Buying the Night Flight (52 page)

Then, at one of our meetings, something extraordinary emerged. As I revealed to him what happened to me, he revealed that, although he had eventually gone with Morrow as his publisher, with an advance of $500,000, in the beginning Simon & Schuster was also bidding -- with none other than Alice doing the bidding.

As we sat there that early evening in their beautiful home in northwest Washington, Tad remained silent for a long time. Then he very slowly reviewed his facts. "Simon & Schuster went up to $400,000," he went on, "but they first wanted me to edit and partially write and 'supply bridges' for Castro's 'memoirs.' I said, 'No, thanks, I have my own project and besides I'm no ghost writer.'" He paused, then added archly, "It was Alice who came to me. That was the spring of 1984."

Now I was beginning to figure it out: Simon & Schuster was trying to buy up the Castro biographies that were suddenly floating about, while simultaneously negotiating with Castro himself for whatever type of book they, or he, had in mind. My lawyers said that, while there was probably nothing illegal about such transactions, they were surely extremely unethical, as even Tad's book and mine were in direct competition. We all surmised much the same thing -- most probably Simon & Schuster had planned to use them to get Castro to write "his" own book. I went from Tad's house the next week to the Treasury Department.

Now, the United States has for many years had an embargo against Cuba and neither individuals or companies were, or are as of this writing, permitted to do business with the "Communist Island." But it is possible to apply to Treasury for special permission to do so, as Alice and Dick Snyder had, indeed, done--obviously unconcerned about someone like me obtaining their letters to Treasury through the Freedom of Information Act.

First I got a chatty Treasury Department man on the phone. Yes, he told me, the two had, indeed, applied for a waiver to do business with Cuba, and Treasury had, indeed, granted them a waiver for one book. In those papers, a stack of which I have guarded over the years, they called it
la obra
, or "the work." If the entire deal materialized, any monies awarded to Castro would have to be placed in an interest-bearing account in his name in the United States, not to be used in any case by Havana.

In fact, Treasury had applied for the waiver to the law as early as August 1984, and Simon & Schuster had received it in November 1984. In short, they seem to have had at least the idea of their own Castro book or books all the time they were contracting with me.

When I actually visited the Treasury Department, I asked Dennis M. O'Connell, the director of the office of Foreign Assets Control, whether he had ever seen any case like this. He just shook his head in disbelief and said slowly, "No, I don't recall any other case like this."

True, to Alice and Snyder, the Fidel of Havana read "revolutionary ... anti-imperialist hero ... victim of American expansionism ... " But Simon & Schuster was also by then owned by Gulf and Western. One of its subsidiaries was a big sugar company that had extensive holdings in the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic. Like so many sugar companies before and since, it had at times dreamed of doing business in delicious and forbidden Cuba.

The late head of Gulf and Western was Charles Bluhorn, a respected entrepreneur who, as an immigrant to America, had not only done brilliantly but was extremely patriotic. Bluhorn was fascinated by Castro, but not "in love with him", as were (and still are) so many American intellectuals. The speculation is that Bluhorn wanted to make sugar deals with Castro, but (the embargo again) they would have to be implemented through European subsidiaries. Meanwhile, the idea emerged for Castro's autobiography.

By now I was working nearly as much on the story of "the books" as I was on my book, when I accidentally met two people with unimpeachable credentials who could and did confirm precisely what I was already convinced had actually happened.

On the night of April 17, 1991, there was a White House State Dinner for Violetta Chamorro, the first democratically elected
presidenta
of Nicaragua, following the abysmal failures of Fidel's ideological "children" -- the Marxist Sandinistas. I happened to be seated next to Disney's Michael Eisner. Despite the beauty of the evening, Eisner was in poor spirits and in worse luck, for he clearly would have preferred to sit next to starlet Teri Garr, who was just across the round table and at whom he kept glancing hopelessly. But, he was stuck between me and President Chamorro, who speaks little English, and who, moreover, was busy talking with President Bush.

As Eisner either had to talk with me or sit there in silence all night, he commented that he had been invited to the White House several times, but had not come -- "Is this supposed to be some kind of honor?" he demanded. Finally, he revealed what he had done before becoming such a world famous figure that he would be invited to the White House despite himself. He mentioned that, in his earlier days, he had worked as an assistant to "Charlie" Bluhorn in the Dominican Republic.

Slowly, I asked him ... wasn't there something about Gulf and Western doing a book ... ? On Fidel Castro was it?

He brightened noticeably (Teri was busy by this time). "Oh, sure," he said, now almost smiling, "We offered Castro everything we could to get that book. It was a sweetener, we were going to get Castro to do sugar deals through European subsidiaries." He paused, then looked at me very seriously, as though he were genuinely, truly, conspiratorially revealing something great, even unforgettable. In fact, he kind of hunched over, as if God only knew what might happen if "the others" heard this. "We were even going to film
Bad News Bears
in Cuba," he whispered to me.

Bad News Bears?
I had never heard of
Bad News Bears.
Apparently everyone was supposed to have heard of the popular movie and television series.
"Bad News Bears, Bad News Bears,"
he repeated several times, snappishly. Each time he would look at me with more barely concealed irritation. But I had learned about something far more important than
Bad News Bears.

Then, on September 16,1992, I went to New York for the kickoff party for the new national radio book show of my old Chicago friend, the popular WGN-Radio interviewing star, Milton Rosenberg, at the fashionable "Le Club." Serendipitously, one of the first people to whom I was introduced when I came in was Michael Korda, the polished editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. We chatted for a moment, and I mentioned that I had written the biography of Castro. He seemed to know and appreciate that and was surely pleasant and charming.

Then, before I could ask him, he volunteered, shaking his head in disappointment, "Yes, we almost had one on Castro, too. I had printed an earlier book on the 'Venceremos Brigades,'" he said, referring to the brigades of young American leftists who flocked to Cuba during the 1960s. "Then Alice and Dick went to Havana and they even signed Fidel up. It didn't work. They say we paid him $1 million, but I don't think any money changed hands." Then he smiled, shook his head in mock confusion and added, "I'm not sure."

In fact, all of Simon & Schuster's machinations had come very close to killing my book, if only because it "relieved" me of my financing. Moreover, I eventually learned from the highest-level Cuban intelligence defector, Major Florentino Aspillaga, that Castro's intelligence had actually intended to copy or steal my manuscript, just as I had always feared. So, in addition to everything else, I had hidden copies under friends' beds and (infinitely more effective) placed copies of everything in two vaults at the Riggs Bank across the street. Ultimately, I had kept my staff by earning more money through speeches (which, of course, severely reduced the amount of time that could be spent on the book) and, in the end, Simon & Schuster had signed off, almost gratefully, on their first advances to me.

What finally happened in this whole "memorable" publishing story was that my book on Fidel was rescued by Little, Brown & Co. and my fine editor Fredrica Friedman. We named the book Guerrilla Prince, to dramatize Fidel's unique inspiration of most of the guerrilla movements of our times, as well as his Machiavellian temperament. Published in January 1991, the book received generally excellent reviews (front cover of
The New Republic
, the cover review of the prestigious
Times Literary Supplement
of
London, two pages in
The Economist
, and so forth) and was optioned for a television series by Francis Ford Coppola. Tad's book was also well-received critically, and we remain good friends.

By far my own greatest joy was that the book beautifully fulfilled one of my greatest hopes for it -- through individual "carriers," it was brought to the underground in Cuba, and the Cuban dissidents and others met to read it aloud to one another. The defectors would call me and tell me excitedly that now, for the first time, Cubans could know
who he really was
.

As for the traveling-carnival-team effort of the Simon & Schuster editors, who apparently naively believed until the bitter end that the
egoismo numero uno
of the entire world could really reveal himself enough to write an autobiography ... to date, all that they have ever published by him is one of his accustomed tirades -- on the economics of the Cuban debt. Now there is one to wake you up!

***

While sipping my morning coffee on September 15, 1992, I received still another surprise when the phone again rang unexpectedly. It was my good friend Col. Denny D'Alelio, a brilliant strategist just retired from the Pentagon, but his usually buoyant and confident voice seemed diffident and confused.

"Gee Gee," he said, "Suzy and I were watching television last night, and there's a new show
with you in it.
She's a famous woman foreign correspondent, and her name is even Georgie Anne ..."

More confused than suspicious, I obtained a video of the show. It was called
Hearts Afire
-- a brand new sitcom that had just been launched by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband Harry Thomason, the two fast-lane friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were that very autumn running for their "copresidency." When I saw the show two days later, I was even more incredulous.

Here was this character, appearing on CBS at 8:30 every Monday night, played by seductive actress Markie Post and immediately billed as a pioneering woman foreign correspondent. She had long blonde hair with long bangs -- just the way I wore my hair when I was younger. She was born and raised in Chicago, worked for the
Chicago Tribune
and
The Washington Post
, now lived in Washington, received calls from world leaders, is a specialist on the Middle East, always says that her favorite interview was Anwar Sadat, and, if all that were not enough, wrote the definitive book on Fidel Castro.

At first I did not know whether to be flattered or enraged. Markie Post is a very pretty woman (that part was all right), but ahh, the differences! This "Georgie Anne Lahti" has a father who looks suspiciously like mine, but, unlike my sterling-character father, finds his future defined by the walls of the federal pen. She has lost her job, cannot pay her credit cards, and would have shocked even the free-and-easy male foreign correspondents of my experience with her breezy abandon and sheer indomitable animal energy between the bedsheets. Indeed, the Thomasons' "Georgie Anne" seems to have slept with just about every man she ever interviewed -- and what's worse, it is directly implied in the first script that she slept with Castro to obtain her interviews with him.

But -- very well -- exactly what was I supposed to do?
Hearts Afire
was flickering away week after week, and all because someone totally unknown to me, far away in California, had arrogantly taken my life and reformed its essence into something so different from mine that it could only parody the original, or in effect, create another kind of image. I began to feel afraid of this amorphous and "unreal" threat. It was as though something that dangerously approximated, acted like, and was named for, me was hovering above my head and shoulders, deflecting the private reality that should be every person's alone. It was as though some witch doc-tress were toying with my soul, and perhaps one was.

The underlying difficulty was that, if you are going to be the first woman to accomplish something, you'd better be straight; and my entire career has been based upon the principle of complete honesty. Indeed, that is the reason that leaders of very different cultures -- princes of Saudi Arabia, Russian leaders, leftist guerrillas in various parts of the world -- always knew they could trust me. I made a whole lifetime of people knowing who I was, and now people would not know.

You see, my life was my life. The Thomasons had not stayed up nights while American diplomats were being killed in Khartoum, or huddled in an underground bunker in 1984 on the Iraqi desert east of Basra being bombarded by Iranian troops, or heard suddenly that their best friends were killed in Teheran (Joe Alex Morris) or Tegucigalpa (Dial Torgerson). Only I had lived this life, only I had created and formed it, and only I had cared enough about those "others" all across the globe to try to translate to my world what was happening "out there." Moreover, we correspondents are not a group lacking in courage, and so trivializing our lives is insufferable.

Complaints from my fine Chicago lawyer and friend Joel Weisman were answered only with derision by their lawyers. Typically, in one letter from Michael J. Plonsker of Lavely & Singer of Los Angeles, he accused me of making "libelous and defamatory statements" about
them!
Then he wrote that I should "cease and desist from making all such statements immediately. All she accomplishes is increasing the amount of damages that she will ultimately be held responsible for."