One of my scariest moments in journalism occurred on April 14, 2001 when I was the victim
of a news tip that turned my life upside down. It was my journalistic Ides of
March.
The
tip came from a man I had known for several years. A resident of Center
City Hollywood
screenwriter who adopted The Wonder Boys
to film. He also mentioned another project, a Harry Potter film. The fact that
he chose to live in Philly and not New York
did not surprise me because there are creative types who like the relative
quiet and comfort of smaller cities.
. When I’d visit Steve
he’d show me his film scripts and talk about the Hollywood
stars he knew, such as Olivia Newton John, who gave him a big brown teddy bear
that had a central place in his apartment. On one of my visits I hugged the
bear and sang a few bars of, Hopelessly
Devoted to You.
Whenever Steve read
a published article of mine, he’d ring me up and talk about it. This went on
for several years. Then one day he called and said he had a story for me. “Are
you sitting down?” he asked. He seemed a little shaken when he told me that the
media had ignored the story that he was about to tell. “I’ve decided to tell it
to you,” he confessed, “because your stuff reaches a wide audience.”
The story involved the murder of a man in Washington
Square .
After Steve fleshed
out the details of the story, I contacted my editor and related what I had
heard. My editor agreed that an Op-Ed was in order, and so I wrote a piece that
came to be titled, Painful silence makes
the slaying of a gay man a double tragedy. The piece was published on Saturday, April 14, 2001 , but by the
following Monday all hell would break loose.
Here’s what readers
of The Inquirer read that day:
About three weeks ago in Washington Square 8 a.m. , two men approached a couple walking in the
park. Within view were people scurrying to
Work…What happened
next would change many lives. One of the men pulled out a knife and demanded
that the couple empty their pockets. The couple did as they were told; no doubt
expecting the men would disappear once they got what they wanted.
But one of the robbers plunged the knife
into one of the robbed. The victim fell, and the two criminals ran. When police
and ambulance arrived, the injured party was taken to a nearby hospital where
he fell into a coma. While this was happening, the victim’s friend went with
police to search for the assailants.
They caught one of them, but the man
responsible for the knifing—by the following morning the charge would be
murder—remains at large.
What made the story a “double tragedy” was the
fact that the victim had been so private about his life that his family, after
flying out from the Midwest , was hard pressed to find
out anything about their son.
“The one of two
friends remained tight lipped when the family wanted to know why their son
didn’t know more people. The family had no choice but to take the body home for
a private funeral.” The son of course knew many people, but because they were
all gay, nobody was talking.
After the piece
was published I called Steve to see if he had read the Op Ed, but he seemed to
have vanished.
Over the weekend various people called me to
say how horrified they were that a murder of that magnitude had gone under the
radar. In my mind, I was still “thanking” Steve for choosing me to be the one
to break the story.
The following Monday
morning, as coffee brewed in my kitchen, my editor at The Inquirer called, his
voice shaky as he announced that he had some bad news. He related how the
Philadelphia Police had contacted the paper and reported that no murders had
been committed in Washington Square
area at that time, and that my Op Ed had some city detectives sweating bullets
thinking that they had missed a major crime. Neither The Inquirer or your truly
had called police to confirm that a murder had been committed before writing
and/or running the story.
The realization
that my friend Steve had played a trick on me was devastating.
When my editor informed me that the newspaper
had printed a retraction in the Monday edition, I ran around to the local 7/11
to get a copy. My heart sank when I saw the boxed headline on the editorial
page:
Murder report was a
hoax
“…Reports of the crime were fabricated by a source on whom
the writer relied in writing the commentary….The writer himself believed the
report of the crime to be true, based on several interviews with a source who
provided extensive details. …”
I went home and headed straight for the
telephone. Steve answered this time. My mood was up there with road rage
drivers. .
“There was no
murder, Steve, the whole thing was a hoax,” I said as soon as he answered. “Why
did you do this, Steve?”
He kept calling me
Tommy and seemed to regard the incident as humorous. “Why Tommy,” he added, “Why
don’t you just tell your editor that you made the whole thing up?” I swallowed
hard and reminded him of all the times I’d taken him home from the hospital, carrying
his overnight bag and sitting with him in taxis then escorting him into his
apartment. Finally he told me that the story
was from a new screenplay he was writing and that he just wanted to see if I
would be convinced of its authenticity. “I thought I told you it was from a
screen play,” he said, adding insult to injury.
After that
conversation I never spoke to Steve again. And in the news story melee that
followed, Steve would refuse to comment when reporters like Daniel Brook of
City Paper and Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post called for comments. Steve
literally vanished after that.
In the meantime, my Daily News editor called
and left a message saying that he supported me and that what happened would
not—not—affect my work with the DN. I
felt some relief hearing this even though he would come to break his promise.
In a day or two I would need this editor’s feedback when Washington Post writer
Howard Kurtz called me requesting an interview.
I wanted the DN’s
editor’s opinion about how to deal with Kurtz, since a writer friend of mine
cautioned me that Kurtz “could be a barracuda and make you look really bad in
print.” The DN editor was not returning my calls, however, though I tried for a
couple days before the dreaded Kurtz interview. When it became obvious that the
DN editor had vanished, I went ahead with the interview. When the piece appeared
in The Post, the DN editor magically surfaced but only to criticize me for me
for what I had said to Kurtz. “You should have assumed full responsibility for
what happened,” he said. “You never said those words,” Years later I would see this
phrase over and over again repeated by seasoned politicians and others who had
been caught in some kind of scandal.
I assume full responsibility. I assume full
responsibility.
Life was getting worse: not only had I
perpetuated a hoax, but now I was seen by some as an arrogant son of a bitch
who didn’t seem sorry enough.
But I truly was sorry, and I thought I made
that clear to Kurtz but somehow that sentiment never came through in his
reporting.
Some months later,
I was interviewed by Daniel Brook of City Paper.
“These days, Thom Nickels is a busy man,” Brook wrote. “With the recent release of his new book,Manayunk (Arcadia Publishing), Nickels has been
making the rounds on the local TV interview circuit. Thus far, he’s appeared on
WCAU and KYW.
“According to Nickels and another source who declined
to be named, “Steve” claims to have written major Hollywood screenplays like Wonder
Boys under the pen
name Steve Kloves. Indeed, Steve Kloves is the big-name Oscar-nominated
screenwriter who adapted Wonder Boys to film. His latest project, a movie
version of Harry Potter, is due out this
Thanksgiving. But according to two sources City
Paper contacted, one
at Warner Bros., which is producing the Harry Potter movie, and another at Creative Artists
Agency, which represents Kloves, Steve Kloves isn’t a pen name. He’s a real
person, who lives in Los Angeles
Steve, meanwhile, had always told me that
his wife had died in a plane crash.
To
this day I cannot hear an Olivia Newton John song without being reminded of how
I was duped by a man who had a teddy bear in his living room.
