Gourmet Gossip: Ann Gerber Eats Her Words
The five commandments of column writing:
(4) Know when to keep your mouth shut. Remember the magic words, “My column speaks for itself.”
The Rumor appeared under the heading “Gourmet Gossip.” No one else in town has “Gourmet Gossip,” says Gerber proudly.
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Despite Ann Gerber’s craft, Oprah Winfrey saw fit to express dismay. Gerber soon heard from several friends of the TV hostess, all of whom said there was nothing to The Rumor. One of them knew of a cop who’d gone looking in the police files and come up dry. Winfrey’s publicist screamed at Gerber over the telephone. At this critical moment, Gerber’s fortunes might have been better served had she been paralyzed by uncertainty or perhaps turned to a senior editor in panic. Instead she acted decisively. Her column the following Wednesday contained the following report: “Rumors that TV talk show star Oprah Winfrey and her hunk Stedman Graham had a major rift (one version has Oprah shooting him) just aren’t true, friends insist.”
“I gave him names, people who’d given me the rumor, when I first heard about it. The calls that I had gotten. . . . Once, when I was at the Ritz phone booth–they have nice phone booths there, you can sit down and close the door and I often go there and call back all the people who call me when I’m downtown–and I called Northwestern Memorial Hospital and asked if there was an S. Graham there and the woman said no and I said ‘But wasn’t he here a month ago? Wasn’t there an S. Graham?’ And she said ‘Well, I don’t know, I only have today’s records. I can’t tell you anything.’ I mean, I did do that just thinking I might have found a needle in a haystack, somebody who would say ‘Oh yeah, it was Stedman,’ but nobody ever said anything like that. Anyway, I gave him [Towers] all kinds of information. I admitted that I couldn’t verify it. After all, as I kept saying, if I could verify it, it would have been on every paper everywhere . . .
Tribune Stooping
Our first impression was that the Tribune’s flag editorial on Memorial Day must have been written by the marketing department. But that can’t be right. Marketing is much too busy launching the Tribune’s Subscribers Only program.
How fast do these TRIB points pile up? Madigan’s letter doesn’t get into that, but we found out it’s pretty slowly. You get a 250-point stake for signing on to Subscribers Only. After that the points accumulate at a niggardly rate of 25 a week. One of the more attractive awards, “gift certificates worth up to $100 at Marshall Field’s,” requires 15,500 points–that’s ten solid years of Tribune subscribing.
