The Porkchoppers Page 19

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m not going to divorce Don. I’m not going to marry you. I’m not going to bed with you anymore. Now do you understand?”

  Mure grinned. “I’ll give you two days to change your mind. I’ll bet you don’t even hold out two days.”

  “No. Not this time. It’s over. Really over.”

  “All right, then let me ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  “Why is it over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it’s too dangerous. Too dangerous for you, for me, and especially for Don. They could use us on him.”

  “Ah, Christ, Sadie. They don’t care about anything like that.”

  “I’m not going to take the chance.”

  “Let me ask you something else then.”

  “Just as long as you understand that we’re through.”

  “Okay. Okay. I understand. But what if Don divorced you, what if he found out about us and divorced you, would you marry me then?”

  “You’re not threatening me, are you, Fred?”

  “No. I’m just asking you a question. Would you marry me if Don divorced you?”

  Sadie shrugged. “Maybe, but he won’t.”

  “How do you know? If he finds out, he might.”

  Sadie moved over to Fred and touched his cheek. “Fred, you’re really not very bright, are you?”

  “I’m not so dumb.”

  “No, if you were bright, you’d understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Don’s never going to divorce me.”

  “If he found out about us he would.”

  Sadie shook her head slowly. “No, darling not even then.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he already knows about us.”

  24

  It was the last week of the campaign, the week of October 8, and the shifts changed at seven o’clock in the morning and by six forty-five they had Donald Cubbin stationed at gate number five and the cameras of three television networks were aimed at him as he steadily pumped the hands of the plant workers who streamed in and out.

  Clustered around Cubbin were Charles Guyan, the public relations man; Oscar Imber, the campaign manager; Fred Mure, the general factotum, and Kelly Cubbin, son, who stood about twenty feet away, safely out of camera range.

  Officials of the local union were scattered about, hustling the members to “step over and shake hands with President Cubbin.” They said it over and over, until they found the phrase meaningless, but they still said it because they felt they had to participate somehow.

  Everyone but the television crews seemed faintly embarrassed. The union members were embarrassed to see their international president out soliciting their votes at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. Cubbin was embarrassed because he felt that the members thought him a fool. Oscar Imber was embarrassed because he kept overhearing the members say, “Who the fuck was that?” after they shook hands with Cubbin. Charles Guyan was embarrassed because the scene was too static to make a good television segment. Kelly Cubbin was embarrassed because his father was making an ass of himself at a manufactured event. And Fred Mure was embarrassed because he couldn’t figure out why everyone else was and he didn’t want to ask.

  Cubbin’s line was, “Hi yah, pal, good to see you.” He was too good an actor to say it mechanically and each time it came out as a completely personal greeting.

  “You gonna vote for him?” Melvin Gomes, a dip stage assembler who earned $10,357 the previous year, asked his car-pool driver, Victor Wurl, molder, who last year earned $12,391.

  “Who?”

  “What’s-his-face, Cubbin.”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “I think I might vote for that other guy, Hanks?”

  “Yeah. Hanks.”

  “I might vote for him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Why’re you gonna vote for Cubbin?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it don’t make a damn who we vote for. It’s still gonna be the same old shit.”

  “Well, at least that’s something we can count on.”

  At ten minutes past seven the television crews began packing up their equipment. Cubbin turned to Oscar Imber and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here; I’m freezing.”

  “We’re on our way,” Imber said.

  “What else this morning?” Cubbin asked Charles Guyan.

  “You’ve got that radio program at eleven.”

  “What radio program?”

  “‘Here’s Phyllis.’”

  “Jesus, who listens to that?”

  Guyan shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the guys who’re sick.”

  A little over two thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., it was ten o’clock in the morning as Mickey Della walked into Sammy Hanks’s campaign office and slammed an 8½″ x 11″ leaflet down on his desk.

  “Now where in the hell did they get that?” Della snapped.

  Hanks picked up the leaflet. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Most of the leaflet was taken up by a large picture of Sammy Hanks, nattily attired in tennis whites, a racket in his hand, a foolish smile on his face, as he stood by a sun umbrella. In the background were tennis courts and a large, rambling structure that looked like exactly what it was, a country club. The headline on the leaflet read:

  Tennis Anyone?

  What’s All This About Country

  Club Unionism, Sammy?

  The text embroidered the theme that while Sammy Hanks tried to tag his political opponent with practicing country-club unionism, the union members just might be interested in what posh clubs Hanks hung out at. The copy was pithy, not quite cute, and in Mickey Della’s opinion, deadly.

  “Where’d they get that picture?” he said.

  “My wife took it. It was about five years ago when she was trying to teach me tennis.”

  “At a country club?”

  “That’s right, damn it, at a country club. It’s up in Connecticut.”

  “Where’s the picture now?”

  “In her scrapbook.”

  “Is she home?”

  “She’s home.”

  “Call her. Ask her if it’s still there.”

  “Look, you’re not trying to say that my wife gave it to those bastards?”

  “I just want to see if it’s still there.”

  Hanks held the phone while his wife went to look for the scrapbook. When she came back and told him what she had found, he said, “Thanks, honey, I’ll call you later,” and hung up the phone. “It’s still there,” he told Della.

  “They copied it then,” Della said, not bothering to keep the admiration out of his voice. “They broke into your house, swiped the picture, copied it, and broke in again to put it back. Slick. Very slick.”

  Hanks felt the anger building in him and fought it back. “You mean I got burgled?”

  “You did indeed.”

  “And they’re getting this thing around?” he asked, touching the leaflet gingerly.

  “I imagine they’ve printed a million of them. I know I would.”

  “Well, what’re you going to do?”

  Mickey Della smiled slyly. “Don’t worry, Sammy. I’ve still got a couple of tricks left.”

  “What kind?”

  Della smiled again. “Dirty ones, of course. Are there any other kind?”

  It had been a dirty, mean campaign and now that it was in its final week it promised to get even dirtier. A syndicated editorial service that operated just outside Washington in Virginia had supplied its indently conservative clients, who were often too lazy or too ignorant to write their own editorials, with a stinging attack on Sammy Hanks for having introduced gutter politics into a trade-union campaign. The editorial was dutifully printed in twenty-nine newspapers and all it had cost Ted Lawson of Walter Penry and Associates was $5,000. The man who owned the editorial service had once been nominated for a Pulitz
er Prize for his writing ability. He now wrote for the highest bidder whenever he could and if Sammy Hanks had been first in line with $5,000, the man would have cheerfully written an editorial slamming Donald Cubbin.

  Except for reports and appearances on TV news programs, it had been a print campaign with Mickey Della setting the tone in his first leaflet that had used a photograph of Cubbin as he followed through with a two wood on some unidentified golf course. The leaflet had a black border around it, another Della trademark, and a caption that read:

  At the Next Hole Will This Man Sell You

  Out to His Big Business Buddies?

  The text, written in Della’s florid, but extremely readable style, described Cubbin’s efforts to get into the exclusive Federalists Club and then went on to warn darkly that Cubbin might sell out his members to satisfy his social ambitions.

  Della had liked that leaflet, but he liked his second one even better. It showed the face of a handsome black wearing a hard hat tipped at a rakish angle. The caption asked:

  Why Isn’t This Man Good

  Enough for Donald Cubbin?

  This time, Della’s text raked over Cubbin’s refusal to resign from the Federalists Club after the black government official had been blackballed. Mickey Della had liked both of his leaflets so much that he had had a million of each printed.

  At first, Charles Guyan had tried to ignore Della’s attacks. Guyan put out an eight-page tabloid newspaper that was mailed to each of the union’s 990,000 members. The tabloid dutifully recorded Cubbin’s past achievements. It was a sprightly-looking paper with big type and lots of pictures, but praise is never as interesting as slander, and Guyan had the feeling that nobody read it.

  Guyan felt lost without television. With a minute spot he could destroy an opponent’s entire campaign. He needed only twenty seconds to show why his own candidate should be elected. He was accustomed to thinking in sharply defined scenes that lasted sometimes no more than a second or two, but which could have devastating impact. It was two o’clock in the morning after Mickey Della’s last leaflet appeared when Guyan came to his decision. He picked up the phone and placed a person-to-person call to Peter Majury of Walter Penry and Associates.

  “I think we’d better meet,” Guyan said after Majury whispered his hello.

  “Yes, I think that would be decidedly advantageous. Where are you now?”

  “In Pittsburgh. At the Hilton.”

  “Ted Lawson and I will be there at ten. Would you mind ordering breakfast for us both?”

  The meeting lasted only an hour, but to Guyan it was worth five years of personal experience in practical politics, the ward-heeling kind that he had never known. The first thing that Peter Majury did was to casually hand Guyan the picture of Sammy Hanks dressed in his tennis whites.

  “We thought you might be able to use this,” Majury said.

  “Jesus,” Guyan said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Ted found it someplace, I think.”

  “Ah, hell, tell him,” Ted Lawson said. “He’s gotta learn sometime.”

  Majury smiled slightly and smoothed his hair. “Ted paid a burglar he knows five hundred dollars to steal the picture. He paid him another five hundred to put it back—after we made a copy.”

  “You might get a kick out of this, too,” Lawson said. “We didn’t print too many of them, but I’ve got it fixed so that every time Sammy rides in a car he’ll see this bumper sticker around and he’ll think there’re millions of them.”

  He handed Guyan a bumper sticker printed in bright yellow and scarlet Da-Glo that read: “SAMMY HANKS SUCKS.”

  “Jesus,” Guyan said.

  “Merely a minor irritant to Sammy, but we thought you’d find it amusing,” Majury said.

  “We’ve got some more stuff, too,” Ted Lawson said.

  “One item in particular might be useful. It’s a compilation of remarks that Hanks has made about Cubbin over the years.” Majury scanned a sheet of paper that he had taken from a large manila envelope. “Yes, this is it. On October twenty-first, 1969, in Philadelphia, Hanks called Cubbin—and I quote—‘The greatest man in the American labor movement.’ On February twentieth, 1967, in Los Angeles, he described Cubbin as the man who ‘has earned my respect, my love, and most important, my undying loyalty.’ It goes on like that. Do you think you can use it?”

  “Christ, yes,” Guyan said, “except you’re making me feel a bit simple.”

  “There’s lots more in there,” Lawson said, indicating the manila envelope.

  “You shouldn’t feel simple, Charles,” Majury said. “If this were a regular campaign and you had full use of your own medium, which is, of course, television, then you would be perfectly matched against someone like Mickey Della. But in a print campaign such as this there is virtually no one who can match Mickey for sheer viciousness unless, of course, it’s Ted and I. I think we’ve given you enough ammunition to finish the campaign, but if you run into any problem, just give us a call.”

  “I’ll do that,” Guyan said, deciding that if he must deal in slime, he might as well trade with the guys who owned the pit.

  By four that afternoon, Ted Lawson and Peter Majury were sitting in Walter Penry’s office, giving him a report.

  “I think that Guyan will work out rather well after all,” Majury said. “Once he found that he was out of his depth, he called for help. That shows a certain amount of resourcefulness.”

  “Good,” Penry said. “Can you think of anything else that we should do?”

  “Nothing except in Chicago,” Majery said. “I’m having a very difficult time finding out just how they intend to steal it there.”

  “Keep working on it,” Penry said.

  “Oh, I intend to, but it will cost.”

  “How much have we spent so far?”

  “Nearly a hundred and fifty thousand,” Lawson said.

  “And we gave Cubbin?”

  “About four hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “So we’ve got about fifty thousand dollars left?” Penry said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “I—uh—think so,” Majury said. “That reporter wants ten thousand.”

  “For one question?”

  “Well, it’s going to be a rather big question.”

  “All right, pay him. When are they going to announce it?”

  “Tomorrow. This is Friday so that will give them a day over two weeks to build up the publicity.”

  “You’re sure Hanks will accept?”

  “Oh, yes,” Majury said. “He’s been yelling for a debate with Cubbin.”

  “But it won’t be a debate?” Penry said.

  Majury shook his head. “No.”

  “Okay,” Penry said. “On Sunday, October fifteenth, Cubbin and Hanks appear on—Christ, I can never remember the name of the damn thing—”

  “‘The Whole World Is Watching,’” Majury said.

  “No wonder I can’t remember it. All right, they appear on that, side by side, to be interviewed by a panel of distinguished newsmen, so-called. Both sides and the network will give it a big buildup because it’ll be the only appearance of the two candidates together. And this program will make or break Cubbin’s campaign.”

  “Unless they manage to steal it from him in Chicago,” Lawson said.

  “Yes,” Penry said, looking at Majury, “unless they steal it from him in Chicago.”

  Majury smiled and again smoothed his hair. “For some reason,” he said, “I don’t think they will.”

  25

  There were several reasons why the television program “The Whole World Is Watching” had proved to be surprisingly popular, the principal one being that it was scheduled one hour before the network’s Sunday pro football game.

  But the program had other features. It chose its controversies carefully and it always procured the two chief spokesmen for the opposing sides. Then, too, its panel of four newsmen had been selected for their over
all nasti ness, and the program often disintegrated into a yelling match that delighted its pregame audience who got the comfortable feeling they were keeping up with public affairs without sacrificing entertainment.

  The program’s moderator, although “provocateur” would be a more accurate description, was Neal James, the syndicated political columnist who specialized in political muckraking and whose backlog of libel suits seldom totaled less than twenty million dollars. The more heated the discussion, the better James liked it, and if the program’s pace flagged, James was always ready with an insultingly provocative question or observation that more than once had sent a guest into bitter ranting. On three occasions, fists had been used and this, of course, had served as a delightful appetizer for the nearly forty million fans who were settling down for a long afternoon of fairly mindless violence.

  At ten o’clock the morning of October 13 in his suite in the Madison Hotel in Washington, Donald Cubbin was being subjected to a merciless interrogation by a team of experts led by Peter Majury. Others included Charles Guyan, Oscar Imber, two union economists, and the union’s highly paid legal counsel, who at the last moment had decided to abandon his neutrality and back Cubbin.

  For two hours they fired questions at him and when they didn’t like his answers, they told him what he should have said. They went into the Federalists Club affair, into his drinking, his personal political philosophy, his home life, his religion, his stewardship of the union, past, present, and future, and finally, why should an old man like you who’s past sixty still want to clutch at power? They were bitter, cynical, extremely knowledgeable questions, and Cubbin answered most of them surprisingly well.

  Over in Sammy Hanks’s campaign headquarters at 14th and K Streets, Mickey Della was subjecting Hanks to a similar inquisition, except that the questions that Della and his crew asked were even nastier than those put to Cubbin. After two hours of it, Della signaled a halt, turned to Hanks and said, “You’ll do.” Mickey Della never liked to praise anyone too much.