Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [8]
By 9:00 A.M. I have showered, shaved, breakfasted, digested the morning Tribune and Sun-Times (I always find one more digestible than the other), and am heading by taxi for the Sun-Times-Daily News Building, at Wabash Avenue and the Chicago River. (Cabbies, incidentally, are among my favorite people and are among the best barometers of man-on-the-street opinion.) I once jokingly described my office as “the only one in town that goes up and down with the Wabash Avenue Bridge.” Actually, it is on solid ground, a windowless, two-room layout just off the paper’s fourth-floor city room. It’s furnished with a leather sofa, TV set, bookshelf, desk, typewriter, and two secretaries: brunette Connie Chancellor, ex-wife of NBC-TV’s John (Today) Chancellor, and her part-time assistant, blonde Sharon Stelmok, a Northwestern University journalism student.
Awaiting my arrival is a mountain of morning mail, which I sift through as quickly as possible. Next comes a reading of a tear sheet of that day’s column, in which I circle various names, especially those of out-of-towners who may not have seen the paper. Each is sent a clipping, a gesture I consider both a courtesy and an aid in maintaining out-of-town contacts which can lead to further column items. This is only one of the four or five daily readings I give the column, for proofreading, updating, or plain self-criticism. (There’s not a time when I read it that I don’t see how some item could have been sharpened.)
Meanwhile the phone rings incessantly. It may be a celebrity or public official or private citizen with a gripe or tip, a press agent (I must be on the list of ten thousand or more) calling with a potential item, a reader wanting to chat or comment on something. No matter how busy I am or who the caller is, whenever possible I take time to talk. This also is a time when I’m placing calls to Washington, New York, Hollywood, or other points, running down likely stories based on tips, newspaper articles, or items I’ve picked up on the previous night’s rounds. It is not unusual for me to make a couple of dozen long-distance calls a day.
A word about press agents and public-relations men. They are either a columnist’s best friend – or worst enemy. Since I do my own reporting, with no “leg men” to assist me, I couldn’t begin to cover Chicago and the rest of my beat without the tips and short cuts provided by press agents. They can arrange interviews, call attention to newsworthy items, give important background information, and perform other valuable functions. The great majority do. But inevitably there is a minority who are the bane of a harried columnist’s existence. They are the ones who try to plant phony or misleading tips, or supply self-aggrandizing blurbs for publicity-hungry clients seeking a place in the Sun-Times. At worst they try to ingratiate themselves by providing witty quotes and quips which are fine – except that they have already appeared somewhere else. Because it is impossible for me to read regularly columns of such colleagues as Earl Wilson, Ed Sullivan, and Hy Gardner in New York, Herb Caen in San Francisco, or Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Mike Connolly in Hollywood, periodically a press agent manages to palm off as original an excerpt from these various columns. The columnist thus plagiarized has justifiable cause to be miffed. I feel the same when my material turns up elsewhere without credit. When this happens, the press agent himself is the ultimate loser. Once he is pegged as a lifter, he is never trusted again.
Indispensable are those silent heroes, the “amateur” quipsters whose material never stops flowing. One of the best known is Ivan Bunny. Ivan actually is two brothers named Jimmy and Ivan Colitz. Each night they sit down at a typewriter and knock out gags for my column.