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"  Originally published in the December 1989 issue In an era when I would have been more than happy to receive the acclaim of my peers \u2014 no matter how astounded \u2014 I became a hero, albeit briefly, for sleeping with Diane Sawyer. I was in New York then, going over the final galleys of a novel that, for eleven years, had weighed my spirit like a cow carried on a peasant&amp;#039;s back to market. A childhood buddy who had risen through the buzz-sawed branches of CBS \u2014 not just clinging but prospering \u2014 agreed, after much browbeating, to introduce Sawyer to me. She showed up in the midevening at the eastside high-rise where I was a guest. The doorman announced her arrival over the intercom with uncharacteristic tremulousness, prompting me to pour a fresh vodka. Beautiful, oh yes, in her sorority-girl plaid pants and white sweater, she nevertheless entered shyly, like someone whose reputation had spent more time at parties than she had. She was there in the room with me, she had stepped through the screen, she was flesh-and-blood, not merely skittering molecules in a TV set! For the next hour we discussed the state of television, the state of politics, and the state of New York, everything, in fact, except my first novel, A Fan&amp;#039;s Notes, which she claimed, in other company, to have read.  As one might expect from the Wellesley-educated daughter of a Glasgow, Kentucky, judge, Sawyer carries with her an almost southern-belle graciousness, as well as the dimpled luminosity of America&amp;#039;s most suave TV interviewer. In a nervous euphoria compounded of vodka and desperate admiration, I decided to take a flyer. &amp;quot;Diane,&amp;quot; I croaked, &amp;quot;would you mind standing up and turning around?&amp;quot;  I was not unaware that this might sound a trifle perverse to Sawyer but, after all, she had always been allowed to ask the tough questions. Miraculously, she stood up and turned around, looking tolerant and bemused, as if she were humoring a drinking man, which, in fact, she was.   &amp;quot;You know, Diane, you have a flat ass,&amp;quot; I said.  What a horrible remark! She took it well, but her mask of geniality did not prevent me from glimpsing a moment of wounded vanity.   &amp;quot;How can you say that, Fred?&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got a great ass.&amp;quot; After that our conversation never regained its rumpled intimacy. With the studied briskness of an executive concluding a meeting, Sawyer uttered the unredeemable words: &amp;quot;Mike is expecting me. He&amp;#039;s got a plane to catch tonight.&amp;quot; She was referring, of course, to her new husband, Mike Nichols, and although I&amp;#039;ve lived too long to wish a marriage ill, I wouldn&amp;#039;t have minded had she snuggled closer to me on the couch, unbuttoned a little of her famous poise and, wriggling with guilt and embarrassment, spoken into the phone with the directness of the practical deceiver I&amp;#039;d dreamed her to be: &amp;quot;Mike, something&amp;#039;s come up at the last minute,&amp;quot; she would have said as she caressed me. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll just see you when you get back from Cannes.&amp;quot; But Diane Sawyer is nothing if not faithful, faithful to the point of obstinacy. That night, she left the apartment, took the elevator down, away from my besodden life, and clacked through the vacant lobby. As fate would have it, the doorman was answering nature&amp;#039;s call and missed her exit. When my host, a publishing honcho, returned from a business trip early the next morning, the doorman was back at this station.   &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;s my buddy Ex?&amp;quot; my friend, the esteemed publisher, inquired. A reasonable question. He knew my sorry peccadilloes. &amp;quot;Just fine, sir,&amp;quot; the doorman replied.   &amp;quot;What time did Sawyer leave?&amp;quot; the publisher asked. He had been hearing about our long-awaited meeting for months.  A look of awe, nearly religious in its incomprehension, was said to have appeared on the doorman&amp;#039;s face. He shook his head, a partner in the male conspiracy. &amp;quot;She. . . she . . . she&amp;#039;s still up there, sir.&amp;quot; Graceful as always, Diane Sawyer tittered sympathetically as I recounted this moment of triumph, an instant of adolescent glory in which I stood taller in my friends&amp;#039; eyes than when I was named defensive player of the year on the 1947 Watertown High football team.   &amp;quot;For two minutes, Diane,&amp;quot; I said to her, &amp;quot;I was the biggest make-out artist in New York.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Savor it while you can, Fred,&amp;quot; she laughed. We are sitting in her ostentatiously unostentatious office at ABC. She is without makeup and for the first time it occurs to me that the makeup people overdo it in Sawyer&amp;#039;s case, especially in the way they paint her rather puckered mouth a screeching harlot red. Her attempts to seduce take a more eloquent and insidious form. The pleasantries seem far behind us when, not five minutes into our talk, I try to pin her into an ugly corner of truth. What I want is for her to question \u2014 no, renounce \u2014 having given eight years of her life to the most wretched, spiteful little man ever to inhabit the White House. But Sawyer&amp;#039;s loyalty is so fiercely and intentionally innocent, so verging on the willful stubbornness of a spoiled, lovely child that one wants to put her over a knee and give her rather striking behind a good blistering. For four years she had worked with Richard M. Nixon in post-Watergate exile, a faithful spin doctor collaborating on RN, a fairy tale of a memoir at San Clemente, Nixon&amp;#039;s Elba on the beaches of La-La Land.   &amp;quot;I fell into the most seductive trap that awaits every one of us,&amp;quot; explained Sawyer, &amp;quot;which is the fiction of one&amp;#039;s indispensability.... I was being loyal and noble. They&amp;#039;re among my worst faults.&amp;quot; A painful silence settled over the room. We could hear phones ringing in the background.   &amp;quot;Oh, Fred, you&amp;#039;d have done the same thing. How could you not.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d have told Tricky Dick to go piss up a rope.&amp;quot; Even in the fifteen years since he was run out of town, Nixon had dogged my paranoid dream life, the president of my nightmares.   &amp;quot;What exactly did I do?&amp;quot; She never sounded more wounded, more vulnerable, more breathtakingly naive.   &amp;quot;You were seduced by hanging out and rubbing shoulders with those people. I don&amp;#039;t think if I were head of a news division that I would have hired you after all that.&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know that I would have, either. I was conflicted. It was a very tricky straddle.&amp;quot; More than anything, it is absolutely essential to the health of Diane Sawyer&amp;#039;s psyche that she never be reduced to anything as unseemly as saying, &amp;quot;Okay hotshot, I blew it.&amp;quot; It is essential because Diane Sawyer, along with the rest of her TV colleagues, those glowing stars in our pedestrian firmaments, is creating her own biography, her own version of herself. Equable is the watchword here. Her life must at all costs be as poised and calm as her beauty is blond and cool, and she cannot afford to have a picky, picky, picky ding-a-ling like me disrupt the serenity, the gentleness of the pond by throwing meanspirited little pebbles into it. Sawyer&amp;#039;s nonautobiography will, of course, one day head the best seller list for ten years, the only anomaly being that in lieu of heading up the nonfiction it would find a more appropriate home topping off the other column. If one wanted to be unkind, one might say it&amp;#039;ll be not unlike the nonbook Sawyer wasted four years of life helping to create for Nixon. As, indeed, her inability to say I blew it might also have been learned at the feet of the master. And what fascinating feet they evidently were.   &amp;quot;...You are constantly chasing Nixon around corners trying to find out who he is,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I wanted to know more about him.... His public life is too long and too blistering for you ever to go back and retrieve the private man. There&amp;#039;s too much. When it works, it&amp;#039;s a natural dual personality [the public and the private man] with politicians. Some of them, you can figure out who they really are. The ones like him \u2014 highly intelligent, almost congenitally embattled, and wary to the point of extreme elusiveness \u2014 are a lifetime&amp;#039;s work of trying to diagnose.... Part of what keeps him such a living presence, think how long, when you are switching the television screen, you see him there, you stop, and you continue to stop, and I don&amp;#039;t believe that even you continue to switch when you see him come on.... Think how long, in an age when people get used up really fast, and use themselves up really fast, when it takes very little to parch a person&amp;#039;s life, and their life history, to dry them out, he stays riveting. And that in itself is an accomplishment of some phenomenal and mysterious kind.... Any of the people who find it inexplicable [Sawyer&amp;#039;s loyalty to Nixon] I bet would have done the same thing, standing there seeing a man on that day [Nixon&amp;#039;s impeachment day], with the destruction all around him, however self-created, would have done the same thing...  &amp;quot;Everybody talks about his awkwardness with social talk. Not only is he not awkward when he gets into substance, he weaves magic in a room.... It used to be one of the rare amusements in San Clemente to see people come in who held no brief for him, who were firmly defended by their political and personal preconceptions, and watch how long it took for their mouths to drop open. It usually took somewhere between three and four minutes, and then they were captive. And it happened over and over again....&amp;quot; All this has been delivered with an apostolic fervor, so that when Sawyer finishes I simply sit there stunned and limp, in many ways more limp than an orgasm has ever left me. Because I admire her so much, I naturally yearn for her approval in return, and were I to tell her what I&amp;#039;d been thinking about throughout her breathless, obtuse paean, thereby revealing to her the gaping, the terrifying division between our outlooks, a vast area in which Sawyer and I could not even find enough common mud to circle each other warily, least of all affectionately, were I to reveal to her what I&amp;#039;d been thinking \u2014 I&amp;#039;d be compelled to tell her that the only way Richard M. Nixon could rivet my attention would be to strap me to a chair and blowtorch my testicles. What Sawyer could not have known \u2014 and would now never know \u2014 was that from the first time I became aware of her \u2014 as I recall, she was interviewing Pete Rose (some irony here!) on the CBS Morning News \u2014 I had been collaring anyone who would listen to tell him that she was going to become the biggest thing on TV, including succeeding where Barbara Walters had failed, as co-anchor on the evening news (and she will, she will). Moreover, I had asked editors for years if I could write about her, only to be told, &amp;quot;Naw, all you want to do is get into her pants,&amp;quot; and honestly answering, &amp;quot;Yeah, well, that too, in the miraculously unlikely event it happens.&amp;quot; And of course I had sat back bemusedly and watched as everything I had predicted for her began coming true, and had to read that spate, that avalanche of dreary and laughable cover stories and articles that necessarily accompany such a meteoric rise in our star-struck society. Having Sawyer on the brain would seem to be a more pleasant state than having water there, though assuredly not as serene an existence as the cheerful idiocy that comes with having no brain at all \u2014 a condition one might arguably ascribe to a good part of the TV audience to which Diane appeals. I had a vision of legions of cub reporters wearing fedoras with a card bearing the legend SCOOP stuck into the hatbands, their pencils poised quavering over their notebooks, dutifully and industriously taking down and accepting Diane&amp;#039;s version of the primal scenes of her life.  At seventeen, Diane won America&amp;#039;s Junior Miss competition, and the following year, as a freshman at Wellesley, she went to her first mixer, a co-ed social gathering, and overheard some boor say, &amp;quot;Is that really her? She ain&amp;#039;t that nice.&amp;quot; And, as Diane would have it, this asshole so traumatized her she slinked back to her room, never went to another mixer, and suffered an identity crisis so severe she withdrew into herself and only dated three or four times her entire college career. The worst of it is that the media bought and continues to buy and repeat and repeat and repeat (it&amp;#039;s like the Oriental water torture) this story as if they aren&amp;#039;t in fact buying nonsense. Do these reporters so underestimate Sawyer&amp;#039;s intelligence that they believe this is a genuinely traumatic experience instead of a scene she is shaping, and reshaping, and getting just so for her nonbook?  The grave demeanor with which reporters continue to repeat this story \u2014 it has no more significance to them than her $1.6 million salary (one point six mil!) \u2014 is more than astonishing, it is mind-boggling. Where is that proverbial, omniscient editor who, behind his cigar, is supposed to bellow, &amp;quot;Look, I don&amp;#039;t want to read this horseshit one more time!&amp;quot; If we all use TV to avoid our lives (TV is certainly a better remedy than crack or alcohol), we are, by allowing Sawyer (a beautiful child of TV) to foist this silliness off on us as the traumatic experience of her adolescence, doing Diane the greatest cruelty of all by granting her license never to make an attempt to come to terms with who she is.  &amp;quot;You cannot redeem me, can you?&amp;quot; she asks, and when I fail to respond, she laughs her sad, golden little laugh again, and adds, &amp;quot;And you&amp;#039;re looking not to lay hands on me!&amp;quot;  Before we go out for a sandwich, I ask Sawyer if she&amp;#039;d mind replacing her dark prescription glasses, which she has just donned, with her regular ones. When she just looks perplexedly at me, with just a bit of irritation, as though to say that our brief meetings, however smoothly they have gone, do not grant me license to dictate what she wears, I say, &amp;quot;Look, all those dark glasses do is succeed in bringing attention to yourself,&amp;quot; assuming she is as aware of this as every other goddamn celebrity in America, the here-I-am world syndrome.  Ironically, I see immediately that she is not aware. We have already discussed her lack of guile; I sense I have accused her of a grandstanding she hasn&amp;#039;t intended, that I may even have hurt her feelings, and that she is seriously pondering whether she is the kind of person whose appetite for attention is so insatiable she can&amp;#039;t have a tuna-fish sandwich without a standing ovation, and further, that she is seriously considering abandoning these dark glasses altogether. I should have been man enough to apologize and tell her what was really bothering me, the idea of strolling about the lunch-time streets of Manhattan with one of the most admired and coveted women in the Republic and having the pedestrians wondering who that guy is with her.  Sawyer is tall, five ten, and as we walk I detect she has a timid and becoming slouch. In junior high school, when the girls were going through puberty and forming breasts, a number of them had cultivated this slouch and the guys had called it &amp;quot;hiding the buds.&amp;quot; In Sawyer&amp;#039;s case however, it has nothing to do with this. What Sawyer&amp;#039;s decency, her femininity, yes, her demureness dictate, I realize, is that she pander to the macho asshole next to her by not suggesting to the world that she is taller than he. And I am laughing to myself, thinking how little she understands me that she would imagine my ego needs this kind of massaging, and thinking further what a likable person Sawyer is.  A guy in a T-shirt and Levis is leaning on a parking meter, his forearm his prop, and looking Sawyer over rather boldly. When we are well and safely past him, I say, &amp;quot;Did you hear what that guy said?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, what?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#039;So that&amp;#039;s her? She don&amp;#039;t look that nice to me.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; But Sawyer is once again way ahead of me. She simply smiles, a rather shit-eating grin, and shakes her lovely blond head in feigned exasperation, as though she is wondering what ever possessed her to grant this interview. It is, of course, understood between us that if she comes out with any horseshit about being &amp;quot;crushed,&amp;quot; or gives me a pouty &amp;quot;Did he really just say that,&amp;quot; I am going to take her arm in a meanspirited, vicious \u2014 oh, I am going to leave her some authentically memorable trauma! \u2014 grip and, right there at Broadway and Sixty-sixth, give her the worst, perhaps the only, spanking of her life. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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