What If She’d Gone to the Papers?
“I would have told her to do exactly what she did–go to the proper authorities,” Vernon Jarrett told me. Jarrett’s the former Sun-Times columnist who excoriated Reynolds when he was the darling of the downtown media. “I couldn’t see any publication taking a chance on that sort of innuendo. It would have to be supported by some kind of reportage on legal action.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Chicago’s papers like corruption, but they don’t like sex. Fourteen years ago the Sun-Times ran a series of articles that called into question the integrity of the late John Cardinal Cody by exposing financial favors granted to a lifelong friend named Helen Wilson. She served, I wrote then in the Reader, “as a surrogate for a career of dubious conduct that didn’t happen to fall beyond the law.” The “unspoken subtext” was sexual, yet the paper “didn’t acknowledge that it had even raised the subject of romantic conduct.” The Sun-Times sat on the Cody series for months and went to press when it could obscure its own two years of digging by playing up a federal grand jury investigation.
“Nobody tells the whole truth. Everybody kind of lies,” a reporter told me. “You’d want backup for what she was saying.” Another reporter said, “One reason you don’t see many of the sexual-type stories is you don’t have documentation. . . . If tapes were available–pictures, letters, something in writing–then maybe the press would do something with it.”
Don’t overestimate the press’s appetite for juicy tales. If Heard had knocked on the door the press probably would have responded–whether out of fecklessness, sloth, professionalism, or common sense–by sending her to another door.
Say what? Maybe I’ve lived too long in Chicago, the town that made subterfuge an art. Anyway, the undercover reporting Stuart says SPJ won’t condone hasn’t cost me a minute’s sleep.
