It was unbelievable watching the heads of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization shaking hands on the White House lawn.
Wasn’t it?
It turns out that a special 1988 issue of Life magazine, on “150 Years of Photography,” beat everybody to the punch with “When Seeing Isn’t Believing,” a one-page demonstration of the impact of technology on photography.
The magazine’s design director, Tom Bentkowski, used a photographic image processing system called Quantel Graphic Paintbox to create a photo of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat about to embrace Yitzhak Shamir, then the Israeli prime minister, with a delighted President Ronald Reagan looking on.
“Impossible, you say?” Life asked in the copy underneath the photo. “Impossible indeed. Life arranged this diplomatic face-off on the neutral turf of a computer screen.”
It then conceded that this was “a farfetched example of the photo manipulation that has become common in advertising and increasingly tempting in journalism.” Life had taken three photos and electronically doctored them, including replacing unwanted bodies in a photo of Arafat about to embrace Egyptian President Husni Mubarak.
The result was a photographic theater of the absurd, the boss men of the PLO, Israel and United States together.
Unbelievable.
Missing
There’s a grand now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tradition in American media. As has been the case with Latin American political activists, people get “disappeared.” It happened last week.
In 1987, the Sun-Times ran a nationwide contest to replace Ann Landers, who now resides several inches from this space. It was similar to a search run 31 years earlier when Ruth Crowley, the second person to write the Ann Landers column, passed away. The choice then was Eppie Lederer, who took over in September 1955 and shows no sign of slowing down.
The 1987 search brought, oddly, not one but two replacements, Jeff Zaslow and Diane Crowley, daughter of Ruth. Their columns have appeared next to each other-until last week.
Without any mention of her fate to readers, Crowley was quietly replaced by several other syndicated, presumably less costly, advice features.
A reader calling the paper was told both that Crowley’s contract was not renewed and that few had noticed.
Still, it’s another reason Sundays will never be the same.
From the great beyond
Mike Royko occasionally offers a seance with a former Chicago mayor no longer with us. Now, C-Span, the cable channel, seems to have made actual contact.
Late Wednesday, one of its monotoned announcers was introducing the tape of a strategy session of activists who want to defeat the North American Free Trade Agreement. The voice from Planet Vanilla informed that President Clinton had selected “former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley” to help lobby NAFTA in Congress.
It’s actually son Bill, the spurned transportation secretary candidate. But if C-Span does get an exclusive with his dad, look for it, without any publicity, sandwiched between the British Prime Minister’s Question Time and a Sierra Club breakfast with reporters.
Call from the White House
As a member of the American Bar Association’s public affairs operation, Jean Kaczmarek of Glen Ellyn suffered the indignity in recent years of having to introduce me at an annual media workshop held for state and local bar association presidents from around the country.
Then, she lost her job, which helps explain why she introduced herself to Bill Clinton at the White House Thursday in a show-and-tell on health care.
Kaczmarek, 36, was laid off in January and confronted problems in getting health insurance because of complications she endured during a pregnancy. She and her husband, who was working for a small law firm, looked around for a substitute and settled temporarily on an 18-month Cobra plan that offered the same coverage as her association plan but at a steep $660 a month.
Frustrated, she sent a letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who heads the health care task force. “I wrote that there had to be a better way than this, especially when it comes to coverage of pre-existing conditions,” Kaczmarek said.
After about four months, she got a pro forma postcard, acknowledging receipt of her letter and stamped with Hillary’s name.
Then, in August, she got a letter from the White House. She left it unopened for several days: “I thought it was junk mail. For years I’ve bought the annual White House Christmas ornament. I assumed that’s what this was about, so I laid it aside.”
When she opened it, she did a double take. Clinton’s task force wanted to place excerpts of her letter to Clinton in its final proposal and asked her to call. She was then invited to the White House for Thursday’s much-reported “citizens forum.”
When she returned home, she also returned to a less expensive Cobra policy ($200 a month and $1,000 deductible) she had switched to. She awaits word on whether, given those past complications, she can qualify for the plan at her husband’s new law firm.
Case of the lost `Ironsides’
Troubling news: In the wake of cultural icon Raymond Burr’s recent passing, one assumed that Chicago’s fine Museum of Broadcast Communications would be full of his labors.
Alas, it concedes to having just one episode of “Perry Mason” and not a single “Ironsides.”
The “Perry Mason” is 1958’s “The Case of the Lazy Lover” in which “a woman is suspected of murdering her husband.”
Wanna bet $10 that somebody else confessed on the witness stand with 4 minutes left?
Acting up again?
Steve McMichael, the Bears defensive lineman, is an aggressive Luddite with a certain reverse TV appeal in an age of white-bread, we-got-to-look-within-ourselves-and-give-it-110-percent jocks.
He now surfaces after Bears games Sunday on Fox’s WFLD-Ch. 32 and, despite past crudities that got him booted from a post-game gig on WMAQ-Ch. 5, still inspires a certain how-will-the-train-wreck curiosity. He remains more alluring than his bland teammates around the dial Sunday evenings.
Last week he brought news: namely that his wife, Debra, the former Mrs. Illinois, was contemplating going to New York for acting classes with Lee Strasberg. Presumably, he meant classes at the fabled Actors Studio since Strasberg, coach of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, among others, died in 1982.
Last year, Debra put on a bravura R-rated performance when she and a party of 14 were not seated instantly at a North Side restaurant. She split and then badmouthed the joint on her chum Eleanor Mondale’s radio program the next morning.
Perhaps she’ll now learn how to at least act in public.
