Nostalgic types in the news business have long been concerned that the gritty, blue-collar spirit of The Front Page reporter is dead -- killed off by a lethal injection of overeducation, high pay, and elitist airs. This fear that something vibrant is being lost dates at least to the 1928 play: in its stage directions, ace Chicago Herald Examiner reporter Hildy Johnson, the main character, is billed as "a vanishing type -- the lusty, hoodlumesque half-drunken caballero that was the newspaperman of our youth. Schools of journalism and the advertising business have nearly extirpated the species." Lately, dwindling circulation has stoked a more pragmatic anxiety: that reporters have become too upscale and erudite to connect with just plain folks.

But hold on. There's good news: capital punishment is back and execution stories -- the very essence of The Front Page, in which the plot hinges on a scheduled hanging -- are again becoming a mainstay. Nothing captures the public mind so completely as a ritualized killing. And -- skeptics be damned -- today's upscale reporters show signs of being up to Front Page standards -- as witness execution coverage of murderer Thomas Grasso (whom New York Governor George Pataki shipped to the Oklahoma death house, keeping a campaign vow). The death-beat baby boomers did not meet every Front Page benchmark. But, overcoming such handicaps as grad school education, they displayed a skill that would have made their forebears proud in tapping the large eye-for-an-eye market.

A visually spectacular execution is of course a plus in tapping that market. In one film version of the play, Walter Matthau, portraying Hildy's tyrannical editor Walter Burns, delivers a soliloquy on headlines he could have written, if only the electric chair rather than a gallows were available for convict Earl Williams: "williams fries! . . . williams roasted alive!" In this regard, the Grasso reporters faced a handicap: he died by lethal injection, the dullest way to go. Thus a New York Post reporter could only write that Grasso's death was "no more dramatic than watching a veterinarian put a sick animal to sleep." The headline screamed witness to animal's last breath, but the reality was flat.

Luckily the supposed humaneness of lethal injection provided a foil to retain the audience. For instance, The Daily Oklahoman (killer's death contrasts with victim's) reported: "The sight of Grasso in his sleeplike position offered a stark contrast to the graphic photos of Hilda [no relation to Hildy] Johnson of Tulsa, lying dead . . . ." The AP declared, "It was a stark contrast to the strangulation of Johnson, who was found Christmas Day 1990, . . . one eye jarred open by death." The implication was that injection is not gruesome enough and that a kind of reverse golden rule should apply -- doing unto the convict exactly what he has done to others -- which, taken to its logical extreme, would mean that if Grasso throws a man off a skyscraper, we throw him off. Walter Burns would have a field day: grasso is goo!!

Grasso reporters also showed their mettle by performing a kind of Front Page Punch and Judy rite -- jeering at the convict, hitting him with punch lines. (In the play, one paper makes Williams a figure of fun with the thin-air story that he planned to wed a prostitute on the scaffold.) With Grasso, much of the ridicule involved food -- a topic that is big by tradition, the last meal menu being a detail that is nearly always available and of interest. Grasso had come up with a very specific last meal request: his pasta to be served at room temperature in a sixteen-ounce can, his mango to be medium size, mussels to be on the half shell, cheeseburger to be from Burger King, with lettuce, tomato, onions, mustard, and mayonnaise, etc. The menu gave rise to a press theme -- Grasso-as-glutton -- and to derision in papers from Texas to New York, where a Buffalo News reporter, responding to Grasso's request for half a pumpkin pie, observed: "Half? Tom. Babe. Go for the whole. What's the worry? Indigestion later on?" This jest was repeated nearly verbatim in the same space two weeks later, back by popular demand.

Above all, Grasso wanted SpaghettiOs. When he was instead given spaghetti to go, he became upset and issued his last public statement before execution: "Please tell the media, I did not get my SpaghettiOs." This was the ultimate Grasso-as-glutton anecdote and the media ate it up. In fact, Newsweek and People carried reports focusing only on SpaghettiOs.

For the reporters in the play, exaggeration in defense of front-page placement is no vice. When Williams escapes, hides in a roll-top desk in the nearby press room, and is arrested unarmed without a fight, reporters phone in such updates as: "Williams put up a desperate struggle . . . . Williams tried to shoot it out, but his gun wouldn't work . . . ."

The Grasso reporters proved to be factually challenged as well, but in their case the errors served to hype the size of Grasso's appetite. Newsday said Grasso was standing by a request for spare ribs, despite a prison handout indicating the order had been struck from a downsized menu; The Daily Oklahoman insisted he was demanding two milkshakes when he had halved the order; the New York Daily News reported accurately that Grasso had cut his mussel order from twenty-four to twelve, but, then, on the same page of the same March 19 edition, reasserted that he was demanding twenty-four. London's Daily Mirror claimed Grasso requested "a can of Coke, a bottle of lemonade, and a tub of ice cream" and wanted his mussels "in broth flavored with beer, rosemary, and cumin." A copy of Grasso's proposed menu makes no mention of any of these items. Asked where he got his data, reporter Allan Hall replied: "It must have been an American paper. All I do is troll through American papers . . . I just can't recall."

What of the concern that today's reporters have moved too far above Hildy Johnson on the erudition ladder and are culturally disconnected from readers? How wide is this divide? Thanks to Thomas Grasso, we now have a better idea. On Grasso's last day of life, he released to the media two statements on time and death: "What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." And: "For most of us there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time. And right action is freedom from the past and future also." Some reporters seemed unimpressed ("often-rambling," said The Dallas Morning News) but most decided to give Grasso his say. For instance, The New York Times (as death nears, inmate says he sees a new beginning) led off its pre-execution story: "In an enigmatic final statement, scribbled on a piece of paper and handed to prison officials here at 3:15 . . . , Thomas J. Grasso said, 'What we call the beginning . . . .' "

The next day reporters were forced to acknowledge what a literature professor had phoned the prison to report -- that these passages were by T.S. Eliot, not T.J. Grasso. Far from identifying the lines, the journalists failed to draw an obvious conclusion based on style: that the person who composed the rest of the verbiage issued by Grasso to the media on execution day (e.g., a doggerel verse: ". . . As the poison drips into my veins/And from my body life does drain/I'll know then, once and for all/what 'last call' means/when serving 'toxahol' ") could not conceivably have composed those passages about time. Grasso had seized an opportunity to play Gotcha from the grave. As his lawyer, Johnie O'Neal, explained: Grasso (who admired Eliot and looked down on the news media) "felt certain reporters would take those quotations and not know where they came from and make some statement that would reveal a little bit about the person's training and background." It was almost as if Grasso were modeling himself on Walt Burns, who plays an analogous joke in the play: when Hildy quits to get married after a last scoop, Burns gives him his watch, then reports it stolen.

Grasso's stunt was embarrassing but also reassuring: we are not as disconnected from Joe Sixpack as some had feared when it comes to high culture.

Joe Sixpack may not be erudite, but he does have an empathetic side and a curiosity about people. Here the yuppie-reporters failed him, for in most of their portrayals the convict remained a cartoon figure, with many questions left unanswered. Why, for instance, did Grasso have his heart set on SpaghettiOs? When he was eleven, says O'Neal, he opened a can and found only eight meatballs, when there should have been twelve. He wrote to complain and Franco-American sent him four free cans. In ordering SpaghettiOs for his last meal, Grasso was hoping to relive one of the few moments of success and happiness in his life. Few readers got any inkling of this.

Where the Grasso reporters fell short was in forgetting that there is more than one Front Page tradition: in addition to tapping the agony market the play's reporters tap the compassion market. They first pigeon-hole Williams as a snarling bolshevik murderer, but eventually determine he may be innocent and help prevent his execution. Hildy professes to be "a bum! Without any feelings!! And that's all I want to be!" but by curtain time he has displayed more than a glimmer of humanity on the job. That is nothing to be afraid of.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe