My Twenty-Four Days on the Slippery Slope

Last January, a year after the name Tonya Harding first surfaced in connection with a plot to attack the skater Nancy Kerrigan, I was walking in San Francisco with friends, hashing over the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Seven months into the story, the case still entranced us beyond reason. Midway into savoring the news that Dog World had assigned a reporter to the trial because of interest in Nicole Brown Simpson's Akita, Kato, my gaze caught the marquee of Big Al's adult book store. In black letters on white was the name Tonya Harding, last year's media obsession, paired with the name of another who found media fame in 1994, both now sunk to their level in a poorly spelled advertisement for pornographic videos:

john w. bobbitt
tonya harding
give they're xxx all

"Oh, Tonya," I said, and my friends laughed, and the conversation turned back to O.J.-land. But for a minute or two I dropped out. With the release of the "Tonya and Jeff's Wedding Night" video by her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, Harding seemed more ridiculous than ever; in many ways, her story had seemed ridiculous then. So what did that make me?

For twenty-four days I had tracked Tonya Harding for The Boston Globe as she moved from an obscure figure skater who could perform a stunning triple axel to a criminal defendant accused of involvement in a plot to whack Kerrigan in the knee and eliminate her from Olympic contention. I stood in the clump of reporters at the edge of the Clackamas Town Center rink as Harding practiced; I waited, shivering, at the end of her driveway, hoping she'd drive by and throw out a quote. I participated, in other words, in the kind of bottom-feeding journalism ridiculed -- even as we in the "mainstream" do more of it -- by virtually everyone: the subjects of the stories, the public, and other reporters, including myself.

I now watch the reporters chasing the Simpson story with pity as well as envy -- pity for the ordeal, envy of the big story. I have felt the group hysteria at the chance of missing a tidbit. I have experienced how it is possible to begin reporting a story with a sense of the larger issues involved and after weeks of pointless stakeouts, rude brushoffs, and tabloid scoops to greet almost every development with a snicker.

Looking back I wish I could say I would do it differently next time. I'd be calmer, I'd stay above the fray, I'd insist on substance. But I'm not sure it would be possible.

It was January and February 1994. O.J. Simpson had not yet murdered or not murdered his ex-wife and her friend, and Michael Jackson had not married (much less split up with) Lisa Marie Presley. The trial of Lorena Bobbitt for cutting off her husband's penis with a kitchen knife was under way. And in Portland, Oregon, where the skies were nickel-gray and often rainy, we were deep into the gathering of information about a morally ambiguous skater who had rocked the established order of the Olympic Games. Across the country, the attraction-revulsion dynamic was going full-tilt: an attraction to the details of these quasi-celebrity stories, followed by a queasy sense of revulsion. Who wouldn't want to know that Tonya Harding's mother had been ejected from a skating rink for directing a stream of obscenities at her daughter as she practiced? Or that she had forbidden six-year-old Tonya to leave the ice to go to the bathroom, so she'd peed on the rink? I relished these facts; I'd chased them down. To justify intrung into someone's life, I told myself what reporters always tell themselves: the stories involved "the public's right to know."

In the Harding case, there were indeed legitimate questions: Did Harding know of the plot to attack Kerrigan, who was all that Harding would never be -- long-legged and richly marketable? Had Harding violated the Olympic code of ethics? Should she be allowed to skate in the games? The fifty or seventy-five or one hundred reporters who descended on Portland and took up residence at the Marriott or the Benson or the Heathman pursued those stories as long as they could. But then a void arose. It would be March, well after the Olympics (in which she took part, badly) before any charges were filed against Harding; the lawyers, meanwhile, were mostly mum, and so the focus shifted to her personal exploits. We began to chronicle the life of an abused and possibly criminal young skater. The problem was, almost no one had access to Harding, who was keenly aware that her words were a
 salable commodity. For the most part, she did not talk to anyone who did not pay her cash or cash-equivalent or offer prime-time exposure. Those were her rules. It must have been satisfying to her to wield such power.

In more innocent times, under the rules of the media game, a tough-talking, Marlboro-smoking skater with a tenth-grade education would spill her story to whoever got there first, or asked in the most empathic tones, or worked for the most prestigious news organization. She would open her life to us, flattered that we'd asked. Not Tonya; not in the 1990s. With the help of her lawyers, she sold her story, for a fee well into six figures, to the tabloid television show Inside Edition; she gave an on-ice interview to Diane Sawyer that was more like a photo op with a caption; and she gave a vague, tearful interview to Connie Chung of CBS, the official Winter Olympics television network. Most of the rest of us were left on our own.

Not by and large reporters who had covered celebrities of any caliber, we were mentally ill-equipped for the meaninglessness of our assignment, some of which I tried to inject into my daily dispatches to Boston: Tonya's mother collapses on afternoon television talk show; Portland radio station plays Hang Down Your Head Gillooly; the wrestler Playboy Buddy Rose in leopard-print pants appears at ringside, wants to be Tonya's bodyguard.

Sometime during this period I began to clean out the supply of little bottles of lotion and shampoo from the wicker basket by the sink in my hotel room. Every day I used some or just smelled the more aromatic ones, then loaded them into my suitcase. Every day the maid put out new bottles. What did she care? She'd undoubtedly seen worse. Then one night I took nine small bottles from the health club at the Benson. Can never have too much of the stuff, I thought, but I knew, the way a drunk person will know, that I was drunk, that I had crossed the line, had become sucked into the driving ethos of this story: insatiability, the endless, sometimes pointless quest for more.

No piece of information was too trivial. No effort too ridiculous. For most of us it's a foolish feeling, standing outside someone's house -- unless the person shows up. One Saturday night a reporter for USA Today and one for The Philadelphia Inquirer were rewarded for being outside Harding's father's apartment. When I heard they'd managed a brief conversation with Harding, who was heading out in tight jeans to party, I felt remiss for not joining their vigil.

By then I'd already endured the embarrassing experience of slipping in alongside a crowd of ten-year-olds at Harding's rink so I could get into the free skate, in the hopes that Harding's coach would speak to me (she wouldn't). And I'd spent one chilly evening sitting in a rented car while a colleague looked in the windows of the cheaply built A-frame where Harding and Gillooly lived (trespassing by anyone's definition).

"I see some skates," she'd said, her nose at the glass. When she lifted up the lid on the garbage can, I said, "Will you get in this car!" and reluctantly she did.

Perhaps the most fruitless experience was the eight hours about thirty-five of us spent in the lobby of the Portland headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, waiting for Harding to emerge from questioning. By the time Harding walked out of the elevator after 11 p.m., it was past deadline for most of us, and the lobby reeked of sweat and leftover pizza; but we'd stayed on, numbed. Suddenly, there she was: blond-haired, shorter than I'd realized. She stood mute while her lawyer, Robert Weaver, explained that she had nothing to say. That seemed to fuel the hysteria. When Harding and Weaver turned to exit, in herd formation we followed out the lobby and into the parking garage. One cameraman fell, hard, face-forward on the cement steps behind me; the herd kept moving. Finally Harding said yes, she had a message to her fans: "Please believe in me!" We jotted that down. She slipped into her lawyer's red BMW. Weaver opened the door on the driver's side. For a moment we had them surrounded. We glared at em. They glared back.

In my hotel room, weary, I threw the little bottles into my suitcase.

Now, Harding mania has been eclipsed by Simpson mania, and my supply of hotel freebies has shrunk to seven bottles. The other night I sliced open the piece of paper on a bottle of Marriott lotion, unscrewed the top, and one whiff brought back the Harding siege -- the long drives to the Clackamas Town Center, the thinly carpeted floor at FBI headquarters. I remembered a television tabloid reporter I'd sat beside in court, his face coated with heavy orange pancake makeup at 10 a.m. He seemed to me now no more desperate than the rest of us, just more naked in his ambition. I started to shake out the sickly-sweet-smelling lotion and then thought, I don't have to do this.

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