Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

As part of Cleveland Magazine's 30th anniversary celebration, the editors have chosen 52 of their favorite stories from the magazine's archives, and wish to share them with you.

A new story will appear every week at Clevelandmagazine.com. It might be controversial, comical, nostalgic or nonplussing. But it will be Cleveland.

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From Cleveland Magazine, December 1977

I HEAR ... that inside each of us lives a loathesome creature who just loves to roll in dirt. A Hieronymus Bosch abomination: beady eyes, snarling lips, bile-green complexion. And very large ears. The little devil loves everything that is juicy and spicy, salty and forbidden. It lives on gossip - devouring People magazine with a glance, furtively wolfing down the National Enquirer at supermarket checkouts (F.Y.I., more than 50,000 copies of these two publications are sold in Greater Cleveland -every week). A fearsome beast, to be sure. It is even said to admire Earl Butz and Larry Flynt.

I HEAR ... the creature also loves to spread secrets. During .World War Two it provoked the warning, "Loose lips sink ships." More recently, consider the Wayne Hays affair: If the evil being within 'his blonde-haired Congressional perquisite had not blabbed to a reporter on a stalled commuter train one day, poor Wayne's armada would still be afloat. Of course, the beasts in the rest of us greedily gobbled up all the sordid details. Gar-

bage-can appetites they have - anything and everything goes down.

Ah, but the creature has favorites. Hollywood and Capitol Hill, are tasty, but ... to coin a phrase ... there's no place like home. Above all things, down-home fare is divine.

In the New Yorks and L.A.s, no problem. Dirt fairly clings to the tinsel and glitter. Here in Cleveland, well, it has always been a bit tougher. We've got plenty of soot and grime, but tinsel is reserved for Christmas trees and glitter for searchlighted gas station openings. Not that we lack our own cache of rumor, innuendo and slurs; just that we keep them mostly word of mouth, whispers among small circles of friends. Heavy-duty beast gratifica. tion requires shouts and alarums, town criers of wicked news. It needs ink and newsprint and a journalistic imperative: Let the beasts be fed.

Enter the gossip columnists. They feed us all. Dirt. Sin. Scandal. In High Places. Among the Grand Folks. It feels so good. Our lives of quiet desperation are made to seem a little less dreary, as we revel in the beautiful. Cheap thrills, perhaps, but luckily both The Plain Dealer and Press provide daily space for this purpose. The monster must be sated.

But the truth is that here, too, we in Cleveland get the short end of the stick. Beastwise, that is. Even cheap thrills are hard to come by, since the practitioners of the dark art of gossip reporting on our daily news, papers rarely practice their art very darkly. In sum, they write pretty tame stuff. Newsy, breezy, amusing, name-dropping stuff, but there must be a lot of stunted beast growth for lack of local delicacies in their diet. Rarely is there truly delicious gossip in our daily newspapers.

The resident PD gossip these days is Mary Strassmeyer, who has labored at the morning newspaper since 1960; for 11 of those years she was a sometimes-crusty society editor ("A great put-down artist," complains a publicist who moves easily in rarefied atmospheres, "she drove a lot of society types into the forest.") Now she writes the sometimes-crusty weekday column which is called "Today." Most of the PR men in town, who dearly love to plant clients' names in gossip columns, have yet to figure her out. ("I can't make heads or tails of Mary's column," says one. "She gives ungodly space to the strangest things, and she's still hung up on names that have Palm Beach connections.") As for Mary, she insists her formula is simple as can be - she wants a story with a twist, an 0. Henry ending, and doesn't give a damn if the story is high society or comes from her Ward 9 neighbors along Broadview Road.

"One of my best spies is a person I went to grade school with," she confides. Hathaway Brown? Nope. Our Lady of Good Counsel on Pearl Road.

The afternoon competition boasts not one, but two professional gossips. Weekdays for the past five years have belonged to Bill Dvorak, a nice man who started full-time at the Press in 1933. After years in the sports department, the city desk, rewrite bank and writing a weekly .dining out" column, he began the gossip column which bears his name. His predecessor as chief gossip was the almost legendary Milt Widder, who, even now in retirement, is usually the first name mentioned when the subject of Cleveland gossips is raised. That's a tough act to follow, but in one respect, at least, Dvorak comes close to matching the Widder standard - names, names, names. "I use more names in my column than anybody else does," he says with some pride. "Without making it a telephone book."

The exalted Widder, good as he was, had two deep throats he counted on regularly, Dvorak gently reminds you - long-time Press politics writer Dick Maher (now deceased) and, yes, former Editor Louie Seltzer. Both wore 24-hour antennae. In contrast, Dvorak swears that current Editor Tom Boardman, a different sort from Louie, has never given him a single item. And today's politics writer, Brent Larkin? He is cited as a prime source by Dvorak's in-house competition, Associate Editor Herb Kamm. In an unusual show of pique, Bill almost growls, "If Kamm tells you he gives me items he can't use ... he doesn't."

Kamm makes no such assertion, but there is little question that, of the town's three gossip writers, he is in the modt "enviable position," as Mary Strassmeyer puts it. His daily duties at the Press include. riding herd on the paper's editorial page, which not only puts him in frequent contact with news makers in various arenas, but also makes him a guy with some clout, someone it would not hurt to leak an interesting tidbit to. He is well plugged in. And "Herb Hears," his column which,has run page one on Saturdays for nearly a year now, reflects that fact. It is loaded with items about prominent downtown ' businessmen and politicos and downtown rumors. Kamm, seemingly more than his rivals, loves a good rumor.

Herb takes a good deal of pride in his 43 years in the news business, which began when he was 17 years old in the . sports department of a newspaper in Asbury Park, New Jersey (where he was also working the other side of the street, as a $5per-game play-by-play radio broadcaster for local high school games, a, dual media role he continues today were spent in the Big Apple, a fact you will learn in any conversation with Kamm of more than a few minutes' duration.

Among other things, he credits the years in New York with honing a newsman's instinct ("You and I are reporters, and that's what you have to be to write a good gossip col. umn"), which gives him a scent for when "an item might be breaking," when to take', a flyer on a . rumor when your guts tell you it is true but it can't be confirmed.

Need it be noted, however, that there are rumors and there are rumors? Like his competitors, Kamm shies from the personal and - perish the thought - the nasty, Back in January as the column was getting off the ground, coincidentally, Doonesbury on the Press comics page was banishing its Rick Red. fern, ace political reporter, to Peo ple's "Chatter" section (Rick: "We agreed I wouldn't have to cover Marisa Berenson"); Herb was reporting the rumor that Stouffer's would not be involved in the deal for the Sheraton on Public Square. He missed on that one, but it was becoming clear that buildings more than Berensons were the rumors he would traffic in.

Yet Kamm has occasionally dip ped a toe into the murkier waters of the gossip mill stream. Reporting gleefully, for instance, that PD Publisher and Editor Tom Vail stunned an Aurora man by writing out a $62,000 check as total payment for a home for "his caretaker." Not quite as juicy as the Washington Star's column, "Ear," which chronicles the every move of the O.P.'s (Other Paper's) Fun Couple (Post Ar-

Executive Editor Ben adlee and reporter Sally Quinn), but not bad That particular item, says Kamm, resulted from a tip from Burt Graeff, his paper's basketball writer af a chance meeting at the Col. iseum; the Aurora man was Graeff s neighbor.

Kamm recalls his reaction to Graeff s tip as: "Wow!" He adds, "Jesus, I was salivating over that one."

Surely the most scintillating piece of Kamm gossip, though, hit print last February: "I HEAR ... Cleveland society is agog (and agape) over the illustrated ad placed in the Personals column of Cleveland Magazine by Patricia (Modi) Luke, in which the 'beautiful, voluptuous' ex-wife of lawyer Randall Luke advertised for a new living partner ...."

True, Mrs. Luke placed the ad, but her name was not contained in it. The last thing she expected was to find her photo and identity displayed prominently on page one of the Press.

Kamm remembers that item fondly as one of his best; particularly because it had "all the elements": a society lady, sexiness, the gossip value of revealing who the anonymous but intriguing ad-taker was. Herb also tells you that the daring Mrs. Luke was a hell of a good sport about it all.

The lady herself has a differing view. Her only act of gentlewomanly 'forbearance, she says pointedly, was in not suing. In fact, even months later, she can quickly become worked up about Herb Kamm. .

As it turned out, no ogre showed up. Her phone rang off the hook, though. A friend recorded a message to callers on her answering machine, that all calls were being monitored by the police. On an hour of tape-recorded calls, she claims that only her mother did not hang up at the tone.

Yup, Modi Luke is still steamed at Herb. "No one likes him," she says with the chilling finality of a shroud being laid over a corpse.

' So that's what happened when Kamm tried to toss the beasts a modest crumb. It goes a long way toward explaining why gossip reporting here is a pale imitation of, say, San Francisco, where veteran gossip Herb Caen of the Chronicle told another reporter recently: "Gossip should have some scandal to it. It's got to be a little nasty. A little bit of going for the jugular. Otherwise, what the hell's the point of it?"

Kamm,by way of contrast, states: What kind of stuff won't I touch? The bottom line is, is it worth using? How many people are going to get hurt or embarrassed? ... Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I'm not on the prowl for deeply personal items. I have the feeling that people are more interested in things which have general appeal - like, is Ralph Perk going to back Edward Feighan for mayor?"

In fact, Herb does not like to think of himself as a professional gossip. The column, he says, is only a fun sideline for him, a breather from his primary duties at the newspaper. He continues: "I guess what I'm saying is that I'm page-one oriented. I don't think of myself as writing titillating stuff as much as writing interesting stuff. The Walter Winchell era is gone. It went with Winchell."

Bill Dvorak echoes those sentiments. "I don't want to be harmful to anybody if I can help it," he says. "I want to write about things that are interesting, that have a little humor. It's a gossip column, but it could be more gossipy. I don't very often write about divorces or who's sleeping with whom." That even overstates the case. If Dvorak ever actually wrote about illicit sleeping arrangements, you would hear the thud of startled jaws dropping as far away as Waite Hill; he is simply not the guy to delve into the salacious stuff. Even divorces, by Bill's own estimate, only find their way into his column two or three times a year.

He tells about one of those infrequent - occasions. A recent item briefly stated that Fisher Foods executive John Fazio and his wife were splitting up. Dvorak relates a lengthy tale about hearing the rumor weeks earlier, but mistakenly thinking it concerned another of the Fazios; about trying to check out the story with the Fisher PR man, former Press reporter Sam Giamo; about how Giamo said he- was all wrong, neglecting to point him toward the real Fazio involved.

garies of his job. Then, incredibly, the Press' own gossip asks me not to write about the Fazios or Giamo.That's Dvorak. The couple is still together. He does not make waves.

Except on those extraordinary occasions when provoked. Really provoked. Like the time earlier this year when he ran a harmless item noting that WHK Radio personality Gary Dee had moved to Bratenahl. The volatile Mr. Dee had railed for years against "lily-livered suburbanites" who flee the city each day at 5 p.m.; now he was moving out of Cleveland, seeking refuge himself, except that he refused to tell his listeners where. After the item appeared Dee went crazy. He called Dvorak an egg-sucking dog. He called his newspaper The Afternoon Abortion.

"When he came at me, I decided to let him have it," recalls Dvorak with relish. He retaliated the next day by printing Dee's exact street address.

"Then he really came at me,10 Dvorak continues. "He carried on all morning, saying he was going to have his listeners picket the Press, telling them to call me up to protest. I really got a kick out of it." (Incidentally, Dvorak says he received no more than a dozen calls, and no picketers ever materialized.)

Gary Dee is good copy, but would Hedda or Louella or even Earl Wilson bother to write about a radio deejay's new address? Why should they, with their worlds peopled by the biggest names in show biz, sports, you name it. Or, as. the PD's Mary Strassmeyer laments, "How I wish we had a Cher and a Gregg Allman here!" In other words, the real problem with Cleveland gossip reporting, Strassmeyer proclaims, is "a dearth of notables doing wicked things."

She goes on: "If someone is having an affair in Cleveland, it's a very quiet thing - unlike New York or Hollywood, where an affair is a chance for fresh publicity." Besides, she believes affairs are hot column items only when at least one person involved is already a celebrity. Again, our dreaded Celebrity Gap. "Name a Cleveland jet-setter," she challenges. "We only have three - Lorin and Israela Maazel and Cyrus Eaton - and there's only so much you can write about them."

If it sounds as though she is talking herself out of a job, not so. "There's a place for the column in Cleveland," she avers. "People like to read about what others are doing minimal though that may be. That's another problem with Cleveland. People aren't doing very interesting things."

Those who are, furthermore, often do not want the glare of publicity. A gossip column can be a lightning bolt of sorts - striking swiftly, unexpectedly and with too much white heat to ignore. "The results of agossip columnist's cleverness," as local PR man puts it, "are seen within 24 hours. A gossip column can have downtown Cleveland talking tomorrow." Yet an area socialite (who begged for anonymity) notes that an East Side hostess was "furious" recently when mention of one of her soirees made it into Strassmeyer's column. The party had been "fabulous" - so fabulous that guards were posted to keep out curious reporters and photographers. It was not the publicity per se that angered the hostess, though. She feared that, because of it, the IRS might decide to take a closer look at her financial affairs. According to our socialite source, the specter of government ac. countants with sharp pencils is only one reason for the old, monied families' paranoia about media at. tention. Compared to New York where the rich can hide behind apartment doormen, locked build. ing entrances and the facelessness of Manhattan life, the wealthy here feel extremely exposed; fears of robberies and kidnappings, apparently, are intense. Then, too, the upper class in Cleveland is still a fairly conservative bunch compared to more brightly lit centers of high society.

"A few of the new money people like publicity, but the old rooted money does not," says Strassmeyer. "They still love to quote the old saw about the lady who only has her name in print on three occasions - her birth, marriage and death." Or, as the socialite explains patiently: "If you are Society - with a large S- you don't need someone running around with your pictures. The phone calls will come."

So they will. However, that leaves the gossip columnist shut out in the cold, unless spies can be found who are admitted into the inner sanctum. Each of our trio of newspaper gossips has a private collec. tion of such undercover agents whose identities . they refuse to divulge. Each also depends upon "over-the-transom" tips from readers and from their coworkers (only Mary can sweeten the pot with a small stipend: monthly awards of $25, $15 and $ 10 are bestowed upon the PD editorial employes who provide the best items to her column). Each is on the must-invite list for press parties and any social function seeking notice by the press. Kamm and Strassmeyer spend a lot of their evenings out, sniffing the wind for items; Dvorak prefers a less frenetic pace and bar-and-party hops less frequently.

In their offices, the phones jangle constantly. Strassmeyer, for instance, estimates that 50 callers offering items is "a busy day." Several of those calls are bound to be from publicists, who have a natural affinity for their kind Of column. Depending upon the nature of their clients, PR people are forever trying to get clients' names in, or to keep them out. Since the columnists themselves refuse to name their sources in the outside world, I asked a prominent publicist to take a guess. His immediate reply: "Bankers." Sedate, pin-striped bankers? "Sure. Banks are really hyper about gossip columns. They're more sensitive than anyone about publicity. Moreover, banks hate one another, and the people in banks talk too much."

He had just about lost me until he offered this example: "Say you work for Union Commerce Bank ... and you hear that National City is going to build a new 37-story building. You call one of the columnists and leak it. Why? To water down the imPact of National City's formal announcement, that's why. It's not a bad way to bust up a story for somebody."

OK, who else are the snitches? "The people who are most hyper about their competitors ... anybody in entertainment, the department stores, politicians and, of course, those in the media."

As far as the publicists are concerned, there is also a "horsetrading aspect" to all this: I feed you a choice item or two, and the next time I need a favor, well ... Often that favor is to delay some item affecting a client - for instance, an item announcing a job shift when the person's current employer has yet to be informed of the news (outright killing of an item, say both the columnists and PR people, is virtually nonexistent). "Negotiating" for a day or two of additional time, says one publicist, has caused him to offer "everything but putting my wife in a mahogany box."

This same PR man allows that he would love to have his own gossip column - for about a month. "Then I'd move to Ft. Lauderdale," he says.

He may have hit at the core of our inquiry. In the last analysis, the town's gossip columnists are not restrained because Cleveland is dull, or because Cleveland is so conservative. It's that Cleveland, despite its size, is a fairly small town when it comes to the recognizable names which make the choicest morsels of gossip. Now, everyone knows that small towns are hotbeds of gossip, especially of the bedroom variety. But to put that juicy stuff in print, to expose the undergroun grapevine of ripe gossip to the lig of day, on clean white newsprint that takes a columnist of true grittiness. A professional gossip with the bite of a snake has to have the hide of an armadillo.

As Herb Kamm says: "I think I'd be a little more daring in New York. You feel a greater insulation from the public there than you do here. There you think of this vast arena occupied by faceless people. In Cleveland my audience is almost looking over my shoulder." That is especially true of the "very sophisticated" audience to which Kamm says he is directing his column.

All this leads us to what might be called the First Principle of Gossip Reporting: The nastiness quotient is directly proportional to the size of the city.

And this corollary: Except in those instances where the gossip himself thrives on flying fur, barroom threats and the combined envy, fear and grudging respect of his fellow citizens.

Herb, Bill and Mary, it seems, want too much to be loved. And the beasts be damned. Let them eat People.