Flashback 2003: Coming clean on Royko, NASA and other tall tales

      This would never run in the newspaper today. Our shrunken news hole means that frivolity is shown the gate. No one wants to indulge a weisenheimer anyway, not with the planet on fire and the United States in the grip of a nationalist madman and his army of quislings and credulous dupes performing their tarantella of naked illegality, epic failure and ceaseless mendacity and self-dealing.

      I enjoyed re-reading this — then again, I'm biased, I wrote it. But maybe you will too.
     The Rick Bragg mentioned in the first paragraph was a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who resigned after it was revealed that a story he presented as being written by himself was actually reported by an uncredited stringer. There seems to be a lot of that kind of thing in the thin-air of the mountaintop. Makes me glad to have spent my career quietly planting my tomatoes in this obscure midwest patch of earth. At least I never felt the need to lie trying keep my job.

     As the New York Times scandal festered, I withheld comment, telling myself there was no need to jump atop such an enormous pile-up. But as the days wore on, and Rick Bragg joined Jayson Blair, I realized this was self-deception — a lie, really, the latest in a career of lying, a sham world built on falsehood. Guilt kept me mute, but no more. Time to come clean, to fling open the doors of deceit and let in the bracing air of truth. All too often I have taken a kernel of fact, then stretched and embellished it to my benefit. Apologies to everyone I misled, but:
     1. Mike Royko was never my "best friend." When I said we used to drink together at the Billy Goat, that was literally true, but he was at the bar with his cronies and I was 10 feet away, alone, sneaking glances in his direction. We never went fishing together in Key Biscayne. While he did in fact once threaten to "break my legs," it was not in a joking, avuncular fashion, as I have hinted, but in a genuine, mean, menacing way that left me skittish for weeks. The Sun-Times regrets the error.
     2. I never served in the U. S. Marines. Any implication that I did is based on a photograph of myself standing in the hatch of an Amphibious Assault Vehicle, grinning like an idiot. My oblique comments about "when I was with the Marines" refer to three days at Camp Pendleton, researching a story. I regret suggesting otherwise, particularly to my sons, whom I plan to eventually inform that I was not a general and did not win World War II.
     3. On that note, I also vow to tell my boys I am not the strongest man in the world, and I regret ever agreeing that I was. Being in the newspaper does not make me "famous." We are not rich.
     Never left Earth
     4. Nor did I walk on the moon. That was another Neil. I was never an astronaut. Whenever I mention "my work with NASA," I am really referring to the summer I spent writing PR for their Cleveland lab. The shoulder patches I have from the various moon missions were purchased in the gift shop there, not given to me by my astronaut buddies. I have never been inside a space shuttle, much less piloted one. I regret any misunderstanding.
     5. While I was indeed in Washington, D.C., this spring, my claims to have "visited George and Laura Bush at the White House" were in error. We did not chat by the fire. What actually happened was I stood on the South Lawn and watched the first family take off in Marine One. The president did not wave and wink at me, in particular, but rather at the group of 50 people of which I was a member. I did, however, wave back, a shy flutter of the hand at shoulder level, and I apologize for that, too.
     6. Speaking of hands, the stiff pinkie finger on my left hand is "an old football injury" only in the sense it was caused by a football thrown, not by Jim McMahon during a casual pickup game, but by Mike Bailey, back when we were both young reporters at the Barrington Courier-Review. The pinkie got bent back and I neglected to wear the brace and it healed wrong. Nor, I should point out, did Walter Payton and I keep in shape by running up sand dunes together. The "and I" in that story was included because of a typographical error. Mea culpa.
     7. I did not attend Richard Roeper's secret wedding to Cameron Diaz in Las Vegas in 1996. Nor did we grow up together in Dolton. When I say he is "my closest friend in the world" I am actually commenting on my paucity of friends and regret implying there is any kind of relationship between us. I did once throw up in his brand new kitchen sink, but that was years ago.
     8. I did not run with the Weathermen during the riots in 1968. At the time I was in second grade and thought hippies were pirates. When I said that I "hung out with Abbie Hoffman, Abe Peck and the Chicago Seed crowd," I was referring to the fact that I took a class from Peck in 1982. That class was at Northwestern, not Oxford.
     9. I never "traded licks" with Dizzy Gillespie. While we did have dinner together, it was in Joliet, not Paris. Any suggestion that he called me "Mister Cool Himself, my main man, hip Neil-daddio" or coaxed me onstage to jam on "Night in Tunisia" is a fiction.
     10. In countless phone conversations, I have referred to myself as "the star Sun-Times columnist" or mentioned "the million readers hanging on my every word." This was a gross overstatement. The artist Saul Steinberg was not my father, nor was Grace Kelly my mother, nor does my family own the Steinberg food store chain in Canada. For making these claims I have suffered and repent. God has forgiven me; why can't you?
     11. The last sentence in the above was lifted verbatim from an old "Bloom County" comic strip.
     12. This column was inspired by a recent New Yorker piece, which I cynically decided to rework. I'm sorry for that as well.
     Sorry for past, future misdeeds
     Space permits me to address only the dozen most egregious lies and exaggerations, but believe me, I apologize for all the others, both in the past and yet to come. Human beings will do almost anything to look better, and journalists — believe it or not — are human beings, for the most part.
     There. So now that that's over, where's my big, fat book deal?
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2003