, telexed three days later, would not have pleased the Greater Philadelphia and Delaware Valley Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Kruger suspected, correctly, that Stanford Fortner Wells III wanted to know what was wrong with Philadelphia, not get a listing of its many cultural and industrial assets.
Mr. Wells’s first reaction to the report would not have pleased the chamber of commerce either. He judged, from what he read, that Philadelphia was no worse, certainly not as bad as New York City, than other major American cities, and a lot better than most. But in people’s minds, it was something like Phoenix, Arizona, or Saint Louis, Missouri, not the Cradle of the American Republic and the nation’s fourth largest city. Mr. Wells thought that if he was in Philadelphia (that is, if he owned a newspaper or a television station there), the first thing he would do would be clean out the chamber of commerce from the executive director downward, and hire some people who knew how to blow a city’s horn properly.
Mr. Kruger’s report had nothing to say about an apartment. Mr. Wells instructed his secretary to get Mr. Kruger on the horn.
“I thought maybe you’d be calling, Fort,” Mr. Kruger said. “How’ve you been?”
“You didn’t mention anything about housing, Kurt. Still working on that, are you?”
“I found, I think, just the place, but I thought it would be easier to talk about it than write it down,” Mr. Kruger said. “You got a minute?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“How well do you know Philadelphia?”
“I went there to chase girls when I was at Princeton; I know it.”
“It’s changed a lot, I would suppose, from your time,” Kruger said. “You know the area near Market Street from City Hall to the bridge over the Delaware?”
“Around Independence Hall?”
“Right. Well, that whole section, which they call ‘Society Hill,’ is pretty much a slum. Been going downhill since Ben Franklin moved away, so to speak.”
“Can you get to the point of this anytime soon?”
“It’s being rehabilitated; they’re gutting buildings to the exterior walls, if necessary, and doing them over. Luxuriously. Among the people doing this, you might be interested to know, is the Daye-Nelson Corporation.”
