Shots in the Dark

Supporters of Judge Samuel Alito have turned the tables on Democrats who have criticized Alito’s membership in a conservative, Princeton alumni club: What’s the difference between that and Teddy Kennedy’s being a member of The Owl, an all-male final club, at Harvard?

Hmm….

Actually, it’s a pretty good question. You could argue that Teddy’s membership is actually more incriminating than Alito’s.

Such incidents might make all those ambitious young Harvard men realize that the final clubs might one day come back to haunt them…

And believe me, that’s not something I say very often. But Ms. Dowd has written an eloquent column on the loss of an honest man and the ill-gotten gain of a dishonest one.

She writes so well when she’s not trying to be glib; I wish she’d do it more often.

“She has hit that moment when the future seems overflowing, delirious even, with possibilities—not for fame and fortune, but to do something meaningful.”
—Yevgenia Peretz writing on Lindsay Lohan in the February Vanity Fair

“I just sold coke to…”
—a man who claims he just fed the jones of Lindsay Lohan and Kate Moss, on this Internet site…

The Yale class of 2006 has chosen Anderson Cooper to be its Class Day speaker. This bodes ill for Yale students, not so much because of the choice of speaker, but because of the atrocious grammar used to announce it.

Here’s part of the statement from the Yale Senior Class Council:

His domestic and international journalistic experience will provide unique insight to seniors as they transition out of college. As an alumnus of Yale College, his address will be particularly relevant.

Hmmm. I won’t even mention the dubious usage of the word “unique.” Perhaps certain Yalies need to learn what a misplaced modifier is before they graduate in May…. Because that should read, “As an alumnus of Yale College, he will be particularly relevant.”

A small point, I know. But if you can’t hold Ivy Leaguers to minimum grammatical standards, who can you?

Occasionally journalists do something right: The faculty of the Columbia journalism school voted overwhelmingly not to let a professor accept a trip to Saudi Arabia largely paid for by the kingdom’s state-owned oil company, according to the New York Sun.

The vote over whether to take the trip was a slam-dunk—unanimous, as it should have been.

But not everyone at Columbia was so ethical. The dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, did go on the trip. Anderson subsequently sat on Columbia’s five-member committee abjudicating the matter of alleged anti-Israeli professors in Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department. As the Sun puts it, “The five member committee for the most part cleared the professors, and its report was criticized by some as a whitewash.”

I don’t know whether Anderson’s trip had any influence on her committee work, but it certainly doesn’t look good, and she shouldn’t have taken it.

I’m pretty tough on a lot of journalists on this blog, and sometimes I forget to mention that one of the things I like about journalism is that we journalists at least think about such matters, even if we sometimes drop the ball. (Don’t get me started about travel writers, entertainment writers, and so on.)

In so many facets of American professional life, a trip like this wouldn’t even prompt a raised eyebrow.

I’d be very curious to learn more about junkets in the academic world. Did anyone from Harvard go on this trip, for example? And did it have any connection to the $20 million that Harvard just received from a Saudi prince to pursue Middle Eastern studies?

As we journalists know, there’s a fine line between a donation and a bribe….

As his senior staffers were telling him that he needed to apologize for his women-in-science remarks last February, Larry Summers dug in his heels and sneered, “This is bullshit,” according to Zachary M. Seward in the Crimson.

Seward’s piece is a fascinating tick-tock of the internal deliberations on how to handle the burgeoning controversy over Summers’ indelicate speech.

Summers used the word “bullshit” in various conversations with people both inside and outside of Mass Hall. He also told diners at at least two dinner parties that the episode “has not increased my faith in humanity.”

Seward’s reportage reinforces a report in the New York Observer last year to the effect that a tipsy Summers had told a reporter at an after-party for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that he wasn’t going to be bothered by “whiny professors.”

I’m not surprised that Summers didn’t want to apologize, nor am I surprised by his insults of the faculty and his crude language. I reported both in Harvard Rules (although I got the feeling that some readers found the truth hard to believe). I remember Summers referring to Zayed Yasin, the 2002 commencement speaker, as “the little shit.”

What strikes me is the vast gap between the Larry Summers who likes to gladhand with students at a freshman dance and the (more true?) character who refers to them as “shit” in private, or insults his professors in equally crude ways.

Will the real Larry Summers please stand up?

Lindsay Lohan is “genuinely fun to be with—affectionate, unguarded, mischievous, and a little loopy. …But behind the playfulness there’s a serious and emotional young woman. Though she has fallen many times in her life, she clearly has great reserves of strength….”
—Yevgenia Peretz writing on Lindsay Lohan in the February Vanity Fair

“Scarlet is a bloody cunt.”
Lindsay Lohan writing on Scarlet Johannsen on the ladies’ room wall at Dark Room, a New York City bar

That Lindsay Lohan—she sure is genuinely fun to be with!

Let us all pause a moment to wish my sister Kate a happy birthday. She is—well, I won’t say how old she is today.

I’ll just say that it’s way, way older than me….

Incidentally, the Times story today is headlined, “”Writer Says He Made Up Some Details.” It’s important to note that Frey said no such thing. He said he “embellished,” “changed,” and “toned up.” He never said he invented material—which, as the Smoking Gun showed, he clearly did.

By the way, there’s a fascinating back-and-forth in the article—nice going, reporter Edward Wyatt—on the subject of whether Frey’s actions are acceptable. Writer Gay Talese says they are not; Doubleday publisher Nan Talese, who happens to be both Frey’s publisher and Gay Talese’s wife, says they are.

Here’s Gay: “Nonfiction takes no liberty with the facts, and it should not,” Mr. Talese said. “I think all writers should be held accountable. The trouble with book publishers is that they don’t have the staff or they don’t want to have the staff to ensure the veracity of a writer. You could argue that they had better, or they’re going to have more stories like this one. My wife is going to hate me for this, but that is what I believe.”

Here’s Nan: “Nonfiction is not a single monolithic category as defined by the best-seller list,” she said yesterday when asked to comment on her husband’s remarks. “Memoir is personal recollection. It is not absolute fact. It’s how one remembers what happened. That is different from history and criticism and biography, and they cannot be measured by the same yardstick.”

Nan’s response is weak. To her, “how one remembers what happened” is the relevant standard for inclusion in a memoir. That’s a pretty broad standard. I could remember that, oh, the Holocaust never happened, and write that in a memoir, and according to Nan Talese, that would be a-okay.

Moreover, Frey didn’t just misremember what happened; he invented things that never happened, like a three-month stay in jail for hitting a policeman with a car. That’s not a case of getting the details slightly wrong. That’s a case of making something up to make your story more dramatic. The intention is not to try to remember as best one can; the only possible intention is to mislead.

Good for Gay Talese. He and William Bastone, editor of The Smoking Gun, deserve to be recognized for telling the truth about a con.

So I Tivoed the Larry King interview with James Frey. It was gripping television. For the most part, King put pretty good questions to Frey—you could tell that the fabrications in Frey’s memoir bother King, and at one point he actually said something like, “I wrote a memoir, and I didn’t make anything up.” In the second half of the hour, King did throw Frey a few softballs, and the shtick of bringing Frey’s mother on was pretty craven all around. Could anyone possibly believe her when she said that, even as she sat in the audience of Oprah Winfrey’s show, she didn’t know why she was there?

Frey didn’t have much of a defense of his behavior, it has to be said. He certainly never admitted to making anything up, instead repeatedly referring to the fabrications as being “in dispute” or “the disputed material.” The argument he raised again and again was that he stands by the “essential truth” of the book.

My impression? James Frey is a fundamentally dishonest man, and I would bet my right arm that the book is filled with many more fabrications than just the ones that The Smoking Gun was able to prove.

Throughout the interview, Frey equivocated, fudged, hemmed and hawed, changed the subject, refused to give a direct answer to questions, and attempted to blur the nature of his fictions, suggesting again and again that they were limited to changing names in order to protect the privacy of people mentioned in the book. But his physical mannerisms gave him away: he licked his lips, his eyes darted back and forth, and every time he said something you could tell he really didn’t believe, he prefaced his answer with “ums” and “I means.”

But perhaps it’s best just to let Frey speak for himself. Below, a sampling of the show, with some occasional italics added to denote remarks that struck me as egregious b.s. and some asides from yours truly.

After an introductory report, Larry King asked: “What’s your side, James?”

JF: Um, I mean, my side is that I wrote a memoir. I never expected the book to come under the kind of scrutiny that it has. A memoir—the word literally means my “story.” A memoir is a subjective retelling of events.

LK: But they’re supposed to be factual events.

JF: Yeah, a memoir is in the genre of non-fiction. I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say (unintelligible) to anyone. You know, the book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. That falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.

(RB: According to whom? I missed the panel where they said that seven percent was too much, but five percent, well, that’s okay.)

LK: …why embellish anything?

JF: Um…I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book. I’ve changed things. In certain cases, things were toned up. In certain cases things were toned down…

(RB: “Toned up”? Is that kind of like a liar’s way of saying, “made up”?)

…That names were changed. That identifying characteristics were changed. You know, there’s a great debate about memoir, and about what should be most properly served, the story or some form of journalistic truth. Memoirs don’t generally come under the type of scrutiny that mine has.

(RB: I like that: “some form of journalistic truth”… I’ll have to use that the next time I’m caught fibbing. As in, “What do you want from me? Some form of journalistic truth?”)

LK: People read a memoir expecting it to be the true story….

JF: It’s an individual’s perception of what happened in their own life. This is my recollection of my life.

(RB: Let’s be clear: Frey says he spent three months in jail for hitting a police officer with a car. Didn’t happen. That’s an interesting “recollection.”)

JF: …a lot of the events took place while I was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. You know, I still stand by my book. I still stand by the fact that it’s my story, and that it’s a truthful retelling of the story. …I’ve acknowledged changing things.

LK: Did you tell Oprah that?

JF: Um, I don’t remember specifically what I told Oprah….

LK: …there’s a story around that you originally shopped the book as fiction….

JF: Um, we originally shopped the book as a novel. It was turned down by a number of publishers as a novel or as a non-fiction book. Um, when [Doubleday editor] Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure what they knew what they were going to publish it as. …They thought the best thing to do was to publish it as a memoir.

LK: Why did you shop it as a novel if it wasn’t?

(RB: Good question!)

JF: I mean, I think of the book as working in a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.

LK: But they all said fiction.

JF: Yeah! They did. And at the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t really exist.

(RB: That is too funny.)

LK: (asks whether it’s true that Frey hit a cop with a car.)

JF: …again, we’re dealing with a very subjective memory….

LK: …was [the book] fact-checked?

JF: Um…I don’t know how specifically it was fact-checked. When you’re changing names and changing identities to protect people, the publisher usually considers that good enough. I can’t necessarily speak specifically for what their policies are.

(RB: I can: Frey’s just flat-out lying here. There’s no way he doesn’t know whether his book was fact-checked or not. [Believe me, if it were, he’d remember.] The answer is no. As I’ve previously written on this blog, one of the problems of modern book publishing is that publishers won’t pay for fact-checkers. Some writers, such as myself, pay for their own; I hired fact-checkers for both my books, one of which was a memoir. Of course, as the old saying goes, some stories are too good to check.)

Asked if he would do anything differently, Frey said no, and added, “I take responsibility for my life…. That’s what I’ve always done, and I would be a liar if I didn’t.”

Even generously interpreted, nothing in Frey’s interview with Larry King could be described as “taking responsibility.” The man is, in his own words, a liar, and his book is a con.