“Guess who’s coming to lunch?”
That might be the title for a Hollywood adaptation of an intimate affair that last week quietly melded the capital and Tinseltown.
Unfortunately, getting details from a normally garrulous group of participants was difficult. There is apparently no Sunshine Law when it comes to journalists’ luncheons with A-list celebrities in private hotel suites.
“I called you back because my mother lives in Macomb, Ill., and reads the Tribune,” said Todd Purdum, a White House reporter for The New York Times. “But I don’t have anything to say. Such lunches that I have are private. Sorry,” he concluded, just as I was about to offer mom free Sunday home delivery.
R.W. Apple Jr., the paper’s Washington bureau chief and a bombastic figure of grand talent, with a penchant for big stories and a zest for fine living, was mum, too, and uncharacteristically so.
“He doesn’t want to be grilled . It’s much too personal,” he said through an assistant (and tongue-in-cheek, I dearly hope).
Andrew Rosenthal, the bureau’s news editor, was less forthcoming and not tongue-in-cheek. It didn’t even work when I responded affirmatively to his question of whether I ever disclosed my luncheon companions.
(In fact, I’d dined on a deli sandwich that very day with the publisher of the Tribune and the director of human resources, choosing turkey breast on a French roll, with honey mustard, Bermuda onions, tomato and a slice of Swiss. This interrupted a Cal Ripken-like streak of consecutive eating at a takeout Chinese buffet around the corner, for anywhere from $4.40 to roughly $6.10.)
Wrenching myself free after editing stories on budget resolutions, an armed Pizza Hut alumnus scaling the White House fence, Sen. Phil Gramm’s home page on the Internet, and U.S. non-policy toward Bosnia, I junked the idea of filing a Freedom of Dining Information Act request. Instead, other Times Folk indicated the following:
Land of Lincoln native Purdum had invited Barbra Streisand, the entertainer and public-policy specialist, to be the paper’s guest at an annual bash held by the White House Correspondents Association and known for a boy-aren’t-we-cool competitiveness for guests among some media organizations. We at the all-business-all-the-time Tribune opted for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Streisand apparently made some requests, including her need of special security, which the paper was hesitant to fulfill at its expense. So she said no, but apparently felt a bit guilty. Artists are like that.
This resulted in a second offer, which she accepted, to be the guest at a catered lunch at the Times’ bureau. It was set for last Monday, but came a cropper when Streisand apparently got cold feet at the last moment. Artists do this.
She asked Purdum to come by her suite at the very elegant, sedate and European-style Jefferson Hotel. He accepted, securing invitations for his two bosses as well. As a manager, I can assure readers that he will go far.
And that is all we non-Times Folk know, other than that the luncheon lasted a long time. Sources assure that it would have been difficult for any of the journalists to make that afternoon’s 2 p.m. hearing by the House Commerce Committee’s Trade and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee on ammonium nitrate fertilizer, or even a 4 p.m. American Enterprise Institute forum on “Why Men Don’t Use Condoms; What We Know About Male Attitude.”
But everything else is left to our imaginations.
For starters, what to eat?
The group might have begun with champagne. Streisand would be inclined to a fancy name, like Dom Perignon. That might be a tad plebian for Apple, who’d go for Krug champagne.
After that, Copper River king salmon from Alaska would be in order, though I fear Streisand would pass. Trying to stay slim, she’d order a leaf or two of lettuce and stick with the champagne.
With the salmon, iconoclast Apple might break the white-wine-with-fish dictum and opt for a Domaine Drouhin pinot noir from Oregon. For sentiment’s sake, the room service sommelier might have found Purdum a Lynfred zinfandel from Roselle, Ill.
For dessert, Apple, a man of German descent, might have suggested a Raspberry souffle (filled, cynics might note, with ample hot air). In addition, he’d go for a dazzling, sweet German dessert wine, perhaps a 1971 trockenbeerenauslese. Streisand would pick at her romaine and sip the Dom Perignon. Artists do this.
As for conversation, Apple might be inclined to discuss architecture and art-collecting with Streisand. But she’d quickly turn to politics. It was she, after all, who told a Harvard audience in January that her high-profile ilk should not be defamed as Hollywood “bubbleheads” in a speech whose liberal tack was unabashed.
She is a Serious Person.
“Why are you guys all beating up on Bill Clinton?” one can hear her saying in the suite.
“No, no, we merely are covering him,” Apple might good-naturedly thunder.
“Why, oh why, is Hillary given such a hard time?”
No, no, Purdum would respond, shirking false modesty and citing his own fair-minded coverage of the First Lady’s trek to Asia.
“What is that creep Gingrich going to do with welfare? Is he going to get away with shafting the poor?”
Yes, the capital insiders would whisper, chagrined and shaking their heads in collective solemnity.
“And how can that little, hyperactive runt from Ohio be emasculating the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities?” she would ask in reference to Rep. John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee.
The end of Twyla Tharp, and Western civilization as we know it, the Timesmen would concur.
“And why is anybody with a three-picture deal, or millions in TV-sitcom residuals, considered a bubblehead for speaking out on politics? Doesn’t Bob Redford know the Endangered Species Act better than Al D’Amato, and Ted Danson the Clean Water Act better than cracker Jesse Helms?”
Ted Danson? Ah . . . yeah . . . for sure. It’s unfair to stereotype, the newsies would agree.
And with that, they’d have to split, but not before facing the matter of who picks up the tab.
After all, it was only last week that the paper’s metro staff back in New York, clearly victims of rising newsprint prices and a profit margin merely in the mid-teens, was presented with the draconian mandate of keeping all expense account lunches under $50 for two.
The hostess probably put it on her room tab but gave them each an autographed “Barbra Streisand–The Broadway Album” CD, including Stephen Sondheim’s “Putting It Together” from “Sunday in the Park With George”:
“`Drink by drink, taking every comment as it comes/Learning how to play the politician/Like you play piano, bass and drums/Otherwise, you’ll find your composition/Isn’t gonna get much exhibition.”
Ever alert
Here’s a previously unreported international-affairs tidbit.
For several years, the Chicago-based American Bar Association has been planning a joint venture with its counterpart in China. A 50-person delegation of hotshot U.S. lawyers and investment bankers was to head to Beijing and Shanghai for a 10-day conference starting June 9 on “The Role of Lawyers in the Creation of a Market Economy in China.”
Last week, the Chinese group canceled without explanation. Could it be related to the Chinese government’s anger over the U.S.’s reversing policy and granting a visa to the president of Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province, so he can speak at his alma mater, Cornell University?
Folks at your State Department’s China Desk say they don’t have a clue, and didn’t even know about the gathering.
Cokie watch
As we’ve said, she can’t handle all paid speaking gigs. Plus, her politics wouldn’t permit her to be the closing banquet speaker July 1 at the National Right to Life Convention in Nashville.
Fred Barnes, of the New Republic and “The McLaughlin Group,” gets this one.
