I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (28 page)

“Yes, I’m fine,” I lied again, and looked around the office so she couldn’t focus on my bleary eyes. Sawyer’s sixteen Emmys, haphazardly arranged around the shelves, were outnumbered by the myriad pictures of her family and friends. The furniture was surprisingly nondescript. There was nothing glamorous about the place or her at that early hour. Off-camera, in work mode, she had the bookish look of the Wellesley College student she once was who was unaware of her own astonishing beauty. She was wearing thick red-framed glasses and not a speck of makeup. A fleece top was slightly unzipped at her neck and her favorite pair of sweat socks, pilling around the ankles, was peeking from under her jeans. Her shoes were some sort of clog-like contraptions fashioned from soft fabric. Hanging on the door was an Ann Taylor suit Sawyer planned to wear that evening on the
ABC World News
telecast. “That’s the other me,” she had said, pointing at the clothes when I came in and falsely confessed about my stomach bug. I had offered to sit as far away from her as possible so she couldn’t catch it, the real reason being I didn’t want her to get too close a look at me.

I suddenly brought up my climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and my pilgrimage over the Pyrenees on the Camino not only to remind myself that I could be a disciplined person—my own “other me”—but also to use as a segue to talk about a news special Sawyer had done about the hardscrabble life in the Appalachian Mountains back in her home state of Kentucky. “I’ve always seen you as a kind of rarified woman living a rarified life,” I told her, motioning toward all the photos and Emmys. This made her laugh, which seemed momentarily to ease her concern about me. The sound of such laughter—the fact that I had been able to elicit it so easily from her—eased, in turn, my own concern about myself. “When I saw that program you did on Appalachia, Diane, it dawned on me: She’s a mountain gal. She’s mountain stock.”

“The music of those mountains and the enormous pride—and in some cases despair—of those people moves me,” she said. “My ancestors were mountain folk. You’re right. My mom did this great narrative in which she traced her childhood and even further back into her mother’s and mother’s mother’s childhoods. She took pictures of the Cumberland Gap and the Appalachian Trail where they came across the mountains. She did it as a book for her grandchildren. It was such a beautiful story. And there is something about the exquisite poetry of the rugged life and what it took to get across those hills and survive that is still right there in the language of those mountains, in the DNA of it.”

“You must still have it in your DNA to get through this first stressful month on your new job. You’ve been calling on your inner mountain woman,” I told her, wishing I had some of it in my own DNA right about then to call upon to get me through the rest of the interview.

“You want to see pioneer stock! I’ll show you pioneer stock!” she exclaimed.

I then brought up another of her special reports, this one about the foster-care system, using as its focus the Maryhurst School, which was also back in Kentucky, in her hometown of Louisville. “Was that a way of filling a maternal need—is that too part of your DNA—since you’ve never had children of your own?” I asked.

“I don’t think of it that way,” she said. “I just respond to a story. It’s that feeling of response. There is a wonderful minister I used to go hear every Sunday who preached a sermon once that really spoke to me about where your great joy meets the world’s great need. And I kept hearing the great need of these foster children who were moved sometimes to fourteen foster homes by the time they were ten years old. I loved getting their stories right and trying to get people to pay attention. So that’s what it feels like to me. And every single one of them talks to you with such eloquence … they see their lives with unsparing clarity.”

“It sounds as if you’re describing what you have: the journalistic gene,” I told her. “It’s a survival mechanism for those foster kids as it just might be for you on some other level. I’m too lazy to be a real journalist myself. I think of myself more as a writer who works in journalism. But the same thing holds. I wasn’t in foster care, but I was an orphan who was raised by my grandparents. I can only speak for myself. But that ability to separate myself from what it is I am seeing around me not only saved my life early on but has also later made me a writer. It’s what still makes me one. Even right now. This moment.”

“The story you are telling yourself about your life is so important,” Sawyer said, leaning in and staring right at me. “As Leonard Cohen the songwriter says, can you stay the hero of your own story? That’s the challenge, Kevin.”

*   *   *

As I look back on that morning with Diane up at ABC News, all the major themes of my life were coming to nest in that conversation. They gave me a way to hold on to my place in it. “Are you especially aware of mentoring other women?” I asked.

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope so,” she repeated. “Now that I’m really two generations removed from the women and men coming up I think it is so important that with this new generation—especially in television journalism since we are forever racing down hallways to meet deadlines—that we the older generation be, whenever it’s useful, the Global Positioning System for someone who may not be able to see that there is a shining path ahead of them.”

“And also to impart some knowledge,” I ventured.

Sawyer smiled. “My husband’s favorite fact he ever found in that Harper’s Index is that fourteen percent of high school kids thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.”

It was my turn now to laugh, but I grimaced at how it made my head feel. I paused, allowing the throbbing to subside in my temples. “How does all your travel around the world covering breaking news stories affect your marriage to Mike?” I asked.

“He loves—God bless him—seeing the story with me in it,” she said. “And he’s excited to hear when I get home how it smelt ’n’ felt. How hot it was. What it tasted like. So he loves seeing me stretched flat out.”

“Not to put too Freudian a spin on it,” I teased her, and thought of the boy from the night before and how he smelled and felt and tasted flat out on my own bed.

Again Sawyer’s laughter filled the office; it erased my image of the boy. The laughter faded and she looked over at a photograph of Mike and her. “He said once—very early on in our marriage, because he used to go away for two or three months at a time to shoot a movie—after I wondered aloud if that were a wonderful thing for a marriage or a taxing thing for a marriage, he once said, ‘It’s both.’ And that’s true because you get to miss each other mightily and then everything becomes new and chosen again when you’re back together. Talk about heightened.”

“But more than acquaintances.”

“Yes. Much more. Much.”

“You are both in professions in which you have to be—or appear to be—invulnerable,” I told her. This made her laugh yet again. “So is part of your love for each other finding someone with whom you can feel a private vulnerability?”

“Well, Kevin, I’ll put it this way,” she said, still chuckling. “It’s wonderful to have a safe place to be a basket case. And Mike is a genius at helping you know who you are and helping you know what is real and what is not real in the world and keeping you aimed toward a North Star.”

“Just as you’ll always be a mountain gal in your deepest DNA, Mike will always be a refugee from Germany,” I said. “Talk about a narrative—the two of you finding each other in the world is a pretty powerful one.”

“And I love the fact that this son and grandson of blazing Jewish intellectuals ends up with this Methodist girl from the South,” she said.

“Who can quote John Wesley to him,” I kept it up.

“And sing all the hymns in the hymnal, including most of the second verses,” she continued.

We both sighed at that. “I grew up with the Cokesbury hymnal,” I told her, relaxing into thoughts of my first morning in a Methodist church, the one thought I could always circle back to as a kind of beginning in my life even as my childhood was about to come to an end with the deaths of my parents. Grief was the truest mountain in my own life, the truest part of my own DNA. But the memory of my first morning in a Mississippi Methodist church always had a way of comforting me, focusing me, making me feel connected to the world, no matter the condition I found myself in.

“I grew up with the Cokesbury hymnal too,” Diane said. “I know that even now when I go to church and they don’t sing the version of the hymn I learned growing up from the Cokesbury I find it personally offending. There is a church at Eighty-fifth and Park Avenue called Park Avenue Christian Church that you have to go check out. I was taking a walk one Sunday morning and wandered into it. There was a statement printed there on the wall that said that they believe in the divinity of difference. We believe in inclusion. And I thought to myself, Wait a minute—am I still on Park Avenue?”

How had Diane Sawyer and I gotten off the subject? Maybe I was still on the Camino after all. I was told by one pilgrim on the path that once I began walking it I would never leave it. “What books are you reading right now?” I asked as a kind of final question I always liked to ask anyone I’m interviewing. “Aren’t you in a secret book club with Oprah?”

“Now?” asked Sawyer. It was the first time she had appeared a bit shocked by one of my questions. “Not now. No. There was a time a while ago she and I and a few others were making a point of sending each other things to read, but that trailed off after a few years because … well … we lead busy lives. I had never read any Trollope.…”

“Joanna or Anthony?” I asked.

She smiled at my literary preening—and at her own. “Anthony, my dear. So I just read
Can You Forgive Her?
which I liked,” she said, mentioning the first of his six Palliser novels. “But I still like Edith Wharton better. If I’m going to go back there and read about that stuff, I’ll stick to Wharton. I read Trollope on my Kindle on the way to Afghanistan this last time.”

“I think you just summed yourself up in that sentence, Diane.” Her laughter once more filled the office.

We said our good-byes. When I got to the door she called my name. “Be better,” she said.

*   *   *

As I walked through New York City after that morning with Diane I recalled the first time years earlier we had sat talking together. It was back during my
Interview
days at the Factory. Shelley Wanger had taken over as editor in chief after Gael Love had been dismissed and Fred Hughes had asked me to run the magazine in the interim for a few months, even giving me a promotion to executive editor. Shelley was the daughter of film producer Walter Wanger and actress Joan Bennett and as a kind of rebellion perhaps against her Hollywood pedigree had become known for her intellectual heft in the literary salons of New York. She was certainly more literary than either Gael or I. Shelley had also married into East Coast aristocracy when she wed the grandson of W. Averell Harriman, David Mortimer. She was the perfect choice for the ever-aspirational Hughes. Plus, Shelley came with the stamp of approval of Diana Vreeland, who had suggested her as a candidate to Fred. Fred worshiped Diana Vreeland. He considered Vreeland, now that he had outgrown the de Menils in his debonair way, his own mentor. The walls in Fred’s office were even an overly lacquered red, much like the walls of Vreeland’s archly red apartment at 550 Park Avenue.

Shelley made her presence known at the Factory by instituting evenings of readings upstairs on the building’s top floor from upcoming books by her favored authors and even from scripts by East Coast screenwriters. It was a way of mixing art-world glamour with mandarins of publishing and other media. At one such event—Carrie Fisher was reading from her first attempt at a screenplay adaptation of her novel
Postcards from the Edge
with Mike Nichols, who was slated to direct it—I found myself seated next to Diane Sawyer, who had only recently married Mike. During the reading Diane was having trouble keeping one of her earrings fastened to her left lobe. It kept dropping into her lap and became a kind of running joke between us.

The B. Altman department store was still open back then and located only a few blocks from the Factory in the West 30s. I’d often eat lunch there in the store’s Charleston Gardens restaurant, which had the faux façade of an antebellum mansion right there on the store’s top floor. The day after sitting by Diane at that literary/showbiz soiree I stopped off at the B. Altman jewelry counter after having yet another lunch at the Charleston Gardens and bought her a new pair of gold earrings. I sent them to her that afternoon with a note apologizing for my magnetic force field that kept pulling her earring from her ear and making it fall into her lap over and over. A few days later I got a thank-you note from her for her new pair of B. Altman earrings. But she closed the note by advising me to “never apologize for your magnetism.” I had always cherished that piece of advice from Diane Sawyer over the years—even if it was a facetious one. So as I walked down into the subway that morning years later I was oddly challenged—even troubled—by her admonition to me as I left her office. She had not told me to “feel better” but to “be better.” I hadn’t exactly heard what she meant as I walked out of her office, but as the subway doors closed behind me and I took my seat I sensed what she was saying. Her journalistic gene had rightly sized up what she was seeing—someone in a state of distress. I needed to be reminded that there was still a shining path before me. For me to stay on it I had to be my own “other me,” the better one. Yet was the better me the truer one?

*   *   *

When I got home, after giving Archie and Teddy a quick walk around the block, I sat on the bed and looked at the mess in the apartment from the night before. My sheets were still a landscape of lube stains and smudges and smells. There was a new burnt spot on my desk from the boy missing the wet paper towel he’d put there to cool the meth pipe and resting the pipe’s freshly torched bulb atop the burled wood instead. I rubbed the blackened bit of desktop with my finger and looked down at the stack of old tattered
Interview
magazines by the desk. As I had felt during my walk from Diane Sawyer’s office to the Lincoln Center subway station, I was again overcome by a wave of nostalgia for that time I was a Factory worker. What did it say about me that my two-year tenure working for Andy Warhol was the time in my New York life when I felt the most innocent? I picked up the old
Interview
from the top of the pile with Michael J. Fox on the cover—the one beneath it was my cover story on Sam Shepard—and leafed through it attempting to discern some of the innocence I had misplaced. “After that interview you left behind a piece of paper with some words on it,” Fox told me that night at the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party all those years later, his words coming back to haunt me once again. “My dog Barnaby found it a few days later between the sofa cushions and I took it from him before he could chew it up,” he’d said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time. It was a litany for a word association game. Every word was sexual. ‘Pussy.’ ‘Dick.’ ‘Cock.’ ‘Fuck’.…” Sam Shepard stared up at me from his own cover. “Everything is sexual to you,” I heard Shepard say once more.