Bill Zehme, master of the celebrity profile, journalism’s ‘bastard stepchild,’

 

Cast of "Ocean's Eleven" (National Portrait Gallery)

     Bill Zehme was your pal, and Frank Sinatra’s.
     Whether you were an unknown Chicago writer just starting out, or a king of late-night television, Zehme would turn his full attention and his Midwestern charm in your direction and make you feel as cool as a Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up, with a twist, at Jilly’s.
     A writer for Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Playboy and other top-shelf magazines back when magazines really mattered, Zehme pierced the shiny veneer of celebrity to capture the flesh-and-blood person within, writing best-selling books on Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman and his idol, Sinatra.

     Zehme, 64, died Sunday at Weiss Memorial Hospital after a long battle with cancer.
     “Bill was first and foremost an incredibly talented writer who had this rare ability to get inside the head and heart of famous people, everyone from Andy Kaufman and Frank Sinatra, very much with my dad,” said Christie Hefner, the daughter of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and former chairwoman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. “He was a personal friend, one of the loveliest and funniest men I ever knew.”
     Zehme was a master of the celebrity profile, a form he looked askance at.
     “I’m really not interested in most people,” he confessed to Ted Allen in Chicago magazine in 1996. “The celebrity profile is the bastard stepchild of journalism, and I’m embarrassed sometimes to be associated with it.”
     He shouldn’t have been.
     “Bill got people to talk to him who wouldn’t talk to anyone else, even members of their own families,” said Bob Kurson, former Sun-Times writer and best-selling author of “Shadow Divers.” “And you only had to join him for a single dinner in a darkened corner of a good steakhouse to understand how that happened — he was genuinely interested in people, even if there was nothing in it for him, especially if there was nothing in it for him.”

To continue reading, click here.

    The photo atop the blog was shot in the Paris catacombs and translates as: "Happy is he who's been able to learn the causes of things, and set aside all fear, and unrelenting fate, and the noise of greedy Acheron under his feet."

Sunday mail bag

     The negative emails that my column used to draw by the dozen every day have dwindled away to practically nothing. I'm not sure why. Maybe newspapers have fallen off the table, culturally. Maybe email has died as a medium of conversation, joining Morse code and the semaphore flag on the shelf of defunct forms of communication. Maybe the haters have finally wandered off, disgusted. Maybe it's just a slow week. Maybe some other thing. 
     My page two update on a trans reader, "There's no downside," drew a number of compliments and just one critical email, two days late. Her opening sentence refers to my lede, where I describe going through the Reader classified looking for story ideas. It isn't that she doesn't have a point, somewhere. It's the tone of aggrievement that I object to, the idea that a slice of pie given to A must necessarily steal some pie from B, C and D.
     I try to carefully compose my replies, subtly delivering a point that in the past might have been conveyed more forcefully. The reader's name was shielded, as a kindness.

Date: March 22, 2023 at 6:50:48 AM CDT
To: Steinberg Neil <nsteinberg@sun-times.com>
Subject: Today’s Article

Read your article in S-T’s today in which you mention seeking news articles to write about. As my Dad always said “it’s right under your nose” as we missed the obvious. Jill Biden recently gave the International Woman’s Award to a male transgender. What a slap in the face to woman of today (and the past) who have accomplished so much on their own. This has nothing to do with male gender or the gay community as they could never walk in our shoes!

Margaret C.
S-T Subscriber

Steinberg, Neil <nsteinberg@suntimes.com>

Dear Ms. C.:

I don't pay much attention to awards and honors, and feel people put too much stock in them. Though that might be sour grapes, as I tend not to win many. As far as slaps in the face of women, I'd say with half the country taking away women's rights to conduct their own reproductive health as they see fit, there are bigger problems than the birth gender of someone Joe Biden hung a ribbon on. Though as a subscriber, you have a right to feel offended by anything you please, and I appreciate your reading, and your letting me know what bothers you. I do agree with you that someone who lived most of life as a male could never have the full female experience. Though I've met more than my share of biological women who supposedly had the full female experience yet seem to have missed out on the sympathy and compassion that the public often associate with being a woman. Thanks for writing.

NS

Works in progress: Frank Sennett

    This stratagem of inviting writer pals to pinch hit Saturdays seems to be working. Part of the fun is seeing what guests do with the opportunity. Always fun and surprising. Novelist Frank Sennett continues that streak today writing about his new thriller (you might recall my column singing its praises last month). I don't think I've ever seen anything written about book launch parties, never mind done so myself, so I enjoyed his perspective (and for the record, he got a good deal from Audible. I think they paid me $1500 for the rights to "Drunkard" for seven years. Which isn't good, but not bad for no extra work and, besides, now that the seven years have passed I'm actually getting royalties).

      Enough preface. Take it away, Frank:

     "It's like the before times!"
     That was the trite though heartfelt thought I expressed to Neil or one of the media luminaries attending his recent book launch at R.J. Grunts. There were servers with trays of miniature milkshakes and savory treats. There was Neil, seeming to relish the moment, chatting briefly with first one guest then another before stopping at a table to inscribe a copy for the latest purchaser. It was beautiful.
     Robert Feder had thrown a similar shindig for me at Petterino's when my Groupon book came out in 2012, an incredible act of kindness and friendship for which I'll always feel both grateful and undeserving.
     Speaking of that book, last year I received an email from the literary agency that sold it to St. Martin's Press and Audible.
     "I’m pleased to share with you a renewal offer for the audio edition of GROUPON’S BIGGEST DEAL EVER from Audible," the email began, promisingly.
     "This is the best offer that we were able to negotiate, and we recommend that you accept the terms of the renewal."
     That best offer? Forgiveness of my "$2397 unearned advance."
     Drinks are on me, I thought as I accepted the renewal. It had not occurred to me that Jeff Bezos might one day send a drone to my door to obtain a partial refund on the bad deal he'd made for my book more than a decade ago. I was relieved to know I would avoid that unpleasant eventuality in exchange for this minor humiliation.
     Some writers dwell on these types of disheartening publishing stories. We all have them. These days, they make me laugh. Mostly.
     A better payoff from my Groupon book experience came thanks to the wonderful editor on the project. He left St. Martin's to start a mystery imprint called Crooked Lane Books, and he told a mutual friend several years ago that if I ever wrote a mystery again, he'd like to see it. (I had published two books in a series about a crime-solving Chicago newspaper reporter with the tiny adult fiction imprint of a giant nonfiction publisher in 2003 and 2004. I wrote them as my creative writing MFA thesis circa 1993 and the manuscripts were literally sitting in my desk drawer when an editor who'd seen some of my magazine feature work called to inquire, "Do you have any novels in your desk drawer?" Why, yes, I replied. I thought you'd never ask.)
     In late 2021, I nailed down a polished draft of a new thriller involving a plot to kill the president, re-creations of infamous assassinations and the infiltration of white supremacist Proud Boys into law enforcement. I contacted my Groupon collaborator. Just as he'd promised our friend, he asked to read the manuscript and soon made an offer, which I gladly accepted. I was assigned to another wonderful project editor, Terri Bischoff, and the marketing team got busy brainstorming a more marketable name to replace my working title, The Secret Assassin. A consensus formed around Shadow State. The novel, first in a planned series featuring former Army Ranger and Secret Service agent Rafe Hendrix, came out in hardcover, e-book and audio Feb. 21.
     Time for a launch party! I knew I wouldn't top Neil's, but he gave me a target to shoot for. I reached out to my friends the Nardini brothers who run Club Lago, the classic Italian joint in River North. We penciled in Monday, Feb. 27 for the big event. Miraculously, more than 100 folks showed up over the course of two and a half hours that evening, including the proprietor of this blog, who recently gave me what will probably remain the best review of my writing career.
     The cadence of the event took me by surprise. At 5:30 p.m., a couple of well-wishers came in and purchased the book. I sat down at the sales table and signed as I chatted. A man who had seen the media coverage mentioning my Montana roots stopped in to buy a copy and ask if by any chance I had ever heard of the name Tom Judge, who was his college roommate at Notre Dame. In fact, I replied, when Judge served as Montana governor, my late father was his assistant, the youngest person in the nation to hold that title at the time. As Steven Wright says, it's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
     After that, the evening became a blur of friendly folks handing me books to inscribe as I stood rooted in one spot for more than two hours. I noticed a couple of friends across the room who ended up leaving before I could say hello because the line was so long. When the room thinned out around 8 pm, I almost fell backwards into the chair. My legs were locked up from standing in one position for so long. I didn't notice the ache until the end.
     It was my "It's a Wonderful Life" moment. Among the guests were friends, acquaintances and colleagues from high school, college and every job I've worked in Chicago, including four former bosses as well as the three partners who run the marketing firm I work at now. And throughout, I met friendly strangers who'd read Neil's review or heard me on Rick Kogan's After Hours show on WGN-AM the day before.
     During a commercial break, Rick took off his headphones and told me he sold 700 books during the 2001 publication party at the House of Blues for Everybody Pays, which he wrote with Maurice Possley,
     Thanks to Neil and several of you, Stephanie Kitchen and her crew at City Lit Books sold 75 copies of Shadow State at Club Lago. So ok, I'm no Kogan or Possley or Steinberg. But that launch party made me feel like (Stephen) King for a day.

‘We nearly broke the system’

 

Photograph for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin

 

    Dr. Jaime Moreno, head of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, was making the rounds Tuesday when he tried to take a quick mid-afternoon break.
     “I haven’t had the chance to sit down yet today,” he said, microwaving a container of beef and vegetables brought from home. “I don’t get a lunch, so I’m going to take my lunch right now.”
     Within minutes. a voice came over the hospital’s public address system: “Code Yellow, Code Yellow, trauma in the emergency room.” A teenager, gunshot wound to the hip. Lunchtime over, Moreno jumped up and hurried to help.
     At the three-year anniversary of the coronavirus shutting down Illinois, the pandemic has ebbed, but Chicago area hospitals are struggling to cope with the vastly altered health care world the plague left behind.   

     “COVID has changed many things,” said Moreno. “We’re still reeling from it.”
     While the public might be trying to forget COVID, that is not a luxury the medical community can indulge in.
     Dr. Ngozi Ezike, who headed up the state COVID response as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health for two years, said while we’re familiar with mass casualty events overwhelming a single hospital or city, COVID is a nationwide mass casualty event — more than a million dead.     ”It was an incredible strain on the system,” she said. “No one living has seen an overwhelming of all hospitals in the entire country at the same time, for a prolonged period of time, literally months at a stretch for each surge. This was unprecedented, and not something any system could fully plan for, prepare for, or endure.”
     “The landscape has changed so completely,” said Kristin Ramsey, senior vice president quality/chief nurse executive at Northwestern Medicine. “Health care providers in all fields are walking away.”
‘Unprecedented’ staff shortage driven by burnout
     Exodus of staff is the No. 1 problem cited by hospital administrators in Chicago and nationwide.
     “A lot of burnout,” said Moreno. Mount Sinai, almost always 10% understaffed, is even lower on “bad days,” with 30%, even 40% fewer personnel on hand than necessary.
     “Unprecedented,” he said. “People are stressed out. A lot of nurses have stepped away, leaving a lot of holes. Not just in my hospital but hospitals around the country.”

To continue reading, click here.

Photograph by Ashlee Rezin

Tie died

  

Portrait of a Man, by Frans Hals (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "Fuck you," I said, or maybe just thought, catching sight of my friend Bill Savage in the lower level hallway at the Evergreen Park Public Library before our program began Wednesday night.
     Not "hello." Not "thanks for coming." Not "good to see you; it's been a while."
     "Fuck you."

     Bill had kindly agreed to be my interlocutor — the guy asking the questions — at a discussion of my book, "Every Goddamn Day." Not to forget the only reason that I still have a book publishing career, of sorts, that I've written three books for the University of Chicago Press, is that 10 years ago Bill thought I might be a good fit. I owe him a lot.
     There's more. We keep up, we grab lunch in Evanston every few months, just to talk about literature and Chicago and the whir of the city we both love.  

     In my defense, there was no malice in my obscene imperative. More like a school days "aww, c'mon" conviviality, almost an affection, a chuckle, and I want you to look at this picture I snapped of Bill and see if the reason for my remark is as obvious as I think it is. Stop reading and look at the picture.
     What was I cursing at him about?     

     It's obvious, right? The tie. Bill wore a necktie. I wore a plaid L.L. Bean teal and red work shirt under a green REI fleece. Naturally, effortlessly, without consideration, almost without thought. I used to dress up more, but I remember my wife saying, "You're the writer; you can wear jeans."

     But there is an insecurity that underlies fashion. A sheeplike conformity. Why do you think men always tend to dress alike, to wear the same thing? There is an assumption that the other guy is right, knows better, is richer, smarter, and worthy of emulation.

     Or maybe that's my own insecurity talking. Maybe most people don't give a damn.

     I think the next thing I said was, "You win!" — or maybe "I lose" — referring to the unspoken competition of men being dressed for an occasion. I'd been blindsided. I don't believe I've ever seen Bill in a tie before, and the thought of wearing a tie would have never crossed my mind. It was almost unfair of him, to commence this contest without warning.
     When I got closer, I could see that not only was it a tie, it was a cool "Clout" tie.
    "Where did you get that?" I asked.
     "Ebay," he said, observing that the little skyline before "CLOUT" had the added graphic benefit of looking like an extended middle finger. 

    Honesty, my first inclination was to carry the fashion theme out to the program — to shunt aside the topic, my book "Every Goddamn Day," point out our differing approach to neckwear and survey the audience about who is in the right here. Me, dressed in the normal, acceptable, comfortable, ready-to-sprawl-on-the-couch, hike-a-mountain, or speak-to-an-audience ensemble of jeans and woodsy wear, or Bill and his friggin' cravat? We could spend the entire hour talking about it. I think I've worn a necktie once in public in the last three years — at a lunch featuring the book at the high hat Chicago Club. A tie, a blue blazer, khakis (good call; most men wore similar, I fit right in). 

    But that seemed unwise and, besides, Bill was in charge of the program, and he started us off and kept us on topic and the conversation lively and interesting. People seemed genuinely pleased, and I sold 21 books. To my disappointment, the tie was never mentioned.
     I suppose the tie was a sort of compliment. I am after all a Chicago author — one whose work is part of the curriculum he teaches. So maybe Bill wanted to give the moment a sense of gravitas and dressed the part. I'm lucky he didn't wear a black robe and mortarboard, purple mantle, and carry a scroll. Unless the necktie was some kind of mockery. I could ask him. But honestly, it might be better not to know the truth.

 

‘There’s no downside’

     “Sometimes I look up and wonder, ‘What the hell happened?’” says John, sliding into a booth at Dapper’s East, a classic family-style restaurant on West Addison.
     We order coffee, no food. John doesn’t want lunch, which strikes me as unusual.
     “Do you not eat, as a practice?” I venture.
     No, by necessity. Stomach cancer. Fifteen years ago.
     “They took the whole thing out,” says John, who doesn’t want his last name used. “I beat the odds, but lost my appetite at some point.”
     We last saw each other in 1992. I had been browsing the classifieds in the Reader, looking for story ideas, and noticed an ad for the store he owned on Elston Avenue, selling women’s clothing in large sizes to men.
     “Now there’s a business you just don’t see in the paper much,” I thought, and headed over and met John, when he dressed as a man, and Karen, when she dressed as a woman.
    Focusing just on the One to One Boutique seemed to miss the larger story. So I broadened my scope, attending a dance held by the Chicago Gender Society, also visiting a safe house — an empty apartment used to stash clothing and wigs and makeup away from prying eyes.
     The store is long gone. When did that happen?
     “The Yankees were just winning their first series in a long time” — says John, a baseball fan. “So it must have been ’96.”
     The resultant story was written without any snickering or judgment: just a group of ordinary people who are unusual in a certain way, trying to comprehend what motivates them. It’s an approach I wish more Americans would embrace: to at least entertain the possibility that people different from themselves can be understood instead of simply condemned.
     Cut to last fall, and a letter from a reader about the possibility of Texas secession. At the end, he mentions, “We met about 30 years ago. I’m the person on Elston ...”
     This seemed an opportunity to better understand the connection, if any, between men who dress as women — called “transvestites” 30 years ago — and another, possibly related, group much in the news lately: trans men and women.
     Even then, there were two distinct categories: transvestites, who were straight men, for the most part, dressing as women, and transsexuals, men who defined themselves as women, or women who defined themselves as men, and sometimes transitioned through hormones and surgery.
     We begin at the beginning.
     “My dirty dark secret is, I’m from Mount Greenwood,” says John. “I did not fit in well there.”

     I'll bet....

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1993: `Crazy' Commuters Scare Road Crews

     The arrival of the spring equinox and construction on the Kennedy expressway arrived simultaneously yesterday evening, and I can only assume the latter was timed to mock the former. Unlike spring, which in three months will yield to summer, the Kennedy congestion mess will continue on for three years, and if that seems an impossibly long time, consider this: I was writing about this the last time they tore up the Kennedy. The article below ran in the Sun-Times exactly 30 years ago tomorrow. I can't imagine either paper will, as I did,  buttonhole construction workers as they work on the highway and quiz them. But if they did, I wouldn't expect the construction perspective to have changed much. Some things are eternal.

     Who are these people, anyway, doing this to us?
     Scrambling over our besieged, vital Kennedy Expressway, with their orange vests, spanner wrenches, work boots, bandannas and heavy machinery. Raising dust. Committing clatter. Gazing at us as we inch miserably by, inscrutable behind their Ray Bans, welder's goggles and safety glasses.
     Meet Fred Williams.

     Williams, 48, is a foreman at Midwest Fence Corp. He and his crew will be working the Kennedy all summer. They are ironworkers, installing guardrails.
     Williams lives in Country Club Hills with his wife and three kids. When he is driving with his family, he sometimes shows off sections of the expressway he has worked on.
     "I'll point to something and say, `I did that,' " said Williams, whose son Theis, 13, is suitably impressed. "He'd love to get into this line of work."
     The Midwest Fence crew's current project underscores an opinion held by almost everybody working on the Kennedy. The crew is installing a guardrail along the Chicago Avenue overpass so that cars will not damage the bridge supports should they veer out of control and crash.
     The opinion is this: Commuters are insane.
     "The Kennedy is the worst for drivers — these guys are crazy," said Dorie Hodal, pausing from her work with the crew. "You never know what may happen; some crazy might run over you. You have to be alert all the time."
     "It's scary, scary, scary," Olga Alvarez shouted. She struggles to hold her orange "SLOW/STOP" sign and orange flag against the hurricane blast of a semi-trailer truck. "Especially the semis. They go fast, blow me and my stop sign away."
     "This morning, three cars missed the exit and cut through the barricades and cut across (the construction area)," said Refujio Puente. "We always have to watch out."
     At the peak of activity this summer, about 400 workers will labor over the expressway.
     Much of their complex feelings about the traffic can be expressed in two words: slow down.

     "If motorists would just obey speed limits and watch for signs, there would be less accidents," said Jim Senerchia, raising a huge orange sign with three curving arrows.
     Senerchia worries that drivers think some sort of malice motivates the construction workers.
     "Drivers act like we're out to get them, like the reason we're here is to slow things down and cause a mess," he said. "We're just trying to fix the road."
     Not everybody thinks the Kennedy is a special case. To John Panieri, operating a Gradall, an all-purpose piece of heavy equipment with a telescoping arm, the Kennedy is no better or worse than any other highway job.
     "It's always like this," he said. "All expressways are the same. It's just the nature of it."
     Rick Andryske, of Directions Metropolitan, is laying down temporary pavement markers - using a thick white paint-like substance, made of thermo-plastic with shiny glass beads.
     "This job has a lot more hectic time frame," he said, comparing the Kennedy to other projects. The scariest thing that ever happened to him in three years of working on the Kennedy was "mountains of ice breaking off from the bottom of a truck and sliding toward me, knocking me into traffic." 
     But you can't worry about accidents, only watch out for them.
     "It's dangerous, but you don't think about it," he said. "You have a job to do."
     But there are good things, too.
     "You do get a few people who know you beeping the horn and saying hello," said Raymond Dorgam, 47, also of Directions.
     If appeals to safety do not get motorists to slow down, another consideration might: heavy, fast traffic delays the work. Without a gap between cars, trucks cannot scoot onto the roadway and, if traffic is crawling, construction equipment crawls, too.
     "Our trucks get stuck in traffic," said a Palumbo Brothers construction foreman. "The first two days, when traffic was light, we nearly got two days of work done in one. Tell people: If they want this done faster, find an alternate route."

              — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 22, 1993