Paris: A Love Story (7 page)

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other . . . But this is how Paris was in the early days . . .

—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

Ten years later, I am back in Paris. For ten years, school, graduate school, and then work—first in radio, then in local television—had intervened. I had briefly been married to a fellow graduate student at George Washington University, with whom I traveled to Asia. But I was much too young, too immature, and burning with dreams of an adventuresome life and career, to sustain such an early marriage. We divorced amicably a few years later. Inspired by the example of the two young reporters whose fearless enterprise brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency, I too became an investigative reporter, working at a local TV station, WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. My beat was the sometimes dangerous intersection of labor and politics. I received death threats and had a warning bullet hole in my red Toyota. But I was young and felt immortal.

•   •   •

For a while, I was the only Philadelphia reporter covering a particularly violent union of roofers, and, as a result, had a request from the legendary
60 Minutes
reporter Mike Wallace for an interview. “Go ahead, Kati,” my boss said with a shrug, “but I’ll have to take you off the labor beat. Wallace will
trap you into saying something compromising. That’s what he does.” After a sleepless night with my ego dueling with my love of the hard-fought-for beat, I declined the
60 Minutes
interview. Long after I had left local television and moved to New York, Wallace would greet me with “So how is the only woman in America ever to turn me down?”

I worked hard to get the network’s attention. I won a George Foster Peabody Award for a special report on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic trip to China—the first cultural exchange between the two hostile powers. But my triumph was marred by an act that did not yet have a name. The term
sexual harassment
would not be coined until the late seventies. After the New York award ceremonies, instead of heading to Penn Station for the train back to Philadelphia, my boss directed the car to the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue, where he had reserved a room for the two of us. It seems incredible now, but in the mid-seventies, though we had the Pill, women were still an exotic and precarious presence in the workplace. This was especially so in the sexist, male province of newsrooms. Terrified of losing my job, I spent the next few hours talking—fast and furiously. Like Scheherazade, I spun amusing stories to divert him. Sometime in the early hours he fell asleep, and I crept out and rushed to catch the train back to Philadelphia. I did not think I would ever get another job in television if I said anything—so I didn’t. I waited until the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 to go public with my own story of sexual harassment, in an article I wrote for
Newsweek.

All the while, I dreamed of the life of the foreign correspondent.
The dream of Paris reached back to childhood, and the abrupt end of my student days, which had literally gone up in smoke a decade earlier. In the intervening years, I continued to gobble up paperbacks of Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, and if a French bistro opened in Washington or Philadelphia, I was among the first to book a table. My personal anthem continued to be the Rimbaud poem I had memorized while biking in the Loire valley.

•   •   •

In late 1977, I finally reached the Mount Everest of broadcast journalism. ABC News offered me a job as foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the West German capital, Bonn. I would be living close enough to Paris for it to be a part of my life again.

Before leaving, I went to say good-bye to my parents in Washington. I remember chatting in the kitchen with my mother when Papa poked his head in. “Come, Kati,” he said, pulling me toward our den. “Watch this reporter on ABC. He has all the qualities of a great broadcaster: a sense of place, a sense of history, and he speaks well, and he is very handsome. Watch, Kati, and learn from Peter Jennings.” I also remember my mother, somewhat later, shaking her head in a way that was almost resigned and, in her wonderful Hungarian-accented English, saying, “I do not think you and he will be
indifferent
to each other.”

•   •   •

It is January 1978, my first week as foreign correspondent. En route to assume my post in Bonn, I am spending some weeks in
London, learning the ropes of satellite feeds and network operations in ABC’s largest overseas bureau. Germany, the front line in the Cold War, was a big story. A breaking story was unfolding there, which made it an even more urgent assignment. A new and violent movement had sprung up in Western Europe: domestic terrorism. Homegrown discontents lashed out against powerful symbols of the postwar German “economic miracle.” The Red Army Faction, which had its Italian counterpart, the Red Brigades, gangs of cold-blooded youths, raged against their “bourgeois” elders and set out to rebuff their parents’ burdensome Nazi/fascist legacies. Between 1970 and the time I took up my post in January 1978, the Red Army Faction had murdered twenty-eight soldiers, policemen, and corporate leaders: 1977 was their bloodiest year. They kidnapped and executed the CEO of Daimler-Benz, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, before shooting the West German attorney general and soon the president of the Dresdner Bank.

This murderous rampage had led ABC to offer me the German post. I had learned German as a child and had a record as a fearless reporter. Neither the network nor its new hire anticipated that I would fall in love before I even reached my assignment.

I watched the story unfold from London with growing impatience. The image of the glamorous, brave foreign correspondent shimmered in front of me. But the news business was a more leisurely affair in those days. First I had to earn my stripes at ABC’s London bureau, a warren of offices on staid Carburton Street. I was duty correspondent in the quiet bureau, recording voiceovers of the war in the Ogaden region
of Somalia, an oil spill off the Normandy coast, and the usual troubles in the Holy Land, stories that never went away but did not rate a human presence on the scene. “Wallpaper,” in network parlance.

•   •   •

As my first weekend as foreign correspondent approached, Paris—so close—beckoned. From my glass cubicle in the largely empty newsroom, I phoned my sister Juli, living in Paris. “I could get in by late Friday,” I told her. “I’m already sick of hotel life,” I said, longing for family and the domesticity of Juli’s Paris home and new baby.

“And just who do you think is going to cover for you here?” a disembodied voice, passing by my office’s open door, growled. “Me?”

“Who is that?” my sister asked. “Sounds rude.” Oh, that’s Peter Jennings, I answered. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with him. See you Friday.

Hanging up, I marched down the hall to the senior foreign correspondent’s spacious corner office. Crammed with tribal and war mementos, a colorful kilim on the floor, and a Syrian pearl-inlaid table piled high with books on the Middle East and Africa, it all reminded me I was now in the lair of the man universally known as PJ, or, more derisively, Peter of Arabia. Famous and improbably good-looking. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Kati, the new girl. En route to take up my post in Germany. As bureau chief,” I said with emphasis.

“I know exactly who you are,” Peter answered, barely looking up, “and I also know there are two correspondents in the
bureau at the moment. You and me. You are the weekend duty correspondent. Which means if anything breaks, you are on it. Did you think I was going to cover for you while you stroll around Paris?” he said, in one clipped Anglo-Canadian breath. I was reeling. He was a legend. I was the newest and youngest and probably the greenest foreign correspondent on the planet. I mumbled something about how quiet the world seemed and how I hadn’t seen my sister in so long and . . . “Okay, well, go ahead,” he shrugged. He was almost horizontal in his chair, with his feet propped up on the vast desk. I noticed he was wearing Hush Puppies. Not Gucci loafers. I found this endearing.

“Don’t blame me if something breaks,” he said, sitting up suddenly and reaching for the phone. My time was up. He was soon chatting to someone he called “Squire.” I soon learned that all men were “Squire” and all women “Darling” in Peter’s vocabulary. What a total jerk, I mumbled on the way back to my microscopic glass cage. And went off to Paris.

In the taxi heading to my sister’s place on rue ChardonLagache, in the sixteenth arrondissement, I could hardly believe my good fortune. I was back—and not as a tourist but as a bureau chief for ABC News. Paris preened for me on this crisp winter day. It was heaven to breathe that pungent air—already tinged with the smell of hot chestnuts—and bliss to descend with my sister and her baby into the familiar Métro, its map still engraved in my memory like a poem. We tore by those stations named for historic battles—Solférino, Austerlitz, Stalingrad (but not Waterloo!)—that always unleashed my imagination. At the outdoor market in Passy, Juli and I shopped for
cheese and fruits, before moving on to the splendors of the charcuterie. Pushing Mathieu’s stroller, I began to relax for the first time since I arrived in London to begin my new life. Paris was mine again.

•   •   •

At my sister’s place, unloading our string shopping bags in her kitchen, the telephone rang. It was Bill Milldyke, the London bureau manager. “Kati, there’s been an IRA attack in Belfast.” For just a second, I couldn’t remember where Belfast was. “You’ve got to get there, ASAP,” he went on. “It’s a dog show. People and dogs injured. You’ll make the evening news. Best you fly to Dublin. Then make your way to Belfast from there.” He sounded like he was speaking to an actual foreign correspondent for whom getting from Paris to Dublin, and thence to Belfast, was like taking the D.C.–New York shuttle. “Okay, Bill. I’ll upcome from there, when I get in,” I said, recalling that everybody at the network was always “upcoming” from someplace.

With my sister’s help, I caught a plane to Dublin that afternoon. It was dark when I hauled my bag toward the car rental place for my onward journey into Northern Ireland and the war zone. A large, smiling man intercepted me with a hearty “You must be Kati, if I’m not mistaken?” His name was Johnny and he was the local Irish “fixer,” one of the network’s unsung heroes who made the wheels go around for ignorant arrivals from New York like me. “Peter called me and told me to meet you here. I’ll try to make things easy for you. Let’s go and get you to Belfast without getting either of us killed on the road.” During that dark and anxious journey across No Man’s Land,
Johnny spoke with warmth about Peter. “One of the great reporters,” he said. “And a good man, too.”

I checked into Belfast’s fortresslike Hotel Europa. (“Now, miss, when the bombs fall, you follow these steps down to the cellar,” the bellman explained, taking my suitcase.) Waiting for me in the lobby was a tall, elegant man and his much shorter partner. “I’m Nicholas,” the tall man said with a faint, non-Irish accent. It turned out he was a Russian aristocrat and a legendary cameraman in the field. “This is Didi, your soundman,” he said, pointing toward a balding man who flashed a tobacco-stained smile my way. Didi was German and lit up his next cigarette while the one he was working on was still going. “Peter called me,” Nicholas said as we hopped in his van. “Not to vorry. Ve shoot beautiful pictures. You make big story. I make you star.”

And so we did. On a weekend news show when not much was going on at home, a dog show in Belfast, with more canine than human loss of life, got more time than I deserved. Thanks to Johnny and Nicholas and Didi we navigated Belfast’s No Man’s Land. I interviewed masked gunmen I would later meet without their masks, in suits and ties, at the Council on Foreign Relations.

I returned to London exhilarated. I had passed my first test. Marching into Peter’s corner office with hand extended, I thanked him. “That’s okay,” he said. “Let’s start again.” He asked me if I liked Gilbert and Sullivan. I lied and said, “Sure. But here is the problem. British Airways lost my bag in Belfast. I have only the clothes on my back. The rest I had already shipped to Germany.” Peter seemed to have solutions for any problem a foreign correspondent might encounter. “Tell Milldyke you
need an advance. Then go to Harrods. Buy yourself a couple of nice things. You’ll need some tweeds, soft wool things. It gets cold here.” I could feel him quickly and critically appraising my very untweedy American outfit. “You’d look good in a kilt, too.” So began my makeover. Later, I wondered if he had something to do with British Air losing my bag.

Wearing my new heather gray suit (with a skirt, as I had noticed Peter noticing my legs), I waited for him to finish the live evening newscast. Off we went to Gilbert and Sullivan. Only it turned out he had picked the wrong night and instead of
H.M.S. Pinafore,
we were suddenly watching a modern dance company from Marseilles. Not knowing each other’s taste, we sat quietly through the first act. At intermission we both admitted a total lack of interest in the performance. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I’ll take you to my favorite place for dinner.” It was Bentley’s on Swallow Street, off Regent Street. We ate oysters and drank Montrachet and Bentley’s became our place. I think we were in love before the check arrived. He walked me home to the Hotel Montblanc near Marble Arch. He kissed me good night—a chaste kiss on the cheek. The next night we returned to Bentley’s (Peter was a creature of habit) and after a few glasses of wine, he said we would produce beautiful and smart children together. This wild notion—on our second evening together—carried a serious undercurrent, which we both understood.

And so began a passionate and tormented love story that lasted fifteen years. Those children we talked about are now grown and wiser than their elders, when they joked about having them, during their second dinner at Bentley’s.

The seventies were a dispirited age, an unheroic time. I looked back on the thrilling sixties and the Age of Aquarius as a dim memory of discovery, of great music, of first love, and of Paris. Now East and West, Washington and Moscow, were frozen in a sullen state of neither war nor peace, which we assumed would be permanent. Gray, geriatric leaders in the Kremlin faced an untried and uncharismatic president in the White House. I was assigned to cover the front line of the same war whose most treacherous face I had witnessed as a little girl in Budapest.